Agile Businesses: Miranda Mantey Of ATB Ventures On How Businesses Pivot and Stay Relevant In The Face of Disruptive Technologies
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Unforeseen disruption pushes people to spend initial reaction time simply focusing on understanding what is happening over what is actually occurring. At the same time, we need that calming leadership presence that paints this time not as if the world is burning down but as a time of coming together to demonstrate the malleability of the organization.
Miranda Mantey is an experienced researcher, foresight practitioner, and strategist with a passion for learning and all things pertaining to the future. This thirst for knowledge is what led her to her position as UX Foresight Strategist at ATB Ventures, and it led her to complete her Masters of Science in Foresight at the University of Houston. Miranda spends her time with ATB Ventures evaluating global trends to understand implications related to innovation strategy, the product portfolio, and customers. Outside of her day job, Miranda is also a published author and professional speaker, and she spends her free time with friends and family.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to ‘get to know you’ a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
I started as a summer student at ATB Financial, working on an innovation team. While in that position, I quickly realized that I had a strength in research and strategy development. I continued at ATB in a student position until I graduated with my Bachelor of Commerce in Risk Management in 2018. Then, I signed on to a full-time position with ATB Ventures.
My time on the team led me to discover the field of foresight in 2019, which quickly became a passion of mine. This passion launched me into completing my Masters of Foresight at the University of Houston in 2021.
I’m still largely focused on research and strategy development to this day, but I have continued to add tools to my toolset, such as foresight methodology, primary research, and design thinking techniques.
Now, my position on the team is to be an advocate for market insights and our customers, and to explore how our portfolio and product strategies can be structured to best support those groups.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take always’ you learned from that?
I started out in the foresight field, being confident my role was to predict the future (insert magic ball). If you know anything about the profession, the number one rule of futurists is “do not try to predict the future.” I figured that out pretty quickly in my first semester at the University of Houston, but one of my classmates stumbled across my Medium profile (that I forgot to update), which referenced something in my bio about predicting the future. She nicely called me out, and I felt straight embarrassment. I broke the number one rule in the public domain! Not a great way to make friends in a brand new program. I fixed it immediately.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
My first leader at ATB Financial, Chett Matchett, was instrumental in identifying my strengths and weaknesses and mentoring me throughout the early stages of my career. She encouraged me to lean into my research capabilities, and I fully believe that if it wasn’t for my time working for her, I wouldn’t be on an innovation team, nor would I have ever discovered the field of foresight.
My current leader, Sue McGill, has also been incredibly supportive in building off of Chett’s mentorship and has continued to push me towards continuing to upgrade both my soft and hard skills. And, of course, none of my success could ever come to fruition without the support of my family!
Extensive research suggests that “purpose driven businesses’’ are more successful in many areas. When your company started, what was its purpose?
The purpose of our team has been rooted in leveraging curiosity, creativity, and empathy to build and launch meaningful products, which bring as many people as possible into the next generation of the digital economy. Our goal is to ensure that all of our products and services are carving out a better, more trusted future for all.
Can you tell our readers a bit about what your business does? How do you help people?
ATB Ventures is a Horizon 3 innovation team that explores how we can leverage emerging technologies. Our key competency is to craft a better future for all.
My role on the team is to assist in identifying and evaluating early-stage product ideas. I do numerous deep dives on trends and important topics, facilitate ideation sessions, and help take product concepts through early-stage validation. I also manage our intellectual property funnel and spend time exploring new potential methodologies as to how to better incorporate user insights into foresight work.
Which technological innovation has encroached or disrupted your industry? Can you explain why this has been disruptive?
From the lens of financial services, it’s not hard to quickly determine why a company like ATB Financial would want to invest in a team such as ATB Ventures. The rise of FinTech, open banking, and the moves from Big Tech into the financial services space make a clear case for “we need to change.” That being said, we approach these current circumstances not as a crisis but an opportunity. We fully believe that we have the talent, capabilities, resources, and drive to carve out what the future will look like — we just need to lean on foresight and some tenacity to follow through on that goal productively.
