#AskAFuturist: What have you been most wrong about in the past?

The inspiration for this post comes from James Saye who responded to my #AskAFuturist thread on Twitter with this question: "What have you been most wrong about in the past?"The short answer is that I got lots wrong, particularly in the early years when I was less cautious about making actual predictions (this is a surprisingly small amount of the work of a futurist). But having analysed why I was wrong, there is an incredibly consistent theme. I don't think I have been very wrong (if at all) about *what* is going to happen. But I was consistently wrong about *when* it would happen. And always in the same direction. I was too positive, or optimistic.It took me a few years as a full time futurist to learn this lesson, and it was part of the thinking that went into High Frequency Change. There are many factors that get in the way of possibility becoming reality.But you don't care about theory do you? You want to know when I was wrong! OK. Let's dive in to some examples.

Wearables? Ahead of their time

For the first two or three years I was working full time as a futurist, I was consistently underestimating the time it would take for technological possibilities to become everyday realities.Take this example from an interview I did with CNBC back in 2014. Here, I was rather forward in predicting the uptake of wearables. Sure, the smartwatch has been something of a success (Apple alone now sells more watches than the entire Swiss watch industry), but wearables are not yet truly ubiquitous. And the smart glasses I could see coming back then are probably still five years away.Do I still believe that we will start to use other devices as our primary digital interface? Absolutely. A small cloud of connected devices can provide a much lower friction interface to our digital world if their interface is truly intuitive. But right now, the experience still isn't that slick, even with the Apple Watch. And charging it remains a bit of a commitment.We'll adopt more wearable tech when its use is just natural. Take the smart shoe inserts I reviewed a few years ago that connect to your navigation app in your phone and tell you when to turn left or right without looking at your screen (themselves worthy of a retrospective blog post at some point). At some point I think we will have more tech like this that takes advantage of our other senses, other than sight and sound, to subtly feed us information. But such devices being so ubiquitous as to be a normal part of your everyday trainers? That's still some time away.

A smarter office? Not yet

How about this interview I did with CNN, also in 2014, about the future office. Here, I am incredibly optimistic about the timeline for some technologies: eye-controlled cursors, smart glasses, and VR video conferencing. All of those are here of course. They were here in some form in 2014 when I did the interview! I had (and must get back from the person I lent it to), a USB eye-tracking interface from a company called The Eye Tribe, that was already pretty slick. But slick enough to replace (or augment) the mouse or touchscreen? Not quite yet. But I think we'll get there, even if it is just part of the smart glasses that I still think are coming - eventually.Hey, at least I was sceptical about implanted microchips...

3D printing

I've written in the past about one of my most optimistic moments about the pace of change: my conviction that a lot more stuff will be 3D printed. This seems to make so much sense rather than manufacturing for an uncertain market on the other side of the world and shipping finished goods at great expense - both financial and environmental. If we can manufacture on demand, then we should. You can read the full article here. TLDR: there are many barriers but eventually additive manufacturing becomes a lot more mainstream in (the alternative to) mass production.

The end of Facebook

Perhaps the timeline I have got most wrong is around the decline of Facebook. Based on this post I was already predicting its decline back in 2011! The gradient of that decline has been a lot shallower than I expected. It continued gathering users in new markets even as it lost them in others, and it made the transition to mobile better than expected. Still, one day it will be eclipsed - not necessarily as a company, but as a network.

Back to the theory

The lesson I learned from all this, is that it's not enough for things to be possible, or even highly desirable for the relevant audiences, in order for them to happen. There are many social, cultural, legal, financial, and behavioural barriers to change. These are much harder to predict or even understand than the primary drivers of scientific possibility and objective benefit. Or in short, it's much easier to predict what will happen than when it will happen. These days I am much more cautious about the pace at which things change. Hence, in High Frequency Change I tried to analyse some of the factors that inspire and delay change, making that more nuanced argument about what moves fast and what doesn't.What is important when developing strategy though, is the possibility of high frequency change. As the current crisis has shown, there is enormous value in preparing for accelerated change rather than optimising completely for your current environment. This is a theme I return to in my next book, Future-Proof Your Business. Watch this space... 

Five trends for the 2020s

What are the five trends for the 2020s that will cause the greatest change in the next decade? The five trends by which businesses will live or die. Or by which governments might rise or fall? I have been tracking these trends for the last five years. One of them was the basis for my first book, High Frequency Change. I strongly believe that these trends, as they clash with global pressures like climate change, will drive the greatest change in almost every aspect of our lives, in the next ten years.These five trends for the 2020s are all indirect effects of technology. That doesn't mean that these are technology trends. They touch every aspect of our lives from healthcare to housing, employment to education, finance to foreign affairs. Technology takes friction from our lives and our work. It allows information to spread faster and further. Technology lowers the barriers to entry to markets. And it enables every human to do more. This friction-lowering effect is continuous and irreversible. And it is therefore important that everyone understands what it does to our companies, our organisations, our careers and our lives.These five trends for the 2020s are how this friction-lowering affects our lives and our work. Therefore they show what you can expect to see in the next decade.

Trend 1: The spreading impact of High Frequency Change

When friction falls it allows a higher rate of change. This does not mean that everything changes faster: the grand arc of history continues on its steady, low frequency way. But overlaid upon it are harmonics of high frequency change. These are most visible in those domains where there are fewer dampeners to slow change down. These dampeners include capital requirements (if a market is expensive to get in to), regulation, and innate human conservatism. In the past I have written about high frequency change being visible primarily in popular culture or consumer electronics. But increasingly I see it in politics, in regulated markets like finance and banking, and even coming to extremely conservative industries like construction. Ultimately, every dampening effect is overcome, if there is pressure for change.Therefore, the first of my five trends for the 2020s is the growing impact of high frequency change in a wider range of domains. You can expect continuing volatility in our politics. More big, established names will be disrupted and displaced from their dominant market positions. And you can expect to see some things that haven't changed for decades suddenly be transformed.

Trend 2: More intermediaries feeding on the choice explosion

Low friction means lower barriers to entry. This inevitably means more competition in any market. That creates more choice for the consumer, whether in a personal or corporate context. This in turn puts pressure on price and service, ideally driving one down and the other up. But it also puts pressure on the buyer. How do you choose when your options seem almost infinite?As choice grows, it gets harder for buyers to find the right sellers and the right products. Inevitably we therefore see new intermediaries coming into the market to do the matchmaking. So the second of my five trends for the 2020s is the growing role of intermediaries. In the next decade, there will be more and more services to help us choose, whether it is insurance, energy, TV shows or breakfast cereals. And more and more of these matchmakers will be robots, not humans. Or they will be combinations of the two. You can expect to outsource more and more of your decision-making to machines. In fact, you will just forget about a lot of decisions as they are made on your behalf. If you can afford it, you will place a growing premium on advice with a human face as more and more services are purely digital.

Trend 3: A nation of iron men and women

Technology is really a long word for tools. And tools amplify our strength in particular areas. In the 2020s, three classes of tool will take human strength to new heights.The first class is physical. Strength and endurance augmentation will become increasingly a normal part of work wear and even clothes. From passive reinforcement of joints with smart materials, to active strength enhancement with exoskeletons. Expect to see these deployed not just in the military but on construction sites, in warehouses and elsewhere as the price comes down.The second class is cognitive. Our brains have long been augmented by technology. But we have little awareness of it. In the 2020s our augmentation goes up but our awareness falls even further as the interface between human and machine becomes so slick as to be invisible. At home and at work you will be increasingly reliant on machines to do your thinking for you. That might sound scary but it should free your mind for more productive and creative tasks. Though there is a huge risk to privacy. Drugs too will play a part. Get comfortable with pills to boost your brain power.The third class is where cognitive and physical augmentations combine into automation. There will be more and more embodied devices in the 2020s, acting autonomously in the physical world, whether they are cars or drones or household assistants. They won't be cute like R2D2. But they will be functional and they will change the employment environment and our streets. Note: I don't expect full autonomy in cars until the end of the 2020s at the earliest. There remain technological barriers, but more importantly, legal, cultural and business issues to overcome.The third of my trends for the 2020s is human augmentation. Over the next decade we will be increasingly bionic.

Trend 4: Now, now, now

In the 2020s we will get even less patient, if you can believe it. There will be growing counter-trends to slow things down as a result. But overall the trend will be for everything to accelerate.Trend 3 will somewhat insulate us from this. Much of the high speed traffic of commerce and consumerism will increasingly be between machines rather than humans. All we will see is notifications that things have been done in the background.  But where humans are the interaction we will have less patience with any delay. This has big implications for streaming and gaming, customer service, ecommerce and deliveries, and physical retail.The responses will include increasing levels of personalisation (balanced with the demand for privacy), accelerated networks (5G and fibre), and a growing role for automation and AI assistants.

