Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Future Horizons

As innovation practitioners spend at least some of their time thinking about the future, it may be worth taking time occasionally to pause and consider the underlying assumptions we are carrying about the future itself. Beyond the old adage “the future is not what is used to be,” the vocabulary we use to describe the future can reveal much about what we assume the future holds. 

Consider the time-oriented vocabulary of “short-term, mid-term, and long-term” and the metrics of “time-to-market and time-to-positive cash flow.” How often have we designated something as longer-term, only to discover later that our predictions of pace needed to be revised? What we thought was going to take longer—and therefore allowed us to delay investing—actually started happening sooner.

Likewise, how often have we designated something as short-term, only to find out that what we thought was right around the corner ended up taking much more time to develop? Timing is very difficult to predict; and so we should be prudently cautious anytime we use these temporal designations in our portfolio decisions.

Spatial vocabulary is also used, for example words like “core and context, adjacencies and outlook.” While it has some advantages of avoiding the guesswork inherent in the strictly temporal orientation to the future, thinking of different spaces—whether adjacent, white space or blue ocean suffers from a similar difficulty as the temporal. That which seems close-in can prove to be more difficult to realize than we  had  anticipated,  and  that which appears  far-a-field  can  be  more readily realized by means of a slight modification of existing complimentary business assets.

Geoffrey Moore's article on Horizon 1, 2 and 3 (Harvard Business Review, July 2007) is an attempt at least to bring the temporal and spatial together, which is likely a wise thing to do when considering what the future holds. Stronger still is Moore's borrowing of evolutionary theory.

Thinking of the future as “emergent” and “evolving” avoids the difficulty of predicting temporal pace or spatial position and reminds us of perhaps something more important: the future is not something to worry about or predict, so much as it is something that requires constant attention, experimentation and adaptation.                           








This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in August 2008. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 460-1313.


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