For too long, the healthcare industry’s silos and dispersed data have created numerous pain points, with problems so large that the prognosis has been poor, at best.

Today, however, the model may be shifting – offering many opportunities. Building on the models put forward by EY (“When the human body is the biggest data platform, who will capture value?”) and elsewhere, the Healthcare 1.0 model was a traditional pipeline value chain, focused on creating blockbuster products and optimizing R&D productivity. Healthcare 2.0 saw the emergence of healthcare networks as consolidation intensified – a model based on Team-based-care and a cross-disciplinary approach. Emerging technologies created more opportunities for scalability and collaboration – but pain points engendered by a fragmented approach remained. Healthcare 3.0 saw a shift towards patient centricity, the emergence of value-based models due to cost pressures, and, as a result, newly diversified portfolios which served different segments of the market, leading in many cases to complex portfolios and brand architectures.

Healthcare 4.0 Takes Shape

Now the pace is accelerating toward Healthcare 4.0 – a future driven by data, collaboration, and new value creation models. In this model, the value creation method is fundamentally changed – it is no longer based on optimizing transactions (e.g. a new drug developed, marketed and sold to providers and end users). Instead, it relies on the power of data to enhance every step of the process so that the value creation model is not based on transactions anymore, but on interactions that generate data and therefore allow the creation of shared value across the ecosystem. This model is what Erich Joachimsthaler calls an Interaction Field.

At its core, an interaction field is dependent on key interactions within the context of the healthcare industry — including, for instance, patients and healthcare providers, exchanging data in the course of these interactions. This is what we call the Nucleus of the interaction field – the first step towards creating an ecosystem.  

An Ecosystem then gets built around this core, which might include health tech companies, medical device manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, hospital systems, professional associations, and other groups. Beyond that, Market Makers will enable velocity in the field by exerting influence. These could include government agencies, equipment suppliers, educational institutions, and foundations or nonprofit organizations. Over time, as the field expands, it creates more shared value.  

According to EY: “To create value now and in the future, life sciences companies should consider participating in data-centric platforms of care that improve individual health outcomes and reduce costs. In this environment, platforms provide a framework to create future value that is based on individualized outcomes, and is amplified by the ability to connect, combine and share data.”

Going forward, data can be used to both create universal standards of care, and to offer more personalized treatment and help deliver precision medicine – in particular in the context of blockchain and Web3 where data can be controlled not just by institutions but by patients themselves, ultimately breaking the barriers that exist to sharing it. 

Harnessing the power of data produced by interactions across the ecosystem, interaction fields have the ability to address and solve new, emerging or previously unsolved problems. This is because problems of this magnitude require collaboration from players across the ecosystem, enabled by data. No one player, company, technology or system has the ability to tackle these problems on their own.  

McKinsey acknowledges, “Today’s connected health technology landscape includes a wide array of apps and a dispersed set of data sources, but to fully exploit the benefits, the provision of solutions and the collection and application of data need to shift from fragmented ‘silos’ to an integrated ‘ecosystem’ of players.” (“Capturing Value From Connected Health”)

Why Healthcare is Ripe for Disruption by Interaction Fields 

A siloed industry, with disconnected sources of data, leading to a disjointed patient experience, healthcare is ripe for disruption by interaction fields. In research that Vivaldi conducted among health care providers (HCPs), they shared feeling isolated, not just when faced with complex patient cases, but also in adapting to evolving requirements and changing models.  

Scattered patient data, a disconnection from outcomes, and one-size-fits-all treatments — all these factors create the opportunity for a sea change.  

There are several criteria that make an industry particularly well-suited for an interaction field, and healthcare presents a number of these. These criteria were examined in the BCG article “Do You Need a Business Ecosystem?”

1. A high proportion of information to value creation. Traditionally, the diagnostic model relied on unstructured data – the judgment call of an HCP. New technologies and analysis tools – such as AI-guided imaging – require the use of databases where this data can be stored and analyzed, typically dissociated from EHR because patient data needs to be de-identified. In an aggregate form, data allows the extraction of patterns – identifying how a patient condition presents itself, spotting patterns, increasingly with the help of AI – and matching treatment options in a way that allows the measuring and weighing of risk of different courses of action. In turn, pattern identification tools and AI can develop learning effects, optimizing future interactions. More data leads to smarter insights, improved pattern identification, and ultimately better outcomes for patients. As a result, an increasing proportion of value is derived from data rather than assets such as equipment and technology. This is evidenced, for instance, in the imaging market where the value of imaging equipment is increasingly enhanced by AI that guides usage and interpretation. One example among many is GE’s decision to acquire BK medical, providing AI-guided surgery – its largest acquisition in years.  

2. Unpredictability. Healthcare has been undergoing rapid market evolution – and yet there is also substantial inertia across the system. The interplay between these two factors creates unpredictability, another pre-condition of the rise of interaction fields. The swift pace of technology development and adoption creates new opportunities for participants in the healthcare ecosystem, and even accommodates different paces of change.  

3. Malleability. Utilizing healthcare data requires a customizable approach. Ultimately, the opportunity is in defining personalized paths based on patterns identified through aggregated patient data – something that is already being explored in genomics and will be further enabled by AI.  

4. High modularity. A high degree of modularity is an intrinsic characteristic of a fragmented industry – disparate steps of the process that create a disjointed patient experience. An interaction field has the ability to bring together different aspects of care or steps of the value chain – in a network rather than hierarchical model.  

5. Intrinsic need for collaboration. The healthcare ecosystem requires that various participants work together – something that glaringly does not happen today. Systematic issues cannot be resolved by any one entity, but require cooperation from the likes of healthcare providers, hospitals, health tech companies, insurance companies, medical device manufacturers, and patients themselves. Beyond that, further collaboration is needed from educational institutions, equipment suppliers, foundations and nonprofits, government entities and regulatory agencies. 

This model of collaboration can solve complex problems that no single entity could resolve, as well as create new market opportunities and spaces for innovation. Interaction fields are well suited for industries that have a high need for coordinated components. Enhancing collaboration can lead to improved outcomes for patients and better processes. 

