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Beata Wickbom on what matters in 2019

Intuitive and caring experiences, fluid organizations, and the art of unlearning. With her relentless questioning of things, Beata Wickbom - our moderator of this year's CXO Conference - is sharing her perspectives on digital maturity, integrity in AI, and how to really drive innovation. “My hope for Combient is that your network becomes so strong that the managers start rotating, and working for each other for a while. Just to explore how others are doing it.” Dragging people into “our industry”

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Beata Wickbom was a driving force in the early days of the Internet in Sweden. With a business background from Stockholm School of Economics, she was a part of building the Swedish company Spray, its merger with the US interactive agency Razorfish, and one of its major creations, the Scandinavian Interactive Media Event (today known as SIME) back in 1996.

– No one understood what we were talking about. We had to drag people into “our industry”, and explain that it was actually theirs too.

This was about the same time as consumer power and communities emerged, and the pioneers were reading “Being digital” by Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT’s Media Lab.

– The book basically stated that everything that can be digital, will be.

Then came the dot-com crash.

– At that time, I felt so disappointed that I couldn’t continue to work with these emerging ideas. But with web 2.0, I decided to be an expert on customer driven business development.

Today, Beata is advising large companies, and moderating conversations on the future of technology, innovation, and digital leadership. Her mission is to inspire people and organizations to embrace technology to create change.

– I am very fortunate. My job is like going to University every day.

To learn and to unlearn

Applying new learnings quickly is an underestimated skill and something that should be fostered more, according to Beata.

– Learning is not something that just happens. The focus of good leadership should be to help apply and evaluate change more rapidly. Continuous learning - to learn and to unlearn - is a strategic capability.

But how do you actively make it happen?

– One thing I did last year was around Blockchain. I thought “I need to start learning more than my customers know about this”, and as a result, pitched myself as keynote at a big event on the topic. This forced me to create a deeper understanding and prove my own expertise, while enabling others to feedback, reflect and build on the things I presented.

In other words, it’s about finding methods to “learn at work” and capture knowledge to be used and improved together with others, Beata explains.

– This is a part of your future digital identity, where you’ll have a variety of resources added to your repertoar, instead of just the “once in a lifetime chance at the University”. And with gig platforms built on recommendations and reviews, this creates new opportunities to market your personal expertise and build trust.

Fluid organizations

– Speaking of Blockchain, we’re moving towards extreme decentralization. Enabled by open data, technology is creating platforms built on trust, that everyone can access. No middlemen.

This is the real power of digital transformation and the beauty of open innovation, enabling a multitude of systems and solutions thanks to big companies opening up to third parties, Beata continues:

– Just look at the decline of Facebook, it’s lost some of its power to more open and transparent platforms, and we’re just at the beginning.

What we need now is creating fluid organizations, Beata argues.

– Fluidity on who’s inside or outside, who’s a full-time employee or a gigger. We need super experts from platforms like GrabCAD, teams that jump between global and local, and a flow of researchers, students and startups.

– My hope for Combient is that your network becomes so strong that the managers starts rotating, and working for each other for a while. Just to explore how others are doing it.

“Don’t change it, it’ll break”

We’re striving for self-leadership, but today’s culture doesn’t do the trick, Beata continues.

– Instead of taking responsibility of our own, we escalate problems up in the hierarchy. Teams aren’t as autonomous as they should be.

She underlines that for innovation, you want diversity and conflict. There’s a “what” obsession, but we seem to forget about the "how".

– This means, you’ve got to give up control and let others pitch in and perfect the desired outcome. Everything can’t be streamlined, and customers will actually except this if everything we do is towards perfecting their user experience.

This also means working in sprints that are not longer than a handful of weeks, in order to stay agile and not get too attached to new product ideas:

– The instinct is, “don’t change it, it’ll break”. But look at Amazon, they do this all the time. Always in beta is the the new normal and with modularization, it’s cheaper than ever to develop new solutions and processes. Never finished doesn’t mean being unsatisfied, but that we should continue to learn and think about the next generation services already today.

Paradoxically, if business is doing well, it prevents you from taking the bold steps.

Digital maturity - and integrity

– We need to move from optimizing corporate value to customer or user value. Going from products to services, do we even need to “own” our customers?

Coming back to the trusted platforms, Beata argues that companies that are not having a trustful relationship with their customers are also the ones that appears to use data “in a creepy way”.

– Implementing AI with integrity is closely connected to the data strategy. I think, for instance, that GDPR has been very valuable for many companies, because it has forced them to really think through how to design for data driven business models.

Investing in AI today will give us a hint of the competence needed in the near future, she explains.

– The ROI will come in just a few years, but more importantly, bringing in new competence from this field will foster a data culture that understands the value of trust and integrity. Because if you don’t understand that from your customers point of view… I mean, this is at the core of digital business.

What matters in 2019

– Number one, analytical ways of working. More organizations are going to say “let’s stop guessing, and let’s start looking at the data we have”. It will not be okay to sit in a meeting and say “I believe”. We’re going to say “let’s test it”!

– Number two, moving from text and images to video... to sound. With all these voice devices, we have to start asking ourselves new questions like “what does our brand sound like?”, “how are users interacting with us through voice” or, perhaps most importantly, “what new skills do we need to acquire in order to answer these questions?”.

– Number three, user experience is the most competitive advantage. Whether it’s a customer, stakeholder or an employee, users are demanding and impatient. Focus will be on how to create experiences that are intuitive, smart, easy to use, and show that we care.