Can You Really Future-Proof?

To be honest, I wanted to scream the title for this week's article.

HOW CAN YOU FUTURE-PROOF ANYTHING?

How can you predict with any certainty? Someone once called me a futurist. I laughed - politely. To me, that means I can make a prediction with 50% accuracy. I'm either right or wrong. When I do a keynote, they still often use the term in my bio.

I can activate a future - yours or the organisation's. But accurate prediction? Hypothesis yes. What is certain today, however, may be completely irrelevant tomorrow.

Then I considered Singularity University Co-Founder Ray Kurzweil.

Where most futurists often offer vague visions (50% bet either way), Kurzweil has spent decades publishing specific, dated predictions and letting the record speak, which is a much riskier way to build a reputation. Independent reviews of his forecasting record put him at roughly 86 per cent accuracy when partial hits are included, and around 65 per cent for predictions that came entirely true, an unusually strong hit rate for anyone forecasting technology over a multi-decade horizon. And before technology was in everyone's office and home the way it is today.

Kurzweil's edge comes from a consistent framework rather than guesswork. He built his predictions around what we at SingularityU call the Law of Accelerating Returns, the observation that information technologies improve exponentially rather than steadily. And he applied that lens years before most people took exponential growth seriously as a planning tool rather than a curiosity.

Today, everyone wants to use the word Exponential. And COVID brought the understanding of the Exponential Curve to the uninitiated.

Ray Kurzweil is still holding firm on the two dates that have anchored his predictions for decades: 2029, when he expects AI to reach broadly human-level general intelligence, and 2045, when he believes biological and computational intelligence will merge closely enough to fundamentally change what it means to be human. He has also recently said that he expects humans to effectively beat disease within seven years, driven by AI accelerating medical research. What makes him worth citing rather than dismissing as a futurist with a big imagination is the track record mentioned above.

In his recent interviews, I've noticed a shift in tone. He is no longer describing a distant future. He has said that things are moving so fast now that looking even a year ahead counts as a long-term prediction. For most of his career, he was the person telling everyone else to think further out than they were comfortable with. Now he is one of those saying that what lies around the next corner is becoming increasingly difficult to see!

The new thinking is to plan for the next twelve months or the next twenty years. Anything in between is too close to be predictable and not far enough to be visionary.

To prove a point that the only certainty will ever be uncertainty, and the predictions by most of us need to be backed by evidence and a solid argument, let's look at what happened recently at the Box Office.

It turns out that this year's biggest entertainment story isn't a blockbuster. It's a $750,000 USD thriller called Obsession, directed by newcomer Curry Barker. It has pulled in over $400 million USD worldwide. Watch the trailer. You may become obsessed with watching it yourself.

And apparently that is one of the most incredible returns in the history of a thriller.

To add to the argument, and with something considered more mainstream, Project Hail Mary, a hard science fiction film starring Ryan Gosling, a genre studios usually treat as a tough sell because it asks audiences to sit with complex ideas rather than easy spectacle, has taken in over $680 million globally, becoming one of the biggest wins of the year.

Two films with 'exponentially' different budgets did the same thing. They ignored (?) what the industry was sure audiences wanted (how can anyone be sure - if they were always sure, there would be no box-office flops), and audiences still came.

Which leads to the hypothesis that the safe bet isn't actually the safe bet anymore.

Betting on consensus has a hidden cost that doesn't show up in the pitch meeting. If the 'market' already agrees a thing will work, you are not creating anything; you are just funding what was always going to happen anyway. And see above comment - it doesn't always work out the way you want it to.

The bigger returns are often where someone made a call the room wasn't fully comfortable with. Albeit considered. But genuinely against the grain. Steve Jobs did not follow a trend. Marc Randolph wrote a book titled That Will Never Work, because that's what they told him about Netflix.

When I was in marketing, we tested a product with the appropriate target market. We wanted to know what colour they wanted this particular product in. We had samples. The winner was yellow. Yet when we went to market, with so much yellow in the warehouse, people bought the safer black or white instead. Just saying - you can think what you will about who will like what and who will buy what. In the end, the consumers' actions ring that till louder than their words.

And it's not just film.

It's remark-able how this pattern is constant in innovation. A product or service can get resourced because it looks like three other existing products. That's not innovation - unless it's meant to be incremental. Whether it's strategy, a safe hire, a safe pitch, a safe idea - because nobody in the room will ever be blamed for backing it - it will lack the remark-ability to be part of what IS coming NEXT! It's predictable.

All of it optimises for the same thing: to be Failure Safe!

Obsession and Project Hail Mary didn't succeed because someone found a clever hack (anyone else sick of reading about the latest health/wealth/fitness/weightloss hacks?). They succeeded because someone with conviction and resilience, with perseverance and faith, backed something the 'popular-vote' said was too risky, too cheap, too complicated, or too niche. They backed it anyway, with enough skill and integrity to make it work.

If you are sitting on an idea that you have softened to make it more palatable, more familiar, more like the thing that already worked for someone else, it's worth asking what you did that for. Whose comfort are you protecting? Because it is rarely the audience's, or the customer's. The customer actually has a brain. The customer is usually discerning. The customer either has a problem to solve or is a first follower.

Who is willing to be wrong in public if the 'thing' doesn't work? Who is willing to fail out loud? Who is willing to take a risk? Because the more risks you take, the closer you are to success.

The only sure bet is that there is no sure bet. The only uncertainty is uncertainty. And that change is as constant as it has always been. Maybe just catapulting faster.

Celebrating Success One Failure at a Time is now available as a book, an audiobook, and an online course. You can bring this conversation to your organisation as a keynote, workshop, or leadership programme.