The Limits of How We Picture the Future

0:28This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. Get everything you need to grow the way you want. Like all the way. Stack more sales with the best converting checkout on the planet. Track your cha-chings from every channel right in one spot. And turn real-time reporting into big-time opportunities. Take your business to a whole new level. Switch to Shopify. Start your free trial today. When we come to thinking about the future, it sort of extends like a cone from our chest outwards. The further out we go, the wider it becomes and the more uncertain things become. But I think we are actually proven to be not very good at imagining what might actually be out there.

1:09So when we're thinking about the future, it's very easy to say, well, that would never happen. That's impossible. And sort of push it out into the impossible outside of this cone of possibility. Also, time doesn't really work how we think it does. Lots of things are exponential and they happen a lot quicker than we think they might happen. So our ability to build these scenarios out into the future is not necessarily as good as we think it is. You know, you ask companies like Nokia, where I used to work, or Blockbuster or Kodak, whether they had all of the ideas about the future in front of them in place, they'd probably say, yeah, we had a pretty fair idea.

1:41But we all know from history, they were sideswiped by something that they either didn't see coming, or they put way out in the sort of preposterous, that'll never happen territory. So I think one of the weaknesses of might futurism is exactly that, our levels of imagination and a sort of breadth of ideation around potential futures is not as good as we think it is.