Types of Emerging Interaction Fields  

For the various sets of interactions, different types of interaction fields are already emerging. There are four key types that are currently developing: 

1. Real World Data and Health Data Companies: These companies are collaborating to revolutionize how patient data is shared and turned into insights. This data might include electronic health records and doctors’ notes. The Real World Evidence (RWE) Alliance, for instance, is a group of healthcare companies that are working to make real world data and evidence more accessible so that more informed care decisions and regulatory policies are possible. Another company, Datavant, also looks to aggregate vast amounts of patient data to develop smarter insights. Datavant brings fragmented data together across thousands of organizations to create a complete picture of patient health, but, as expected, still has some limitations on access to data.  

2. Personalized and Relevant Solutions: Organizations in this type are leveraging their capabilities and insights to produce smarter patient solutions in real time at a lower cost. For example, Aetion has a platform that analyzes data from real world evidence, which can be used by providers to develop better patient solutions, and during the height of the Covid crisis, helped provide solutions directly to the FDA.

3. Foster Collaboration Amongst Care Teams: This type of interaction field can bring care teams closer together, regardless of geography. The company Owkin is aggregating data to produce insights for drug discovery and development. Through cloud capabilities compliant with patient privacy measures, they are able to work with numerous hospitals, universities, and life science companies to accelerate drug development, optimize clinical trials, and identify patient populations of interest.

4. Foster Collaboration Amongst Patients: With access to aggregated data, patients themselves can connect through online forums or other platforms to discuss conditions and treatments, provide support, and enable others to utilize health systems in a way that delivers more positive patient connections and outcomes. PatientsLikeMe is one such forum. Based on aggregated data, patients are brought together with others who have similar problems or conditions, enabling them to seek solutions in a smarter way, and allowing health systems to get more positive patient connections and outcomes as a result.

5. Sharing Insights with Patients: Analytics are as advanced as ever, and healthcare might allow for providers to have as detailed a look as ever into what may be happening to their bodies and what may be the best course of action to help treat them.  Included Health is an example of a company looking to become a one stop shop in the digital health world to provide these services, as they offer personalized guidance for patients in everyday and urgent care, primary care, behavioral health, and specialty care.  

While the HealthTech market has yet to shake out, large healthcare players are increasingly vying for the interaction field opportunity. Corinne Dive-Reclus, Head of Lab Insights at Roche Information Solutions has said, “With the use of digital healthcare ecosystems, we can, together and right now, innovate to change lives quickly and effectively for all.” And Pfizer’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Lidia Fonseca, has referred to health care as a “team sport.”  

To help build health tech innovation pipelines, Novartis introduced the Novartis Biome digital innovation lab, and Merck launched Merck Digital Sciences Studio. Pfizer has been introducing AI-powered tools and apps as part of its Pfizer Digital Companion platform, and has partnered with a robotics company to deliver medications to remote areas via drone. Roche is pursuing a digital ecosystem to better unify data, with the goal of creating more personalized care. And Eli Lilly and Company has been collaborating with technology companies, including Apple, to work on solutions for health diagnoses and management. 

As we move further into this Healthcare 4.0 era, the focus is on data-driven healthcare ecosystems: data, analytics, and insights shared across participants to find, and create, new forms of value. The opportunity for key healthcare players is to assess their role – participate or assume a leading role in shaping the ecosystem. Ultimately, the opportunity is larger than ecosystems within specific areas of healthcare or data aggregation; it is in what is being called the “platform of platforms” or “Interaction Field of Interaction Fields,” bringing together all different ecosystems within healthcare into one meta-ecosystem.  

While it is clear that emerging Interaction Fields will pivot and evolve multiple times, the key questions will be how the future value chain shifts, which players will bring the ecosystem together, and who will be at the center. One can only hope it will ultimately be the patient.

The post Building An Interaction Field In The Healthcare Industry appeared first on Vivaldi.

Our society has managed to steadily progress despite the myriad issues around diversity embedded in it, and some might argue that slow progress coupled with the many benefits offered by AI is good enough. I obviously disagree. While there are more than enough moral and ethical reasons for diversity, the most salient fact is that at the end of the day, DEI doesn’t just mean Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, I believe it should also stand for Diversity Equals Income. Every time a company uses an algorithm that alienates a user, diminishes an outlier in order to fit a model, tamps down diversity when making a hiring decision, or works in a diversity-blind fashion as opposed to a pro-diversity manor, dollars are being left on the table — dollars that few businesses can afford to spare.

The first time the potentially negative interaction of technology and race dawned on me was back in the late ‘90s and early 2000s when I – and many of my black friends – found ourselves unable to be properly identified by the face recognition software used by Facebook. As we soon learned, who was in the room doing the programing mattered. The programmers, the majority of whom did not look like us, trained the machines on faces that looked like theirs and not ours, leaving those of us with darker complexions as mysteries unable to be identified by computerized eyes. One would think that as the years have progressed, things would have gotten better, but a 2018 study conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) found that some facial recognition algorithms had error rates that were up to 100 times higher for African Americans than for Caucasians.

Sadly, this bias isn’t just found in visual data. A 2019 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that algorithms used by credit scoring companies tended to underestimate the creditworthiness of African American and Hispanic borrowers. These algorithms routinely gave these borrowers lower credit scores and higher interest rates.

What does this have to do with diversity? AI has also ushered us into a new age for HR. All across the world companies are using AI to screen resumes for potential hires. The issue is that AI-powered hiring systems have been found to discriminate against women and minorities. A study by the University of Cambridge found that an AI-powered recruitment tool developed by Amazon consequently downgraded resumes that contained words such as “women,” “female,” and “gender,” and as a result, candidates with female-sounding names were less likely to be selected for interviews.

There were two problems — both of which are interconnected, difficult to solve, and which need to be addressed. First, in all these situations, the training set was flawed. If a system is trained on biased information, it will generate and propagate a biased output. In the case of the recruitment tool, it had been trained on resumes submitted to the company over a 10-year period, most of which were from male applicants (who were chosen, in some part, due to the systemic bias of the human HR people). Second, those in charge of these systems didn’t value or consider diversity enough to actually encode it in the system.

