My Name's Alex Hagan, and if you're at this page, chances are it's because I've given you a business card.

Every one of my business cards tells a different story. There's about 100 of them and I chose this card for you because I want to tell you this specific story.

In 1997, a computer beat chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov. It had taken a team of three people eight years to program that computer.  The computer and Kasparov played six rounds, and in the end the computer one three and a half rounds to Kasparov's two and a half rounds. It was heralded as an example of the amazing advances in computer technology to the point where they were able to beat humans at a game humans had been mastering for thousands of years. That was 20 years ago, and chess computers have been getting better ever since.

In 2017, Google's Alpha Zero beat the world's best chess computer in 100 rounds. This was no 3.5-to-2.5-game win.  Alpha Zero tied or won against the computer in every one of those 100 rounds.  The most amazing part of this story?  Alpha Zero hadn't been programmed.  It had sucked up the world's entire archive of computerised chess games in four hours.

Today, we are in a world where and entire field of human endeavor can be disrupted by machine learning not in decades or years, but before lunch.  Automation is rapidly transforming our economy, industries, organisations, and lives.

Part of the work we do at Kienco is to help organisations identify the drivers and trends that will provide either opportunities, risks, or (more commonly) both of these to their business models.  And then we help them determine how best to navigate the landscape of opportunity.  It's a critical part of Strategic Workforce Planning, but often impacts business models, product strategy, and marketing strategy too.

If you'd like to explore how your organisation can be successful in executing your vision and mission in this landscape of opportunity we call VUCA, if you'd like to be a "Future Maker", and if you'd like your strategies to be robust in a fast-changing landscape, then let's have a chat about how we can work together.

Thanks for reading.

Alex

0430 734 142 | 1800 KIENCO | Email