The five year forecast problem: A reason it’s becoming impossible.

Imagine for a second that you lived 4000 years ago, how difficult do you think it would be to forecast with some degree of certainty what the world would look like in 20 years? A fair bet would be that it would look very much like it did at the time of the forecast. If however you imagine yourself back in our time, it’s fair to say that such a 20-year forecast would be largely inaccurate. I think we all agree that forecasting has become more difficult and I pose that it just keeps getting worse. Why is this so?

I believe there are three driving forces to this. Firstly, the earth is finite; it has a fixed size, when population increase in a finite space, the distance between people decrease, and each person can reach more people. The direct effect of this is that there are almost no isolated pockets of people in the world, as opposed to 4000 years ago when there were almost only isolated pockets of people. This means that ripple effects of choices reach longer.

Secondly, the numbers of choices we are presented with are increasing, something that is reflected accurately in the movie Trainspotting: “Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television (…)” and so on. While most of our newfound choices are trivial in nature, such as what brand of cereal you want for breakfast, also the number choices that have severe effects are increasing.

This leads us to the third force, technology, which is more of an enabler of the second force. As technology gets more sophisticated, and more accessible, more people have access to items that they can use to affect the world in the direction they please. With more people, more choices and larger ramification of each choice, the equation that would accurately predict the future becomes immensely complex.

To illustrate this we can look at the incident at the WTC in 2001, how do the three forces affect this event? Firstly, the fact that people live closer (globalization) caused friction long before the bombing, as we all know, many people in the Arabic world were growing more hostile to western interference, while the west was growing more hostile to Arabic hostility, though one may put forth hundreds of arguments of race, religion, oil and so on, there can be little doubt that globalization and the shortening of distance played a crucial role. Secondly, not only were there a number of people with motivation to do something, there was a significant number of people with the possibility. Advents in travel and technology made it possible to get to the US, and the vast number of targets available to the terrorists made it impossible for the Americans, even if they knew that an attack was imminent, to predict where. The sets of choices of how and where to strike was so vast that prediction was nearly impossible.

The WTC bombing is but one example, if you compare the financial crisis of 1929 and 2008 you will find that the ripples of the latter traveled much further, faster. However the effects were less significant because more people had thought about how this could be handled, more choices were available. Also more people were in a position of power to induce a financial crisis, experts are still at it about what caused the crisis, was it a bubble? Was it the sub-prime market? Was it regulation? Or was it corrupt bankers? The fact that more people can willingly or unwillingly cause crises of various sorts, also leads to the inevitable fact that the future becomes more uncertain, because it’s not only determined by measurable events, but also by random choices made by people not on anyone’s radar.

The point here is that there are so many options, that however unlikely one isolated event is, it is extremely likely that several extremely unlikely events will occur. It’s not very likely that a specific fortune 500 company goes bankrupt in the next 20 years for example, but it’s very likely that at least one of them does. When there are several thousands of large events like this that will without a doubt happen, we can be certain that the changes in the next 20 years will be profound (so gambling on status quo is the bet with the worst odds), but since we don’t know which immense and unlikely changes will occur, just that some will, we have no way to know in which direction the world will shift. So we are left with the certainty that things will change, and the certainty that we don’t know in which way the world will change.

This also raises another concern. If the forces I have mentioned have driven our path to uncertainty, then we can expect the future to become even more uncertain in the future as these trends continue. Technology continues to evolve, the population to increase, and more people are getting the ability to make greater choices. So what will happen to our ability to predict the future? And what consequences will this have?

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Thoughts About Way Too Needy Products or The Microwave that Went ”Me! Me! Me! Me!”

We have so many manufactured items around us that we often forget they are manufactured goods that at some time got bought, paradoxically we rarely think about many of these products. While we live in a mutually dependent relationship with these items, some product developers don’t understand that new products have to fit into the already existing eco-systems that are our lives.

In our everyday lives we interact with hundreds and maybe thousands of products, in fact mostly anything that we use are products of some sort, (look around you now, how many things that’s not some sort of a product can you find?) We once created all these items, but they also influence us back. I like to think about manufactured goods, services and anything that for some reason can be called a product as living in a symbiotic relationship with mankind, we depend on them, they depend on us. The reason we keep them around is because they (help) perform small tasks that makes our lives easier, for example a door can be opened or closed – a very practical notion that allows us to separate rooms and give them different functionality, different rooms are equipped with different products that perform tasks that naturally occur in that room, for example toilet paper, one of my favorite products, belongs in the bathroom and makes the tasks performed in there easier to handle.

The paradox is that we rarely think about how many products we are surrounded by in our lives, if you ask people how many products or items that was once manufactured they own, most people would grossly underestimate the number. This is because we only think about our iPhones and laptops and televisions or whatnot, we don’t think about door handles and the paint on our walls, we don’t think about that stack of newspapers or that jar of jam in the fridge. The fact of the matter is that we have so many things around us that are products that we can barely wrap our minds around it, which is a good thing. If we constantly went around being reminded of all our products we wouldn’t find time to do anything, and that’s why most products are made to blend in to our lives. So why does some product developers feel that their products are so important that they can disrupt the natural flow in the eco-system of man and his creations?

Let me give a couple of examples: Fire alarms beep too often and too loudly when the batteries go out, I get it! It’s important, but seriously, it can wait until morning. Some microwaves do the exact same thing, every 10 second it will let out a beep until you have opened the door. Why? Maybe the stuff I was heating said to let it rest for a few minutes, can’t I watch TV until then? Yet another example, to quote David l. French: “My Pantec phone...is so needy that in addition to sucking down juice like a college kid on St. Patty's day it makes you press 3 buttons before it even allows you to make a call.” Facebook e-mails you each time something barely happens, and it’s too damn hard to turn off (I just set my spam filter to catch *@facebook.com), I had to delete iTunes, because it kept downloading updates the size of entire musical albums every month, and frankly I don’t use it that much. And what’s with trying to force me to install Safari? I don’t want it!

Needy products are becoming an epidemic, and it needs to be stopped. If you are a product manager, try to think less about how important your specific product will be and more about how your products can fit into the lives of your customers. Products exist to make our lives easier or better, and people making products need to realize this and start focusing on the users’ interaction with products within the context of their lives. Products should not act as high-maintenance girlfriends or drama queens. Get serious guys; start making products that I want to keep around me.

If you liked this post or any other post feel free to click the “follow” button to the right to stay tuned to new posts when they appear. You can also follow me on Twitter as @vetleen.