The Price of Progress: From Delusion to Reality

How today's 'delusional' ideas become tomorrow's indispensable technologies.

When its your job to identify human futures for startups because you are more in tune with the technological future that we actually live in, prepare to get accused of all kinds of things by people who don’t operate using frameworks for design thinking or possibility thinking.

I’ve been accused many times of being ‘delusional’ for being more cognizant of the fact that the personal computer, AirBnb and the ability to purchase music online were all inventions that took place during our lifetime.

If Steve Jobs worried about which labels were going to be placed on his forehead for seeing further into the future than other people do we’d still all be using Motorola flip phones without web access or GPS navigation.

Expect that if you are shaping human futures that you will have pushback from people whose job it is to maintain the status quo and that you’ll be classified by them as a way of protecting their definition of ‘normal life’. The state doesn’t like when people think they can put a ding in the universe but they have no problem sending their employees around in an Uber when there is no other form of transportation available to them.

Inventors throughout history and even Mother Theresa were labeled all kinds of things during their lifetimes for their contributions to humanity. You have to be willing to look past the cognitive biases that consumers have and expect from the services that have been designed for them and design something better anyway.