Last week, I met famed futurist Ray Kurzweil who told me that it is virtually certain that I will be a cyborg in about 15 years. Sweet cant wait for that.

I was at Singularity Universitys Exponential Manufacturing conference, where the program inspired roughly equal amounts of excitement and sheer terror in me and my fellow attendees. The impact of exponentials is clearly going to change the world that we live in and who we are and perhaps nowhere more noticeably than in the manufacturing world. Robots will take over some production lines. Additive processes and advances in material science will fundamentally change what we can make. Sensors and advanced analytics will create an ability essentially to erase machine downtime.

As we prepare to compete in such a world, its easy to focus all our attention on the technologies that are arriving on the scene every day. Startups and big incumbents alike (think GE) are delivering enablers of digital transformation faster than ever before. It feels urgent that we keep up and not get left behind. Many say that if you are not in-the-know on technological trends, youre already dead you just dont know it yet.

Dont worry about it. In fact, I recommend we stop trying to keep track of it all.

Start with Human Beings. It used to be that a perfectly reasonable approach to creating advantage from technology was to follow a straightforward and linear approach: Start with a technology in mind and imagine the potential applications within your operations. From there, layer on top an approach to either access or use data to optimize the application. Prototype the solution and go try it out in a pilot plant and see what happens. If it has a positive ROI, scale it; if not, shut it down.

Thats no longer possible in most cases. The reality is that it has already become virtually impossible to keep track of all the technologies available, never mind the almost infinite possible applications and business models. So I recommend flipping the approach around: Start with humans, not technology, and you are bound to be far more successful.

The Power of Behavior. Human behavior is still and for the foreseeable future the most basic building block of economic value for any organization. Whether you are targeting growth or efficiency, you are not going to achieve your goal unless someone, somewhere changes a behavior. So the job that any good manager has is to identify the right behavior to impact and then to discover ways to drive it in as efficiently as possible from an economic perspective.

If we can start with human behavior, then we can reverse the process described above and turn it into three sequential strategic choices:

Instead of spending evermore time trying to stay abreast of new technological developments, we should instead just search selectively for the ones which will drive the most value from digital innovation.

Three Behavioral Domains. As you search for the right possible behavior to target, you should consider three environments for behavioral change: outcomes in your own operations, outcomes for downstream customers, and outcomes in markets. Those focused on your own operations are usually aimed at driving efficiency and reducing costs. Those focused on customers or end-markets are usually targeting topline growth.

At the Exponential Manufacturing conference, I gave a talk which laid out this logic and brought to life examples of each of these with three companys stories:

In these ways, human beings and not technology alone can be at the heart of digital transformation.

Terminator. Of course, none of this changes the fact that Ray Kurzweil is almost certainly right about me and you being a cyborg some time in the 2030s. After all, this is the guy who is famous for getting his far-fetched predictions right. As he relayed to us, he made about 150 predictions back in 1999 for what was going to change in the ensuing decade. He got 86% of them right. But when asked which ones he didnt get right, he explained that they were the ones where human behavior (e.g. adoption, regulation) threw a wrench in the works by being far less predictable than technological advances.

Its nice to know that we still matter. For now.

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We Should Still Humans And Why It's Critical in the Digital Age - HuffPost