Staying ahead of the curve
Practical futurist Andrew Grill shares his secrets on navigating the perils of disruptive technology.
In 1974, legendary science fiction author Arthur C Clarke predicted that computers would be found in every home by 2001, and that we’d even be able to work remotely. It seemed far-fetched at the time, but history went on to prove he was undeniably spot-on.
That’s very similar to what UTS alumnus Andrew Grill does. A self-styled “practical futurist”, Andrew Grill has earned a reputation as one of the world’s pre-eminent speakers on technological disruption and how people and business can best react. He delivered just such a presentation to a London UTS alumni reception last month.
“As a practical futurist, I give clients near-term practical advice about what they should be doing,” explains Grill. His philosophy is simple: “Stay ahead of the curve. Don’t wait for things to happen. Don’t wait for innovation. Actually start doing it now.”
It’s not always a case of ‘embrace change or perish’, though – Grill is happy to entertain dissent, especially when it stimulates discussion. And at the end of his presentations, Grill always challenges his audience to “leave this room with two or three things that you’re going to do differently tomorrow or next week.”
Unsurprisingly, they do.
A devoted technologist, the Adelaide native has an uncanny ability to pivot with technology while moving from one role to the next. Grill has been actively online since 1983. He’s been on LinkedIn since 2004; Twitter since 2007. He failed an undergraduate degree in science two years in a row before switching to engineering. A Masters of Business Administration in e-business management at UTS followed, which led to leadership roles at Telstra, Optus, and then Vodafone in the UK (thanks to his connection with UTS academics). He later spent four years at IBM as a Global Partner in Social Business, and then as Global Managing Partner.
The accumulated experience of living and working with technology is what Grill shares now as a practical futurist. For students who are about to enter the workforce, he offers a sobering reality check on technological self-awareness: “You all look exactly the same to me as an employer.” His advice? “Rise above the noise and do something different. Nowadays with social media, it’s just so easy to get known. I would encourage people to have a voice, have an opinion, start a blog, go on social media. – let others know what you know, and they will actually come looking for you.”
Have a voice, have an opinion, start a blog, go on social media – let others know what you know, and they will actually come looking for you.
Grill applies a similar philosophy to the business world. “I often say that you need to disrupt yourself, otherwise you’re going to get disrupted,” he says, pointing towards the challenges being faced by BBC in the UK as it competes with Netflix’s on-demand streaming service. Likewise, he observes that Australia’s NBN is very likely to be overtaken by 4G and eventual 5G services because, as he puts very succinctly, people are bound to ask, “Why am I putting up with that?”
Central to Grill’s insights is his understanding of the way people use technology. “I think, unfortunately, we have become addicted to this ‘always-on’ technology,” he says. “Ten years ago, when your phone buzzed, it was probably an SMS and that was it. Now it can be anything – a parcel being delivered, the latest weather update. There’s an expectation that every time your phone buzzes, it could be important.”
That said, Grill doesn’t necessarily believe there is a problem with technology: the problem is often with people. “At the end of the day, human beings are the people that are delivering these services. But organisations that struggle with the introduction of new technologies because their culture isn’t ready for it? That generally happens at the top table. The top table have been there for a long time, they haven’t been able to keep up with the technology, and it has a cultural impact that is holding companies back.”
It is almost impossible to know what the immediate future holds for Grill. Some of the issues currently on his radar include the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the rise of Open Banking. Otherwise, he stays ahead of trending events by reading vigorously through the UK and Australia’s biggest headlines every morning – and that’s before his first cup of coffee.
It’s a constant race to stay ahead of the curve: “Rather than waiting for the Amazons, Googles and Netflixes of the world to come and eat your lunch, what are you doing to stay ahead of what they’re doing?”
To keep up with what’s currently on his mind, his musings are available at londoncalling.co.
Well I’m delighted to be invited to speak to the UTS Alumni here in London, and I’ve been asked a few questions. First of all, where did I grow up?
