Most organisations don’t set out to create surveillance systems.
They set out to understand customers.
- What do people want?
- What are they interested in?
- What will they buy?
- What will make them stay?
- What will bring them back?
Individually, each question sounds perfectly reasonable.
But collectively they create something much larger.
An economic incentive to know more about us.
The more we know, the better?
For years, digital business has operated around a seemingly obvious idea:
The more we know about customers, the better we can serve them.
That assumption has driven enormous investment in analytics, profiling, personalisation, engagement and behavioural insight.
And once information about behaviour acquires commercial value, collecting more of it becomes rational.
More information creates more insight.
More insight creates more opportunities to influence decisions.
More influence potentially creates more commercial value.
So organisations keep looking.
The important leadership question is whether this cycle is inevitable.
Imagine a different starting point
Imagine a business where observing customer behaviour provides no additional commercial advantage.
The organisation still needs customers.
It still needs compelling products.
It still needs excellent service.
It still needs to understand its market.
But success cannot depend upon knowing progressively more about individual people.
Suddenly, the incentive changes.
Instead of asking:
How can we learn more about this person?
The organisation has to ask:
How can we create something this person genuinely wants?
That is a very different relationship.
What would this mean for a greenfield business?
For a new organisation, removing the incentive for surveillance before it becomes embedded could fundamentally change the business model.
Customer value would need to come from the product or service itself rather than the information generated around its use.
Growth could not quietly become dependent upon increasingly sophisticated observation.
And privacy would not simply be something controlled through policy.
It would follow naturally from the economics of the system.
If observing people produces no value, there is little reason to build an organisation around observing them.
Existing organisations face a harder question
For established businesses, behavioural information may already be deeply embedded in decision-making.
- Analytics.
- Personalisation.
- Marketing.
- Recommendations.
- Engagement measurement.
- Customer segmentation.
The practical adoption question therefore isn’t whether organisations should suddenly abandon everything they currently know.
It is to examine dependency.
Where does knowing more about the individual genuinely improve the service?
And:
Where has knowing more about the individual simply become valuable to the organisation?
Those are not necessarily the same thing.
Changing the incentive changes the system
This is the leadership significance behind ICCA Design Principles: No Surveillance Incentives.
- Rules can constrain behaviour.
- Policies can govern behaviour.
- Regulation can prohibit behaviour.
- But incentives help create behaviour in the first place.
If a business model rewards organisations for knowing progressively more about individuals, surveillance pressure is likely to remain.
Remove the reward, and something interesting happens.
Privacy stops fighting the business model.
It can become part of it.
A question for leaders
Look at the information your organisation collects about customers and ask:
Who receives the greatest value from each piece of information?
The customer?
The organisation?
Or both?
Then ask the more challenging question:
If we could no longer create commercial value from observing individual behaviour, how would we compete?
Perhaps the answer would require better products.
- Better services.
- Better experiences.
- Better relationships.
And perhaps that is precisely the point.
That is the adoption question behind ICCA Design Principles: No Surveillance Incentives.
The underlying ICCA work is openly shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence, encouraging discussion, challenge, adaptation and further development.
The paper describes the architectural principle. This article asks what happens to an organisation when surveillance is no longer rewarded by the architecture.
#ICCA #Leadership #DigitalTrust #PrivacyByDesign #BusinessStrategy #CustomerTrust #DigitalTransformation #DataGovernance #Innovation #CreativeCommons
