What Planet Property can and needs to learn from Planet Tech

November 2015

I joined 42,000 people from Planet Tech at WebSummit in Dublin recently. These are the key trends I think Planet Property should engage with. Within 2-5 five years I believe they will start to seriously impact on the value of your physical and corporate assets.

The PC Era is over. As with Battleships and Spyplanes being perfected just as they became redundant, so it is with PC’s. Microsoft’s Surface Pro is the perfect PC, but the world has moved on. The Smartphone era is just starting. The platform has been built, iOS and Android have won, and now you’re getting an explosion of innovation on top of that platform. 325 million PC’s are sold a year but 2 billion mobile phones. Computing is now reaching a scale an order of magnitude bigger than we’ve been used to. How will this change the workplace?

Think Robot. Robots, at WebSummit, were defined as non human objects that can sense, think and act. And robots are going to be everywhere: Industrial, social, medical, military and domestic versions will proliferate. Think automation. McKinsey reckon 45% of work activities could be automated using existing technologies. How will this change the way we use property?

Cognitive computing is exploding. As exemplified by IBM Watson, which is a platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning to derive insights from a multitude of data sources. How could cognitive computing transform how we find, manage and optimise real estate?

Artificial intelligence, in the wider sense will usher in the era of the Intelligent Agent. Think Apple’s Siri, Google Now or Facebook’s M project and you can see how AI is being used to humanise computing. The best interface is no inferface they say; just ask your intelligent agent for something and they will work out how it can be done for you. Of course the human skill is in knowing the right question to ask, but in real estate terms how long will it be before AI is brought to bear on disparate, unstructured data sets to augment the services we can offer clients?

The Blockchain, which is the computational underpinning behind Bitcoin, will be huge in real estate. Already it being used by Honduras to build their first land title registry, but the scope for use in providing trust and authentication in contracts is great, particularly in areas where the rule of law is moot.

At WebSummit everyone took The Cloud, Connectivity and Networks to be basic infrastructure. No-one looks to build single vendor IT systems nowadays. Put your data somewhere authorised people can get to it, wherever they are, make sure it can be utilised whatever technology you or your partners choose to use, and above all, have as fast an internet connection as is possible. How like the average real estate company set up is that?

There truly is a wave of transformational technologies reaching commodity status and they will reshape how the entire built environment is conceived, designed, built and used. The key message is to not approach this new world through the lens of old school thinking; the past is not being digitised but reinvented.

And that is without mentioning the sex robots!

Antony

Essential tech for real estate: Augmented/Virtual Reality

November 2015

Alternative realities were all the rage at WebSummit, and it was interesting to see that various technologies were at different stages on the road to becoming mainstream. In a nutshell, virtual reality is on the cusp of becoming a breakout and big hitting technology whereas consumer augmented reality is some years, perhaps five or more, away from being as good as it needs to be.

Palmer Luckey, the schoolboyish founder of Oculus Rift (though very wealthy after selling himself to Facebook) was explaining that their product was set for release next year, and an ecosystem of developers creating for the Oculus platform is building rapidly. For real estate, fully virtual reality offers the prospect of deeply engaging, immersive experiences being possible. Product demos, marketing, planning and design could all make use of Oculus to finally move way beyond printed brochures. I chatted to a developer of roving, remote controlled camera dollies that were fitted with 360 degree multi lens cameras for easily creating virtual worlds. Think of your estate being virtually available around the world.

The problem with augmented reality is the interface. Google Glass worked very well but you looked slightly mad if you wore them. AR apps on your smartphone can be quite clever but are clunky to use. In reality, no one uses them. For now, save your money.

Video though is huge. YouTube traffic is vast and video works fantastically well on smartphones. As of today it is the best marketing, training, support tool at your disposal. Train your staff to use Periscope, Blab, Instagram etc – video works!

True collaboration is disruptive

October 2015

All change, all change
Collaboration is up there, with disruption, in the pantheon of misunderstood and overused words. We are constantly reading about this or that ‘disruptive’ company where in fact all their are doing is digitising the past and building a better way of sustaining existing industries. Similarly collaboration is lauded as the new ‘must have’ in a business when what is referred to is little more than platitudes about ‘We are one team and we work best when we work together’.

The reality is that, in the sense applicable to a digital business, in a digital, globalised world, collaboration involves the breaking down and rebuilding of companies from the inside. It means doing away with an organisational mindset that has prevailed for decades, based on hierarchies, seniority, process and order. It means blowing up silos, radical openness, embracing chaos, rethinking every touchpoint with customers (indeed rethinking who exactly is the customer) and accepting that, to misquote John Donne ‘our company is not an island’.

Why? Because we are moving from the organisational era to the networked era, and what has worked in the past will increasingly fail to work in the future. The world is becoming exponential, driven by technology, and the old structures, the old frameworks we’ve used to manage our lives and businesses cannot cope with change at this speed. When Uber owns no cars, Airbnb no hotels, Facebook no content and Alibaba no inventory, yet in all cases are worth tens of billions and generate extraordinary income per employee, you know that ‘something is up’. This is not business as usual, these are not traditional companies.

Perhaps you believe they are exceptional, oddities, corporate freaks; that is a position to hold, but one that needs tremendous faith when one understands just how come these firms have got where they are. For the truth is that they are outliers, not oddities, and the depth, richness and reach of the networked technologies they all embrace, and are built on, is now available to just about anyone.

And it is technologies that drive human behaviour, as we reprogram our lives based on what is possible, and once that genie is out of the bottle, and the whole world has a supercomputer in their pocket, the rules of the game change. And hierarchical organisations, with processes honed to perfection over years, managers skilled in the exact replication of repeatable tasks, and closed ‘need to know’ information and knowledge sharing structures will not, can not, survive in this game.

Networks need collaboration
In a hierarchical, traditionally organised company, instruction and information gets passed down from the top, filtered as it flows, to neatly defined departments, dealing with accounts, or marketing, sales, operations etc. What everyone does, and needs to do, is generally known and understood. Do this and that will happen next. The larger the company the more regimented this becomes.

This works fine when you know what everyone around you is doing, your position in the market, and how the industry you are in operates. For decades this has been how business has worked, each year iterating on what has gone before, safe in the knowledge that you’ve plenty of time to work on updates, improvements and modifications. The smart companies have even followed the advice of Ice Hockey star Wayne Gretzky who said ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.’

In the analogue age this was the key to success. But in the digital age, exponential companies are not updating the game, they are changing it, and therein lies disaster. If you were in the taxi, or music, or camera business, for instance, you saw your whole world almost disappear in a matter of a few short years. Even in the tech world itself, Microsoft, once the undisputed elephant in the room, is now but a bit player in the hottest sector, mobile phones. And Google, the king of search that everyone thought was untouchable is finding its market seeping away to the social world of Facebook.

In this type of world, if you company fits the hierarchical profile above (in the opinion of employees, not the board) you need to embrace collaboration. You need not only more brain power applied to fundamental problems, but more brain power used to the max. You need a true network of brains, each with access to the others, and the free flowing of data, knowledge, assets and resources throughout this network. And to this network you need to give overriding principles, not specific targets. Facebook had no plan to become the company it is today, there was no detailed specification. Instead Mark Zuckerberg said “Our mission is to make the world more open and connected”, and then freed and enabled his network to make it happen.

Collaboration works when openness and transparency becomes the natural order of things. When you can access what you need, when you need it and have no barriers between you and whomsoever else in your organisation you need to consult or work with. And collaboration really comes into its own when the underlying purpose of the company is understood by all, and each employee is given the space and tools to maximise their potential, through their own endeavours, with persistent and ongoing feedback and with freedom to roam across skill sets.

All of which is easier said than done, because on the face of it this freedom and lack of structure looks like chaos to many a manager. Without clear goals, and a clear and documented process to reach them, how can we possibly succeed? That though is the point. Running your company in a similar manner to the Waterfall system of software development, where objectives and specifications, in precise detail and encapsulating the whole range of desired functionality, are decided upon and fixed in advance of development commencing is, in todays world, as likely to meet with great success.

Collaboration and agility (the exact opposite of the Waterfall methodology) are blood brothers. Only an agile company can be truly collaborative. Release early, release often, and iterate, iterate, iterate. Feel your way to the solution, and roll with the punches. Don’t guess what will work, see what will work. Put your work in the hands of a customer, see what works, what doesn’t and go from there. As with software, no business is ever finished; life in perpetual beta is the way.

