Thank You

A huge thank you from us here at Nimbus Ninety to everybody who attended Converge on Monday. Between canapes and drinks, it was exhilarating to see such a great turnout; and to hear sharp thinking, actionable insight, and wit, across a range of topics.

For that reason, we’d like to extend individual thank yous to our speakers and panel contributors:

• Rose Luckin, Professor of Learner Centred Design at University College London.
• Robert Bridge, the Chief Customer Officer at Telegraph Media Group.
• Philip Green, working in association with start-ups; and with previous senior roles at Deliveroo, Groupon, and Amazon.
• Greg Moore, the Personalisation and Campaign Lead at Episerver.

It was great fun and a privilege to listen to you.

The Digital Trends Report 2018

One of the purposes of the night was to celebrate the launch of our Digital Trends Report 2018! Hopefully, if you are reading this, you have a (gorgeous) physical copy of the report. If not, the full report can be accessed here:

It spans members’ insights across the topics of foresight, competition, strategy, skills, customers, and hindsight.

Our three speakers are all interviewed in the report alongside Martin Reed, the MD of Reed.co.uk, David Mattin, the Head of Insight at Trendwatching, and Bruce Daisley, the VP of EMEA at Twitter.

The report is a great read and we’re extremely proud of it.

Some of the Night's Insights

1. Learn to Keep Learning

Professor Rose Luckin helped assuage some of the worries about the negotiation between AI and human workers by advocating for a changed relationship between adults and education. Will education be something we do throughout our life? If so, self-efficacy becomes extremely important as adults must become more adaptable in the face of change.

Perhaps some industries need to break out of the “3+ years of experience” mindset; to take on people with more varied backgrounds; to find tough, adaptable employees, and to trust them to grow into role changes. Perhaps some people need to become more flexible in their career path, think critically about what they can provide that an AI can’t, and most importantly, learn to keep learning.

2. Simplify and Automate

Philip Green’s talk ranged about many different ways that disruptors think.

But here’s one: think about success in a different way. We all want success for ourselves and our organisations. But the tangle between the appearance of success, and success itself, can lead to focus which is self-interested or wrongheaded. Budget over ROI. Scale over success. Presenteeism over output.

One way to seem successful is to surround yourself by dashboard software, have a huge department, wave bits of paper around, and make sure you are working hard in an inefficient way. That’s not ideal for individuals or a company. Instead, focus sharply on your goals, and try to build processes that can make it as simple to achieve as possible.

If you can, attempt the task of automating yourself out of a job. It will make yourself and the company richer as you do so.

3. Prosecute the Right Goals

Implementing West Coast platform wisdom to a traditional British broadsheet shows how far the media has already come as a “post-disruption” industry.

Robert Bridge spoke about the changing ways that businesses in media have come to measure progress. When different interfaces change everything from revenue streams, means of access, to measures of use, it can take a while to find the right metric to determine where to optimise.

Traditional media has been on a journey from purchases of copies, to clicks, to subscriptions, and over the same time digital and print have integrated more fully as a business.