What once seemed to many like a problem for the next generation has arrived with urgency, everywhere: the climate crisis is here. Virtually all corporations from banks to CPG are pledging to take action; many of them are participating in Climate Week NYC right now during the UN General Assembly. On an individual level, we’re starting to see tech workers moving to organizations with a clear focus on climate.
In the nonprofit sector, organizations are trying to understand, define, and tackle the problem. Probable Futures is creating interactive maps to visualize the different scenarios and drive action at the highest level. Many more organizations are working on the ground, raising awareness or engaging those most affected by the crisis to inform mitigation and solutions.
Women are a powerful and underutilized resource in this effort. A recent report on women’s leadership from The Rockefeller Foundation [PDF] notes the explicit opportunity to engage more women, pointing out that women are uniquely positioned to contribute to climate solutions. “Gendered divisions of labor mean that women are already on the frontlines of resource management in their communities. Women’s meaningful participation in local-level adaptation can translate into greater economic empowerment and decision-making power, and contribute to more climate-resilient communities.”
All of those reasons and more are why I joined Solar Sister as a board member last month. Having spent the last few years diving deeper into social impact, I’ve learned a great deal about the power of engaging local communities in crafting and driving effective data-driven solutions. Time spent in marketing in the private sector and on the board of Junior Achievement reinforce my belief that solutions that also foster entrepreneurship and economic empowerment are more likely to engage and endure. The next few months will be a learning journey here in the US and in Kenya and Tanzania; I look forward to seeing firsthand what over 7,000 clean energy women entrepreneurs are accomplishing, and what those successes mean for the role of women in climate more broadly.
I’m always curious how people end up in the careers they do. My own trajectory has been far from a straight line narrative, going back and forth between digital strategy and marketing roles, private and nonprofit sectors. I have had one clear career through line: belief in the power of technology to convey groundbreaking ideas and effect behavioral change.
My curiosity about career pathways led me to create a new interview series at data.org. There are so many ways to be involved in data for social impact: academia, philanthropy, social sector, and government roles all play a part. These interviews ask how these leaders in different sectors came to do what they do, what strengthens their work, and what they see on the horizon. Check it out over at data.org, and let me know what you think (and who I’m missing!).
It’s both hard and easy to believe that the sentiment “Digital will become the core” still attracts a lot of attention in 2020. It’s hard to believe: Isn’t that the pivot we have all been making for more than twenty years? But it’s easy to believe when we experience interactions with enterprise companies that are mired in literal paperwork and cumbersome processes that clearly require a digital rethink.
COVID will be a catalyst for the companies who have been holding back fully integrating digital initiatives into core operations. Rapid shifts in consumer behavior and heightened expectations created by organizations who are digital leaders will put pressure on the laggards to advance. Three examples of the kinds of changes playing out today:
Distance or remote learning will dominate. Higher education is in the midst of a major transition to online learning: a little later than Clayton Christensen predicted, but with devastating effect. This shift translates into learning and credentialing for employees, where everything from new employee onboarding to advanced product training will take place online with in-person as the exception. Rather than forming separate divisions of online learning, learning software and expertise will be required everywhere from HR to Marketing Operations. There’s potentially huge upside here for companies to better identify and understand the verifiable skills in its employee base.
Anything that can be sold online, will be sold online. We’ve seen online viewing rooms for art sales, virtual house tours for residential real estate, and of course the mass migration of thousands of Americans to buying their groceries online. Many of these new consumer habits will stick, and require enterprises still siloing their digital experience teams and customer data to shift them to the core. In many cases, the traditional experience will also need a complete rethink — for the times you will go to a physical grocery store, what should the new product layout look like? In a time where supply chains are, for now, intermittently disrupted, how might digital be used to signal availability of goods?
