The Future Is About Finding the Seeds, Not Watering the Plants

A wise man told me a few months ago that his rule of thumb is that over 99% of the activity in the wireless world is feeding existing consumer demand while less than 1% is unveiling unknown (assumed by the developer) consumer demand (I will assume this rule of thumb can be applied to any industry). The true futurists are within this 1% bucket.

A futurist looks beyond the hot markets of today. I like to compare it to a garden of flowers. While 99% of the people are watering the flowers that have grown and hence are visible to them, the futurists are the people working on finding the seeds that have yet to grow.

Let’s be realistic: Few futurists will succeed in seeing their technologies becoming big. The challenges a futurist will face between idea and gaining market acceptance are enormous. Though I will argue that the biggest challenge is not the technology, marketing, or the business side, instead it is the early feedback the futurist gets from opinion makers, friends, and team members (assuming the futurist has a team that is going to realize the vision).

What futurists have to be not just good at, but excellent at is judging people’s opinions. I had Walt Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg slaughter my mobile payment technology in front of hundreds of people back in 2006. Yet, just an hour before a representative from Vodafone had come up to me and said our technology was some of the best he had seen in the mobile payment sector.

In many cases Mossberg’s comments would have discouraged the futurist from continuing forward. So who do you listen to? After all, Mossberg is quite the opinion maker in popular media. But if you think about it, the Vodafone representative earns his paycheck by researching emerging mobile payment technologies. Mossberg would have a hard time selling newspapers if he wrote about tomorrow’s technologies that his reader couldn’t easily wrap their head around. A futurist has to be good at knowing who to share their vision with at what time.

Even more damaging is building a team with non-futuristic people. A team tasked at realizing a futuristic technology needs to be comfortable with building a technology that won’t be popular within the month. This is a hurdle I just recently experienced at GoLife Mobile when a person in our executive management team in a meeting advocated for abandoning the vision because she couldn’t see evidence that consumer’s wanted this. Even though we had “shopped” the vision around leading wireless experts and analysts with phenomenal feedback, this person argued that opinions didn’t matter, hard evidence do.

Although in 99% of startups that might well be a good rule of thumb, a startup (or established company) building futuristic technology can’t ask themselves what the market wants today. The question is “How will the market look tomorrow?” A successful futurist will understand that evidence is at best weak in the early stages and instead use the right people’s opinions to evaluate their own gut feeling.

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