Well I was born and bred in Adelaide, South Australia. It’s my hometown. And when I was growing up, I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. But I really had a love of technology and electronics, and I remember at about six years old, I was playing with some lamps and joining them up in different ways and writing it down in my log book, how they’d glow different brightness levels depending on whether they were connected. So I suppose I’ve always had that inquisitive mind and always been interested in technology.
What I do outside of my day job is I like to teach other people what I know. I do a lot of public speaking. I’m a member of a group called Speakers for Schools, and we go around and we talk to schools. These are year 8s, 9s, 10, 11, and leaving level students that wouldn’t normally be able to attract a speaker from the business community, and so I help out with that.
I looked at an engineering degree because, being inquisitive about technology, I thought it was the next best step. In fact, I attempted a science degree at Flinders University and I failed two years in a row. And when I go out and give careers advice, I say it’s okay to fail things. You actually need to go after your passion. And so, failing two years of a science degree, I realised probably engineering was the right thing for me.
But once I’d studied engineering, once I’d moved to Sydney, more about that in a moment, I thought how do I further my education? So I approached UTS, and I was accepted to do an MBA in e-business management at UTS. And so, that’s what I did.
I really learned a lot about business. I’d been in my career 5-6 years by that stage, so I knew what it was like to go to work, I wasn’t fresh out of school. And I was really struck by the 30 or so other people in my class. Every week, every time we met for lectures, we all were looking at similar business problems we had in our own career.
What sort of advice would I give to students about looking to graduate and going into the workforce? I think it is so competitive now. I do a lot of speeches to schools through Speakers for Schools, to university level student, to graduates. And I say to them that while you all look fantastic, you all look wonderful, you all look exactly the same to me as an employer. And I encourage them to rise above the noise and do something different. So, back when I was studying both my undergraduate and my postgraduate, we didn’t have social media. And so I had to get myself known by going to events and networking events. Nowadays with social media, it’s just so easy to get known. I would encourage people to have a voice, have an opinion, start a blog, go on social media, go on LinkedIn and actually let others know what you know, and they will actually come looking for you.
So, after I completed my MBA, I had a number of different positions. I worked for Telstra, I worked for Optus in Australia. I have a connection to UTS because the job that got me to London was actually a couple of UTS academics had designed some very smart location-based services technology. And my first customer, living in Sydney, was Vodafone in Newbury here in the UK. And so I was in a plane every three weeks from Sydney to London, and they said why don’t you move to the UK and service the clients over there, and that’s what I did back in 2006.
I do a lot of public speaking, as I said, and I’ve been doing keynotes since 1999. And more lately I’ve styled myself as a practical futurist. And often people say to me, what’s the difference between a futurist and a practical futurist?
And the best way to describe that is, thinking of my favourite futurist Arthur C Clarke, he was a co-author of 2001: Space Odyssey. And in 1974 he was asked by an Australia journalist what the world would be like in the year 2001 and if you watch his answer he got it pretty right. He said that we would have a computer in our own home, we would be able to work remotely. He even addressed the societal impacts of technology taking over our lives.
So as a practical futurist, I give clients near term practical advice about what they should be doing. I often challenge myself to say ‘I want you to leave this room with two or three things that you’re going do differently tomorrow or next week as a result’.
So one of the most common questions I get versus when I started speaking in 1999, back then it was do we need a web presence, do we need to be online and of course we know how the story ends. Nowadays it’s more a case of should we be on social media, do we need an innovation team, how do we stay ahead and make sure we’re not disrupted? So I get those sort of questions all the time from clients.
In terms of the practical advice I give clients, I can honestly say that people put it into practice because the day after a talk a few months ago, I had someone tweet me to say they had been in the audience the day before, they enjoyed what I was saying and they had actually put the advice I had given into play and they were talking about it at their team meeting. That’s happened several times. In fact I’m doing a talk next month to a large insurer and I will actually end the talk by inviting the CEOs from around the world for this company to sign up to three things they’re going to do differently and they’ll be held to that in their objectives. So I really do like to know that people are taking my advice.
