Take a winter walk, as we have during the writing of this book, through the woods or along a park path on a sunny but chilly Minnesota morning. As you meander, you see your breath, and soon feel your heart beating in your chest as you zip your parka up as far as it goes. The crisp Arctic air stings your face before the low-hanging sun has the chance to warm your body. The wind resonates in your ears, the sound muffled a bit by the hat pulled tightly over your head. You walk a little faster against the wind, swinging your arms as you gradually feel a warming in your chest and limbs. You see an expanse of white snow with dry milkweed pods peeking through. You spy a hawk on a bare branch of a maple tree, then cardinals and blue jays darting from a linden tree to a sheltering spruce. You taste the peppermint balm protecting your lips, sniffle, and inhale a jolt of icy air. You smell wood fires burning in nearby homes and hear the songs of chickadees, the scraping of sharp skate blades against the ice on a nearby pond, and then the slap of a hockey stick against a puck. As you finish your stroll, you think of what a wonderful world it is.
If cold Minnesota mornings are not your cup of tea, stay inside and steep a cup, watching the flow of dark, leaf-infused liquid permeate the clear, steaming water. Or visit a cafe for a cup of coffee brewed from beans ground that very morning, observing all the rituals of preparation, production, and consumption. Maybe take your family out to dinner at your favorite restaurant and see how everyone’s day went, and play a board game when you get home. Or go on a walk not in the wintry woods but on a summery beach to feel the warm, dry sand filter between your toes as you hear the steady motion of the waves and the happy cries of children. Or visit a store whose talents go beyond merchandising to experience staging, such as climbing a cliff face rising in the tower of a R.E.I. store, watching myriad fish dart by in an aquarium inside a Cabela’s, dining with your daughter in the Cafe of an American Girl Place, or asking a genius to help you explore the newest capabilities of your iPhone in an Apple store. Or maybe you are a construction executive looking for a new piece of equipment; then ask Case Construction if you can head up to its Tomahawk Experience Center in the northwoods of Wisconsin to try out all its equipment in what is essentially a giant sandbox.
Perhaps you want to explore the world. (But don’t do it alone! Bring along a loved one and/or make new friends as you go.) Have your tea poured for you through the spout of a three-foot-long pot in the confines of Jin Li Street in Chengdu, China. Visit the Caffè Florian in the Piazza San Marco at the heart of Venice, soaking in all the sights and sounds of that most old-world of Italian cities. Take your beach walk on the island of Mauritius before returning to your room at the One&Only Le Saint Géran. Observe fish without the glass of an intervening tank as you scuba dive during your cruise on Royal Caribbean’s Allure of the Seas. Go mountain climbing in the Rockies, or skiing in the Alps, or golfing in Scotland, or any one of a million different ways you can experience the breadth of God’s creation.
And imagine this: Throughout your experiences you enjoy stunning 3D visuals with complete stereo sound! Moreover, you encounter both natural and human-crafted artifacts that present incredible tactile sensations, excite the taste buds, and fill the nostrils with rich aromas.
Defined by its sheer physicality, Reality still presents the richest experiences of all the realms; its essence is to fully engage the five senses, enrapture the whole body, captivate the mind, involve the physical world, and bond you with your fellow members of humanity. Even the most ordinary of experiences—having dinner with family, making a cup of coffee, taking a walk—comes imbued with cultural references and hidden rituals worthy of the attention they so often lack. Extraordinary experiences such as those described above go a step further, commanding not only our attention but a response from deep within us while generating memories that last not just for days and weeks but months and years afterward.
Whatever the type, the common thread of such Reality-based experiences—or, rather, the three common threads weaving through the tapestry of our lives—are, as depicted in Figure 2.1, how each event un-spools in actual time, the way it occupies a real place somewhere in the world, and how it brims with material substances, engaging our senses with the raw stuff of life itself. So do not consider this book a plea to abandon real-life experiences (business-book reading least among them!). No, we believe people should experience life more richly, savor it more fully, and live it more abundantly.
Think, though, of how each and every experience mentioned above is already infused with technology, from the pot of tea to the warm parka (perhaps filled with 3M Thinsulate), from a diminutive coffee grinder to a gargantuan ship representing the height of Finnish shipbuilding prowess, from aquariums that keep the water in to the mobile gates attempting (at least) to keep the water out of Venice. (And that doesn’t even include that iPhone you took into the Apple store.) Life is no less real for already being filled with technology, for technology is how we humans navigate our lives.1
We infuse life with technology, and have always done so. It could not be otherwise, for as noted economist W. Brian Arthur concisely defines it, technology is “a means to fulfill a human purpose.”2 We have always devised better and better means by which to experience the world and thereby fulfill our purposes, both individually and collectively. We have done so through diverse technological domains, as Arthur calls them,3 such as clothing, containers, and ships (although each of these could also be broken down into more specific domains). Technologies create value by amplifying our innate human capabilities. Eyeglasses, microscopes, and telescopes extend our sense of sight. Shovels, tractors, and saws increase our capability to perform work. Postal services, telephones, and television link us together beyond talking face to face. Protocols, laws, and management processes organize us for effective collective action.
Today, the tsunami of digital technology offers an ever-increasing multitude of opportunities to improve our lives and fulfill our purposes in wondrous new ways. It dwarfs all other forms of technical innovation, for the innovations companies create from digital technology proffer radically new capabilities in both degree and kind.
As this digital wave washes through the economy with permanent order-of-magnitude changes in the value/price equation, in customer expectations, and in company capabilities for accelerating innovation, your company has scant time to learn how to ride this wave before being swept away. Figuring out how to employ digital technology within your offerings, on your opportunities, and for your customers becomes imperative. As you address this vast opportunity, keep this question in mind: If technology is not used to make a human connection—a positive and enduring one—with and especially between your current and prospective customers, what is the point? Never use technology for the sake of technology (which goes for individuals as much as corporations). Use it to connect with people on a human level and to enable them to connect with others, with the greater world around them, and to the dreams within them.
Given this proviso to use technology to fulfill edifying human purposes, and without ever forsaking the opportunities still abounding within Reality itself as a realm of experience, in the rest of this part of the book we take a closer look at the other three octants within the Realms of the Real, shown together in Figure 2.2. Each has its roots in Reality, all revolving around the Space axis encompassing real places and therefore the realms most played out in the real world itself. Think of it as one anchor of the Multiverse, Reality, stretching out to encompass aspects of the other anchor, Virtuality: shifting from Matter to No-Matter yields Augmented Reality, swapping Time for No-Time produces Warped Reality, and substituting both variables engenders Alternate Reality.
Figure 2.2 The Realms of the Real
It would be just as accurate to say that Virtuality reaches out to pull a Reality-based experience in its direction by flipping the appropriate dimension from Reality-based to Virtuality-based: from atoms to bits for Augmented Reality, from actual to autonomous for Warped Reality, and again flipping both for Alternate Reality. Creating experiences in these four realms all involve staging experiences via forming real places. But while the next three realms all maintain the feel of the real about them, they each take on one or more facets of the virtual and thereby provide opportunities for discovering ways of creating customer value through the exploration of the cosmos incogniti lying beyond the digital frontier.