Making your business agile and collaborative means there are no silos. Teams will form and disband as needs must. No more marketing sits here, IT over there and operations somewhere else entirely. All your business issues involve all your capabilities, in different measures, working as one, in parallel not sequentially, Every service you provide, every product you make, every touch point you have with every stakeholder in your ecosystem can be made better, bit by bit, by a collaborative team of diverse skills and capabilities working their way from chaos to order. And back again. Over and over. You are transforming your business, not solving discrete technical problems.

True collaboration is a mindset. One of trust, openness, respect, curiosity, imagination and ambition. In reality, most companies will substitute a bit more communication for true collaboration. They though, will not be the companies the smart creatives (to use Google’s term) will want to work for. The best and brightest want to work for the best, and those will be, indeed are, great collaborators.

Antony

First published in Estates Gazette ‘The Collaborators’ special for MIPIM UK in October 2015.

The impact of technology on real estate: A Panglossian future?

October 2015

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the concept of Loss Aversion in 1984 (1), highlighting people’s tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. Most studies suggest that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains. Lose £100 and we will feel a remorse that easily outweighs winning a £100.

In a similar fashion we find it very hard to see future positives when confronted with short term loses. We understand easily what we have lost but cannot imagine what there is to be gained. Furthermore, as Frederic Bastiat wrote in an 1850 paper (2), ‘That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen’ man has a tendency to “pursue a small present good, which will be followed by a great evil to come, rather than a great good to come, – at the risk of a small present evil”.

Put these together and it is no wonder that, by and large, the future of work, real estate and the workplace is misunderstood. The strength of argument put behind thinking of the traditional Office as a ‘sustaining technology’ as opposed to something crying out for ‘disruption’ is intense. It fits perfectly into Clayton Christensen’s worldview, where innovations are resisted by incumbents, laughed at, and dismissed right up to the point where they reach a position where they can no longer be resisted.(3)

It is time to be more positive, to stop holding on to a belief system that is no longer applicable. Yes, much is going to change in the next ten years (as it has done in the last ten) and things we are used to are going to disappear. There is though ‘a great good to come’, if we become cognisant of the huge technological forces at work and learn to embrace new ways of living, thinking and feeling. We need to co-opt technology to augment our lives, our society, and our planet. A computer can beat any human chess player, but cannot beat a human working in conjunction with another computer.(4) As society becomes ever more digital we must resist digitising the past. As Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” The future will reflect human predilections, but these will be repurposed around technological capabilities.

Below are several developments that will reshape ‘work, rest and play’. And that is ‘will’ not ‘may’; it is up to each of us to make the most of this inevitability. We can shape change, we cannot resist it.

You should assume the office really is dead.
Only by embracing the fact that technology has removed the need for an office to undertake work (5), will you reimagine the office as somewhere that does have a real, enduring purpose.

We used to need an office because that was where we could access the technology, data and people we needed to get our work done. This is, barring a minority of companies, no longer true. And anyone who still thinks ‘water cooler’ moments make it all worthwhile clearly isn’t living in the real world of social media and streaming, anything, anytime information.

Do believe the hype, the robots ARE coming and they will take 30-40% (6) of todays jobs. And most of those will be the jobs that people do in the office right now. Any work that can be codified will be codified, and thereafter automated.

So what then is the point of the office? Well, to understand that you need to focus intensely on what is is that we humans can do, that computers can’t. And that boils down to things that cannot be codified, are unique, require social intelligence and are an amalgam of disparate, unstructured inference and intuition.(7)

Then, and only then, will you be able to see the future of the office. It has one, but not as most of us currently know it.

Machine learning is a double edged sword. 
A big difference between computing today and just a few years ago is that, whilst the notion of computers as being sentient is currently fanciful, they can now do things off their own bat that previously required human instruction. Think of it like a game of ‘if this then that’; where once the ’that’ needed to be pre-defined for the ’this’ to take effect, computers today can infer or induce what the ’that’ is. The machine can learn from the data it has to hand. It can deduce that if X occurs the next thing to happen will be Y. In effect machine learning means machines can build their own decision trees (8). And therein lies the rub. The positive is that we can enlist the help of the machines with complex analysis or the development of predictive analytics. The negative is that the bar is being raised as to what the machines can do without our help.