Like a child learning what is right and wrong or how to behave, an AI needs to be taught. To properly teach it how to deal with the myriad different situations it may encounter, organizations must expose the AI to past examples of right and wrong (or success and failure). These past examples can be redolent with bias against women, immigrants, people with physical or neurodivergence, as well as race and ethnic groups. Currently, since the complexity of the AI’s computations is so high that it is virtually a black box, the best way to check if a system is biased is through testing both the input and the output. Testing for any sort of sampling bias in terms of a specific characteristic, or geography, or demographic marker in what was fed into the system as well as unwanted correlations from what comes out of the algorithm is critical. The issue is that this extra step, while relatively simple, is time consuming and time is money. That being said, a fair question to ask is — is this enough?

In our social discourse, it’s generally understood that simply being colorblind (for example) is insufficient in light of the various systemic structures at play in our society. In order to achieve some sort of equity, “color bravery” — in other words, a more proactive stance on addressing racial disparities — is necessary. So then, if in other circles, simply being color blind is insufficient, why then in this circle, would being un-biased be sufficient? As I’ve said time and again, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is important but it’s not just important because it is morally right or humanistically right but because in business (as I also said earlier) Diversity Equals Income.

To give a few examples:

• A 2009 study by the Center for American Progress found that companies with more racial and gender diversity were more likely to have higher profits.
• A 2016 study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that companies with more female executives were more profitable.
• A 2018 study by the Boston Consulting Group found that companies with more racially and gender diverse boards of directors were more profitable.

Studies have shown that diverse teams can bring a wider range of perspectives and experiences to the table, leading to more creative problem-solving and better decision-making. They can be more effective in understanding and serving a diverse customer base, and they can be more attractive to top talent, which can lead to higher productivity and innovation. AI provides businesses the opportunity not only to ensure that their hiring practices aren’t biased but that their staff has the diversity needed produce the best goods and services for their ever more diverse consumers.

The organizations that are relying solely on AI to screen resumes, sift through applications for schools, or make decisions about credit, etc. are making a grave mistake. They are mistaking the hammer for the carpenter and the car for the driver. This is actually very similar to a problem I occasionally run into while leading product ideation workshops. Clients will get so invested in the exact rules and procedures of an exercise I’ve devised to help unlock their creativity that they’ll literally get upset when I throw out the rules and start capturing the ideas that start pouring out. They often want to hold their tongue and risk losing their idea, rather than sacrifice the well laid out rules of the exercise — that is until I remind them that the exercise is just a tool, and what really matters is the idea.

AI is merely a tool. Yes, it is a powerful tool, but it is still only a tool — one of many tools that we as businesspeople, members of society, and human beings have at our disposal. We need to remember that the goal needs to remain one of creating a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive business environment — so we can create better products, services, and experiences for our consumers. If we don’t, we are leaving money on the table, we are leaving our consumers unsatisfied, we are leaving our companies without the best talent, and we are leaving ourselves exposed to the first competitor who is smart enough to capitalize on our blind spot.

The smartest companies that I’ve worked with are the ones that define their goals first and find the tools to achieve those goals second — not the other way around. Marshall McLuhan once said, “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” This is one situation where we cannot, and must not, allow our tools to shape us if we hope to continue forward to a more diverse future, let alone a more profitable one for our businesses.

Cerrone Lundy is a Director at Vivaldi. He works with organizations to better understand their client needs and create products, services, experiences and more. 

The post Enhancing AI: Why New Technology Must Include Diversity appeared first on Vivaldi.

What do these shifts mean for organizational culture, teams, and retention? What is the impact on social interaction? The new book “The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups” by Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey, and Robin Dunbar looks at how our work lives are influenced by our inherited biology and how our team, leadership, and social structures can be better utilized.

Vivaldi spoke with Tracey Camilleri, Associate Fellow at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, former Director of the Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme and co-founder of leadership and organizational development consultancy, Thompson Harrison, about building functional team sizes, the challenges for leadership, and the rising needs of Gen Z.

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Vivaldi: Can you share a bit about the origins of this book and how it relates to your work running the Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme?

Tracey Camilleri: I’ve known Robin Dunbar for about 10 years, and I had always been interested in his research. I spent over 10 years as the director of the Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme and my challenge always was, how do you get a group of really smart, friendly strangers, inside of a week, to open up to each other, and create a sense of a tribe? I started to experiment, and increasingly I realized that the immersive experiential side of learning was actually what made people go back and change what they do. I met Robin and I went into his study and there – amazing! –  he’d done all my research.  There it was, reams of research on the value of  things like walking together, synchrony, creating social endorphins, shared experience. Our other co-author, Sam, had been working in a huge global company, thinking about the same sorts of things, how do you make a group function as more than the sum of its parts? How do you create the right environment for it? We came together and interviewed around 50 leaders as case studies and stories for the book about how this works in all kinds of different environments from government ministries to sports teams.

Emerging from the pandemic it seems like people are re-thinking teams and their structures — are there optimal group sizes for different group functions?

In short, yes. A high-functioning small team of about five can move very fast in a kind of synchronous flow. They don’t need a leader, and that size is great for crisis teams, creative teams. The small size means that each is capable of holding the mindstate of the other (called mentalizing) which is heavy cognitive work and becomes too onerous at bigger group sizes.. Twelve to fifteen is a great group size for decision making. If you need to make a complex decision, you need different perspectives, you need time to make good decisions, and you need facilitative leadership. Too many leaders are not taught how to facilitate, mediate, empower, listen, structure conversations and so they waste the value of the diversity in the room.

I think we’re in a moment now where companies need to rethink  the skills that their future leaders are being taught. The broadcast skills of speaking in public, giving good presentations, etc. need to play second fiddle to more reciprocal relational skills. In addition, leaders need to bring the same rigor and application that they’ve been giving to developing their financial, digital or global strategies to developing social strategies for their businesses. Human connections aren’t just happening serendipitously in this hybrid world.

Trust, social capital, discretionary effort, friendship, all those things are so important and part of leadership in 2023 is to create environments within which that relational wealth can be built.