Healthcare needs to deliver digital consistently. The term “telemedicine” has been around for decades, but until very recently it was a grudging exception to the in-person visit. Appointment scheduling and prescription refills have shifted online, but the digital patient experience is disjointed. At my own healthcare provider, for example, you can schedule visits with physicians you have seen through an app, but not new visits. Until very recently, many insurance companies refused to cover the video visits healthcare providers were actively promoting. These gaps in digital experience were felt by the consumer, and reflected the internal disconnect between different components of healthcare industry embracing digital at different speeds. Consumers will be reluctant to return to long telephone wait times and in-person visits where video would suffice, so real collaboration will be required to deliver digital in a heavily regulated industry.
Nothing about moving digital to the core is easy, particularly for enterprises with robust analog businesses slower to be disrupted. The COVID crisis shifts the equation dramatically:
Pressure from customers and consumers for digital-first experiences accelerates
Executive leadership / divisional silos reduce in the rush to adapt and serve the customer
Employees working from home drive rapid adoption of collaboration software (and disrupt long evaluation periods / cost:benefit analyses led by IT)
Tolerance for the kinds of quick experimentation that informs digital strategy is higher
The never waste a crisis rule applies here: for the enterprise organizations still operating with digital as an adjunct, it’s time to align data, technology, and culture to move digital to the core.
For several years I’ve served on the business council for Glasswing, an early stage venture firm focused on AI and frontier tech. Working with Glasswing has broadened my knowledge of where AI is currently viable, particularly its application under the hood in marketing technology. Three takeaways from their recent annual summit at MIT Media Lab:
AI ethics are top of mind everywhere. Forget self-driving cars: Specific applications of AI in job candidate screening, loan approval, and security protocols require clear guidelines and transparency. An important caveat is that we should measure the risks of AI against what we have today versus an ideal world scenario: existing human systems are not free of bias.
AI expertise is largely missing in the boardroom. Many startups selling into the enterprise are working with innovative business unit, IT, or marketing leads who are driving execution but in need of a champion at the board level. Without board understanding and stewardship, application of AI risks being piecemeal rather than strategic.
AI wins specific to marketing today include accelerated customer support interactions that also boost human capacity, analytics that generate insights from your customer data platform, and budget planning and management. What I’m still waiting for: uses of AI that amplify the creativity in marketing, speeding time to launch campaigns and evolve as they go.
Like the early days of the internet, there are some companies already deeply transformed, recognizing revenue wins and costs savings while many others mired in PowerPoint decks outlining the AI opportunity. Here’s hoping the AI future — from transformational benefits to informed governance — soon becomes more evenly distributed.
Fun to do this Track Changes podcast with the Postlight team. In this episode, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade mock a bunch of CxO titles, and then dig in on the hard slog of marketing knowledge and learning. In the end, I make the case for closer collaboration between marketing and product teams.
Almost every event I’ve been to lately — whether it’s within the marketing, technology, or social entrepreneurship communities — raises both the inevitability and the risks of artificial intelligence. There’s a lot of excitement and trepidation, and early consideration about where the responsibility for ethical AI resides. A new Pew report captures some of those perspectives, and I shared ways humans and AI might evolve together in the next decade through the lens of AI in the home.
One takeaway from this report and all these convenings: at the operating and board level, there is a dearth of executives with a deep understanding of artificial intelligence and its implementation. We’re still early days on a consistent board tech/AI governance practice, which I suspect will be a new normal in 2020.
Startups salivate at the prospect of entering the enterprise — and for good reason. The enterprise is rife with legacy systems and circuitous processes that frustrate employees and hinder results — and the startup has just the perfect product to fix the problem.
Too often though, the pitch to the enterprise falls flat or a promising pilot gets sidelined. Sometimes there’s a clear obstacle, like a mismatch between product and problem to be solved, an inability to scale or the loss of an internal sponsor. But more often than one would expect, the startup’s value is simply getting lost in translation.
Bringing teams together to work on enterprise content products requires intentional and consistent effort. It’s hard to get people sitting in different silos to collaborate, and it’s crucial to gain executive buy-in for an investment in content strategy.
Confab 2018 invited me to share some of the approaches I’ve used to break down barriers and garner support for content strategy. These include tactics like governance checklists, ongoing education programs, and even brokering an exchange of hostages.
