Gradually, then suddenly. That’s the line that I borrowed from Ernest Hemingway to describe the progress of strategic inflection points. They brew along for a long time – sometimes decades – before finally breaking through.
Strategic inflection points – those events that punctuate a shift from one reality to another – feel as though they came out of nowhere. But as I’ve said in my book “Seeing Around Corners” the process of a fully fledged inflection point coming to life is often a very long one.
Humans are ingenious – able to imagine the existence of things that don’t yet exist. So, too, with autonomous cars. In fact, Leonardo Da Vinci is credited with designing the very first autonomous “vehicle” – a cart that could move by itself using wind-up springs, like those you might find in a child’s toy. While it never got off the drawing board in his lifetime, or for many lifetimes after, his 1478 speculation was finally brought to real life in 2004.
General Motors funded a theatrical vision of a driverless and car-centric future at the 1939 World’s Fair in an exhibit called “Futurama” that proved remarkably predictive of the growth of car-dependent suburbs after World War II. This development, while promising convenience, led to sprawl, long commutes, cities starved of resources for investment in mass transit infrastructure and inequities in access to social resources that are today widely recognized as problematic.
It’s quite common when thinking about the future for people to project a change in one part of the system while holding the rest of it constant. Even the Jetsons!
The show had flying cars and robot servants, but social roles and workplace norms remained firmly grounded in 1962 when it premiered.
We’ve developed a deeply researched team effectiveness diagnostic that allows you to get to the bottom of why so many teams don’t work very well and make interventions to correct them. We’re offering the first ten teams to sign up before the end of the year the opportunity to run the diagnostic and have a customized one-on-one debrief with myself and the Valize team. It’s $125 per team member plus $2,900 for the customized debrief plus results report.
