Throughout most of human history, if you proclaimed your ability to predict the future, people most likely concluded that you were either very wise, endowed with magical powers, or insane. The conclusion they drew depended on your demeanor and their personal world view. If your predictions turned out to be true, you were a hero; if they didn't, you were scorned and shunned. People have always had to choose their predictions carefully.
Sure, some things are easier to predict than others. The tides rise and fall, the seasons come and go. But those aren't the kind of predictions people are most interested in, are they? The predictions that matter are the ones that aren't so easy to make. From the direction of the stock market to the social impact of a new technology, our world is full of complex phenomena whose underlying patterns are difficult to discern.
In response, we've created systems whose chief selling point is their resistance to change. Schools, governments, social structures of all kinds; in a sense, most of what we call "civilization" serves to some degree as a buffer against unexpected change. Without such systems and the stability they provide, it's hard to imagine that the rapid growth and progress of the last 150 years would have been possible.
After all, nowhere is this reliance on predictable systems resistant to change more evident than in the world of business. Companies are always looking for ways to reduce the unpredictability of doing business. They implement operational systems to maximize efficiency. They invest in sales and marketing systems to maintain high levels of customer demand. They search for business models that are impervious to shifts in the competitive landscape.
For creators of products and services, the pressure is particularly acute. The forces of globalization and technological progress have created an environment in which creating a product that isn't obsolete by the time it finds an audience is increasingly difficult. The accelerating pace of change is working against the art of predicting the future.
Predicting the future has never been easy, but it's never been more difficult. As the social and economic environments around us grow ever more complex, the patterns that drive them become subtler and harder to identify. What we need aren't better predictions of the future—because better predictions are proving impossible. Instead, we need a better toolset for responding to the sudden twists and turns the future may have in store.
The book you're reading now is a guide to that toolset.
The key to creating successful products and services in a rapidly changing world is not resistance to unexpected change, but the flexibility to adapt to it. That flexibility must take a number of forms: flexible design processes to adapt to new insights into user behavior, flexible development processes to adapt to new technological opportunities, and flexible decision-making processes to adapt to new competitive and market realities.
The trouble with predictions is that you don't know they're wrong until it's too late. The future is, increasingly, subject to change without notice. The only question is whether to keep seeking new, more accurate predictions, or to seek approaches that will continue to work no matter which prediction comes true.
—Jesse James Garrett
President, Adaptive Path
Get Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