Fifty is a particularly interesting number for startups and entrepreneurs. It’s the number at which you really start to need structured leadership and begin to need subgroups. Once you get to 150, the so called “Dunbar Number,” beyond which we can’t actually have real relationships (due to the size of our neo cortex, the time constraints we live within and the way that information moves around the system), leadership there becomes more symbolic. Followers, due to the size of the group, project upon the leader their hopes and their fears as a substitute for real relationship. Thinking about the scale of teams and conceiving of an organization as a series of fractals or clusters, rather than a pyramid or a machine requires you to think differently about how you communicate, how you lead, and how you think about the future in quite a different way.

The book says that “the future is the territory of leadership” — for people to lead their teams into the future, is there a mindset shift that has to occur?

As a human species we have a unique intellectual ability to actually inhabit multiple futures. We have imaginations, we can think conceptually – and yet a lot of our organizational way of working actually militates against us using those skills. We are too often head down, task focused, time poor. We say that the territory of leadership is the future and so it needs those who are curious and can adopt different ways of looking at things. Who do we need in the room to think about the future together? It may be the most junior coder, it may be somebody from another industry or another discipline. Convening – and convening the right people – not the same-old, same-old group who meets every week, is another underrated part of leadership.

Tracey Camilleri

Is there a way to leverage or better leverage technology?

I think there is absolutely. But the other side of the coin is that if I run a program, I make it as analog as I can because there is something about the human need to come together with other human beings, the sensory side of it, the bonding side of it that is lost when we are mediated by screens. Technology is hugely our friend, but it is not a substitute for friendship, shared humor or experience. Most of us work  almost half our waking lives and we need to be able to thrive, to be our most human, not playing catch up with machines.

This is a quite shocking moment in terms of mental health, around $50 billion a year is being spent on mental health support at work. Most of this effort is focused on individuals.  Back in the 1950s, The World Health Organization defined wellbeing as “mental, physical, and social health.”

Not so much attention has been paid to the social side of wellbeing, loneliness and the importance of friendship at work, not just for the sake of mental health, but also for the sake of productivity, performance, innovation and impact.

As so much time is spent hybrid-working, when people do actually come together, in person it needs to matter and that requires care, design and forethought. So that’s why we’ve been thinking and working with leaders to design social strategies for their organizations.

It seems like there’s a sentiment that people in hybrid situations might feel like they are more productive, but there’s less social engagement — is that true, and how much of a tradeoff is that?

They may complete more tasks, spend less time commuting, etc. The problem is, however, that you’re in danger of mortgaging the future. If things go badly or you need to innovate, to grow and expand, you find you don’t have the bank of social capital and trust that you need to draw on. You also may be creating a future retention and belonging issue because people need to come together in person. We are relational creatures. So it depends, if you’re just head-down, getting through the tasks, possibly working from home is more productive. But how do you think coherently together? How do you learn from each other? How do you build trust? Make friends?

Younger workers, Gen Z, are changing jobs more frequently — how does that relate to the social side of things — is there less of a feeling of social connection? Are there generational differences?

We’re doing some research on Gen Z – the ones who’ve just transitioned into work. I personally think there is some psychological re-contracting that needs to be done between employers and that generation. They were hit particularly hard socially and educationally by covid and now the nature of work is being renegotiated on their watch. How do they build groups of work friends, or get the incidental learning that comes simply from sitting next to someone more experienced? On the other side, I spoke to a group of entrepreneurs recently and I got a bit of pushback from them, saying, actually we’re finding it really hard to motivate our youngest employees, they are kind of “quiet quitting,” they’re out there somewhere behind the screen, but we don’t quite know what they’re doing. I was quite surprised. There’s something that needs to be faced together about the experience this generation has had. I’m interested to learn from organizations who are being inventive here. This is a generation that also expects more, and quite rightly. Certainly in the UK they are not getting more at the moment.

Tracey Camilleri is an Associate Fellow at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, former Director of the Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme, and co-founder of leadership and organizational development consultancy, Thompson Harrison. She is the co-author of “The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups.” 

The post Today’s Challenge to Build “Relational Wealth” with Tracey Camilleri appeared first on Vivaldi.

On March 14, 2023, OpenAI released GPT-4, a new version of the natural language processing technology, which has the ability to handle images as well as text — though this is currently only available to paid subscribers. This advanced system has even more wide-ranging abilities and increased accuracy, with the company reporting that it scored in the 90^th percentile on the bar exam.

As technology pieces are changing rapidly, Vivaldi spoke with Jeff Hancock, Founding Director of the Stanford Social Media Lab and Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University, to get a perspective on AI’s continuing evolution and how it may be used — for bad and good.

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Vivaldi: Currently there’s so much news about ChatGPT and speculation about the future — how, within the last few years, has AI already changed some of the ways that we work or interact?

Jeff Hancock: Spellcheck came out of the Stanford AI lab back in the ‘80s. Now nobody thinks of spellcheck as interesting AI, but it did change how we work. Autocomplete, autocorrect —these things changed the way we communicate with each other.

In your research, you’ve found that humans can no longer tell the difference between something written by a human and something written by a machine — what are the potential dangers of that and the potential opportunities?

I think the number one danger is around trust; that these technologies can undermine trust in each other, in anything online, in communication. We saw in one of our previous papers that as soon as we told participants that some of the things we were showing them might be AI, they got really suspicious and distrusted everything.

A positive way it could be done is it just gets incorporated like spellcheck did and we don’t really think any more about it. We improve our work lives, we’re able to do more, or do the same amount in way less time and get to spend more time with our family. I think what’s going to matter is actually less of the tech and more about what we say is okay; the social contract and the social norms that go into when these things can and should be used. There’s a lot of work still to be done there.

With regard to the trust piece and disclosing the use of AI — are there “best practices” around this, or is that still in development?

I think best practices are emerging. I don’t think it’s going to be that AI gets disclosed every time it’s used, that would be like indicating that spellcheck was used, but it will come to be understood when these things are not used. I think there are a lot of conversations in society about when these things can and can’t be used or how to attribute it when it is.

It’s kind of changing every day.

As are people’s beliefs. In December it was a lot of wonder, and excitement, and then there was some fear like, wow, they’re so good, they could take our jobs, and now it’s like these things are kind of crazy. Our beliefs about them change, and then as our beliefs change, even though the technology hasn’t, that changes our interactions and what we think is reasonable and ethical and effective. There’s a lot on the human side that we’re still working out.