Suddenly, we’re surrounded. From internet-enabled speakers to just-in-time text messages to AI-powered bots of all flavors, we have daily interactions through conversational user interactions. And as with any technology in its infancy, many of those interactions are flawed. They turn up at the wrong time, offer the wrong tone, don’t understand what we’re asking for, or don’t solve our problem as intended. How do you begin to create well-designed conversational interactions that take into account both the intent and context?
One source to turn to is Erika Hall’s Conversational Design, which introduces the thought-provoking issues and practical considerations inherent to conversational interactions. The book covers principles and practice, the role of personality, and how organizations can plan for getting it done. It’s the last of these that fascinates me: how can organizations deliver the content capability for these new forms? All these interactions require new kinds of content, and organizations need first to create a culture and practice of strong verbal design as part of an overall content strategy to fuel these interactions.
Three preliminary takeaways:
New interactions require deep understanding of customer behavior, learned through user testing. Find ways for the content team to embed with product to participate in that questioning and learning process. What are the edge cases to bear in mind? How do you develop personas that move beyond task to develop empathy for user context? Are there overall content lessons learned that may be applicable to other interfaces, like social? How is that information shared?
Ensure your organization has voice and tone guides appropriate for this new kind of interaction design. For example, there should be considerations for ways to marry words and imagery; a reasoned approach to pacing and pauses through artificial wait times; options for setting the tone of the customer’s response options correctly.
Hall points to the pitfalls of bland mimicry of other experiences — at worst you get your own voice hideously wrong, and at best, you sound like content created by committee. But that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook from looking outward: she suggests you collect voice samples. When you’re in the build process, bring together a cross-section of people to listen to the voice samples and evaluate. What’s working and what’s not?
It took us a couple of decades of the commercial web to move beyond the design team throwing PhotoShop documents over the transom to the developers, a practice that resulted in a lot of disconnects evident to users. With the rise of conversational interfaces across the web, we have the opportunity to bring teams together early on for a customer-first content strategy to support effective and engaging conversational interactions.
A wheel design to eliminate road ruts for American farmers. A new reseller model bringing internet access to villages in rural Mexico. A radar device that allows first responders and military to see through walls before entering a building. These are just a few of the pitches from teams competing in the Idaho Entrepreneurship Challenge held at Boise State College of Innovation & Design. 63 talented students on 24 teams from five Idaho colleges participated in the final round, and met up with judges with deep and varied experience in tech innovation and product leadership.
Students are natural idea generators. Exposed to new concepts, people, and settings, students are in a learning mindset and readily apply their minds to solving problems on campus, locally, and even globally. But how can campuses build on this natural inclination to help students take their ideas a step further? It takes work to create and nurture a culture that fosters student entrepreneurship, whether that’s toward commercial or social good. Reflecting on the entrepreneurship challenge in Boise, as well as my experience at Harvard University and Junior Achievement, I’ve observed consistent patterns — patterns that apply to corporate campuses as well as college ones.
Build on the learning mindset — not just the educational one. Students attending university have been focused on concrete, measurable outcomes: final grades and university acceptances. And these milestones matter. But as entrepreneurs, students will find out that most ideas fail, and that learning to fail quickly, adapt their approach based on these mistakes, and start again with improved information is critical. As one young mechanical engineer explained to me, “We know how not to build it one million times. And we’re getting closer each time.” To encourage this thinking, campuses are developing labs settings, like Harvard’s Innovation Labs, and bringing in professors of practice to offer applied guidance. Sometimes these initiatives come with credit hours or other academic benefit.
Organizations as diverse as Fidelity Investments and the New York Public Library are also adopting this tactic. While lean startup is a well-known principle in parts of the working world, to paraphrase William Gibson, this future is still not evenly distributed. Done right, a labs environment can provide a pathway to a new kind of learning. A critical part of this learning stems from transparency: organizations used to sweeping failed projects under the rug are now sharing them via processes like blameless post-mortems to capture lessons and encourage experimentation. Popular new books like Radical Candor and Principles emphasize the benefits of rapid and transparent feedback as a driver of a growth mindset.
