Its been 4 + months since I last wrote anything on my blog and to be honest I was feeling a little guilty for not doing so even though I had good reason as my workload piled on incessantly during this time forcing me to set aside my writing. But I’m back with this last blog of 2016.
As with most people who approach the year end, I began to reflect on the past year and look back at what I have achieved and what the new year could have in store for me. But then I began to look beyond myself and at the world around me and what transpired in the past 12 months and searched agonisingly for a single word that would aptly describe how I felt about 2016.
The words that came to my mind were somewhat dark and sombre like “painful”, “tragic”, “melancholic”, “gloomy” and “desolate”. Maybe it wasn’t surprising because of the rash of celebrity deaths that had occured this year which made for some woeful reading. Just check out the list of celebrity deaths we’ve had this year which includes, politicians, actors, directors, singers, sports and fashion icons.
Alan Rickman, Alan Thicke, Anton Yelchin, Arnold Palmer, Carrie Fischer, Christina Grimmie, Craig Strickland, David Bowie, Debbie Reynolds, Fidel Castro, George Kennedy, George Michael, Gene Wilder, Glen Frey, John Glenn, Leonard Cohen, Maurice White, Michael Cimino, Muhammad Ali, Prince, Robert Vaughn, Sonia Rykiel, Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Maybe its because many of these celebrities were very familiar to me and I feel like I grew up with them listening and dancing to their songs or watching them on TV or the big screen, playing iconic characters which left an indelible print on the pop culture that has defined my generation.
But then looking past this and reflecting further on other world events just made me realise that the word I was looking for was DISRUPTION.
Perhaps a little overused and becoming more common in our vernacular, we are seeing DISRUPTION at a scale that is, quite frankly, a little scary, in virtually all segments of human life.
Systems, which in their very nature, are designed to be stable, are being destabilised by new players, new technology and a push to streamline processes, cutting away layers of hierarchy and bureaucracy and connecting consumers directly to producers and products through a process sometimes referred to as disintermediation.
The DISRUPTION that is currently seen in the finance and investment sector is one example where disintermediation is happening at a rapid pace leading to many financial advisors watching nervously for any signs that redundancy is taking root in the banks and financial institutions that they are employed at.
The taxi sector is another great example of DISRUPTION where the influx of 3rd party booking apps like Uber and Grab and private hire cars, have prompted the Singapore taxi companies (like Trans-Cab and SMRT) to lower their rental rates, offer incentives to attract more taxi drivers to join them and perhaps even consider removing the midnight surcharge which private hire cars do not charge.
In the higher education sector, polytechnics and universities are reviewing how they can re-focus more on competencies and skills rather than developing 3 or 4 year diploma and degree programmes which have a substantial concentration on academic knowledge. As part of the larger SkillsFuture movement in Singapore, a new skills certification framework which allows people to do short courses to learn new skills through remote learning is quickly being developed. This DISRUPTION would mean that educational institutions and the government have to part ways with a host of huge legacy systems and start looking at developing nationally accredited alternative certification of competencies and skills, see how public and private employers hire based on these certifications and if higher educational institutions will enrol and admit students based on these alternative certification programmes.
The media industry has been identified as the most disrupted industry out there and not surprisingly so. News organisations are looking for new ways of engaging their readers and are forced to reconsider and revise time-honoured premises and models on which they operated for decades. News can now be accessed on mobile phones on social sites rather than on traditional media sites. News can also be customised and packaged for each individual and accessed through the individual’s preferred social site on his mobile device at his own convenience.
An example of this collaboration between social sites and news publishers is the New York Times using Facebook’s Instant Articles (IA) application where NYT’s selected news articles will be shared on Facebook in the hope of better engagement with its readers.
Digital disruption of this nature where consumers are accessing products and services on their mobiles, disrupts other related industries and the audience measurement and advertising industry comes to mind. Where previously TV audience and newspaper readership were measured by methods that can best be described as educated guesses, now new metrics have emerged for internet-enabled media sites which can accurately determine actual engagement through various metrics like Click Through Rates, View Through Rates, Cost Per Click/View and Engagement Rate. All thanks to data analytics of consumer data captured digitally as more of them use digital screens facilitated by broadband internet connections.
Native advertising (or sponsored articles or videos that resemble genuine editorials) has also emerged as one of the main generators of revenue for an increasing number of digital publishers even though confidence and trust in verified news sources can be compromised if this is not done carefully.
DISRUPTION is happening on such a wide spectrum of services that this could be an unrelenting theme in our lives in the coming years and probably rising in its pace and intensity as well.
The crowdfunding phenomenon that took off by storm several years ago by Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, has now adapted itself in many various ways in other fields like welfare donations and philanthropy and widened its concept to embrace crowdsourcing. Almost anyone can use this concept to offer a range of services and products like disaster relief, logo design, information gathering and intelligence and more. This disrupts the traditional systems and organisational infrastructure set up to provide these services in the first place as they can now be provided more efficiently and cheaply.
But DISRUPTION is also being seen in the political front and the best example of that was Donald Trump winning the U.S. presidential elections held on 8 November 2016. An outsider who lacked political experience and who is more familiar with making business deals. Trump is willing to slaughter every sacred cow there is in order to pursue his goals. He was not a popular figure even within his own Republican party at the time of nomination. But it seems that the average American had bread and butter concerns which were not being adequately addressed by the incumbent Obama administration that was more preoccupied with the need to embrace technological advancement, globalisation and open and free trade which were the main drivers of disruption in the lives of the average American.
Crowdsourcing in the political/ideological field took on a more sinister complexion, with the terrorist group, ISIS, recruiting its jihadist members from all over the world to fight for its twisted and much maligned cause in Iraq and Syria. This has resulted in tragic loss of lives and DISRUPTION in the lives of innocent Syrians who are fleeing their country in a perilous journey as refugees to Turkey enroute to Europe. It has created one of the most trying and difficult human and political crises in recent history as Europe struggles to cope with the sheer numbers that are fleeing, not to mention the anger and disenchantment this has caused among ordinary Europeans and the ferocity of political debates in the continent raging over how to balance humanity with the needs of its own citizens.
Closer to home, China has re-exerted its claim over a large swathe of the South China Sea in what some political observers would describe as belligerent by building military bases on several artificial islands reclaimed from the sea. This has disrupted the stability in this region where several ASEAN countries are themselves locked in a dispute over territorial claims of several islands. The fact that peace and stability in the South China Sea was maintained for decades inspite of territorial disputes among the ASEAN countries is testament to the strength and unity of the regional economic and political grouping. But China’s entry into the equation has upset the balance somewhat and is now causing some discomfort among ASEAN members and testing the ties and bonds that have been nurtured for so long over the years.
All this led me to think about DISRUPTION and whether it is intrinsically bad for everyone when it upsets and brings distress and alarm to many people. And then I realised that just like the mythical phoenix that rose from the ashes, disruption happens for a reason; so that systems can get better, more robust and more efficient through a process of renewal, revival and re-ingoration.
But in this constant quest for change to do things better, let’s remember that change needs to be explained and people need to be convinced that the change is for their own good. Let’s not forget that people are at the centre of everything we do and we need to facilitate Change with Compassion. But change we must, if we are to survive.
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside
And it is ragin’.
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’.
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin’.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.
Happy New Year everyone!
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