Well done is better than well said - Benjamin Franklin
Turning thoughts into things is an important skill set to understand.
Visionaries tend to spend a lot of their time exploring the future. In and of itself, this is neither good nor bad.
If you generate a lot of ideas (but don't properly cultivate and structure them) those ideas can easily become a distraction to you and your team.
When properly managed and pursued methodically and purposefully - those same ideas become the catalyst for massive progress.
There are three main ways, I believe you can make thoughts into things:
- Focus Your Energy - People often focus more on what they don't want, rather than on what they do want. By directing your energy and focus toward opportunities and possibilities, it becomes a lot more likely that you will recognize and take advantage of opportunities and possibilities when they appear or occur.
- Imagine Your Future - One of my favorite quotes is " the best way to predict the future is to create it." Abraham Lincoln originally said it, but I've thought or said it enough it feels like mine to me. By deeply imagining the future you want to call into existence, and thinking about it with that end in mind, it becomes easier to imagine the intermediary goals or milestones needed to reach your desired goals. The basic outline brings order to the chaos ... and the strategies and tactics needed come from the finer distinctions you make thinking about each part (or what is needed to reach the next milestone).
- Make It Tangible - Name it! Naming something is powerful. Whether it's a product in your business, a concept, or a goal. Making it tangible solidifies it in your mind, and in the mind of others. Think about what happens if you reach it (and what would happen if you fail). Come up with the criteria that provides evidence of success. What would it look like? How would it perform? What does it make possible? What would it prevent? How would it impact key measures of efficiency, effectiveness, or certainty? What can you do about it now?
Ultimately, each of these ideas is entirely dependent on the actions you're willing to take. And how decisive you can be.
What aren't you doing because you're overthinking it? Are there opportunities you are missing simply because you aren't looking for them?
Onwards!
Gartner's 2020 Hype Cycle For Emerging Technologies
Each year, I share an article about Gartner's Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies. It's one of the few reports that I make sure to track every year. It does a good job of explaining what technologies are reaching maturity, but which technologies are being supported by the cultural zeitgeist.
Technology has become cultural. It influences almost every aspect of every-day life, and it's also a massive differentiator in today's competitive landscape.
Sorting through which technologies are making real waves (and will impact the world) and which technologies are a flash in the pan, can be a monumental task. Gartner's report is a great benchmark to compare reality against.
2019's trends lead nicely into 2020's trends. While there have been a lot of innovations, the industry movers have stayed the same - advanced AI and analytics, post-classical computing and communication, and the increasing ubiquity of technology (sensors, augmentation, IoT, etc.).
What's a "Hype Cycle"?
As technology advances, it is human nature to get excited about the possibilities and to get disappointed when those expectations aren't met.
At its core, the Hype Cycle tells us where in the product's timeline we are, and how long it will take the technology to hit maturity. It attempts to tell us which technologies will survive the hype and have the potential to become a part of our daily life.
Gartner's Hype Cycle Report is a considered analysis of market excitement, maturity, and the benefit of various technologies. It aggregates data and distills more than 2,000 technologies into a succinct and contextually understandable snapshot of where various emerging technologies sit in their hype cycle.
Here are the five regions of Gartner's Hype Cycle framework:
Understanding this hype cycle framework enables you to ask important questions like "How will these technologies impact my business?" and "Which technologies can I trust to stay relevant in 5 years?"
That being said - it's worth acknowledging that the hype cycle can't predict which technologies will survive the trough of disillusionment and which ones will fade into obscurity.
What's exciting this year?
Before I focus on this year, it's important to remember that last year Gartner shifted towards introducing new technologies at the expense of technologies that would normally persist through multiple iterations of the cycle. This points toward more innovation and more technologies being introduced than in the genesis of this report. Many of the technologies from last year (like Augmented Intelligence, 5G, biochips, the decentralized web, etc.) are represented within newer modalities.
It's also worth noting the impact of the pandemic on the prevalent technologies.
For comparison, here's my article from last year, and here's my article from 2015. Click on the chart below to see a larger version of this year's Hype Cycle.
via Gartner
This year's ~30 key technologies were selected from over 2000 technologies and bucketed into 5 major trends:
I'm always most interested in the intersection of AI and advanced analytics. This year, it looks like many of the fledgling AI technologies have become integrated and more advanced. Much like the formative years for children, formative AI represents a new era in AI maturity. Models are becoming more generalized, and able to attack more problems. They're becoming integrated with human behavior (and even with humans as seen in digital me).
As we reach new echelons of AI, it's actually more likely that you'll see over-hype and short-term failures. As you reach for new heights, you often miss a rung on the ladder... but it doesn't mean you stop climbing. More importantly, it doesn't mean failure or even a lack of progress. Challenges and practical realities act as force functions that forge better, stronger, more resilient, and adaptable solutions that do what you wanted (or something better). It just takes longer than you initially wanted or hoped.
To paraphrase a quote I have up on the wall in my office from Rudiger Dornbusch ... Things often take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.
Many of these technologies have been hyped for years - but the hype cycle is different than the adoption cycle. We often overestimate a year and underestimate 10.
Which technologies do you think will survive the hype?
Posted at 09:11 PM in Business, Current Affairs, Gadgets, Ideas, Market Commentary, Science, Trading Tools, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)
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