Getting Perspective

It is very difficult for people to imagine the future. There is something, very stable in our minds, about the present and the status quo. No matter how much change we have seen in the past, we do not see that much change in our future. For example, I am pretty sure that at some point in the future web interfaces will be both intelligent and three dimensional. But it is very difficult to convince anyone of either. We can imagine robots and flying cars as long as they stay in our imaginations. When we think about our lives being different, we reject the notions.

One of the techniques I use to overcome this cognitive resistance is to ask people to imagine that it is fifty years into the future. In this scenario, they are sitting with their grandchildren on their lap explaining what life was like back in the year which is current when I am doing this exercise. The kids ask “what was life like back in …. “ At which point they say to the grandkids “You won’t believe this but back in …… we used to ….” And they fill in the blank with something that is a mainstay of the current day but will probably be gone and forgotten fifty years hence.

Here is an example. Fifty years from now people will tell their grandchildren that back in 2013 people would get up every morning and sit in traffic for an hour or more driving to the building in which they work. In the future with advances in both telecommunications and virtual worlds, the idea of everybody having to be in the same physical building will become impractical and arcane. People will go to work by logging into their home computer. What that home computer may look like is another thing entirely. But, I use this example as a starting point for a whole host of other changes.

This exercise is useful because we are more used to looking back at the past and seeing how things in the present are different than we are of looking into the future and seeing how things will be different. I will come back to this technique from time to time to illustrate other principles.