And often I’ve come off stage and people have said ‘That was a great talk’. It’s very flattering because I think I’m a good speaker and so I deflect the flattery and I say ‘But what will you do differently as a result?’ And they go ‘That’s a really good question’ and I then know whether they’ve actually listened to my advice and they’re going to do something differently the next week.
What’s my ultimate vision? What do I hope to achieve or inspire others? I mean I stay up to date, I’m a technologist, I understand the practical implications of this new technology. But I want to inspire others to stay ahead of the curve. Don’t wait for things to happen. Don’t wait for innovation. Actually start doing it now. I often say that you need to disrupt yourself otherwise you’re going to get disrupted.
I get asked all the time, how I stay current. There is so much to look at and I read vigorously. By the time I’ve gotten up in the morning, had my first cup of coffee, I’ve scanned the UK papers, I’ve scanned the Australian papers, I’ve read the Financial Times, I’ve looked at some of the tech blogs. I have alerts all the time letting me know what’s going on. I save things, I use a read it now service called Pocket, getpocket.com and that allows me to save things I’ve seen to look at later and I often use those in my talks. I’m always taking pictures of signs, I’m always taking screenshots of ads that I’ve seen and in fact I was doing a presentation preparation this morning for a talk I’m doing next week in Rotterdam, and I was actually some of things I was doing screenshots of weeks ago into my presentation. So I just read, I question, I try and stay ahead, I try and sign up to these new services. I’ve been online since 1983 with dial-up modems and bulletin boards. I’ve been on Twitter since 2007, LinkedIn since 2004. I really try and stay ahead of what’s out there.
The impact of technology though is not just geeky stuff and the new tech and AI, Block Chain IIT. Every time I talk about disruption and technology, it comes back to one thing and that’s culture. At the end of day, human beings are the people that are delivering these services and we rely on humans and we will always rely on humans. But organisations that I see that struggle with the introduction to new technologies because their culture isn’t ready for it, that generally happens at the top table. The top table have been there for a long time, they haven’t been able to keep up with the technology, they’re not sure how to communicate these changes and it’s a cultural impact more often than not that is holding companies back from not being disrupted.
You know I really love when people disagree with me. I started debating when I was at school, grade 5 I started debating back then. So I’ll do a talk and I’ll often say ‘who disagrees with me?’ I want people to actually disagree because otherwise it’s just ‘yes we believe everything you’re saying’. When I’m on stage, if I’m on a panel or I’m on by myself, I often try and be a little bit controversial to stimulate discussion because there’s nothing worse than everyone going ‘yeah we’ll just agree with you’. And so I love it when people disagree with me, I respect their right, but also like to be heard and to be able to put my point of view back to them and actually see whether they agree. So in a public forum, or one-on-one, I don’t mind a disagreement, I prefer that.
Sometimes people say you know ‘I’ve got to embrace this change or you’ll perish’. Like I said before, if you don’t disrupt yourself, you’re going to get disrupted. So rather than waiting for the Amazons, Googles, Netflixes of the world to come and eat your lunch, what are you doing to stay ahead of what they’re doing? A good example here in the UK would be the BBC is under a massive threat from Netflix. Now the BBC is funded by £150 a year license fee. So in effect, we all subscribe to the BBC at a £150 a year whether we like it or not and if you don’t pay the license fee you get fined. It’s one of the most unique funding mechanisms in the world for a public broadcaster. And the BBC and the other public broadcasters are very worried because people are now going to Netflix. I pay my £10 a month for Netflix and I don’t have any ads and I see what I want when I want to.
So I think that we’re going to see a lot of disruption from the usual suspects. We’re going to see disruption from across all areas. And some of the things happening this year, certainly here in Europe, are what I call regulator disruptions. There’s the general data protection regulation or GDPR, which comes into play just in a few weeks here in the UK and across Europe. And that is a fundamental change in how companies deal with private data and private information.
