In the past, I suggested that the role of the CIO needs to shift from that of a Chief Information Officer to a Chief Innovation Officer, largely due to the rapid, multiple technology-driven transformations that are always occurring. But just as the CIO’s role needs to change, so too does the CTO’s role—from Chief Technology Officer to Chief Transformation Officer. This shift is necessary in order to maintain and elevate the position’s relevance within the organization. There is less of a need for merely understanding information and technology, and a much greater requirement of leaders to be anticipatory in regard to innovation and transformation.

Transform Instead of Change

Traditionally, the CIO has historically been focused on the technology needed for running the company, while the CTO has been responsible for the technology integral to products being sold to customers or clients. However, based on predictable Hard Trends that have taken place and ones that will take place in the coming years, business processes always undergo major transformations, making it imperative that someone both drives and oversees internal as well as external, transformation in order to stay ahead of the curve and become an Anticipatory Organization®.

Keep in mind that change is doing the same thing, only with some small differences. Transformation is doing something completely different. The iTunes store changed music, giving us the ability to digitally purchase full-length albums and upload them to our iPods, cataloging them on our desktop computers. Spotify transformed it, giving us subscription access to just about anything we want to listen to on our mobile devices for one monthly fee, without us having to store anything on our desktop computers.

Old Titles and New Roles

It’s no longer enough to merely change your ways; you need to transform, no matter what field you operate in. There is no profession, career, business, or organization that is not going to transform dramatically and fundamentally as more technological change occurs every year, if not a little bit every day. Always expect radical transformation to occur fast and oftentimes without warning whatsoever.

Many technology companies of today not only profit but operate in a space of products and services that were nonexistent just a few short years ago. Snapchat is a great example of this. Before its inception, individuals took photos and videos with their mobile devices, sharing them merely on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and via text message in a semi-permanent fashion. Snapchat quickly facilitated the ability to send private photo and video messages that would delete themselves unless the recipient manually saved the message. In a matter of months, sending Snapchats became more popular than simple picture text messages, reflecting the transformative nature of business today as well as the speed of the transformation.

Given this example, it’s vital that today’s CTOs embrace the role of Chief Transformation Officer. No longer will this position’s relevance be tied to how well he or she can oversee the development of technology. The CTO will need to oversee the transformation of every business process, including how you sell, market, communicate, collaborate, and innovate.

This also means that the CTO and CIO need to be in closer collaboration with each other. Because the CIO’s new role is Chief Innovation Officer, and because so much of the CIO’s previous responsibilities are digitized today with nearly everything as a service (XaaS), the CIO is free to focus on overall innovation. By working closely together, the CTO and CIO can drive transformation and innovation—both internally and in terms of product and service development.

Ultimately, no matter what business or occupation you’re in, it will transform in many ways. In fact, the landscape is going to transform so radically that no organization will go untouched. It’s up to the Chief Transformation Officer to ensure that your company is the one that not only anticipates and survives these transformations but also thrives during and after it. Only then can you turn disruption and change into opportunity and advantage for your organization.

Now that I’ve revealed what business leaders must know in order to become the disruptor instead of the disrupted, the next step is applying those principles. I discussed previously the need to solve problems before they occur; however, what happens when you do uncover a problem?

Whatever it is, you have to take that problem and skip it, because that problem is not really your problem. The key to unraveling your organization’s most intractable problems often lies in recognizing that the problem confronting you is not the real problem, just what you think the problem is.

Consider Elon Musk and Tesla. During the company’s inception, Musk funneled millions of his own money into Tesla to jump-start manufacturing. When creation, testing, and everything was moving slower than expected while pre-orders for a Roadster stacked up, he had to funnel even more of his money into the company, nearly bankrupting himself. Tesla wasn’t just facing one big problem; their problem was multiple problems! Batteries would overheat and burn, cars would fail safety testing; you name it, it happened.

However, Musk and the Tesla team decided to skip those problems, realizing their real challenge was bringing fully electric cars to market. So employees focused on making sure the vehicles ran safely and got them to market, later debuting sedan models in addition to sports cars to make the very concept of electric vehicles appealing to the masses.

Like Tesla, if you look at your problem from different angles, you may well find that it is not your true problem, and rather than trying to solve it, you fare better by skipping it entirely. 

Go opposite (Follow the path less traveled)

When searching for the real problem you want to address, it’s not always easy to know where to look. A great way to harness your anticipatory abilities is to note where everyone else is looking and then look in the opposite direction. Uber looked at how traditional taxi cab companies operated, where individuals ride in vehicles and have to stress about how to split the cab fare with friends or worry if their cab driver took them on a joy ride in an unfamiliar area to increase the final bill.

