2022 Megatrends and Predictions

Join ISG’s CMO, Paul Gottsegen, as he interviews ISG Advisor, Prashant Kelker, about digital trends and predictions for 2022.

Transcript:

Paul

Hello everybody, thanks for joining us. 

I'm here with Prashant Kelker, and we're getting towards the end of a very challenging but in some ways uplifting year in terms of what everybody done to persevere through a dynamic time. Now we're getting into the latter half of December as we're recording this Q&A and starting to think very seriously about what comes up in 2022. 

Now, there's been a lot of changes. The pace of change has accelerated dramatically. The degree of complexity has increased as well, and as – or when – the dust continues to settle a little bit, there may be a new set of winners and losers in every sector because things are so dynamic. We want to talk about what some of the forecasts and predictions are for the megatrends as we move into next year (2022). 

Okay, so Prashant, good to see you. You got a lot of books behind you. I think that those – rather, I think that's your reading list just from the last two weeks – just based on what I know of you. 

So anyway, why don't we just kick right into it? We'll get more specific, but what I'd like to ask you is: what are the overarching shifts that you're seeing? What are two or three big trends that, as you think about 2022, enterprises need to consider? 

Prashant

I think you touched upon this, Paul, the minute you used the word “dynamism.” And I think if we go beyond the things that we are reading today in the newspapers with hybrid workplaces, if we just focus on that dynamism part, I think clients are getting used to dynamism. They're really – they know how to deal with dynamism now, so we've seen three patterns come out through dynamism. 

1. The first one is they're moving from large scale programs towards what we are calling continuous transformations. There's no start, there's no end, right? It's a sequence of events. 
2. Which leads us to the second point, and that is, how do you get used to planning and delivering for a string of business outcomes as opposed to one row or one business case? 
3. And I think the third thing the pandemic has taught everybody is you can't do anything alone. So how do you do all of this with an ecosystem of partners and suppliers? 

I think, if you ask me at the highest level, what we're going to see in 2022, irrespective of what the industry segment is – it’s these three things. 

Paul 

And it on that first one, Prashant, where there's never really an end. How will people feel confident that they've achieved a key milestone? There's always that great sense of completion when you've done a large project. You know, you go live with it, and you're done… but I guess we have to think of this with a whole different paradigm now. 

Prashant 

Oh yeah, Paul. And there's one interesting paradigm I'm going to use that word coming out from the West Coast. I think it started in Intel. Then it went to Google. And now it's slowly rolling out, and that's the system of OKR's: objectives and key results. 

So, clients have got used to – organizations are getting used to – saying okay what are our objectives for the next six months? And what are the key results these should bring? And then they leave it to the rest of the organization, which takes these OKR's as a mission and then breaks it out, right? They don't try to spell it out for them. 

Continuous transformation is not chaos. Continuous transformation is a sequence of delivering to outcomes. That's… that's creating a few shifts in mind shifts, right? 

So, one is you go away from planning and coding to shipping more often. If you ship more often, then you start seeing the results of what you just shipped, which you can bring into the next sequence of OKRs. 

So, you know, we're getting away from a world where you had large programs which had a start and an end and moving to this continuous way of delivery. The focus then shifts from what is a good program to what is a good team. 

Paul

No, I think that makes sense, and I think the idea of continuous delivery as a form of agility has been around for a while. Like many things, it got accelerated through the last 22 months, and it sounds like it will just gain more speed.