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Strategy, Book synthesis

18 September 2019

Book synthesis

In a time of chaos, broaden your strategic thinking

Welcome to a world that’s impossible to understand. You’re bombarded by indicators, but you don’t understand them all — events you didn’t see coming and whose consequences you can’t anticipate. Intellectual property rules have been shattered: your resources and output no longer really belong to you, and other companies can use them however they want. No, it’s not the beginning of a bad futuristic novel. It’s just a description of the world we’re heading towards with the advent of the Internet and artificial intelligence. And it’s this new universe that Weinberger invites us to visit in Everyday Chaos. Are you ready for the trip? Your first step, perhaps, should be to put everything you think you know to one side, because it’s not going to be of much use to you.

  Will you always need to understand? #Complexity

Deep learning is revolutionizing prediction, delivering a degree of reliability and accuracy that is beyond the reach of traditional human resources. Deep Patient, for example, can advise you to take medicine to prevent you from falling ill even though you haven’t shown any warning signs. Paws can be used to help rangers find you if you’re thinking about poaching in a national park. And several companies now offer AI systems that can determine the sex of chickens when they are only a couple of hours old (so that males, which are harder to fatten up, can be “discarded”). The most remarkable aspect of these AI tools is their ability to self-organize so they can learn. Their designers “told” the tools what to look for and fed them with petabytes of data; but they didn’t explain how to use the information, because they do not know themselves. For humans who have been brought up to believe there is an explanation for everything, that we can understand why events happen and that we can cause or stop them, the rise of these autonomous and impenetrable digital oracles may seem destabilizing. We will have to revisit our predictive models1 in the near future, and devise new decision maps not based on known facts but on indicators.

  Are you looking to stay one step ahead? #Inanticipation

Being one step ahead is a good idea —but staying two steps ahead is even better! Since time immemorial, strategic thinkinghas resembled a game of chess, where anticipation is the number–one rule. This approach may still bear fruit whenconquering new markets and protecting against hazards. But today, attempts at anticipating future needs oftenend up beingnothing more than an advanced cost. Think of the resources wasted onwarehouses that store“just in case”spare parts, not to mention the thousands of development hours dedicated to designing revolutionary products that simply fizzle out.

Excerpt from Business Digest N°299, September 2019

Tagged with: réflexion, artificial intelligence, David Weinberger, knowledge, décision, deep patient, complexity, learning, Paws, human, prédiction, strategy, data, new technologies, AI, Deep learning, market

Published by Françoise Tollet

She spent 12 years in industry, working for Bolloré Technologies, among others. She co-founded Business Digest in 1992 and has been running the company since 1998. And she took the Internet plunge in 1996, even before coming on board as part of the BD team. 