What fears do you think are unfounded, and what are the areas that we should be more concerned about?

It’s not going to take over most people’s jobs. Certainly not in the near term. People will find out what it’s really good for, which is producing first drafts or editing drafts in more constrained context. It will help you write, but you can’t rely on it. You have to work with it. They’re finding that connecting it with a search engine is less non-trivial than they thought, and accuracy is important, and they don’t seem to work super well. That’s not surprising. Classification is going to be something that will be used a lot, but it hasn’t been talked about very much yet.

Jeff Hancock, Founding Director of the Stanford Social Media Lab and Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University

There’s been so much talk about different professions being disrupted — how would an industry like consulting be disrupted by this?

Consulting in some ways is about asking really good questions. I think GPT is really great at helping think out what the questions are. If you’re a consultant, you say okay, let’s try to understand whether this practice, whatever that may be, is good. There’s a way for GPT to say okay, here’s what the outcomes are in this context and now here’s what this company is doing. For Company A and Company B, which do we think will lead to the best outcome? Whether it’s right or not, it will certainly help you think out why is it answering the way it’s answering, based on its huge amount of knowledge about the way things work. I’d be excited if I was in consulting, to start using this tool as a way to gain insights.

You also have a deep expertise in social media. So much of the early online and social media world has been driven by paid advertising — what could that potentially mean for a system like ChatGPT or other AI programs?

A really short answer is, I don’t know. We made decisions about social media, where we wanted it for free and to do that we had to use advertising. It led to all kinds of issues, especially around how social media is optimized for engagement and that’s showing to be problematic, with unintended consequences. The question here will be, who is going to pay for this and how? If you don’t make some of these tools freely available, then I think there’s a risk of inequality being worsened. So a model, hopefully not advertising just by default, but a model that allows everybody to get access to most of these tools would be preferred I think.

Social media companies have had some legal protections with regard to what gets posted on their platforms. Will that also be adopted for AI usage, or will companies be held liable if something happens because of what’s said by an AI?

With social media the rules are actually quite clear, even though there are two challenges to the laws now. They are not liable for most content that’s posted, they have some responsibilities, and there’s protected free speech. Here it’s not clear. The company gets broad free speech protection, but they don’t have the same kind of Section 230 protections that platforms do. If it produces something that leads to harm — initially if you asked how to commit suicide, it would tell you. If that happened, then who is responsible? Is it the builder of the AI, the person who used it to do that, is it the tool? I think these are all important questions.

What are you most excited to see developing in the future?

I’m really interested in trust and wellbeing, and how these tools can be used to enhance rather than undermine. There’s huge space in counseling, coaching, mentorship, where there seems to be a pretty serious lack – we don’t have enough counselors or coaches or mentors for people who need them. When it comes to trust, there are so many open questions. When can you trust a machine to help you out? Will the concerns around synthetic media lead us to be like, I don’t trust anyone until we meet in person — and thereby really dial up how much people want to meet face to face? That would be pretty cool.

It’s an interesting consequence if it pushes the other direction, into the real world.

Right, if the advent of AI means that everything online will be viewed as fiction. Check back in a decade.

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What are your thoughts on the future of AI? Tell us how your business is utilizing AI: hello@vivaldigroup.com

The post Working With AI: An Interview with Stanford’s Jeff Hancock appeared first on Vivaldi.

Kip Meyer, Managing Director, Custom Partnerships at IESE welcomed a packed room of executives at IESE Business School in New York City, inviting them to, “turn off your certainty, turn on your curiosity.”

The event had a unique three-part format: an introduction setting the context for the discussion, a moderated panel of global business leaders, and interactive small group conversations that enabled the participants to explore the implications of business reinvention, facilitated by Professor Mike Rosenberg.

Vivaldi founder and CEO, Erich Joachimsthaler, PhD, opened the door for curiosity with the introduction, highlighting a recent AlixPartners survey of 3,000 CEOs that found 98% saying they need to overhaul their business model within the next three years, but most did not know where to get started. Joachimsthaler also explained the differences between digital transformation and real business reinvention – it is about reinventing the core, not just leveraging technology but also reinventing the entire business model and even the leadership approach.

The expert panel included Krishan Bhatia, President & Chief Business Officer, NBCUniversal; Tara Bustamante, Group SVP, Business Transformation, Warner Bros. Discovery; and Andreas Fibig, former Chairman and CEO of IFF and former President & Chairman of the Board of Management of Bayer Pharmaceutical.

Over the next 90 minutes, some of the thorniest questions facing businesses today were presented by moderators Julia Prats, IESE Professor, and Anne Olderog, Vivaldi Senior Partner.

• How do you know it is time to reinvent you core and what does this imply?
• When do you integrate new technology?
• How do you navigate a changing business model?
• What are the implications for leadership?

The discussion spanned these 4 key areas:

REDEFINING THE CORE

Industry Boundaries Are Shifting

In times of disruption, industry boundaries are not what they used to be. Krishan Bhatia spoke about the example of how we’re seeing increasingly interactive commerce functionality introduced into the media and gaming sectors, as consumers look for shopping experiences that are as simple and engaging as watching their favorite shows. At Warner Bros, the recent success of the game Hogwarts World demonstrated how media franchises can span traditional media and gaming.

Andreas Fibig spoke of entirely shifting industries during his leadership at IFF – from chemistry to biology, from producing ingredients to co-creating entire solutions.

The Core is Not What It Used to Be

While the core of the media industry has always been defined as content – as Tara Bustamante pointed out, the definition of what content is, evolves at the speed of light. Is it content enriched by data that shows its significance and impact? Is it metadata? Is it content co-created by and with consumers, such as on social media? Is it interaction and discussion around its impact? What trusted/quality content was yesterday may not be what it is in the future, as we are headed towards immersive, engaging, interactive content where audiences are invited to participate in various forms (and share data on their preferences in the process).