What did you do to pivot as a result of this disruption?
ATB Financial pivoted due to these industry pressures by creating our team, ATB Ventures, in 2018. The intent was to launch a research-based innovation lab that tackles net-new product development driven by four major trends: data, machine learning, human-machine interfaces, and a new era of trust. Through this, we are able to explore and operationalize diverse revenue streams that span beyond our core operations.
Was there a specific “aha moment” that gave you the idea to start this new path? If yes, we’d love to hear the story.
After a year of trying to figure out the most powerful way to help my team understand what the world will look like 10+ years from now, I had an “aha” moment when my leader sent me the website of a foresight consultancy. I thought to myself, “I don’t have to make this methodology up anymore?” Although, arguably, I didn’t have to transition my entire career to a new path, I was able to better define myself and my work in such a way that I felt reinvented.
So, how are things going with this new direction?
Definitely pretty well so far! I’ve been able to apply foresight principles directly to my work at ATB Ventures (including through our Humans of 2030+ project), and I’ve seen the impact of it on the quality of our team’s work.
On a personal note, I’ve seriously advanced the impact of my work and my strategy development. I was lucky enough to have won a few student awards while in my Masters’ program; I had some of my work published; and I’ve had a few professional speaking engagements.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started this pivot?
For me, the Humans of 2030+ project is the most interesting piece of work that I applied foresight to since my transition into this space. This project maps out how different user groups might react to various potential futures (https://atbventures.com/humans-of-2030/ ). From what I’ve seen in my time in foresight, a lot of the work tends to focus on worldbuilding on a macro-level. This isn’t a bad thing by any means; I just think we can take it further.
I am passionate about taking these worldbuilding frameworks and continuing our thinking in that space to evaluate what it might be like to actually live in those worlds. In order to do that, my team and I invented a new model of thinking called Human-Centered Foresight, where we married psychometric models, data analytics, and foresight into a really fascinating deep-dive as to what people might look like and feel like in 2030 and beyond. Our future personas aren’t just works of art; they are actually based on data! (How cool is that?)
We’re planning to continue our work in this space, hopefully building it out to offer both businesses and individuals insights into future people. I honestly just loved being a part of inventing something that I view as incredibly cutting edge.
What would you say is the most critical role of a leader during a disruptive period?
During disruption, leaders need to be the calming force that encourages the team to lean into the uncertainty that is being experienced. I think it’s human nature to shut down when things feel overwhelming. Unforeseen disruption pushes people to spend initial reaction time simply focusing on understanding what is happening over what is actually occurring. That is why I think foresight can be so powerful — it allows us to feel less surprised by sudden change because even though we didn’t necessarily predict the exact details of what is happening, having already walked through the various shifts helps our brain understand that the future won’t just simply continue as it has in the past. We recover from the shock significantly quicker. At the same time, we need that calming leadership presence that paints this time not as if the world is burning down but as a time of coming together to demonstrate the malleability of the organization.
When the future seems so uncertain, what is the best way to boost morale? What can a leader do to inspire, motivate and engage their team?
I think it’s important for leaders to understand that their team members aren’t just struggling to process the future of their company and/or industry, but they’re struggling to process the future of life. The term eco-anxiety or climate anxiety has popped up in the last few years as the prediction our scientists are painting is an incredibly bleak picture of what the next 100 years hold. Many of us feel a perceived obligation to try to ensure the longevity of all of humanity — an obligation that leads to vast hopelessness and stress because no one person can take that on.
I think a leader needs to understand and be empathetic to the fact that weakened morale likely goes far beyond focusing on one’s own company. By understanding that, there’s a level of patience and support that you can give your team. I recommend trying to avoid too many “doomsday” conversations. Yes, sometimes it’s realistic to set the conditions of “we need to change, or our company will die,” but on a daily basis, try to keep the conversations more optimistic. Things like “we do have this very tough competitor that entered the market, but this gives us an opportunity to focus on the next iteration of what we do” places your team into a creative mindset rather than a fight-or-flight one.