You need to assess what questions the machines should answer themselves, and what ones you need to work on together, in partnership.

The ‘Death of Distance’ will return. 
In 1997 The Economist’s Frances Cairncross wrote a much lauded book, The Death of Distance (9). It posited the idea that communications technology would free people to work wherever they wanted to, and that people would gravitate to the places that suited them most, safe in the knowledge that they could work anywhere. Well, much to the delight especially of technology naysayers, this hasn’t come to pass. In fact people have gravitated en masse to already successful cities, and clusters of like minded companies have formed in crowded, urban city centres.

But the death of distance is a real phenomenon and will re-assert itself in the years ahead. If you think of Netflix, or Apple TV, or streaming music services like Spotify you just take them for granted. But ten years ago none of these things could have existed, as the technology required simply did not exist. Whilst many scoff at the companies that went belly up in the Dot Com crash of 2000, the fact is most of the big failures were simply ahead of their time. It is a question of what behaviour is enabled by technology. To date, distance has not died as people need to be near each other because the tools and infrastructure they require are not universally available.

However, this is an evolutionary process and as demand grows so does supply. So we now, for instance, have multiple ’Silicon Valley’ type tech centres around the world; London, Berlin, Stockholm, Tel Aviv etc. And a world is developing where every talented coder does not have to move to San Francisco to partake in the technology industry. And the connectivity, and hardware/software, to genuinely be in multiple places at once, is now becoming commonplace.

Like e-commerce, the point is not to aggregate figures across the whole market and infer minimal impact, but to look at those areas where sizeable numbers of people or companies are starting to work in a different way. Disruption is when something not as good as, but dramatically cheaper than the incumbents starts to gain traction. Like the lily pond analogy, not a lot happens for a long time and then suddenly everything changes.

So consider that Automattic, who make WordPress which powers a quarter of all the worlds websites, is an entirely remote company. Or the dispersed, networked nature of companies like AirBnB, or Uber, operating in hundreds of companies largely through online collaboration. And the plethora of on-demand companies springing up to provide you with what you want, wherever you want it, at the press of a button.

All of this involves the death of distance. People connected by technology, not place. And it is growing.

The advantages, once you adjust your thinking, are huge. As Bill Joy has said “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” Being constrained by one’s immediate surroundings is something the digital age removes. As Venkatesh Rao writes in Breaking Smart (10), the command and control nature of many businesses is dying and with it the limiting closed mindset, based around order, process and industrialised production. There is a big world out there, talk to it.

There is no such thing as Work/life balance, and that is good.
When you can do your work anywhere you do not need to parcel your life up in this way. Work is becoming more and more about getting things done than being present, at your desk, for a set number of hours each day. At the heart of smart working is judging progress by what gets done, productive collaboration and developing ones business in an agile, iterative way. And this does not necessarily involve a contiguous number of hours. Or presence in one place. So for those lucky, or smart, enough to have jobs that they enjoy, that have purpose and that enable them to demonstrate their skills, the whole notion of work/life balance is old hat. Work/life is a blend, not an either or.

Assume everything is mobile (11). 
With 4 billion people across the world owning a phone, and replacing it roughly every two years, the mobile is increasingly the first screen people use to access anything. In the western world, where smartphones are de rigeur, each of us has a 1990’s supercomputer in our pocket. And we have this with us almost all the time.

The Cloud rules. 
And part of the reason your smartphone is so powerful is because it can access pretty much anything via The Cloud, and can offload complex tasks to server filled data centres via The Cloud. In practice you have the total computational resources of the world in your pocket. If you are not serving your employees, suppliers, partners and customers via The Cloud you are missing out on an huge opportunity.(12)

Connectivity matters. 
Harnessing the hardware power of your smartphone and the resources available via The Cloud requires good connectivity. Wallis Simpson once said ‘You cannot be too rich, or too thin’ – if she were alive today she would add ‘or have too much bandwidth’. It matters.

Whereas the real estate mantra “location, location, location” still retains a validity, in a networked world it is “connections, connections and connections” that really matters.

Work is being unbundled.
So much office work is a process of aggregating data from different people, in different departments, and then organising this for reporting or presentation purposes. Once aggregated and distilled, in all likelihood any facts and figures included are a static snapshot of a moment in time.

