I hear this far too often: “this will future proof your business.”
If you’re hearing this from your innovation partners, stop and question if they actually understand how the future works. Or even what the past has taught us.
Before Facebook, no one thought that social media would change world politics. Before 3G, would streaming video content have sounded like a great idea? Before WiFi, we didn’t know the ubiquity with which we’d access the internet.
The problem with the phrase “future proof” is that, like waterproof or soundproof or childproof, it imagines the future won’t “get in” and mess things up. But it will. There’s no decision today that anyone could guarantee sets you up for the future, unless that time horizon is 5 minutes long.
Be Future Ready, Not Future Proofed
The best thing you can do to future proof your brand or business, is to be ready to change it all again. That’s the one prediction we can all make confidently. There is no set and forget any longer. There is no clear playbook that will work for the next 30 years.
You’re going to have to keep evolving. And decisions made confidently 18 months earlier may no longer be the right ones — even if they were the best decision that could be made at the time. The best leaders know this and remove barriers (including punitive reactions) to their teams elevating new issues with old decisions.
It’s wise to check your ego when it comes to anticipating where the future will head.
Instead, we should measure our technology, our employees, our business models, our experiences for their Readiness to Change (let’s call it RTC). What’s the RTC factor on what you’re making decisions on today? Does your culture allow for change or want to drag the business toward stagnation?
The future does send signals
I’ve written before about how I seek out signals to prepare my clients for what may happen. Understanding changing human motivations, emerging enabling technologies, and latent market demand can allow us to identify possible, even probable outcomes.
But the picture can only get but so clear. The nuance and detail will always be missing, including things like which version of a technology will win out, whether something totally different and better will come along, or how, say, a pandemic might shake up business as usual to create new needs.
This is why the best decisions are living decisions. When they’re insight-informed, they’re firm until enough data piles up that suggests it’s time to look again. Don’t ignore the need to change. Embrace change as proof (see what I did there) your organization understands that flexibility is the real market differentiator.