Although the rolling passage of time makes a changing year somewhat irrelevant in the greater scheme of things, the turn of a decade is a useful milestone for reflection and looking forward. My biggest learning points from the last 10 years are…

The web has exposed what we really are…

Animals. There is no better illustration of this than the herd behaviour it has facilitated on a global level, which has been a repeated pattern of the last decade – from the dotcom boom and bust to the financial bubbles to Twitter. The latter is an appropriate name for something that induces ‘flocking’ or ‘swarming’. You can almost visualise this happening as a leading influencer changes direction or swoops down on something new.

So – is this a good or bad thing? I guess it depends whether, on balance, it has done more harm than good. It’s driven growth, that’s for sure – but has it been the right sort of growth? There would appear to be an even greater gap between rich and poor and it is becoming ever clearer that we have raped and pillaged our planet more in the last ten years than at any time before. The consequences of that could well be catastrophic if you believe the growing consensus of scientific opinion.

Bill Gates is right…

Well about one thing anyway. His soundbite from The Road Ahead about people “overestimating what will happen in the next two years but underestimating what will happen in the next 10” keeps playing out. Slightly ironic I guess that the biggest example from the last decade is the mobile market. When I worked on projects at the beginning of the decade to visualise the types of services 3G technology would bring to phone users I must admit that none of them looked much like a Microsoft approach. However, I had an underlying sense that the proprietary monolith would come to dominate the mobile world, as it had the desktop.

The big lesson here is that applying thinking and approaches from one environment to a fundamentally different one – is deeply flawed. Fresh thinking is needed. And Apple demonstrated that so well with the iPhone. Design a device and applications specifically for the context in which they are used rather than trying to get a phone to behave like a desktop PC. Lessons from my time at NTL in the 90s suggest exactly the same is applicable to the web and interactivity ‘on TV’ – in a communal, lean back environment, the context and approach must be relevant and compelling. Also lessons from spending half of the last decade in IT/software development roles also suggest that continuing to apply desktop thinking to an inter-connected always-on online world is also ultimately flawed.

Tony Blair was wrong…

Well, not about everything – but certainly in ‘his’ decision to commit the UK to an ill-conceived war and extremely badly planned peace in Iraq. Although I’ve highlighted the dangers of herd behaviour in the first point, there are times when ‘the wisdom of crowds’ is right – the challenge of course is to read the situation correctly. The largest demonstration ever on the streets of London and in other capitals around the world suggested that the majority of people felt uncomfortable with the reasons for going to war – even if they didn’t physically take to the streets. I’m sure that I and many others are having our own thoughts back in 2003 confirmed as the latest enquiries expose the degree to which we were misled. It is particularly galling to remember our prime minister telling us that we didn’t see what he saw in terms of intelligence reports and therefore he had to make the decision on our behalf.  There was a collective sense, more than anything I have experienced in my life, that this was wrong – I feel we had an innate understanding that we were being lied to but were ultimately powerless to stop the political machinery taking us to war. This matters deeply and it’s made me question everything I ever understood about ‘democracy’. If social media had been more prominent in the early part of the decade I’m wondering if things would still have happened in the way they did and if many hundred of thousands of innocent lives could have been saved?

There is hope…

If we can harness herd behaviour effectively in the next 5 years to help fix some of the damage we have done to our environment and promote more sustainable ways of living – then the web driven booms and busts of the Noughties will provide some consolation. But, and it’s a big but, we need to be convinced that those influencing the herd or causing the flock to change direction have thought about what they are doing and the effect such mass changed behaviour will have in the longer term.

If we can be brave enough to slow down, take a step back and look at things differently then the next decade could be full of exciting innovations that really would have the potential to change the world for the better. The challenge here is having the courage and vision to turn away from the herd and head for new pastures. I encountered the Blue Ocean Strategy a while back which, although it really is a post-justification reasoning, it does illustrate the thinking that has created some of the iconic gadgets of the last decade such as the Wii and iPhone. Perhaps a more appropriate title for this approach in the next decade would be Clean Ocean Strategy given the damage we are doing to the remaining Blue Ocean. In this, we would be looking to create new opportunities that didn’t add to the plastic, chemical and CO2 pollution that is turning our seas to an acid bath but also captured people’s imagination in the way that communications and entertainment have done in more recent years.

If we can use the technology to empower those who are repressed and discriminated against to gain a voice and learn for themselves that there are alternative ways to think and live, fundamentalism in all nations can be shown for what it is – a destructive, pseudo reality. For instance, if women had been in a stronger position in places such Afghanistan and Iraq, and likewise in the leading administrations of the Western world earlier this decade I doubt these complicated, entrenched and drawn-out wars would ever have started. Social media in its broadest sense offers the opportunities to make things more transparent expose hypocrisy and lies and amplify wisdom. Conversely, it could be manipulated unhealthily to amplify destructive forces and promote damaging herd behaviour. We have it in our power though to use it for good, rather than evil.

Let hopes rather than fears prevail in the next ten years

2020 here we come…