Similarly, Andreas Fibig spoke of his reinvention of IFF as a CEO – and the move from ingredients to full products that fit consumer needs. An example is the reinvention of animal protein with plant protein in order to supply protein needs of a growing world population – a need that require new textures, flavors and tastes, much beyond enzymes. This move allows the tackling of big, previously unsolved problems – such as world nutrition – and reinventing taste in the process.

TECHNOLOGY

What Comes First – Technology or Consumer Changes

In that age old debate, Krishan Bhatia’s position is that consumer changes force the reinvention – making business reinvention a must. With the growth of streaming alongside linear TV, the advertising model and technology around it is being reinvented, noted Bhatia, who tested the hypotheses that advertising is best when targeted and relevant. NBCU’s One Platform, which Bhatia leads, offers advertising models – and metrics – suited to both streaming and linear TV. He sees an evolution from one standard of measurement that has been the legacy currency for the TV industry to a multi-platform multi-currency measurement giving advertisers more choice. It’s also a far better fit to measure the complexity of how people are consuming content which is increasingly across multiple platforms.

For Tara Bustamante, media and technology cannot be viewed separately anymore – they are intrinsically liked together, especially as predictive analytics allow new consumer experiences to be created, from gaming to shopping or social interactions. As Bustamante said, media and technology are now intertwined — media operates in tandem with technology to create outstanding consumer experiences, supported by data that allows for precision targeting and personalized paths.

“We view everything through the lens of technology,” she shared.

BUSINESS MODEL

The Rise of Ecosystems As a Business Model

As the core is being redefined with support from technology and data, what we monetize today can be very different than yesterday. Yesterday’s model was monetizing content as an asset to be leveraged, in a traditional pipeline value chain model. Today, as Bhatia pointed out, media companies realize that their core asset is the understanding (through data) and relationship (through technology) with consumers. First, this requires a deep understanding of audiences and their preferences and desires on their own terms – rather than simply defining audiences by product preferences (e.g. Action lovers). Second, the foundation of the business model is no longer the transaction (i.e. selling to consumers media that they consume) but a series of interactions that engage consumers across the content they choose to be a part of their lives. These interactions can include gaming, in-media shopping (or InScene Advertising that NBCU has pioneered), content co-creation, etc.

Media companies have an opportunity to redefine themselves as managers/orchestrators of immersive content organized around key media franchises (or in business terms, Interaction Fields, as Erich Joachimsthaler would call these). For the first time, as Bustamante pointed out, media companies are thinking about how to monetize these relationships as opposed to benefit from on-off transactions.

Traditional Value Chains are Pulled Apart

These ecosystems require a broad cooperation from many players across the industry and outside to be effective, as no one player will have the required capabilities. All speakers spoke of collaboration with a wide network of start-ups and other industry players from across the ecosystem. Andreas Fibig spoke of co-creation with customers – a much different model from creating an ingredient and monetizing it by selling it to customers, in a traditional value chain model. The ecosystem model allows forces and capabilities to be pulled together from across the industry to solve big problems.

LEADERSHIP

Curiosity as Core Leadership Competence

Bhatia echoed the need for inquisitiveness – he actively recruits for curiosity as a core competence, since he sees it as a key success factor for leaders in today’s world of complex ecosystems. This makes experience in the industry less relevant than the ability to calculate backwards from the desired outcome. For the ecosystem economy, leaders can be those who can ask the right questions, since nobody has the definitive answers.

In closing the event, IESE Professor Mike Rosenberg drew a further distinction between transformation and business reinvention, rooted in radical shifts in technology and the world. To cope, an ecosystem approach may be called – to push industry boundaries, search for big answers to big questions – and ultimately reinvent your business.

Is your business ready for the future?

This event evolved from a unique partnership between Vivaldi Group, a global leader in business and brand transformation, and IESE Business School, a global leader in management education ranked #3 worldwide (2022 MBA rankings.) Following the success of the event, IESE Business School and Vivaldi plan to partner to host more events together in the future.

The post Four Key Takeaways from “Reinventing Business” appeared first on Vivaldi.

Founded in 2017 by former Australian army officers, Craig Cowdrey, Peter Burnheim, and Christopher Marr, Sonder is a company focused on providing active care services through its responder network and technology platform. Utilized by Woolworths, PWC, Allianz, Team Global Express and other organizations, Sonder has made an impact across Australia and New Zealand, and it’s working to take its mission global.

Vivaldi spoke with Chris Marr, Sonder’s Chief Commercial Officer, about building a care network, meeting the demands of Gen Z, and the limitations of bots in addressing human challenges.

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Christopher Marr, CCO, Sonder

How would you describe Sonder and the benefits it offers?

We consider Sonder a single entry point for care — and there’s a lot that those few words speak to. It recognizes that the health landscape across safety, medical, and mental health is really disparate. It has typically existed in silos; individual services or point solutions, that may, when aggregated, deal with a broad spectrum of issues, but actually there’s no ecosystem around that. We understand at Sonder that issues don’t exist in isolation, they’re conflated. For example, if you’ve got anxiety, it often doesn’t exist on its own, it exists because there’s an underlying issue. As a single entry point to care, we make it really simple for people to engage with health solutions, increasing access to care, and ultimately making impact on the health of people around the world.

Understanding how all of those things work together might be a differentiator from what else is out there.

If you think of the landscape, it’s all point solutions and it’s really hard to even understand that they exist, let alone understand what’s the best way to access them. Together they present serious hurdles for people to access help, so that’s the problem we’re solving. We’re decluttering this otherwise really complex landscape to make it really simple and highly accessible in order to help people.

Who participates in the Sonder network?

Up front we have the digital interface, it’s an app focused on building earlier intervention pathways and help-seeking behavior. It does that through clinically based wellbeing and mental health assessment tools that enable you to get personalized support for your unique needs.

The mobile interface is also a mechanism to get you through to our care specialists, and that’s where the heart of the business exists. Our doctors, nurses and psychologists are there 24-7 to listen and, because we know that issues get conflated, to try to understand the holistic picture for a person and put together a bespoke care plan.

Pillar number three is our care pathways — these might be our medical, safety, or mental health teams, financial or legal support programs, internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy, a whole host of different programs. You don’t just get filtered into one of them, the plan recognizes the depth and significance of the issues, challenges or opportunities that people are facing. It also includes our responder network. Throughout Australia and New Zealand we can be by someone’s side within an hour. That provides huge peace of mind.

