Building for the future when you don’t know what the future looks like
Designing for options, not outcomes (plus, the Crystal Ball goes on vacation)
It’s been a while!
You were treated to the wonderful innovation wit and wisdom from Sona, Leonard, and Danielle the last few weeks.
This week is about building for the future when you don’t know what the future looks like.
Berndnaut Smilde, Nimbus II, 2012, Cloud in room, Lambda print on dibond, 75 x 112 cm, Hotel Maria Kapel, Hoorn, NL, courtesy the artist and Ronchini Gallery. Credit: Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk
This isn’t an abstract academic problem. We face this in our work every day.
How do we modernize a system when we don’t know what the specific future use cases will be?
How do we deliver specific outcomes for today’s business requirements while building in flexibility for the variable future?
How do we be good friends to our future selves?
When you don’t – or can’t – know what the future holds, think about designing options, not outcomes.
The internet is a great example. The whole world shifted to online working virtually overnight without the internet infrastructure missing a beat. We have an abundance of network capacity. The people who laid the cable decades ago couldn’t have possibly predicted Netflix or Zoom. They didn’t need to. They saw that this nascent thing called the internet was valuable, and that people will likely be using more of it in the future.
Here’s another example from our business. We may not know exactly what the future retirement process will look like. But again, we don’t need to. By focusing on building options vs. outcomes, we start to see the world differently.
What if, say, you know you eventually wanted to match recent retirees with those just entering the retirement journey? What if we hypothesized that this would ease the transition into the next life phase? Let’s say some core system needs are prioritized first, so this would be a year or two down the road. What are your options?
You could scope out the concept, do user research, build user stories and try to squeeze it onto the product roadmap, knowing there’s a 99% chance you’ll be wrong and out of date by the time you go live.
Or, you could envision your future self, two years down the road. You could speculate what two data points would make your life 10x easier. Maybe something around a person’s values or their bucket list? It’s a simple checkbox data field. You may never use it. Or it may just be the golden nugget of data that you can build a killer feature off of because you can match people according to affinity. But you could only do this because some kind soul had enough sense to build in an affordance with no idea where it would lead.
We think about this when we hire people as well. It’s a given the star candidate will be able to do the job of today. But what capabilities are they bringing that we don’t yet have projects for? How does hiring candidate A vs. candidate B change the entire course of history for the team – because you’ve expanded your capability and can create new service lines that don’t yet exist? How are you building ‘optionality and potentiality’ with every decision you make?
The point here is you can have strategy without design. You can make choices without knowing the outcomes.
Build more doors to open. Be good to your future self; your future team; your future company.
Borrowing from Shane Parrish of Farnam Street, a simple question to ask yourself before deciding:
"Is this choice going to make the future easier or harder?"
Choose easy over hard. Choose options over outcomes.
Choose to make your future self proud.
In that spirit, the Crystal Ball is going to take a break for a few weeks to recharge and reset. Future us is going to thank current us.
Creativity is a renewable resource – but it’s not infinite. It takes time to regenerate. Deep work requires active rest.
You can never step in the same river twice. Same too, for this team. We’ll be a completely different team when we’re all back in the Fall. Yet in many ways, we will be truer to the core of our mission than ever.
The beautiful paradox of progress. The more things change, the more things stay the same.
We’ll be back in September with weekly dispatches at the crux of design, foresight, innovation, and systemic paradoxes.
The future’s so bright, we gotta wear shades.
Onward.
What we’re reading (watching, and listening to)
The Economist asks: What If? – The always-engaging annual collection of scenarios, this one on the future of health. “Each of these stories is fiction, but grounded in historical fact, current speculation and real science. They do not present a unified narrative but are set in different futures.”
How Apple Is Organized for Innovation [YouTube] - When Steve Jobs arrived back at Apple in 1997, he laid off general managers of all business units and combined disparate functional departments into one functional organization.
The Coming Creativity Boom: How human ingenuity will power the 2020s – It’s not often you’ll see Big Bank ‘thought leadership’ here, but this one is worth a read – if only to understand how the establishment thinks about something.
Design Thinking is Ready for Version 2.0 – It’s not often you see Big Consulting ‘thought leadership’ here, but this one is also worth a read – if only to understand how the establishment thinks about something.
The dangerous appeal of technology-driven futures – Technology doesn’t rule us. We direct it, but often by inaction.
Last word
“Everyone takes the limits of their vision for the limits of the world.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer