Facts as they Stand
Peter de Jager is a provocative Speaker, Writer and Consultant. His primary focus in on how we manage change, technology and the future.
In addition to speaking at conferences worldwide, he's also written monthly columns for Municipal World and Computing Canada.
His goal is always to question what we think is so, and in so doing perhaps open up new opportunities.
If you'd like permission to reprint any of Peter's articles, please contact him directly.
You can contact him at
pdejager@technobility.com
Or sign the Guest Book and he'll get back to you.
When Cassier's Magazine touched on the subject of domestic refrigeration and refrained from stating it would never happen, they showed either remarkable insight or just cautious reluctance to speculate about the Future. In either case they adroitly escaped a trap that many others have fallen into.
We all know that tomorrow will be different from today. While we believe in cause and effect, we find it difficult to describe many of causes that allow us to predict the Future to varying degrees. They range from the obvious to the obscure.
From, “If I toss a coin into the air, it’ll fall back down.” to “Real Estate values will increase/decrease – depending on prevailing circumstances when they build a local bypass.”
-0-
A discussion about predicting the future might seem like a descent into the Black Arts, but every organization, especially those diligent enough to actually attempt to create strategic plans, must look to the future if they expect to survive long enough to arrive there.
Unfortunately, our perception of what the Future might bring, is far from perfect and filled with flaws repeated time and time again. When we predict the future of certain types of products, it is as if we refuse to learn from our past mistakes.
We all know the following to be true:
At the beginning of the life cycle of any product, the associated production, distribution and marketing costs keep the product out of the reach of the vast majority of potential consumers. This is always a temporary situation. As production costs decrease, as we refine and perfect the new technology, consumer access to and uses for the product inevitably increases.
So far, there's nothing earth shattering here. A critical reader might suggest these observations are unworthy of mention.
Of course these observations are true. How could they not be? We never get things right when we first create something. It’s only after we’ve explored different design options over a period of time that we can figure out how to make the product cheaper and better. It does not take a PhD in mass marketing or mass production to know that the first items off the assembly line will cost more to produce, market and sell than the 1,000,000th item.
Yet there is a good reason to restate the blatantly obvious, it forces us to ask the following question: “Why do we continue to make statements about the Future that contradict these incredibly simplistic and all too obvious truisms?”
What is it about our view of the Future than generates the following statements from leaders expert in their various fields?
"You could put in this room... all the radiotelephone apparatus that the country will ever need",
Stated by W. W. Dean, President of Dean Telephone Company in 1907.
"I think there is a world market for about five computers"
Attributed to Thomas Watson in 1943, then Chairman of the board of International Business Machines (now IBM).
"640k ought to be enough for anybody"
Attributed to Bill Gates in 1981.
These are only a sample of a vast store of failed predictions. Any reader could easily find at least a dozen other quotes perfectly at home in this list. This small collection of quotes is a perfect example, symptom if you prefer, of a fundamental flaw in how we think about the future. Despite our painful awareness of the rapid pace of change, when we look to the future we imagine it’s going to be pretty much identical to the way it is now. Only more so.
"Vapor Point" did not spring full blown into our view; it grew slowly, haltingly, out of a wide variety of observations and experiences. The first hint there was even a pattern worthwhile exploring was a casual conversation amongst friends during which we rudely, and disrespectfully with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, chuckled over quotations such as those mentioned above.
In each of the quotes, the speaker is following a peculiar chain of logic. They seem to believe that the constraints which exist today in these products, or the manner in which we currently use them, will never change. Therefore, at no time in the future, will consumer behavior ever change.
These once prophetic, now humorous predictions, all adhere to this strange thought process. Despite the contradictory evidence in front of them… the technology these experts are discussing, is itself, representative of a significant change in the constraints of yesterday.
More peculiar, is that the speakers are all individuals who, by their personal effort, have brought about significant change themselves. Through their own actions they are personally responsible for invalidating similar statements made in the past!
We find such quotes so perversely amusing, we repeat them time and time again in conversation, yet we fail to learn from the very lessons they are presenting to us. I'm sure Bill Gates was aware of, and at some point in time even chuckled over, the Thomas Watson quote… how could he not? His impressive success at propagating his operating system to every desktop computer in the world, was only possible because Thomas Watson’s quote was so fundamentally wrong!
In spite of this, Bill Gates appeared to honestly believe (if the quote is accurate) that human ingenuity would happily restrict itself to 640k of memory. Likewise, Thomas Watson appeared to believe that human ingenuity could not find widespread use for computers in nearly every human endeavor.
Is it so unreasonable, especially when we consider the source of the quotes, to expect that the speakers would have a better grasp of what the future might bring? Sadly, for all of us, we're all guilty at times of the same fuzzy thinking with respect to the future.
Perhaps it's because we tend to think mostly about the past, seldom about the present and rarely past dinner? Whatever the reason, we're not very good at looking forward and when the world is changing as fast as it is, the ability to cope with rapid change is rapidly becoming an important survival skill.
The selected quotes by themselves are insufficient to arrive at the concept of "Vapor Point", they represent only the start of the thought process. The contradiction between what we know to be true, and the soon disproved statements we make, presents us with a challenge. Can we formalize our understanding of how the future unfolds, to the point where even the urge to make a statement along the lines of "We'll never need more than 'X' in the future" rings a very loud alarm bell inside out heads?
Can we formulate a series of rules about how we progress to the Future, so that even if they do not enable us to make perfect predictions, at least they prevent us from those lines of thinking which ultimately prove to be embarrassingly silly and naïve?
There is some evidence to support the notion that we can, and are learning to understand the future a bit better. Thanks to Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, very few computer experts would suggest that computers will remain as powerful tomorrow, as they are today.
In 1965, Moore observed that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits per dollar cost had doubled every year since they were invented. He suggested this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. Nearly 40 years later his observation has changed very little and is now known as Moore’s Law. It is usually simply phrased as follows. "Computing power doubles every 18 months".
This 'law' has become an integral part of our thought process when thinking about the future of computers. So much so, that people still hold off from buying a computer today, because they know it'll be 'obsolete' within 6-12 months. Naturally there's a flaw to this type of thinking. We mention it only to demonstrate the widespread impact a simple idea can have on consumer buying patterns.
Moore’s Law radically changed our perception of how computer technology advances. His simply stated formulation allows us to predict the power of computers, to a reasonable degree, 10 years from now. The advantages are obvious… we need more Future guidelines of this type in all industries.
© 2007 Peter de Jager – Peter is a keynote speaker focused on management issues, with special attention to issues relating to change management. You can contact him at pdejager@technobility.com
For
reprint permissions click here.
I'd appreciate reading your comments
regarding this article... please take the time to respond.
Resources: