Predictions are wrong — Kelford Labs Daily

“I have seen the future of the cinema, and it is not digital. No matter what you’ve read, the movie theater of the future will not use digital video projectors, and it will not beam the signal down from satellites. It will use film, and the film will be right there in the theater with you.”

— Roger Ebert, “Celluloid vs. Digital: The War for the Soul of the Cinema,” 1999

Three years after making that pronouncement, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, filmed digitally, would be projected digitally in a few dozen theatres around the world.

20-odd years on, digital projectors are the standard. Even if a movie was shot on real celluloid, only a handful of theatres are capable of actually projecting film.

How could a film expert like Roger Ebert get a prediction so wrong, and so close to its own unfulfillment?

Because, like Clayton Christensen wrote about disruptive technologies in The Innovator’s Dilemma, “Experts’ forecasts will always be wrong.”

Nobody can be counted on to accurately predict the future. Look, I once thought the app Clubhouse was going to be the next big thing, but it just took me 20 seconds to even remember its name so I could write this sentence.

And now we’ve all got our pet predictions about how AI will shake out and how industries will change (or how and when speculative investment bubbles will burst). But nobody knows. I certainly don’t.

Me, depending on the day, I’m somewhere between, “This is a massive speculative bubble that will, upon bursting, be cataclysmic to the tech industry at large” and “machine learning is already fundamentally reshaping parts of the economy.” Or some combination of those.

But I don’t, you know, know.

So I’m keeping my eyes and mind open to changes, to clues, to hints at what might be happening next.

Like, for instance, that more and more prospects and clients are leaning on AI to help them with their marketing.

Whatever industry we’re in, there are technological seasons changing. Prospects and clients are reorganizing their priorities based on their context.

That’s why flexibility and adaptability is so important. Because we will have to change eventually, inevitably, to suit the season.

The only question is in what way. And we figure that out by paying attention, by noticing how market, prospect, and client priorities are changing.

I can’t know for sure what’s going to happen next, but I can know for sure what I’m going to do next:

• I’m going to pay attention to how our clients talk about us and our industry, and what they say in their own words
• I’m going to notice if any particular marketing effort is less effective than it once was, and what could be driving that
• And I’m going to consider how our process could change to meet our prospects’ changing priorities, by noticing what they value most

So that we can change to suit the season, without compromising our principles.

What will you do?

Reply to this email to tell me what you think, or ask any questions!

Kelford Inc. shows experts the way to always knowing what to say.