The fourth aspect is the data and insights. We’re a healthcare company, so all the records are medically credentialled. It’s completely anonymized, aggregated data, but it allows us to look at population trends. It lets us understand what issues are burgeoning.

Was this idea for aggregating data built in from the beginning?

In order to make sound business decisions, we needed to be data-led. By understanding the data and insights, by understanding the levers we can pull, we can ultimately have the best affect on someone’s health, and the health of a population generally.

You started with a safety focus, why is that one of the core pillars of what you offer?

Safety sits as the foundation for all the higher order needs or requirements. By being a company that has a foundation in providing safety, it gives the stepping stone to explore higher order needs. We give that platform for people to ultimately get to a place where they can have confidence and trust in the solution in order to engage on something more sensitive like mental health conditions, anxiety, depression, perhaps in its most extreme suicidal ideation.

I think many of the legacy providers that are focused on high-grade mental health are supposing that someone can jump through all these steps independently. We just don’t think that that’s how people behave. We don’t think that’s how to build trust, and if we want to make an impact on the problem and help people, then we ultimately need to provide that platform for them to move through that process themselves.

How do you see the future of the health, wellness, and safety space evolving?

We see Active Care as the future, where people have got the power to engage on their own device, in their own time, on demand, and relevant to their specific requirements, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. We need to have modern solutions that will recognize complexity, and ultimately simplify care programs for people so they can get the results that they need to crack on with life.

Are you seeing the priorities of Gen Z changing how these pieces are integrated into daily life or work life? How are they impacting where things are going?

I think they’re really demanding, and that’s a wonderful thing. The more recent generations have been exposed to some of the most sophisticated technologies. They understand what good design looks like, they understand that their needs and requirements are fundamental to good output. To the Active Care point, Gen Z are going to continue to demand that services are accessible to them on their own device on their own time for their specific requirements, and they want to have a wonderful experience. You won’t be successful without offering a world class experience because there’s just no patience for anything less.

A lot of businesses think about wellness as critical to employee retention — how are you thinking about that during these more challenging or unpredictable economic times? How do you talk about that with businesses or employers?

It’s a really critical discussion because there are so many providers now that say that they can make impact on productivity, on engagement, on staff churn, but it’s very difficult for them to draw a correlation between input on the left and outcome on the right. I think this is why the data and insights from Sonder are so important. By virtue of the program that we’ve built, the Active Care model that has a foundational focus on safety, it ultimately drives activation and utilization to levels that typically exist between 10 and 20 times the legacy providers. That’s a significant impact.

How do you think about delivering care and what makes your method different than using a chatbot or AI tool?

Sonder uses real people. We don’t use bots. The technologies as we understand it are not sophisticated enough to achieve real impact against real human problems. A chatbot ultimately can’t have empathy. Our business is about supporting people, often in their most vulnerable state. I think when it gets down to the fundamentals of the service, human to human interaction is what we’re all craving. It’s a fundamental aspect to our wellbeing.

What can we look forward to next?

Our expansion into the United Kingdom. Sonder has achieved really significant growth and impact in the Australian and New Zealand markets. We are now expanding into the UK and then other global markets. We want to take the lessons we’ve learned in how to engage and motivate and make more productive people around the world.

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Christopher Marr, DSM, is the Co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer of Sonder. He has dedicated his life to serving others, previously serving 20 years as an Australian Army officer, including 10 as a leader and commander in the special forces. His role at Sonder is to lead the commercial strategy and growth of the company, both domestically and internationally. He is committed to addressing the world’s burgeoning health crisis by disrupting the way people get help.

The post Sonder’s Mission to Provide Active Care Services appeared first on Vivaldi.

If you want to achieve extraordinary impact for customers, investors, and society, we can help with strategies to do that.  

Here are 10 questions that can help to steer internal conversations with teams to help your business get ahead.  

1) What is your business’s field of play? 

A “field of play” refers to where your brand might reasonably fit, unencumbered by the boundaries of categories. For instance, Tesla’s field of play is not just cars, or transport, but intelligent energy. Rather than being bound by strict category definitions, consider how your business might exist in a larger context.  

2) How are you using technology to evolve around your consumers? 

Today technology is reinventing the core of businesses. Consumers are now empowered decisionmakers. In what areas could your business benefit from better utilizing technology? How would your consumer relationships change? What would be the impact on your business’s category? Finding new tech solutions can have wide-ranging implications.  

3) Are you experimenting? 

Those who can achieve transformational growth do so by experimenting at scale and integrating learnings as a systemic capability. Does your business test out new ideas regularly? Do you have a process for utilizing feedback from experiments? Think about how you can incorporate experimentation into your regular processes to help identify new areas for growth or improvement.  

4) How are you taking your strategy beyond transactions? 

The focus of value creation has shifted from driving transactions to driving interactions. It’s not enough to simply accomplish a task for a customer. Brands and businesses deliver real value when they achieve something more or create greater connections. Consider how your company uses brand technology, ownable experiences, data, purpose, and hyper-personalization.  

5) How would you reimagine the structure of your organization to be ambidextrous? 

Now more than ever, organizations need to learn how to optimize their current business model, while building a new one. So called “ambidextrous organizations” are those that can compete in the present while creating possibilities for the future.  

6) If someone evaluated your brand’s actions, would they be consistent with its strategy? 

Strategy is nothing without action. But how often is your company engaging in actions that aren’t aligned with your strategy? Or vice versa? How much strategic thinking does your business have simply sitting in PowerPoint decks? Figure out how to activate this thinking in the real world. 

7) Does your brand harness the power of others to create a more rewarding ecosystem of shared value? 

The value chain doesn’t just end with your product or service. There are opportunities to grow beyond your brand through collaborating with other businesses, or even starting other businesses to create shared value. Applying an ecosystem lens may open opportunities you hadn’t previously considered.  

8) Can all your employees/colleagues articulate what your business stands for in under 20 seconds? 

