Stunned by the pace of progress

I’m sure you know the feeling. Every now and again most of us catch ourselves reeling at the nature and pace of change around us.

As someone who has spent well over a decade studying trends and forecasting disruption, I still find myself amazed when I reflect on the things I take for granted today — things that would have been utterly inconceivable a few short decades, much less centuries, ago.

To this point, celebrated blogger and TED speaker Tim Urban offered a great little thought experiment in a 2015 blog post where he encouraged readers to imagine teleporting a person from the nineteenth century to the modern day.

As Urban suggests:

It’s impossible for us to understand what it would be like for him to see shiny capsules racing by on a highway, talk to people who had been on the other side of the ocean earlier in the day, watch sports that were being played 1,000 miles away … This is all before you show him the Internet or explain things like the International Space Station, the Large Hadron Collider, nuclear weapons, or general relativity. This experience for him wouldn’t be surprising or shocking or even mind-blowing—those words aren’t big enough. He might actually die.¹

And so while the modern day is extraordinary enough, much of my time is dedicated to forecasting the trends and changes that would spin our minds were we able to travel even a few decades forward
in time.

The perils of prediction

Now, to be clear, this is not a book about pie-in-the-sky futurism. As stimulating as it can be to gaze into crystal balls, predicting the future can be a pretty risky business. As I recently heard one business strategist suggest, when it comes to predicting the future, humility is a virtue.²

Consider how many bold predictions by intelligent people throughout history have proven to be just slightly off the mark:

• ∞ Ken Olsen, founder and chairman of computer giant DEC, said in 1977, ‘There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home’.³
• ∞ The legendary American businessman and inventor Alex Lewyt predicted in the 1950s that ‘Nuclear powered vacuum cleaners will be a reality within 10 years’.⁴
• ∞ A Boeing engineer boasted ‘There will never be a bigger plane built’ when Boeing’s 10-seater Model 247 was launched in 1933.⁵
• ∞ Lord Kelvin predicted in 1883 that we would one day discover that x-rays were a hoax all along. (It bears mentioning that Lord Kelvin was no fool. In fact, he was instrumental in formulating the first and second laws of thermodynamics and devised the method for measuring temperature we still use today.)⁶
• ∞ Steve Jobs predicted the failure of Amazon’s Kindle ereader upon its release because, in his words, ‘It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore’.⁷

If nothing else, this list underscores just how hard it can be to predict the future with any degree of certainty. In the words of legendary film producer Samuel Goldwyn, ‘Only a fool would make predictions — especially about the future’.⁸

And yet of all the sensational business predictions that have emerged in recent years, one stands out in my mind above the rest. In June 2015, the retiring CEO of Cisco, John Chambers, delivered his final keynote address. He left the audience in stunned silence (and panicked much of the business world) when he said, ‘40 per cent of businesses in this room, unfortunately, will not exist in a meaningful way in 10 years’.⁹

Now while you could dismiss this prediction as misguided hyperbole, the reality is that Chambers may well be spot on. After all, according to the work of Professor Richard Foster of Yale University, ‘the average lifespan of a major listed company has shrunk from 67 years in the 1920s to just 15 years today’.¹⁰

I have spent much of the Past decade interacting with and interviewing some of the brightest and most visionary thinkers on the planet and their consensus is that the coming decades will see many businesses and industries disrupted in ways they cannot imagine today — and certainly are unprepared for.

My interest in this started back in 2011. As significant businesses crumbled in rapid succession (from Borders to Kodak, Saab and Nortel, then BlackBerry and Blockbuster), what started out as a blog post for my website turned into a three-year research project examining the dynamics of business demise. Over the course of those three years, I tracked 500 brands, organisations and institutions around the world in an effort to answer two questions:

1. Why do the mighty fall?
2. Why do the enduring prevail?

My goal was to try and discover the habits, culture and mindset that separated enduring brands from their endangered counterparts. Those three years of research culminated in a book called Winning the Battle for Relevance.

While that book proved helpful for leaders and organisations trying to stay at the cutting edge, I quickly discovered that the scope of my research had been too limited. After all, it only identified the factors that were driving obsolescence for organisations and brands in the present.

In the years since that book’s release, the scope of my research has shifted to what lies ahead and the specific trends and disruptions that are set to shake up the status quo in significant ways.

A unique time in history

Having spent much of the past few years absorbed in the future, there is little doubt in my mind that we are standing at the precipice of the most significant change our world has known.

Historian and United States Senator Ben Sasse agrees:

When people say we’re at a unique moment in history, the historian’s job is to put things in perspective by pointing out that there is more continuity than discontinuity, that we are not special, that we think our moment is unique because we are narcissists and we’re at this moment. But what we are going through now — the past 20 or 30 years, and the next 20 or 30 years — really is historically unique. It is arguably the largest economic disruption in recorded human history.¹¹

Political scientist and international relations expert David Rothkopf agrees that we are at a significant and historical moment. That said, in his excellent book The Great Questions of Tomorrow, Rothkopf does liken this current point in history to one experienced by our fourteenth-century forebears who had little idea of the sweeping societal changes that the Renaissance was about to usher in:

As was the case during the fourteenth century, we too are living in what might be described as the day before the Renaissance. The epochal change is coming, a transformational tsunami is on the horizon, and most of our leaders and many of us have our backs to it.¹²

Rothkopf suggests that this lack of awareness of and preparedness for what lies ahead is a function of our very human nature. As humans, we operate with a range of biases and we expect the world to confirm them. As a result, we mishear, misread and misinterpret events around us. We live in a world where 85 per cent of the time today’s weather is the same as yesterday’s weather; people tend to let the immediate past shape their expectations of the future.¹³

And yet the future is going to be very different from what any of us have known. We are sailing into uncharted waters. We are at an inflection point where we cannot discern what the future will hold by looking to the past.

And that’s the purpose of this book — to get a clear sense of what’s next so we can start preparing now.

In part I, we’re going to look at what the future holds and how to identify the trends and disruptions that are going to radically redefine the status quo.

In part II, I am going to outline a plan for navigating the turbulent times that lie ahead.

So strap in: things are about to get a bit bumpy. But my commitment is to give you the insights and strategies necessary to thrive in an age of disruption.