Set a vision for the future

Can you predict the future? I use this analogy: My mother likes to do quilting; when she starts a new quilt project, I may not be able to tell you exactly what the new quilt will look like, but I can describe the patterns and colors that quilt will have. Sometimes, rather than building a complete picture of the technology that has yet to come, we need to describe the broad patterns and colors that the future will contain.

When you envision the future, avoid going too deep into specifics. Consider the overall shape of the future and technology that we will use in that future state.

A thought exercise

Consider this exercise to envision the future: What will the “landscape” look like in a year’s time? That’s probably easier to figure out, because one year isn’t that far away, so you can imagine an iterative improvement from today’s technology. It’s probably safe to assume that the landscape a year from now will be not too different from today’s landscape.

What about five years from now? How will technology continue to shape the future? What kinds of devices will we use? Don’t focus too closely on the exact devices we’ll use, but the kinds of devices we’ll take with us every day.

Now consider ten years from now. What is the shape of that technology horizon? While we may not be able to fully describe that future with pinpoint accuracy, we can make informed guesses. Turn your mind to what’s possible and work to bring that imagined technology into a reality you can envision.

You will

Maybe you find it impossible to imagine the shape of technology that’s ten years in the future. But in 1993 and 1994, AT&T did just that in a series of “You Will” television ads. In the series of ads, AT&T painted an ambitious vision of the future.

And that vision was surprisingly accurate, despite coming from the era of 1990s technology when “movies at home” meant VHS tapes, phones had cords, offices ran DOS or Windows 3.1, and computers were big, plain beige boxes. At the time, few people had heard of “email,” and almost no one knew the term “web browser.” The World Wide Web is generally considered to have been “born” in 1994, with the first Netscape browser released in late 1994. So in 1993 and 1994, “the Web” was an unheard-of concept.

Yet AT&T considered what the future might bring and produced this visionary ad campaign designed to bring customers into their vision of the future. AT&T’s “You Will” ads introduced concepts such as electronic books (Kindle), phone and car GPS navigation (Google Maps), streaming video (Netflix), video calls and video conferences (Zoom), online education, online shopping, digital music, digital assistants, wearable computers, and more.

Of course, AT&T imagined dedicated hardware devices for each task. In 1993, AT&T couldn’t have predicted the smartphone innovation, empowering us to do all of these tasks (and more) from a device we carry in our pocket.