By Gerd Leonhard, Futurist and Author

The term ‘Digital Transformation’ is well on its way to becoming overused, long before it even has a chance of becoming a reality. It has become an expression that implies a readiness for the future, but which rarely indicates any profound change in thinking. The kind of changed thinking necessary to equip today’s corporations for surviving the imminent transition awaiting humanity as technology becomes truly embodied. The shifts that this will bring, not only to the world of work but to education, retirement, our concepts of birth, life and death mean that we must not only digitally transform, but we must also transform digitisation.

Transforming digitisation means that we must reassume the lead narrative and change technology before it changes us utterly. Digitisation must not become the vehicle to mass layoffs and unemployment, social contract erosion or cultural collapse and resource wars. Today, we already exist in a world where a shared economic narrative has almost disappeared and as humans on a planet with finite resources, we must master technology in ways that we have not yet demonstrated, including socially, culturally, ethically, and environmentally. The time for treating ethics as a public relations exercise, a nice-to have after the economic model has extracted maximum profit, is long gone. We are entering the age of digital ethics. Technology now enables economic sanctioning of any brand that oversteps the moral mark and as the world becomes ever-more networked, economic demonstrations of discontent will become increasingly common.

The talk about digital transformation needs to move beyond the focus on efficiency and towards wider human progress. We love to talk of exponential technologies rather than of exponential humanism. Technology is not just removing the intermediaries in every market, it’s tearing down the walls between public and private life, between economic survival and moral thriving. The future is not nirvana, neither is it some kind of Hollywood dystopia. The future, I’m afraid, is all too human. It will look and feel like today, only much faster and hyper-connected. It will relentlessly punish any kind of outdated thinking.

Transformation means difference, not merely improvement. We may be the last generation in history to live biologically organic lives. Before this bodily marriage with technology, we should use every remaining minute to evolve morally as much as we do economically. The next 20 years will change humanity more than the previous 300 years.

Source: Adapted from Leading Digital, George Westerman, Didier Bonnet, Andrew McAfee, Harvard Business Review, 2014