To deal with all this newness, to get a handle on all the possible paths and alternatives that lie before us, IT leaders would be foolish not to take advantage of the full bounty of predictions that are but a search engine keystroke away.
On Google, a search for "future predictions" generates some 25 million hits in 0.18 seconds. On MSN, a similar search produces 425,728 hits in 0.13 seconds. You are not alone in trying to figure out what comes next and what we should do next. The scope, scale and span of the questions raised by those who predict are mind-bogglingly large. A vast array of trend-watchers, influencers, style mavens, PR wonks, marketers, critics, think tanks and vendors stands ready to guide your path forward.
Every media outlet for the entire month of January can be expected to assemble competing gangs of symbolic analysts bloviating about the future. Your job is to make some sense of all this noise. Which of these prognosticators is to be believed? Which path should be followed?
As a futurist who has survived more than three decades of predicting, let me share some rules of thumb for those who would look forward:
1. The future will be a linear extrapolation of the past, unless you intervene. High- performing executives have a formalized process for collecting lessons learned from the previous year -- those wondrous chunks of "vu ja de" (things we experienced that we never want to experience again). Policies, procedures and monitoring systems are put in place to make sure that mistakes of the past aren't repeated in the future.
2. It will be a bad year if you don't have a job because you didn't delight customers. Ask your internal customers (one of whom is your boss) and external customers their thoughts about the year to come. Where do they want to go? What do they want to have happen?
3. You are not the only smart person in the arena. Lyndon Johnson used to tell the story of what House Speaker Sam Rayburn had to say to Harry Truman on the day that Truman became president: "Now, Harry, a lot of people are going to tell you you are the smartest man in the country, but Harry, you and I know you ain't." Benefit from the smartness of those around you.
4. Cause conversations about the future to happen. Host a futures party. Invite the smart people in your supply chain, in your chain of command, in your industry and in the economy, and host a daylong seminar on "What comes next, and what should we be doing about it?"
One of my jobs as an uberfuturist is to collect all the year-end predictions of the unterfuturists. Don't try this at home. Your head will explode.
-- Thornton A. May is a longtime industry observer, management consultant and commentator. Contact him at thorntonamay@aol.com.