Trend 5: Everyone is a corporation

Lowering the friction in communications and business interactions allows you to build businesses differently. Companies no longer need to sit under the same physical, legal or financial umbrella to be efficient. Instead you can assemble a network of smaller corps, freelancers and partners to meet the customer's needs. This is increasingly the model for tomorrow's business: networks, not monoliths.The ultimate expression of this is the growing prevalence of freelancers, corporations of one. In the 2020s, we will see more and people put a corporate wrapper around themselves, whether for their full time employment or as part of their side hustle. Freelancers, already a growing population, will grow even further. Most teams will have a proportion of flexible labour on them, allowing the company to scale up and down, and bring in expertise as required. And networks of collaborators will become increasingly competitive against more established business models.

Five trends for the 2020s: hope and fear

So, that is my five trends for the 2020s. Expect to see more high frequency change beyond social media and consumer electronics. Expect the explosion of choice to drive a subsequent explosion in intermediaries, middle men and women. You will be more a cyborg in 10 years than you are today (though you are already bionic). The one bit of you that won't be augmented is your patience. And more than ever you are likely to work for yourself.It is going to be a difficult decade in many ways. We live, as they say, in interesting times. But there are great opportunities as well, for us as individuals, as organisations, and as a race. Let's hope we can take them. 

When driving faster, look further ahead

The faster you’re travelling, the further ahead you need to look. When we get behind the wheel of a car, we all do this automatically.

But we don’t seem to do it in business.

The reality is that all of us in business are travelling faster now. We may not notice it. The effects are subtle. There are no trees whizzing past the window to give us the impression of speed. But it’s there. Information flows faster. Disruption happens quicker. You can see it in everything from the speed of the delivery to your door, to the turnover on the stock market.

This places an imperative on every business leader to look further ahead. Not necessarily at the far horizon — the rate of disruption is so great that it is further clouding that already-unclear picture. But certainly beyond the next quarter or year.

Expand your field of view

Not only do we have to look further, we have to expand our field of view. To return to the driving analogy, we’re not on a long, straight motorway. We’re crossing a constant stream of intersections. Industries are colliding at an unprecedented rate. The threats to the safety of our journey do not come from our competitors coming up behind us. They come from the unexpected entrant to our lane, veering in from elsewhere.

Few — too few — leaders have gotten to grips with this new reality.

From a vision to a mission

I confess a level of self-interest here. This is what I do. I help businesses to see the future and expand their field of view. It’s called Applied Futurism. I’d like to do it for you. But even more, I’d like you to do it for yourself.

Because this belief in the need to look beyond has gone beyond a business proposition. It has become a mission.

I genuinely believe the way that most people do business now is broken.

Firstly, we spend far too much time worrying about our competitors. To return again to my driving analogy, this is like watching your rear view mirror instead of the road ahead. You’re so focused on who might overtake you that you miss the turning that could put you on a much faster route.

Secondly, we spend all our time focused on incremental improvements when there’s an existential threat around the corner. This is like concentrating on your fuel economy when there’s a crash in front of you. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing a few more MPG than your peers if you’re all headed for a pile-up.

Be a futurist

I can’t fix every business. But I can share what I’ve learned in the last five years, working with organisations around the world to address these problems. That’s why I now license my knowledge to consultants and business leaders, so that they can address these problems in their own businesses and those of their clients. And I teach the tools I I’ve created to professionals on one-day courses at the University of Salford.

In fact, we’ve just announced new dates for the course. You can find out more about the course at https://www.salford.ac.uk/onecpd/courses/futurism-for-business. And if you’re interested in the tools, check out https://futurism-tools.com.

Whether you choose to use my tools or not, I’d urge you to do this: next time you get in the driving seat of your business, stop and look up. Look ahead, not one year but two, three, five. Look around. Look to your left and to your right, at your customers, at the businesses you interact with at home and think: what could these people, their processes, their technologies, do to my industry and my business?

Look ahead and then act. Make change. Steer around that potential crash. Be the first to take that new route.

Futurism is strategy and storytelling

The team at my new marketing agency tell me that people don’t know what futurism is, let alone ‘applied futurism’.

I think they’re probably right.

What is futurism to you? (Please don’t say ‘a fascist art movement’).