By Uber essentially making the ride a flat fee from the start, it takes away a lot of stress, not to mention using your mobile device to call a personal driver to your pickup location and eliminating having to hail a cab amongst everyone on the street.

Redefine and reinvent (Identify and leverage your uniqueness in new ways)

Change is the only constant, so you can’t rest on your laurels doing what you’ve always done, even if you do your best to keep doing it better. The only way to survive and thrive is to continuously reinvent and redefine everything.

Reinventing oneself has always been a powerful strategy, but in the past, corporate and product reinvention was an option. Today it is imperative. In the past, stability and change were two contrasting states: when you achieved stability, you did so despite change. Today change itself has become an integral part of stability: you achieve stability by embracing change as a constant.

Beat the competition by redefining anything and everything about your business. Additionally, decommoditize continuously by looking for creative ways to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Direct your future (Or someone will direct it for you)

Anticipate the future to direct your future. Becoming more anticipatory starts with seeing the certainty of hard trends that will happen and making strategic moves based on them. Additionally, observe soft trends as factors you can influence to shape a better future. But it’s not enough to simply heed what I’ve discussed thus far; there is something more all-encompassing. You must actively shape your own future.

Directing your future is your creative capacity to envision and rewrite your future. You become what you dream, so if you want to know what you are becoming, ask yourself what you’re dreaming. This is a vital piece to becoming anticipatory. Anticipation puts a powerful strategic tool in your hands, giving you the control of your own future.

Chart Your Course

Anticipating the future is key to successful innovation and, more importantly, helps you become the disruptor and not the disrupted. If you want your organization and industry to be disruptive, then it is imperative for you to observe the hard trends shaping the future and help shape your organization’s future. By committing to these principles and plans of action, you and your organization will stay ahead of the curve and find a solution before the rest of the world sees a problem.

Have you ever wished you could predict the future? What would you do if you could clearly see critical changes in the months and years ahead and use them to shape your future instead of just letting it unfold by default?

I have good news for you: you can. In fact, paying close attention to the Hard Trends, or certainties that will happen, becoming more anticipatory, and pre-solving problems before they occur will allow you and your organization to become the disruptor instead of the disrupted, positioning yourself as a leader in your industry.

Throughout the entirety of my career, I have worked with several CEOs, government officials, and leaders from all different backgrounds on facing digital disruption. Here are some principles I have discovered that are crucial for business owners and other leaders alike to heed in becoming more anticipatory.

Start with certainty (Use Hard Trends to see what’s coming)

You can use the power of anticipation to spot and profit from future trends long before your competitors do. Just look at Netflix, who accurately saw the trends of individuals looking for convenience in their consumption of media and, likewise, their frustration with nominal late fees stacking up. They went on to build a subscription service for movies and television, pioneering what Hulu and Amazon Prime eventually released as well. Meanwhile, Blockbuster not only clung to their legacy thinking but actually refused to buy Netflix when given the option.

Remember 1999, when the U.S. government predicted a trillion-dollar surplus? We’ve all made similar, wildly wrong predictions because we confuse a cyclical change like the stock market with linear change, similar to population growth. Likewise, we don’t know how to distinguish Hard Trends, like the fact that baby boomers are aging, from Soft Trends, like the shortage of medical professionals to treat aging baby boomers. But by distinguishing what’s a certain future fact from an uncertain future maybe, you can make accurate predictions.

Anyone can avoid a disastrous fate like Blockbuster or even the recording industry, which was disrupted similarly starting with Napster, eventually iTunes, and now Spotify, and instead create must-have products and high-demand services as Tesla, Netflix and so many others have by seeing what others can’t: the Hard Trends that are shaping our future.

Anticipate (Base your strategies on what you know about the future)

Change from the outside is classified as disruption. Change from the inside is disruptive. The latter of the two is the kind of transformation that allows you to direct your future and seize your destiny, and the only possible way to become the disruptor rather than the disrupted is by becoming anticipatory.

Based on the certainty of Hard Trends, this is about asking yourself what problems you are about to have and what problems your organization will face in the immediate future and more importantly, what problems your customers will face. Then, look for creative ways to pre-solve problems before they happen.

When you anticipate your future challenges and opportunities, you can redefine your product or service to capitalize on the Hard Trends you see unfolding and become the disruptor. Keep in mind that disruption and change is always headed our way no matter what. It will burst through every industry and every institution, transforming everything and leaving nothing untouched in its wake. Those who see it coming will stand strong and grow.

