Anticipate Directions of Change
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Spot signals of change that could scale.
- Identify driving forces that are already propelling change.
- Describe critical uncertainties that mark important forks in the road.
The Driving Force That Launched Salesforce
Back in the late 1990s, nobody talked about “the cloud.” And business software was sold as extremely expensive CD-ROM discs to be installed on your own servers in your own company’s data centers. Marc Benioff sold that software, but he was intrigued to see that many young dot-com startups were not just selling but also delivering all sorts of services over the internet.
“The internet seemed to offer a path to reach small and disaggregated customers,” he later wrote in Behind the Cloud. “I believed it could ultimately transform the industry.” Looking back from the 20th anniversary of Salesforce, Benioff said, “It was a very exciting time. We had an inspiration of where Amazon.com and Google and Yahoo could come together with what traditional enterprise software was doing, and together could create a new paradigm.”
Benioff was gripped by his realization that the internet would become the dominant distribution vehicle for all kinds of software. “I saw an opportunity to deliver business software applications in a new way,” he wrote in Behind the Cloud. “My vision was to make software easier to purchase, simpler to use, and more democratic without the complexities of installation, maintenance, and constant upgrades.”
He couldn’t predict how quickly it would be adopted, how security challenges would be overcome, who would dominate the infrastructure market, and many other matters. But he was confident that software was moving to the cloud.
Learn the Building Blocks of the Future
What Benioff did is a great example of the first step in the Salesforce Futures approach: Anticipate the directions of change.
In Anticipate, you look for three things.
| Signals of change | Driving forces | Critical uncertainties | |
|---|---|---|---|
|
What they are |
Small changes that have the potential to scale up and define your environment |
The major changes happening today that are shaping your environment |
Forks in the road that could define how your environment could change |
|
Why you need them |
To be early at seeing how major changes could develop |
To understand what possibilities are already visible |
To identify the most important possibilities for how today’s driving forces and signals could combine |
Benioff did all three. First he saw signals of change: the many niche ways that the internet began to be used for commerce. Then he kept paying attention as they grew in number and kind to become a driving force, which motivated him to start his own business. And, as he built out his business plan, he explicitly recognized many critical uncertainties that he couldn’t predict about how the market for cloud-based enterprise software would develop.
You might be thinking: Sure, but he could only see it because of his particular talent for seeing things coming, and that’s never been my thing. Well, here’s some good news: Signals, forces, and uncertainties are all around us.
Look for a Signal of Change
Big changes are always visible in advance if you take the time to look. So what do you watch for? Start with the simple exercise of noticing anything unusual or surprising in your environment.
Not everything different is meaningful, of course. Let’s say you work in the sneaker industry. If you see someone walking down the street in two different-colored sneakers, that might be a sign of nothing more than a quirky and expressive sense of style. But if you start seeing different people doing it every week, you could be on to something. You’ve just found something that fits the “small changes” part of what makes a signal of change.
Now onto the next part of the definition: Does this signal have the potential to scale up and have a major impact? If your job is to design sneakers, seeing different-colored shoes pop up could be quite relevant. Especially if you see that the people doing it are in a demographic that are often successful trendsetters.
But if your job is quite different–say, tracking how regulation could limit your company’s use of potentially-toxic chemicals–the answer is clearly no. You’ll need different signals for that, such as relevant legal cases making their way through the courts.
Take a moment, right now, and see if you can think of at least one case of “different-color shoes” related to the question you wanted to ask the oracle, that we talked about in the first unit. Have you heard about a new startup? Come across a provocative new idea? Noticed activists spotlighting a new concern? Heard about research into new materials? If you’re coming up dry, try searching on “future of [your topic]” on the web or social media, and you’ll likely find some developments you’ve never heard of.
To hear Peter Schwartz reflecting on how his filters helped him see the COVID-19 pandemic early, see the interview in this video.
Notice a Driving Force
What happens when that signal you see is part of something much, much bigger, like the rise of cloud services that Benioff saw? Think about the first time you were cruising through the grocery store’s meat department and saw a new brand of vegan “meat.” Now think about the first time you went to order at a fast-food chain and saw a meatless burger on the menu. That probably wasn’t long ago. And now we’re in the midst of an explosion of alternative protein products that are hitting the market, with more in the pipeline. It’s clear that alternative protein is here to stay, and that we’ll continue to see more products become available and compete for market share.
That’s what it feels like to notice a driving force. At some point in the past, all you could see was a collection of signals. But today the change has gathered powerful momentum, has a clear direction, and it would be very surprising for it to stop. The only questions are about how it will develop—which are the critical uncertainties we discuss in a moment.
First, let’s see if you can think of three driving forces that you want to investigate. Let’s make at least two of them something that makes you feel hopeful. Remember, the forces we’re talking about are anything with major momentum to change the world in a way that you care about. Just as with signals, search is your friend. Plug in “drivers of change [X]” or “future of [X]” for a given industry or issue, and you’re very likely to find reports that will get you started.
A classic set of categories to spin through as you’re hunting is STEEP: society, technology, economics, environment, and politics. Another pro tip to finding driving forces: Check out the strategic intelligence section of the World Economic Forum’s website. Click the Discover tab, then select Global Issues, and see what catches you among their expansive list that includes AI, climate change, the metaverse, the circular economy, and many other topics.
Identify a Critical Uncertainty
The final part of anticipating the directions of change is naming the biggest open questions about how change could develop. Signals identify a change, and drivers tell you the direction and magnitude of current changes, but there are always upcoming forks in the road that matter to your decision.
Returning to the driving force of alternative protein, the momentum around it raises a number of questions that might matter if you’re a company that makes food products. How soon will we see true taste parity with animal protein? How about price parity? How fast will production scale? Will there always be people who can’t stomach “fake” meat? And, ultimately, how fast will consumer demand grow?
The value of these questions is in naming the hinge-points in our environment that are crucially important but we cannot predict. What we can do is estimate the range of outcomes that we consider plausible, and keep tabs on the question to track whether that range needs updating.
With that, you have all the basic tools for anticipating the direction of change and arriving at better questions. Enjoy the journey! And, a word of caution: Before you go disappearing down that rabbit-hole to learn what you need to know about the future, be it flying cars or sustainability regulations, pack a snack and make sure nothing’s on the stove. You might not come back for a while…
