Have you ever wondered how the world’s great tech visionaries know which of today’s emerging technologies will become critically important over the next few decades? It turns out that the key to thinking about and shaping the future is looking for technological capabilities that are evolving at exponential rates, and imagining what the world will look like when said technologies are a million times more powerful than they are today.
Failing to note and project such trends far enough out can have harsh consequences. For example, in the 1980s, the CEO of a foundationally important, globally renowned technology company believed that there would never be a market for at-home personal computers. He failed to grasp the importance of the fact that, at the time, computing power was doubling every 18 months—an exponential rate. The eventual result was the world we live in today, where portable and handheld devices are ubiquitous, and the now-defunct technology company in question is remembered mainly for its myopia.
The thing is, spotting exponential technologies can be challenging, and, once identified, determining their likely impacts can be even more difficult. To make it easier, we use an approach that we like to call “writing future histories.” Across years of experience, we’ve found that this technique helps individuals and teams come to recognize the technologies of today that will inevitably become the building blocks for future realities, and from there, to invent desired future states that are attainable using these building blocks.
