If you or your kids were out in the street stalking Pokémons in 2016, you already know what it feels like when physical and Web worlds collide. Your phone merged a virtual object into your real-world location. Likewise, the Ikea store app overlays its furniture suggestions onto your phone’s image of your living room. Crank this forward a few years from now—not many, things are moving fast—and we have the ‘Spatial Web’ which will upend how we meet, learn and work. Not least, it will sweep through the executive education industry leaving little unchanged.

The spatial web means real and virtual worlds blending. On the one hand, it is digital representation overlaid onto our real-world view, and on the other, virtual environments that are three-dimensional and ‘enterable’. It means a reality that is digitally augmented and a 3D virtuality of objects and spaces, not flat images on a screen.

To put this another way, when we surreptitiously divide our attention between our dinner date and our mobile phone, the line between the digital and physical worlds remains clear. You know when you’re in one or the other, and so does your date. But now this line is being rubbed out.

Many over-estimate how quickly things will change but under-estimate how very much they will change when they do

The key to this is, it won’t be a phone or pad or any other kind of screen that puts us into the spatial web. It will be eyeglasses. Not the big fat goggles of virtual reality, or any other fanciful headgear from the department of futuristic imagination. Just spectacles. Normal glasses, but with enhanced imaging and connectivity capabilities which are now or soon becoming possible.

3D Web glasses will enhance sight, not in the sense of correcting vision they will do that too but in the sense of adding information, objects, places, and people to our standard view. Colleagues or clients will appear in our glasses, and us in theirs, even if they are not there in the real-world view (not there if we take the glasses off). And we will all be ‘inside’ a digital representation of a real place, or in an entirely synthetic place. The technology will manage the integration, facilitating all its parts into one view.

Many of the biggest digital and internet companies are prototyping the technologies involved. The evolving field is sometimes also called the 3D Web or Web 3.0. Google jumped the gun too early the first time around with its ‘Glass’ concept but is recycling the concept as Google Lass Enterprise. Microsoft currently has a fairly heavy-duty Holo-lens in play. Apple Glasses are strongly rumored, and various major technology firms, notably Amazon, are also developing solutions. Bosch is particularly heading towards a pared-down, mass-market eyeglasses product, while start-ups and new brands such as Magic Leap, Spatial, Nreal, and Epson Moverio are also experimenting with early user solutions.

Common to all this are technologies in different realms simultaneously evolving and coming together, including 5G wireless network speed; geolocation; ubiquitous sensors and smart objects (IoT); new materials evolution; distributed ledger technology (e.g. blockchain); and artificial intelligence.

From an industry foresight point of view, it doesn’t matter so much exactly which company is doing exactly what. What matters is that a lot of money, brains, and brand is being poured into this space. The technology capabilities and their confluence are in plain sight and fast approaching acceptable utility at a mass-market price, in other words, lift-off. Expect progress.

As a caveat, the foresight field has also painfully learned that when a new technology crests the horizon, many overestimate how quickly things will change (but underestimate how very much they will change when they do.) A breathless army of analysts and journalists see the next thing happening tomorrow when it is more commonly some way off due to existing investments and solutions and other frictional forces.

Over time the proportion of on-site offerings must contract as virtual offerings become a high-enough quality option

So, savvy judgment says the spatial web will take time to permeate any sector, including the education sector, meaning possibly three years until we go beyond hobbyists and early adopters, and 5-10 years until mainstream practice starts to noticeably shift. Not only will it look like not much is happening for a while, but it will also be clunky to start with, like all technology pathbreakers, therefore discounted or written off by many.

But, if history is any guide, and it is, once a technology inflection breaks through into early mainstream use the pace of change dramatically accelerates. Thousands of contributing developers and investors, and other reinforcing adopters and enablers turn the ‘flywheel’ that rushes the new reality forward after its tipping point. With these exponential forces at work, it is not unlikely that the spatial web will be central to all human and information combinations in 10-15 years.

As much as the smartphone and tablet are the essential tools of today, so will they look like the abacus and the slide rule once visually and spatially blended reality enters the mainstream of human experience.

Implications for executive education

What does this mean for the executive development industry? The spatial web will go a long way to solving some of its current pinch points. It will also reinforce and accelerate a number of the industry’s long-term trends.

The current big headache is how to make an online Exec Ed experience as rich and ‘experiential’ as the traditional on-site offering. Since well before Covid19, junior-level and functional executive development courses have been steadily migrating online, whereby more people can be taught relative basics at a lower cost. However, this has come with a compromised level of overall experience and enjoyment.

For this reason, senior leadership educational gatherings have remained solidly on-site, to fully enable immersive and possibly transformative learning experiences, with a side benefit of high-level networking.

Along came Coronavirus which pushed everything online. This has not hurt functional Exec Ed; in fact, it has helped it. Institutions and professors quickly had to put most of their offerings online, and have gotten better at delivering them, thereby increasing both the scope and quality of online education and its geographical reach.

