Consultancy Technology Outlook - #9

The more advanced A.I.-powered organizational- and team dashboards monitor their use by analyzing click behavior of the managers who 'own' these dashboards. This click behavior drives a rule engine that friendly nudges the manager to have a look in other places of his dashboard. The consultant gets alerted when individual managers click too little, do not click on crucial dashboard parts (like a transformation to-do list) or not click at all.

Next, nudging expands to the dashboards of individual employees: friendly nudges advise employees what's the fastest way to get things done and which colleague could help to improve rather than having the employee reinvent the wheel herself. Then, the consultant has even richer alerts with which to work. Are managers actively clicking but with a passive (non-clicking) team? Perhaps the transformation doesn't permeate to the work floor. Inactive manager but an active group? Intervene before the energy on the work floor dies out.

The overall consequence of this expanded nudging is that the core of the transformation is a consultant-managed self-service platform. But, when some parts of the organization go astray, alerts keep the human attention focuses on these parts.

When the core of a transformation is a self-service platform managed by consultants, it must be desirable to work with such a platform. Gamification is often mentioned as a stimulating factor but just as often misunderstood in how to apply that gamification. Games are often associated with competition, with my-win-is-your-loss. Shooter games and racing games, for example.

Yet, there also other games with a social fabric at the core (Snapchat), to create something, alone or together (e.g., Minecraft), and with increasing levels of difficulty and matching rewards (in a game like Portal). We'll see more of these latter – positive – aspects of gamification descending on the work floor. An example is a playful and interactive knowledge network (who can help whom) like PRAIORITIZE's Buddy Map.