Green Mind demo. Photo credit Madison Park, Boise State University
Encourage entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs to start with what they know. The media covers innovation in selective ways: the latest dating app is going to get a lot more airtime than a transformative technology in the construction industry. But don’t let that drive you to chase the next media-friendly tool and dismiss the power of what you know. Pitches that stood out in Boise included phrases like, “Because I grew up on a farm, I know that …” and “As a father of six children under twelve, I identified the need …”
How can this extend to your organization? Mine employee creativity with hackathons or challenges addressing topics specific to your organization or industry. And don’t let top-down lead: work with employees tackling these problems head on to generate that list of topics.
Enable and reward cross-disciplinary learning. Media interest in formalized online learning, or “peak MOOC,” occurred in about 2012, and with it the mandate that everyone must learn to code. Today, the interpretation is more nuanced: Quantitative literacy and understanding how software works are vital skills, but not everyone will become a software developer. There’s a renewed appreciation for the liberal arts, especially now as we are confronted by the repercussions of our rapid transformation to a tech-enabled society. On campuses, academic leaders are facilitating multidisciplinary study through curriculum reform, and entrepreneurship centers are making a concerted effort to bring together students across disciplines to solve problems.
Similarly, training across an organization can encourage horizontal thinking — employees prepared to tackle challenges in new ways, and think across silos. A product leadership approach can unite teams with different skill sets, limiting the Balkanization of disciplines like design and engineering. And organizations are increasingly supportive of all kinds of learning: a successful entrepreneur in the not-for-profit education industry once shared with me that when his organization was growing, it took him a while to understand why offering tuition reimbursement for French classes might matter to his SaaS business. In the end he concluded that these courses were well worth the investment — he reaped the reward of engaged employees in a more creative, learning mindset.
Set the stage for formal and informal mentor networks. Formal networks are offered by many career services departments: students should not overlook the ability to trade on alumni loyalty for a conversation. But in a hyper-networked world, formal programs should not prevent students from reaching out directly to someone they admire, whether that’s a recent grad or an established leader. As fellow judge Peter Boyce observed, there’s tremendous power in a carefully crafted message sent from an .edu email address — an otherwise overcommitted exec will sometimes make time for students.
Organizations can provide formal mentor pairings or brown-bag lunches, and reverse-mentoring programs around digital capabilities encourage bi-directional learning. But there’s also benefit in teaching employees how to build their informal networks, to reach out beyond organizational walls to experts and colleagues within and beyond their industry.
Lumineye demo. Photo credit: Madison Park, Boise State University
Recognize that entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes. We all know what a smart tech entrepreneur looks like, right? Hollywood and innumerable stock art images have taught us that it’s a young white guy in a hoodie, usually writing an inscrutable formula on a piece of glass. Great ideas don’t discriminate, so encourage others who may be dissuaded from the conversation based on that image to up your organization’s innovation IQ. In an academic or a workplace setting, providing coaching on how to tell your story about your idea is invaluable. I’ve seen both pull and push initiatives work: for the former, providing data-driven evidence on the performance of diverse teams; for the latter, consider what your organization’s version of an inclusion rider might be.
Gordon Jones, the dean of the Boise State College of Innovation & Design and founding managing director of the Harvard Innovation Lab, convened the Idaho entrepreneurship challenge. Several times, Jones referenced “blue turf thinking” — a term associated with the creativity of the Boise State athletics department, home of the famous blue turf. I’d argue that the term is also useful in framing innovation efforts more broadly: successful innovation is about both thinking different and staying true to your roots.
We’re in an environment where we all need to keep learning — agility and adaptation are the critical skills needed for 21st century knowledge workers. As education expands from episodic and location-based to lifelong and virtual, we need to value both sustained scholarship and lean learning approaches. Learning cultures enabling creative execution through transparency and cross-boundary thinking are the new competitive advantage.
One source to turn to is Erika Hall’s 