Every business needs a North Star to guide what they do, and how they do it. Powerful brands and businesses are the ones who can quickly articulate why they do what they do. Going beyond that are brands who have a higher purpose, or a mission that society can connect to. How strong is your North Star?  

9) What is your strategy to retain your top talent? 

We are in an ongoing war for talent. As companies look to retain and attract top talent, it’s not enough to think about what’s working well enough today. Think about what you will have to do in the next three years to keep your team motivated.   

10) Will your consumers be able to relate to your offering this time next year if you don’t change anything you are doing today? 

In a world of changing technology and consumer needs, companies that fail to reinvent themselves or parts of their business get left behind. How could your business anticipate what’s coming next? How can you build something for the future? 

Vivaldi’s team of strategists is always happy to discuss these questions in depth with you. We want to help create the next generation of your business. Reach out to our team.  

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Darren has led some of the world’s most award-winning agencies as the Chief Creative and Managing Director, bridging the gap between traditional and digital creative, working in the UK, the Netherlands, USA, Canada, and Germany. While leading agencies, Darren has earned over 100 international awards for projects from print design to product innovation, including work for Pepsi, Smart Car, and Getty Images.

In this Q&A, Darren shares how he thinks about the intersection of technology and design, what captures his interest outside of work, and his career journey from financial industry software programmer to chief creative.

Q: How would you define what a “creative technologist” is?

A: I believe a creative technologist can come from tech, creative, production or consulting. Many people think of creative technology as a niche, but I think it’s a massive discipline with many different facets offering many different viewpoints. Take designers for example, you can have an industrial designer, a product designer, a communication designer, a packaging designer — you get the point. The same applies to a creative technologist — the tech vs. creative vs. production vs. consulting skills are dialed up or down depending on the individual.

There is a sweet spot though where a creative technologist has had time in both camps and can look at ideas first from a brand point of view, and then look at how the technology can enhance concepts so that the tech and ideas seem to work together seamlessly, as if they had belonged together all along.

Q: You began your career working as a programmer and found your way into the creative agency world, can you share a bit about that evolution and what guided you?

A: I started my career as a programmer working in the financial industry on the big broker software. While working in that sector though, I always found myself playing and tinkering on my lunch break — always creating little Windows desktop games. The passion I’d had as a teen just stayed with me, even in finance. One day my manager threw Macromedia Flash 2 on my desk and said, “Darren, take a look at this, please. We want you to lead on the new intranet development, but we want it to be engaging and interactive.”

As you can imagine, I was in heaven! I installed the software almost immediately and began playing with the functions and timeline coding. I wanted to learn more though, so I set up a forum which was purely based on Flash and the coding language, Actionscript. That forum ended up becoming the biggest forum in Europe and competed with others across the USA.

Throughout the entire experience, I had learned so much from others and also shared my experiences as well. Web Designer magazine, a global publication, approached me to write magazine articles on design, UX and coding. It was a great way to pass on all the knowledge I had learned from others. Eventually, I was even approached by book publishers to do the same and I ended up co-writing three books on the subject matter.

As you can probably imagine, by this time I was hooked on creating entertaining experiences! A small independent agency working for the BBC approached me to become their interactive creative director and lead the way in creating digital experiences on and offline.

Eventually, I went on to R/GA and Isobar – still in the digital realm – but it wasn’t until I left the UK in 2010 to work on the Adidas World Cup campaign that I learned the dark arts of traditional creative. I found it to be just as fascinating as the digital realm that I had left. Eventually, I moved on to Canada to work as a creative director at CP+B and then back again to Europe as the Chief Creative Officer of BBDO and Proximity in Germany and then CCO of Havas. In 2019 I finally headed back home to the UK and joined WPP to lead one of their biggest clients, and today I am here at Vivaldi.

That’s probably the really long way to answer your question! The short way would be: the shift was easier than I thought. I am one of those lucky people that are able to use the left and right sides of the brain at the same time, so I found it a natural fit and have enjoyed the ride so far.

Q: If you were just starting out in your career today, is there a sector you would gravitate toward?

A: Trick question…of course, consulting! The reason I moved from the world’s biggest ad agency was that I saw the value is with the conversations at the C-suite level; they hold the vision for their brands and are ultimately the decision makers. Having a direct connection will enable you to find and create the right solutions. Also, unlike some consulting agencies, Vivaldi has the ability to deliver end to end solutions, not just stopping at the strategy.

This is where anybody starting their career can make the biggest impact, for themselves with growth and learning and moving brands forward.

Q: You have written a couple of books – how does writing influence or impact the creative work you do?

A: At the time it hugely impacted me, because to author a book you must do tons of research to make sure your subject matter is not all subjective; this was especially true for the books I was writing on programming and design. It is a massive undertaking, and you come out of the process with more knowledge than when you started, so it’s hugely rewarding.

Q: What excites you about creativity now?

A: The way technology has advanced so much and will continue to do so. This in turn has opened the opportunities for better creative solutions and I want to be the one inventing these solutions. What excites me specifically is BIG ideas that have been beautifully executed so the consumer can see the idea and message clearly and connect to the idea and the brand.

Q: Is there a book or podcast you’d recommend?

A: I spend more of my time on LinkedIn and blogs, learning as much as I can. Seeing technology that I might be able to hack into a solution for clients or beautiful art that might inspire a design direction. I’m a bit of a sponge like that.

Q: Do you have any passions or interests outside of work that people might not expect?

A: My son’s football team, where I am the manager. I am also a creative nerd gamer (very cliché). I play on Xbox and VR mainly, but have all the other consoles, even the old ones like the first PlayStation. Music. I have quite a lot of vinyl and my taste is very varied. I have classical, jazz, blues, rock, pop, dance, rap… the list is long so I will spare you. But my favorite artist is the one and only Mr. Jimi Hendrix.

Q: How are you thinking about this new role at Vivaldi?

A: I’m excited! We have super smart and talented people, and everyone I’ve met has been very welcoming. My role will be to push and get the best out of the creative; to connect creative, technology and strategy to solve business problems, and partner that with our strategy team to find the right solutions for the clients. I also have a good track record of leadership, therefore, I would like to instill my learnings and help our talent become future leaders. And lastly, have fun doing all of the above.

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