The Courageous Collective
Two weeks ago I attended CAIS as a guest and also as a guest-tweeter. CAIS is the Cayman Alternative Investment Summit, hosted by Dart and KPMG. It’s one of the highlights in the Cayman conference calendar.
My job for the two day conference was to take over the CAIS20 twitter handle and tweet like crazy! It was an easy job in the sense that the content was phenomenal and there was an endless stream of wise and quotable words. It was a hard job in the sense that this was not my opinion (and if you know me, you know I have opinions) and listening intently, taking notes and converting those into tweets, all the while not missing the next thing to be said, is surprisingly hard!
There were many interesting macro tidbits and thoughts on the future of the alternative investment industry. But the side of the conference that I loved was what I can best describe as the ‘human’ side. It was the exploration of human behaviour and motivation and the ideas around how humans will interact with each other and with technology in the future.
At these sorts of conferences there is often a great deal of talk of change. And there is no doubt that the world is rapidly changing around us in almost every way.
A lot of the change is for the better. Our lives are easier, safer and richer than at any time in the past. If you struggle with feelings of pessimism about the world, read Stephen Pinker’s ‘Enlightenment Now’, or Johan Norberg’s ‘Progress’.
We, as businesses and as individuals, must think about change and adapt to it, of course. But whilst listening to a lot of the speakers, I kept coming back to Jeff Bezos’ quote about change:
“I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?' And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two.”
Amongst the talk of AI, robots, machines, climate change, geopolitical shifts, blockchain, was the idea that humans still need other humans, and humans will always need other humans. The human brain has changed very little in the last 150,000 years, and it’s not about to change over the next ten.
We are tribal. We group in herds. We come together for a common mission or to fight a common enemy. We are, as someone said at the conference, the courageous collective. Whilst the human and the machine is a powerful combination, nothing can beat a human and a human (aided by a machine). We often hear how businesses that don’t keep up with the pace of technological change will fall behind, and there is no doubt that this is true. But I think it will be the businesses that fail to appreciate the basic elements of human psychology, human behaviour and human motivation that don’t make it into the next decade.
Maybe I am biased. I have embraced technology in the running of my business, but in 2020 that should be a given (though I know many businesses are still running off excel). But what will power Liberty Wealth forward, along with many other service businesses, is the fact that us humans, whilst being incredibly complex, are also rather simple. We want to be heard, respected, valued and trusted. We want to form deep, lasting relationships. We want a human at the end of the line. I’m betting on that. What about you?
Georgie
georgie@libertywealth.ky