For me, it’s about two things: strategy, and storytelling.

Futurism is strategy

My friend, former colleague, and creative problem-solver extraordinaire Phil Lewis of Corporate Punk pointed this out to me yesterday. When I look back at everything I’ve written about applied futurism, it turns out I’ve always been saying this, but never clearly or explicitly enough. Futurism is strategy.

Strategy is a long term plan built in the face of uncertainty. The tools of applied futurism inform that strategy and clear some of the uncertainty. That’s perhaps why many of my customers are people who are fearful of the future, either for their company or their industry. A smaller number are excited about the opportunity.

Futurism is storytelling

Whether you want to compel people to follow your strategy, or whether you simply want to show some thought-leadership on the issues of tomorrow, you have to translate your vision of tomorrow into a story. This is a crucial part of futurism and largely explains the remainder of my customer base: brands and marketing agencies who are looking to say something new.

Futurism is the writing and telling the story of tomorrow’s strategy. But it appears I still need to work on the story of futurism.

The art of the probable, the possible, and the desirable

‘The art of the possible’ is a phrase historically associated with realpolitik. It has come to mean ‘achieving what we can (possible), rather than what we want (often impossible)’. But as this piece in the New Statesman points out, it was once used a little more optimistically as a challenge to aged ideas.

For me, science is a much more optimistic ‘art’ of the possible than politics. It explores the boundaries of what the laws of physics permit us to achieve, pushing back those boundaries with knowledge all the time. Inside the envelope defined by science, everything else comes down to choices.

The art of the probable

What, then, is the art of the probable? What shapes those choices inside the bounds set by science?

For the most part, it is money. What is most profitable, or affordable, seems to be the greatest predictor of what will be. Technology drives change, but the direction of that change is largely steered by financial considerations.

There are, of course, other motivations — moral, emotional, environmental. But in our capitalist economy, and (still) reasonably stable democracy, dominated for most of the last thirty years by a particular strain of economics, money tends to drive what’s next.

The art of the desirable

Whether I'm writing or speaking, this reality often causes people consternation. They confuse what I believe will be the case, with what I would like to be the case. They confuse futurism, with politics — the art of the desirable.

You can’t eliminate politics, or personal bias, from your perspective. That’s why I do my best to systematise my analysis. But it will always be, to some extent, subjective.

Arguing for what you would like to see is the job of a politician. I can do that, but it’s not what people pay me for. They pay me to try to be objective about what I think — given all the factors — is possible or likely to happen.

Until the dominant political ideology goes through a major shift, that will largely be a case of understanding how economic factors shape choices within the boundaries defined by science.

The Victorian Arrogance Trap

Back in 1899, Punch magazine carried a satirical sketch looking at the coming century. In it a genius enters a publisher's office seeking a patents clerk, only to be told: “Sir. Everything that can be invented, has been invented.”This quote has since been attributed to various real-life characters with (it appears) very little evidence, and used to support the popular idea that the Victorians, in their arrogance, thought they had invented everything.You can see why a piece of satire became accepted as fact. The idea has the ring of truth to it. Walk around the cities of Manchester or Liverpool and look up at the architecture from the turn of the century and it is brimming with confidence. The preceding 100 year period had seen incredible progress — the industrial revolution — utterly transforming the UK. To live then, assuming you were reasonably well off, must have felt like you’d arrived in the future.I think we all fall into this trap sometimes. As I pointed out in my last post, it’s hard to imagine just how much life could yet transform. And yet we know so very little.I’m reminded of this every time I listen to an episode of Radiolab. Podcasts are one of my primary sources of information. The means by which I try to stay abreast of a lot of areas of science and technology with very limited time. One of my absolute favourites is Radiolab from public radio in the US.A recent episode carried the story of giant viruses, a class of life that has been around for millions of years but that we only discovered since the turn of the century. The discovery of this new class of life that shares traits of both viruses and bacteria shows how many biological things there likely are still on this planet that we haven’t yet witnessed. The gaps in our knowledge of the physics of the universe are greater still. And the things we have yet to invent using that knowledge, near limitless.A recent episode of another of my favourite podcasts, The Infinite Monkey Cage, guests discussed the possibility that we may well be the smartest beings in our galaxy, based on the lack of evidence to date of other civilisations. Whether or not that’s the case, when measured against the number of things we don’t yet know, we should be very humble about our achievements so far.