Is there a “number one principle” that can help guide a company through the ups and downs of turbulent times?
It might be cliche, but I don’t think you’re ever too good to go bankrupt. One of the key premises of foresight is that it encourages leaders to confront their blind spots by mapping out alternative futures from what they expect. There’s no foolproof way to predict the future (and if there was, you know I’d be selling it); instead, we have to respond quickly to whatever change we face when we see the signals in the market begin. Don’t be overconfident, and be ready to act. Foresight is a great methodology to ensure both of those things.
Can you share 3 or 4 of the most common mistakes you have seen other businesses make when faced with disruptive technology? What should one keep in mind to avoid that?
I think a big one is just not having the right corporate mentality (from the top down) for responding to change. Traditional industry mindsets need to die. It’s becoming increasingly rare for companies to say, “we just need to keep doing things how they’ve always been done” and come out on top. A shocking number of companies don’t explicitly say that, but if you read between the lines and evaluate their actions, they think it! Aligning with that, a lot of companies might see the change coming, but they don’t have the right corporate structure, culture, or funding model to act on it. Once you become a certain size, things get slower to move — often too slow to respond in the ways needed — and often that leads to actions being taken too late.
Lastly, diving into the disruptive technologies and innovations before defining what needs they are going to solve with these technologies is a mistake. Generally speaking, companies on the forefront of new technologies will play with what is possible versus what is profitable, and we do need people to take on that burden. That being said, without a clear business case present for why to engage with a new technology, it’s easy to invest in it too early and have a significant investment into a project that ultimately burns out. This is a huge risk, especially for companies that are trying to prove out why investment in innovation is necessary and powerful.
Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things a business leader should do to pivot and stay relevant in the face of disruptive technologies? Please share a story or an example for each.
- Stay in touch with trends, not only technological, but in all areas of the market: This truly is the basis of foresight methodology. How would you ever know to pivot if you are not exposing yourself to what is truly happening in the world? Blockbuster arguably failed because they didn’t analyze the system-wide conditions of the market demands, business model innovations, and technological development to see why they needed to innovate.
- Lean into learning: You probably just heard about the metaverse within the last six months and if you did hear about it earlier, my guess is that you didn’t lean in to fully understand it and what you can do in that space. Facebook, on the other hand, has been working on it since 2018. Don’t just sit and wait for new topics to find you; find them, learn about them, and learn how you can capitalize on them.
- Look globally: Trends might not play out exactly the same in every market, but they can influence each other. What can we learn from the digitally-native population of China? As our world gets more and more globally interconnected through the uptick in Web 3.0, global trends will be more important data points than ever before.
- Don’t stop at insights, stop at implications: Insights provide business value, but implications drive decision-making. From an insights lens, Facebook is excellent for the world as it connects people and makes strong financial returns. From an implications lens, Facebook is potentially tearing society apart. These tell two very different stories — both of which are meaningful.
- Recognize the scope of your capabilities: Imperfect players can win; they just have to play smart. Recognize the strengths of core competencies, the strengths of your brand, and the strengths of your team.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
A renowned futurist, Wendell Bell, once said, “There are two ways you can view the world, you can be cynical, or you can be idealistic. I prefer to be idealistic because that leaves open the possibility that I can influence the world for good. To be cynical means that I have given up all hope that the world can be changed.” As someone who is constantly thinking about the future and doing so by utilizing the doom-and-gloom of mainstream media, it can be easy to get depressed and negative. Bell’s quote has been something I’ve stuck to in regard to actively choosing to be an optimist and talking about the future with hope in my heart.
How can our readers further follow your work?
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mirandamantey
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mmantey/
Medium: https://medium.com/@mmantey
@atbvenures
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Agile Businesses: Miranda Mantey Of ATB Ventures On How Businesses Pivot and Stay Relevant In The… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
