Predicting the future
“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed…”
Predicting the future is always fascinating. It’s exceptionally binary: you were right or you were wrong. But the kicker is always the time horizon. A fun way to visualize this phenomenon is the 2x2 matrix — particularly fun because it’s a bit of a trick question if asked which quadrant is the “optimal” target.
Wrong is always wrong, so that easily eliminates 2 squares. Right + Early misses the market. Right + Late generally (though not always) misses the marketshare land-grab and critical early insights/improvements.
That may lead you to conclude that this is the correct answer:
It isn’t.
The correct answer looks more like this:
Even more precisely, the correct answer looks like this:
Vertical position on the parabola is often, but not always, commensurate with success on a logarithmic scale. That said, “generally right” can outperform the perfect solution when timing gets factored into the analysis.
If you’re thinking this is extremely complicated, you’re sort of correct.
The zen way I’ve come to think about things is that predicting, understanding, and then executing successfully ends up being simultaneously extremely simple and extremely complex.
Repurposing something Scott Belsky wrote in Crafting The First Mile of Product:
An earlier version of the above was published as a section within this post on LinkedIn — Shoptalk 2017 Recap: Seeing the Future of Retail