This process is a construct of the analogue, non networked, age and will disappear in the digital one. Such work will be unbundled, in the sense that distinct processes, applications and API’s will be developed that tie together all this information, via pre-defined (or on demand reprogrammable) templates into real time data feeds that short circuit the whole panoply of manual tasks currently required.

Much of the work that is currently performed via Excel spreadsheets will transition to Cloud based applications, either automatically supplied with data points or supplied via mobile or tablet interfaces.

And with real time, contextual and analysed data to hand, it can be both more widely distributed (hence the flattening of hierarchies) and more valuable and responsive to human designed interpretation and decision making. Companies will have more people working with more accurate data more quickly than ever before.(13)

Software is on-demand, available as a service.
If you look at the way large successful startups are using software you’ll see that the old ‘as long as it’s Microsoft’ days are over. Where it would be typical to run a one supplier stack of applications across your whole business it is commonplace nowadays to meld together, via public API’s and Cloud hosting a wide range of services from 3rd parties specialising in their own particular area. So, if you take Uber as an example they use Google Maps to locate you, Twilio to text you, and SendGrid to email you. With this sort of approach, where software is considered on a modular, plug and play basis, you can concentrate on delivering an exceptional customer experience, and deliver this at speed and with great flexibility.(14)

In addition, with all these services available off the shelf and on-demand, you can be as powerful in a tiny startup as the largest multi-national. The difference, of course, is that you’ll be more flexible in your business modelling and a great deal faster to market. Execution is key, as ever, but today the playing field is pretty much level.

And the result of all this is?
With all of the above going on I hope it is clear that the work we do, and how we’ll do it, as well as the environments that will enable this, will change in the years ahead.

I see the following coming to pass:

The young will continue to congregate in either ever smaller apartments, or flat/house shares (or purpose built new blocks mimicking University life) in the city centre. If you cannot afford your own place then renting right in the heart of the action makes sense.(15)

They will make the most of this but there are limits to how much of their salary people will be prepared to pay in rent. As has been said before, London could follow New York (purportedly) and eat its own creative class.(16)

At some point the allure of city centre living will meet the harsh realities of cost and increasing numbers of people will leave the capital. Primarily for city centre locations in 2nd, 3rd tier UK cities. This is of course a gradual process but a tipping point will be reached. For current hub cities this will be game changing, but for countries as a whole it will be positive as regional centres up their game and attract/offer higher paying, higher skilled employment.

Pure dormitory locations will suffer badly, as they offer neither good jobs or interesting lifestyles.

The zoning of areas will break down, as it becomes increasingly anachronistic to think of places as somewhere you work or somewhere you live. Cities will become dotted with local communities where housing, office space, retail and leisure uses are mixed up and people move around different environments as the need, or urge takes them.

Many of these areas will redefine existing High Streets and turn them into multi purpose communities, rather than single purpose retail destinations.

It will become commonplace to find purpose built apartment blocks incorporating working space as well as retail and leisure uses.

In major city centres large buildings, that once would have been single purpose offices will follow the same pattern, becoming vertical villages.

A large percentage of offices, perhaps 40-60%, will become variants of the co-working spaces we see sprouting up all over the place today. These 3rd spaces, will be sort of hybrid work/home environments that are much more pleasant to spend time in than most people are used to (17). And because the nature of work will have changed so much, emphasising human skills augmented by technology, they will need to be as smart thinking requires the right kind of stimulation.

The centre of super prime cities will be reserved for weekly get togethers, with a continuation of the trend for less but longer commuting journeys as people’s circumstances change and the need for some decent space increases. The flip side of this will be a growth in live/work purpose built communities, in and outside historic market towns.

Property owners will morph into full stack service providers as this world of ‘office as a service’ takes hold, and the demands and requirements of occupiers increases. Those who do it right will be rewarded with more customers spending less time overall in their properties, but paying significantly more on an hour by hour basis.

All of the above will be underpinned by a wave of exponentially developing technologies that will provide extraordinary tools for developing exceptional customer experiences, great human relationships and meaningful, prosperous businesses.

Something to aspire to I think.