And the other thing that’s happening is called open banking. There are a number of open banking projects happening around the world where data from banks is being opened up through APIs or Application Programming Interfaces, so that end users and smart fin-tech start-ups can actually use that. So I think we’re going to see a lot of disruption and consumers will ultimately really benefit.
Now Facebook recently has been in the news a lot because of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and only a few days ago Cambridge Analytica said that they we’re going to close down. When I first heard what CA had done, I thought ‘That’s actually quite savvy marketing to use profile information to be able to target people for advertising’. The more I looked into it I realised they weren’t going about it in an ethical way. So the Guardian’s exposé, the newspaper here in the UK, have really dug very, very deep and caused the company to go out of business. I think Facebook has a few questions to answer though because they let this happen and I think the GDPR could not be better timed, in that consumers will now have their data and privacy rights protected. But I think it’s up to the consumer to realise the value of their data. I think things like GDPR, things like open banking will really help consumers realise the value of their data very soon.
So I’ve been away from Australia for 12 years now and I stay in touch with what’s going on, I read the newspapers every day. I catch up with things like the Sydney Morning Herald and I’ve been watching very closely the National Broadband Network, the NBN, I’ve actually used the NBN in some examples here when we talk about superfast broadband. And I found it fascinating the ABC, I think it was a Four Corners program, in Australia that looked at Dubbo where on one side of the road where they have fibre to the premise, very fast internet. On the other side, they have fibre to the node or fibre to the cabinet and it’s a lot slower. What real estate agents were finding was people were not asking just ‘what school is it close to?’, ‘is it close to transport?’ but ‘is the property I’m about to buy or rent, has it got fast broadband?’ and this means there’s now a digital divide.
Ten years ago when I heard that the then Labour government was going to drop $44-45 billion on fibre to every home I thought ‘that is almost unrealistic’ because the technology needed, the infrastructure needed is going to be out of this world. But here in London where I live, I have a 100mb up and 100mb down and if go somewhere else and it’s slower I think ‘why am I putting up with that?’ So I think the NBN is going to be overtaken by even 4G at the moment, 5G services. So we may find people wanting to use mobile powered wireless broadband rather than the connected broadband directly to their home.
And people talk about unwinding and this thing called the digital detox. I suppose I’m the worst person to talk about the digital detox because I’m always connected and I would have to admit that yes I’m somewhat addicted to social media. I’m addicted to what’s going on online. I find it very hard to shut down, to wind down. But I think even I have to admit that it isn’t to be always wanting to see what’s going on. Social networks have kind of admitted that they’ve built in this dopamine hit that the reason you see someone’s liked your post or the little icon goes red and there are 35 people that have liked your or read your message. It is a dopamine hit and they’ve designed it to be addictive so you come back and you see ads. So while it’s very easy to say ‘we’re just going to switch this off’, I think we’re now in a society where there’s an expectation that every time your phone buzzes it could be important.
Think about just 10 years ago when your phone buzzed, it was probably an SMS and that was it. Now it can be anything, I can be an Amazon parcel’s being delivered, it can be the latest weather update, can be a BBC news update, can be a stock price. So I think, unfortunately, we have become addicted to this always on technology.
And finally, the sort of areas that I hang around if you wanted to find me I’m on LinkedIn a lot. I like posting I think informative, insightful comments on LinkedIn, find me at Andrew Grill. I’m on Twitter @AndrewGrill, I put things there. Twitter hasn’t been as prolific more recently because I think LinkedIn has taken over. I’ve been blogging since 2000, londoncalling.co, where you can find my latest thinking. But I also contribute and I speak a lot, so if you want to find me, if you can’t come to Alumni event in London, then do find me online and I’d love to engage with you, I’d love to have that healthy discussion where you might disagree with me.