However, at the bespoke end of the market, the trade-off between online and on-site remain stark. It remains impossible to reproduce on-site immersion at any price, let alone a reasonable price. There is no way to replicate the profound and exclusive connectivity that comes from putting delegates, professors, and experts in a room together.

But as the spatial web evolves, this trade-off crumbles. On-site will never entirely go away, in fact, it will come back strongly when the pandemic vaccination phase is over and executives are clamoring to be ‘out there’ again. But over time the proportion of on-site offerings must contract as virtual offerings become a high-enough quality delivery option, including at the bespoke end of the market, and the industry reorganizes around new cost-benefit points for each segment.

This will happen via the spatial web, which will incrementally but resolutely erode many of the inimitable benefits of real-world immersion, making them virtually available. And all this for a globally unlocked spread of potential participants, from Bridgend to Beijing.

In practical terms, what might a spatial web executive learning experience be like? Participants could meet in the ‘classroom’ when none of them is there, and on ‘entering’ will be able to see each other, the faculty, and any visual aids such as a video monitor or the blackboard, all synthetically produced into their field of view.

It will be like you walked into a room; others are already there perhaps. You say hello, they talk back., etc. It is all different because it’s happening in your glasses, and yet it is very familiar. Much more familiar than a Zoom call.

Participants will not be able to see themselves, just like they cannot see themselves in real life. They will only be able to see other people or anything else in the room. There will be no single common representation that everyone sees at the same time. Each participant just sees what they, individually can see, depending on where they are sitting and where they are looking. Such sight will of course be digitally overlaid with information, subject to user preferences or group protocols, or settings added by the professor.

Delegates will be able to move and steer themselves around the room, using gestural recognition. Generally, in the spatial web, expect a mostly hands-free interface. It’s not that we’ll stop swiping or even tapping a keyboard sometimes; just that we’ll be doing more talking and pointing. With gesture recognition, you will put text onto a virtual whiteboard in the spatial web by pointing your finger and ‘air writing.’

A big part of the overall impact of this will be to finally, once and for all, shed the classroom (even the virtual classroom) in executive development. Nobody likes a schoolroom for adults, and it has been allegedly on the way out for decades as client companies call for more experiential and on-location situational learning, aka ‘breaking the 4 walls’. However, this is logistically difficult and relatively expensive to provide, even before added travel and accommodation costs.

But breaking the 4 walls is in the DNA of the spatial web. So, while professors could convene a conventional virtual classroom, they can just as easily have the learning group meet in the Houses of Parliament tearoom, or on top of Everest if that suits the educational purpose. The technology will assemble the room from various constituent real and digital parts, to be the same for everyone, no matter who or where they are. Or it will be set up to assist different participants differentially if required.

No matter where students are, they can be put into another skin: into the laboratory, onto a building site, at the factory, or in a client meeting. With the option of any virtual overlay, the spatial web will also accelerate other sought-after Exec Ed client wishes. First, executives learn and work simultaneously on actual company projects. Spatial web technology will assemble and present real work situations into the virtual learning environment; or employees will be able to switch into augmented learning mode, including faculty or coach support, at a real work location.

This will also help with the ‘too academic’ and ‘low-relevance’ accusations that Exec Ed providers sometimes face, in that learning will be easier to directly and immediately apply, and more often take place through such application.

Balancing short and long-term

The spatial web is in what the industry foresight field would class as the medium-horizon future. It won’t matter to short-term decisions but soon will emerge to offer many opportunities to executive education industry operators and not a few perils as they adapt offerings and manage the transition to them.

Different elements of the technology will materialize at different times, and even while the capabilities are coming along, that is not the only thing that needs figuring out. Of equal importance are the product evolution and service mix, and optimal business models of the future.

In navigating technology transitions, the industry foresight field has learned that the best strategies are those that start early, well before the urgency of being disrupted, and specifically combine two things: a robust baseline and a probing orientation.

Robust means what makes sense to do in any plausible future (both what may happen, and how fast) which in this case means developing and improving online education solutions up and down the value chain; from professors who know how to deliver online, to studios and technicians who can assemble great product, to academic coordinators and client-managers who can land it effectively in-company.

Probing explores and refines future solutions by way of practical experiments. The inherently fuzzy future is not predicted. It is worked out by trial and error. In probing, managers take a portion of their existing portfolio, here possibly smaller or newer courses, or clients willing to be experimental and push a prototype new solution as far as possible. And then do this, again, another way. And another. The point of probing is to learn rather than, initially, to make money. In the parlance of design thinking this is ‘fail fast,’ so that, in this case, when the industrial center of gravity reorients around the spatial web, the well-prototyped provider will be ready to scale up and roll out offerings that match available technologies to industry need.