306 - Value Creation
One elephant that you can find sitting in every room is "How can we add more value to our business?". Answering this question is both a moving target, and often it is hyper-complex.
It requires taking the perspectives of not only your current customers, understanding what they want that you don't yet deliver, as well as your "non-consumers", the people who you haven't yet offered any appealing value to. There is always an infinite amount of value that may be added if only you can work out the details, like "what", "where", and "how".
Layoffs are a pretty typical example of failing to answer this question. Given all of the trouble that recruitment and hiring entails, as well as the high cost of greatly reduced employee motivation and loyalty that you'll never find listed on financial ledgers, these are a virtually universal sign of net-loss short-term decision-making.
Governments are an even easier example of this opportunity for added value due to their scope of operations. Different types of governments order and structure the value that they add in different ways, and governments generally choose an array of overlapping ideologies, but virtually every government could offer their citizens greater value. The citizens can't simply switch government providers the way that they might choose a new mobile phone carrier, so they tend to demand a small portion of that potential added value that they're able to both imagine and articulate.
Most of that virtually infinite potential value isn't currently imagined or articulated by anyone, let alone someone with the means and strategy to deploy it. Just as prehistoric humans were unaware of the overwhelming majority of asteroids and comets passing by Earth on a regular basis, humans today remain equally blind to these opportunities for added value. This can change, and to make companies and governments that are able to adapt and thrive over the coming years and decades it must change.
Systems specifically built from scratch to handle and thrive under hyper-complexity, with the freedom to learn and explore all human knowledge, and the scalability to consider problems in human-like ways at superhuman scales, offer a significant advantage here. Not only can they be individually very useful as solo contributors to the process of finding those add-value opportunities, but they can work with and learn from entire companies and governments' worth of employees and stakeholders, asking clarifying questions and continuing to seek better answers over time. They can also be networked together, nested within one another, and many more configurations, to further increase meta-alignment to humanity as a whole (ethics) as well as to increase intelligence that much further.
When you have the technology to know what you should focus on next, and how, what will you do?
