Your Future

I’ve been rummaging through old notebooks lately to see what I should throw out. Not having a lot of luck.

But I did find some quotes about “the future” worth pondering. Ponder away!

Søren Kierkegaard: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

Life is pretty cool for us in the 21^st century. Think about it for a moment. 

Although we complain about air travel, we can get from NY to LA in six hours (after we get through TSA). We can research topics to our minds’ content without leaving our desk. We can go over to Whole Foods and pick up something unusual, tasty and hassle-free for dinner tonight. And we can get into the middle of a texting flurry with family and friends 24×7. Well, maybe the last item is not such a good thing.

We don’t think about the forces that got us to today, but we can see them if we look back in time.

Let’s go back in time and think about some of the forces at play that got us to today. Here are a couple.

• In the early 1800s about 75% of the U.S. population was engaged in farming. That dropped to about 25% by 1920 and stood at about 1.2% by 2022. Think of the impact of John Deere (mechanical technology) and George Washington Carver (agri-science) and how they shaped the future of farming and food in the U.S.

Sometimes our future is shaped by dedicated individuals.

• The texting flurry with our family depends on our phone and internet connection. But how did we get here? Good old American business? Yes, and…. 

The Internet’s progenitor was the 1960s ARPANET, a program funded by the Defense Department. The GPS capabilities of my phone began as Navstar, a 1970s military program. The touchscreen technology was developed by a professor at a publicly funded university and the National Science Foundation. And my phone’s voice, Siri, can be traced to a government artificial-intelligence project.

We may not like “big government” but we’re happy to use the technologies it develops.

Sometimes government programs shape our future.

• In 1900, communicable diseases like influenza, tuberculosis, and diphtheria were the leading causes of death in the U.S. Death rates from infectious diseases have declined faster than other causes. Why? Vaccines!

The vaccine for influenza was developed in 1938.

The vaccine for tuberculosis was developed between 1908 and 1921.

The vaccine for diphtheria was developed in the early 1800s and was widely used in the U.S. by 1914.

Many of us are alive today thanks to old science. You may be alive because your parents or grandparents did NOT die from influenza, tuberculosis, or diphtheria. Tell your anti-vaccination friends to study history. 

Deepak Chopra: “When you make a choice you change the future.”

The beginning of the automobile industry is generally attributed to the machine created by Karl Benz in 1886. At first the automobile was a rich man’s toy but there was broader interest and by 1900 there were hundreds of automobile companies in the United States. Surely you remember the Studebaker, Duryea, Oldsmobile, Mercer, Chicago, and Ward cars? No? How about the steam-powered Stanley Steamer? (Side note: in 1906 the Stanley Rocket set the world land speed record of 205.5 km/hr at Daytona. Pretty cool, huh?)

But it was Henry Ford who shaped the automobile industry – both for better and for worse.

Henry Ford tinkered with the idea for an automobile in the late 1800s and in 1896 built his first Quadricycle, which he drove around Detroit to garner interest in his business. He started Ford Motor Company in 1903 and, after a round of earlier models, introduced the Model T in 1908. It was a huge hit and he immediately had to scale-up production. This led him to the introduction of the automobile assembly line in 1913. And here is the heart of an unanticipated consequence that would shape management / relations for the next century.

The assembly line’s “need for speed” and the introduction of Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management” ran smack into the reality of high factory turnover because of mind-numbing, boring jobs. (Turnover at Ford in 1919 was in excess of 300% per year!) Jobs were further simplified so that a new worker could be proficient in one day. The money was good but the work was terrible.

This led to the formation of the United Auto Workers union and in 1936 they flexed their power in the first sit-down strike at a GM plant in Flint, Michigan. The relationships between company management and the workers has never been the same.

Henry Ford wanted more efficient production, but he ended making enemies of his workers.

Our future is often shaped by our relations with our perceived adversaries.

Margaret Heffernan: “To define a future no one can see yet requires radical imagination.”

Jeanie Egmon and I wrote The Prepared Mind of a Leader in 2006. We addressed eight skills leaders must have to be prepared for the future, and imagination is one of them. Since then, I’ve facilitated hundreds of workshops and often ask about missing skills. Imagination is always in the top three missing skills.

Why is it so important? Well, even though we love “big data” we often forget that there is no data coming back from the future.

• Apple’s iPhone came out in 2007 and it launched into a market dominated by Nokia. In the first quarter of 2008, Apple sold 1.7 million iPhones while Nokia shipped 115 million. Was Nokia looking for data while neglecting to imagine the impact of a “smart” phone industry.
• The first cases of a mysterious pneumonia appeared in a cluster of otherwise healthy men in 1981. By the early 1990s a million men, women, children, drug users, and hemophiliacs were dead. What started out as GRID (gay-related immune deficiency) moved across the population with unimagined speed.
• Although Kodak was an early leader in digital photography, I suspect their leadership culture has a hard time imagining a photography industry not dependent on film and film processing.
• COVID19 moved rapidly across the globe. Couldn’t the country leaders imagine a virus getting on an airplane?  

What to do

All three of the quotes deal with aspects of “the future” and although we know we will spend the rest of our lives there we often don’t give it enough serious thought. We wish, but we don’t think enough about what’s coming our way and what we might do. Why? Because we’re too darned busy dealing with today!

So, here’s a suggestion. Schedule (yes, schedule) 30 to 40 minutes twice a month to ponder three scenarios about your life three years hence. And do this in a quiet place with your phone turned off.

The three scenarios are:

• What will your life probably look like in three years?
• What might your life plausibly look like in three years?
• What could your life possibly look like in three years?

I recently did this and the thought experiment was “interesting.”