Transform (Use technology-driven change to your advantage)

Changing means continuing to do essentially the same thing, only introducing some variation. Build it a little bigger or smaller and faster, for example. This has worked for many industries; however, the record industry or even television providers can’t survive simply by changing. Embracing change is no longer enough: we need to transform.

Transformation means doing something utterly and radically different. In terms of television providers, Spectrum and DirecTV have changed the way we watch TV, by giving you seemingly unlimited options with OnDemand and allowing you to record live TV. However, their astronomical prices have caused their folly, therefore YouTube TV and Sling TV are now transforming how we watch television by keeping their costs down while offering the same if not more of what Spectrum and DirecTV have offered. This transformed how we watch everything.

Ask yourself how you can expect your own field to transform. Equally important, ask how you can give your current and future customers the ability to do what they can’t but would if they knew it was possible. Your answers to these questions will help you begin crafting strategies to transform how you sell, market, communicate, collaborate, and innovate.

Technological change is the only constant in today’s business world, disrupting everything from large organizations to small start-ups. Disruption affects everyone, but will you be the disruptor or the disrupted? You must pay close attention to the Hard Trends shaping the future of your industry, your business, and the outside world to identify opportunities used to innovate and grow rapidly, additionally using those Hard Trends to solve any problems your organization and customers might have before they occur.

The Power of Shared Understandings and Definitions

The shared definition and understanding of the words we use is an issue in business. While several companies are on course to use artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL), others hardly understand the fundamental differences between these powerful technologies. How can one be successful, much less disruptive, when they themselves do not differentiate between AI, ML, and DL?

Recently, technology company Sage conducted surveys pertaining to AI and individuals’ understanding of it. Unfortunately, 43% of respondents in the US and 47% of respondents in the UK indicated they had no idea what AI is capable of in business.

In addition to under-education, many vendors rush different AI solutions to market before the ultimate decision-makers and buyers understand what they need or what the technology could actually do for their companies, causing confusion both internally and externally. Add in those other AI subcategories, ML and DL, and the convolution furthers.

While advising leaders of different backgrounds around the world, I found that we all have different definitions of and understandings about AI and its counterparts. For example, I was invited to participate in a high-level strategy meeting regarding AI in Washington, DC, among experts from the Department of Defense, DARPA, and several major defense contractors.

Before the meeting began, I heard discussions regarding what some were doing with deep learning, and others were talking about the results they received from machine learning. Wondering if we all mutually understood the discussion at hand, I asked one of the experts to give their definition of machine learning, asking another thereafter. By the third person, it was clear we all had different definitions for the same thing.

A similar result occurred when I asked for the definition of deep learning, and, to my surprise, even the definition of artificial intelligence varied amongst the participants.

If we are sharing how we apply a technology but with different definitions and understandings of what it actually is, we are not effectively communicating or collaborating. In actuality, we create more problems going forward. Therefore, in my example, we spent the next part of the meeting crafting definitions that everyone agreed on.

What Exactly Is AI ∙ Machine Learning ∙ Deep Learning

Artificial intelligence applies to computing systems designed to perform tasks usually reserved for human intelligence using logic, if-then rules, and decision trees. AI recognizes patterns from vast amounts of quality data providing insights, predicting outcomes, and making complex decisions.

Machine learning is a subset of AI that utilizes advanced statistical techniques to enable computing systems to improve at tasks with experience over time. Chatbots like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri improve every year thanks to constant use by consumers coupled with the machine learning that takes place in the background.

Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that uses advanced algorithms to enable an AI system to train itself to perform tasks by exposing multilayered neural networks to vast amounts of data. It then uses what it learns to recognize new patterns contained in the data. Learning can be human-supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and/or reinforcement learning like Google used with DeepMind to learn how to beat humans at the game Go.

Autonomous computing uses advanced AI tools like deep learning to enable systems to be self-governing and capable of acting according to situational data without human command. AI autonomy includes perception, high-speed analytics, machine-to-machine communications, and movement. Autonomous vehicles use these features to pilot a vehicle without a human driver.

Augmented thinking: As AI becomes more integrated into objects, processes, products, and services, humans will augment their personal problem-solving and decision-making abilities with the insights AI provides.

It is critical for leaders and employees alike to develop a firm understanding of the fundamental differences between AI, ML, and DL. The increasing levels of business insights that can be gained from a shared understanding of AI is evident when understanding exactly how these ever-growing, disruptive technologies can be harnessed by your organization.

It is imperative for organizations and leaders to go beyond reacting quickly. Becoming anticipatory by paying attention to the Hard Trends that will happen and solving problems before they occur is imperative. Understanding AI technologies and how they build upon one another is a great start, helping your organization move swiftly into the future.