As humans and as businesspeople, we can tolerate a degree of discomfort. Too much discomfort is not easy to handle and we mostly avoid it.

The easiest way to deal with discomfort in the past was to do nothing, or conduct another “study”. Or isolate a problem and appoint an executive to “deal with it”. How do you design a decision-tree when the variables you need to contend with are endless and their implications are also endless?

Yet, you can – by sticking to a few simple guidelines, despite huge complexity. As long as we are in business to solve consumer problems, simplicity is what it is about. Define and problem and draw a straight line to solve it. Layer people, systems and solutions and costs multiply without a concomitant happier customer. All new brands, from Tesla, to Uber, to many online banking applications, do at least one simple thing: make the line between problem and solution simple, direct and fast.

Today – as argued last week, understanding best practice undermines any potential future. Its worth only lies in telling a CEO what not to do.

The changes we face require far harder skills: intellectual agility, a high risk propensity, an ability to work with contradictions. We need people who can cope with change as the new normal. We need intellectually agile people. People with deep conceptual ability who are able to assess complex variables and come up with novel solutions. The ability to deep-dive into strategic options is less important than the agility with which it is done. To get lost in the detail is to miss the opportunity. Yet, deep insight is required to separate the relevant from the noise. Fast.

All lines in business must go straight from how consumer problems are solved to how the business operations must support that.

It is about reduction, where a business solution is the straightest line between problem and solution. From simple things like digital communications, e-commerce and an explosion of user-generated content, to more complex things like Tesla, connected devices, IoT, AI, bio-mimicry, robotics and medical technologies ­– the impact of change has been dramatic and exponential.

This means new competitors with value propositions designed around the consumer from the outset. Many of the new technology brands have created such a competitive advantage that competitors find it very hard to compete, using their legacy structures.

New technology brands solve consumer problems in a fast and seamless way. Their entire structures are designed around their value propositions. That is what true consumer-centricity is.

The implications for most companies are similar to renovating an old home or building a new one. Whilst renovating may often look like a better and cheaper option, at times it is better to redesign and build a house from scratch as the renovation will at best deliver an inferior product.

That is the double-bind most companies are in. They almost need to erase their history and start again as the pain and costs of “renovation” will still leave them with an inferior product.

It will mean a company may be forced, defensively, to transform to protect its current customer base and expand within known parameters, whilst offensively, it launches new companies that originate from the consumer being centre stage, and then design the business operations around that. It may be easier for a bank to adapt to retain existing older customers, but far easier to design new brands to attract younger customers used to another competitive context.

Whereas the history of technology is process-driven, process is merely one element of the way technology will impact a company.

If a company starts with defining consumer lifetime value and how best to drive that value through technology, it needs to start unpacking how every single aspect of its business model can adopt technology to create integration, efficiency, responsiveness and seamless connections.

How must back-end systems support front-end systems so that they are seamless and consistent? How must technology support frontline staff?  How must technology drive more efficient marketing campaigns? How can technology cut the costs of acquisition?How can technology enable better targeting? How can technology enable more seamless online engagement? How can technology enable connecting diverse data points to become more useable? How can companies move beyond UX within channels to UX across channels to build real lifetime value? How can we escape focus upon paid search when the costs are becoming prohibitive?

The point I try to make here, is that technology has made the world complex, even though it can make it much simpler. To remain clear on outcomes, we need to remain clear on objectives and KPI’s.

A simple way to do this, is to unpack the company business model into its respective areas.

To summarise, to really leverage technologies today companies must:

• Be as informed as possible. Yet, information overload is hardly the way to cope. It is not volume, but insight that matters. Instead of drowning in data, how can we reduce that to meaningful insight?
• Learn to work with contradictions. Contradictions enable agility and choice. The greater the degree of uncertainty companies can learn to live with, the greater agility they will have.
• Increase the tolerance for risk. Technology enables fast decisions, but also rapid prototyping and testing of new product and service ideas. Living with high levels of certainty is no longer possible.
• Become agile and flexible to change fast. Not making a decision is making a decision, don’t be fooled.
• Know what data matters and drive that. All the talk about data has made us think all data is relevant, very far form it. In most industries and businesses, a few key data points drive value. The rest is padding.
• Adopt multi-disciplinarily as a norm: flat structures and no functional silos. Companies must be designed around consumer value propositions. Design thinking and its permutations are invaluable in telling us how best to design teams for multi-disciplinary creativity as well as specialist focus.
• Accept most of what they do will not have traditional yardsticks, benchmarks or processes. No brilliant ad has ever tested well, we are conditioned to like certain things, innovation comes from combining the non-obvious.
• Always unpack the business model from how that enables and drives the customer value proposition. There are brilliant tools to do this, the well-known Business Model Canvas is excellent (Alexander Osterwalder).
• Understand that technology decisions can fast be overtaken by technology advancements. The advantage lies with the company that can best implement and leverage the technology to attain critical mass in the market.
• Create a culture of learning. To stick to what “we have always done” is just ludicrous.

To conclude: the end-result for most companies leaves them in a double-bind

Technology enables far greater opportunities for innovation and design efficiencies within organisations. Hence, despite global uncertainties, higher potential revenue and margins are possible.

However, it will entail greater uncertainty, greater risk and greater agility. The counter concern is that, in the current era, technology enables innovation to come from anywhere.

Hence, the threat to companies that are lethargic and inflexible, is very high. This is the vast majority of companies out there today.

Most traditional strategic interventions like benchmarking were defensive rather than offensive.

The decisions companies need to make today are more open-ended, varied, far harder and more complex.

It reminds me of the wonderful line of Kurt Vonnegut, “Do something that scares you everyday” I am sure Kodak would love to be in this position today.

On a very sober note to companies: please do not dabble in these things, be serious and do them right. Dabbling will just cost you money and will achieve nothing. In the process, you will also frustrate your best people and they will do what they can elsewhere.