Why is the Future Hybrid?

As we emerge from two years in a virtual cocoon the entire world seems to be touting the hybrid future, a way of working and living that perfectly blends the right amounts of analog and digital, of physical and virtual, of mechanistic and humanistic. There appears with it a recognition that hybridization (if that’s a word) is the only way forward for critical industries, beginning with financial services. So how did we arrive at such a shared agreement? And as importantly, why now?

It’s my unsubstantiated but plausible view that there are two different but overlapping paths that likely led to this hybrid destination.

Path A: A Logical Evolution

The first is that we’ve been marching towards a hybrid world since this thing called digital began. Way back when (2000?), the world wide web appeared in the world’s operating system, like a satellite or small moon circling the earth and the way we lived, worked, played and communicated. During the first few years our daily lives and jobs remained physically-centric with a few lunar flares here and there of digital intrusion and benefit. Over time, the digital moon got closer and closer to earth, inserting greater and greater pull on our behaviors and ways of being. And that moon cast a light that forced entire industries to rethink and retool their value propositions and business models as new digital first competitors entered the picture. More and more companies began realizing that letting go of some (but not all) of their analog, legacy ways was the only way forward; that the incorporation of digital capacities could improve both top and bottom line performance by delivering greater customer experience, delivery efficiencies and brand distinction.Think mobile banking. 

The progress towards digital integration into a largely still physical construct was steady. And then the pandemic struck. The world retrenched, every industry and bank was suddenly tasked with operating in quarantine. And that meant figuring out how to sustain productivity, maintain value and innovate without people being with people, without paper, without many of the analog processes that still pretty much defined the core of our businesses. And we did figure it out. We pretty quickly realized that the bank would go on, that people could work from home, that we could serve our customers even if we never met our customers. And that’s when the flip switched and the world began to fully embrace the viability of a hybrid future. Banks realized that Generation Z would never need a branch, but Boomers would. Educators realized that online DIY courses do teach, but socialization and in person connection makes the teaching more effective. Doctors finally accepted that telehealth made sense, even if it was not always a replacement for clinic visits. Companies realized that working from home works, but not as a unilateral modality, because culture and creation are fueled by collaboration which is fueled by IRL (In Real Life) engagement. That’s when we realized we needed and could leverage both. That physical and virtual are different, that each carries essential value and that they do better together than apart. The digital moon has worked its way into the molten center of the earth, but the physical earth that surrounds it is still what matters. And that’s why we believe the future is hybrid. 

Path B: A Human Backlash

The second possible path, which does not necessarily contradict the first, is that the future is hybrid because it’s just another case of humans doing what we always do. We often allow and even encourage the pendulum of our beliefs, systems and ways to swing from one extreme to the other, until, over time, we realize that the right answer is in the middle, otherwise known as equilibrium. 

In the beginning there was only physical. Branches, currency and coins, paper, people and pens. And then digital things began appearing. I’ll never forget my first ATM. As the digital proliferation expanded and accelerated more and more customers and companies jumped on the bandwagon, and began singing about an all digital future. The melodies varied but the lyrics were pretty much consistent: all businesses were going to be reduced to bits and bytes. Humans need not apply. And in the case of banking, game over. The distribution of capital and cash could be more efficiently done by machine. And oh, our customers would be just fine with that. This binary prediction that the entire world and most industries would flip from one modality to another is a classic human tendency. We hate shades of gray. In all the messiness and discomfort of what is, we find safety in the world of black or white. That’s why we make everything into a two-horse race. Rich versus poor, East versus West, Isolationist versus Globalist, the list of two choice categories goes on and on. And the technology two-horse race was this: the techno-utopians who are trying to convince us that the future is not hybrid, the future is all digital – that with the advances in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning there won’t be much need for us human beings. On the other side of the argument, the humanists, those futurists, pundits, and business practitioners who were trying to call out the risks associated with a solely and soulless all digital world. 

But then real life happened. And the pandemic. And more and more of us began to realize that the answer was in the middle. We saw that for all the efficiencies the digital world offers, the transactions it enables, regardless of industry, still often involve trust. Humans are human, seeking connection, comfort and trust. We don’t always want to talk to a Bot, we sometimes want to talk to Bob or Bianca. As easy as a ZOOM call is, it’s brutally hard to feel truly connected when you can’t read body language and you spend half the time looking at your own image wondering why the bags under your eyes are so bad. The pandemic showed us that working for home is not terrible, at times it’s absurdly convenient. And it’s particularly great for those individual contributors we perform quantitatively measured tasks, with little need for collaboration or even motivation. But for most of us, our jobs are pretty qualitative, our performance reviews based as much on how our bosses and fellow employees feel about us as the KPIS we’ve hit. And the only way for them to feel us, to know us, to trust us, to believe in us, is to be together, at least a few days a week. As consumers we realized that we are happy to shop from home for many things, but not all things. That certain categories warrant physical exploration, touching, feeling, and sensing to determine what we actually want. 

Fundamentally, humans are a composition of mind, body and spirit, creatures who value mechanics and efficiency alongside humanics and intimate connection. It was inevitable that we would find our way to the middle because thanks to our biology and psychology both parts matter. One without the other is unsustainable, in fact it’s inhuman. Path B is just us finding our essential equilibrium, our uniquely human ground.

So whether the drive force of hybridization is Path A or Path B, or both, the future is hybrid because we are, and likely always will be human.