Antony

First published in Work & Place magazine October 2015
http://workplaceinsight.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Work-Place6.pdf

1 Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A. (1984). “Choices, Values, and Frames” (PDF). American Psychologist 39 (4): 341–350. doi:10.1037/0003-066x.39.4.341.

2. http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html

3. See http://www.claytonchristensen.com/ for more on Professor Christensen’s work.

4. The future AI? Helping human beings think smarter/ http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2014/12/features/brain-power

5 Goodbye to the office – http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/06/goodbye-to-the-office.html

6 Since 2001, 65% of librarians have gone, and almost half of all PA’s and secretaries. Of course, new jobs have risen up to replace these losses.

7 Creativity vs Robots – http://www.nesta.org.uk/news/future-shock/creativity-vs-robots

8 Predictive Analytics: the Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die. Eric Siegel, 2013

9 The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Is Changing Our Lives. Frances Cairncross 2001

10 Breaking Smart http://breakingsmart.com/season-1/ – Venkatesh Rao

11 For the demise of the desktop PC see Ofcom CMR 2015 http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/market-data-research/market-data/communications-market-reports/cmr15/ and for the rise of the smartphone see Ben Evans’ “the smartphone is the new sun” http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/5/13/the-smartphone-and-the-sun

12 The Unbelievable Power of Amazon’s Cloud – http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/04/the-unbelievable-power-of-amazon-web-services/391281/

13 For more on this see http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/5/21/office-messaging-and-verbs

14 Software For The Full-Stack Era http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/25/software-for-the-full-stack-era/#.gvvyzn:UJIY

15 Tomorrow’s Home: Social Trends Report http://www.spaceworksconsulting.co.uk/projects/social-trends-and-the-built-environment/

16 Rohan Silva – London could lose it’s creative class. Dezeen. http://www.dezeen.com/2015/07/10/creative-people-designers-new-york-move-los-angeles-cautionary-tale-london-warns-rohan-silva/

17 WeWork are starting down this path – http://uk.businessinsider.com/startups-are-opening-co-living-spaces-so-you-never-have-to-leave-home-to-go-to-work-2015-8?r=US&IR=T

The past is a poor guide to the future

October 2015

Here’s a thought experiment for you: Think ahead ten years and imagine that no one needs office or retail real estate in the way they need it today. No-one needs to go to an office to do any of their work, and everyone can discover, purchase and have delivered to them any item of clothing, or food or whatever in just a few minutes.

Now don’t let that thought be pushed aside as crazy. Think back ten years and consider that then there were no smartphones, no tablets, no social media to speak of, no Uber, no Airbnb, no Google Docs. Can you honestly say you expected to be doing what you do today ten years ago?

You didn’t did you? And today there are 2 billion people with smartphones, 1.4 billion users on Facebook and hundreds of millions of people who daily use the likes of Twitter, Whats App and Instagram. With 1990’s supercomputers in their pockets vast swathes of the world’s population are spending much of their day doing things that simply did not exist just ten years ago.

So think forward, but abstractly, based on the one thing we can be certain about, that technology is exponentially increasing in power and speed and simultaneously becoming cheaper and cheaper. Consider what might be if everyone has devices 16 or more times faster than now, multi gigabit mobile broadband, unlimited data storage, ubiquitous super high definition screens, and personal artificial intelligence assistants. Imagine Google’s mission to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’ has been achieved.

You’re now thinking backwards from the future, rather than projecting a future based on iterating from the present. And that makes all the difference. Not digitising the past, but imagining what might be possible with tools that do not exist yet.

Many people today say planning is vital, but the worse thing that could happen to you if you set a five year goal is that you achieve it. Because the world will have changed by then and where you thought was the place to be will no longer be where it’s at.

So in ten years time we’ll be deep in an age of information abundance, with extraordinary communication tools at our disposal. We can do so much with so little it beggars belief. What then do we, as humans, bring to the party? And where do we want to do it?

Human capabilities change but human needs do not. Barring adding ‘Batteries and Wifi’ to the base, Maslow’s hierarchy is immutable. What is our value add? What we bring is the ability to innovate, interact with complex objects in unstructured environments and apply social intelligence to problems.

The thought experiment ends therefore with defining what spaces, what places we will need under these new circumstances. It’s not a matter of the death of the office or the high street, it’s about understanding the fundamental customer needs and developing the appropriate product.

Antony