Improving the world around you
Hyper-density
Do you know what this is a photo of?
It’s not a piece of abstract art; it’s a Google Earth photo of just part of the coastline of China.
What you see here are seafood cages and you can zoom into any part of the 1500km long coast from Zhejiang province to Guangdong province and see these floating cages virtually everywhere.
Fish, crabs, prawns, lobster, clams - it’s all there. Part of the 45% of the global seafood catch that China alone consumes. To put that into perspective, China eats 65 million tons of seafood a year; the EU ‘just’ 13 million, Japan 7 million, and the US also 7 million.
This is hyper-dense farming at its most efficient. And, China has been doing it for millennia, with the original version being silkworm farming. Fish, this time in freshwater ponds, eat the silkworm faeces that drop into the water from the mulberry trees they inhabit and that shade the ponds. The same technique has now been applied to ‘above water’ pig farms; the pigs eat waste from sugar cane, which is grown on islands the are shared by the pig farms, rising out of the pond in which the fish (which eat the pig faeces) live.
Question: What efficient circularity can you build into your business to extract more from less?
Face time
When I visit my GP, I’m often struck by how rarely she actually looks at me.
I don’t take it personally, but she spends 90% of the consult either examining my body or typing away at her computer. But, what if there’s a way to drag doctors away from their screens?
ChatGPT has been in the news a LOT these past few months and I agree with Bill Gates that it’s potentially one of the few genuinely transformative technologies in our lifetimes (he thinks the other is the graphical user interface, or GUI, that I’m using to create this newsletter, and that you probably use every single day of your working life).
Here’s a solution to the ‘not looking at patients’ issue, which also solves a problem for doctors: having to take notes. Watch this one minute video about the AI-driven doctors’ ‘co-pilot’ called Nabla:
Now, I can think of a number of issues with this, but I’m struck by the cleverness of removing a pain point for both patients and doctors, in one fell swoop. I wish them well and look forward to my GP looking me in the eye more often.
Question: What’s an application of AI that is available TODAY and that would simulaneously solve an operational problem for your people, and a customer experience problem for your clients?
Visual culture
While we’re talking about ChatGPT, I find myself wondering whether we’re seeing the ‘end of writing’. My son already, in Year 8 at high school, barely uses a pen. Everything is done by keyboard, trackpad, pointing device and voice instructions. He said he’s used a pen three times this year.
And, we’re already deeply into an overwhelmingly visual culture. We watch 10 times more screen content than read books. The percentage of video content on social media platforms doubles each year. I’m one of the 65% of people who, when faced with a practical problem, go first to YouTube (e.g., how to tie a bow tie, or how to get more topspin onto my forehand in tennis).
And, I shouldn’t say this, but even my clients have largely stopped reading. Or, to put it more precisely, they’re losing patience with dense, lengthy text documents.
I’ve been a strategy consultant for 20 years now, and easily my most popular request from clients is for me and my team to produce a “Strategy on a Page”. They love having a concise, highly visual, easy-to-digest explainer of their organisation’s strategic environment, identity, focus of effort and result areas. All on a page, attractively laid out, so the eye goes from one section to another, seamlessly. (Ask me if you want to see some samples - I’m happy to share).
And, we can take it further still.
I’ve started creating videos of the ‘Strategy on a Page’ where it builds up element by element, and I talk a board of directors or an executive team through it. Some of them are then using these short (5 - 10 minute) videos are ‘explainers’ to their entire staff.
Question: What strategic information do you want people to digest that could be conveyed visually, or in video form?
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Until we meet again next Friday, enjoy looking for ways to improve the world around you.
Andrew