Living on Technology’s Leading Edge

In the last decade of the 19^th century and early years of the 20^th century, the biggest problem confronting the people of New York City was the massive amounts of horse manure in the streets. In addition to its offensive odor and having to step carefully when crossing a street, there was a constant health hazard, especially in the hot summer months.  

      The city’s leaders wrestled with means to control it. Increasing the numbers of cleaning crews was insufficient. Among the proposals considered was putting limits on the number of horses allowed in the city. But that wasn’t practical. America’s most populous city, like all others, relied on horses to pull the carriages that conveyed passengers, and the wagons that delivered essential goods.  

      About the time the city fathers were at wit’s end, their problem was solved in a totally unexpected way: The arrival of the internal combustion engine and mass-produced automobiles. Within a decade or so, nearly all horses – and horse manure – disappeared from the streets of New York, replaced by horseless carriages. Problem solved. 

Ethernet goes *poof* 
In a similar vein, beginning in the early to mid-1990s, owners of office buildings scrambled to retrofit their structures with miles and miles of Ethernet cable to accommodate the need to connect all desktop computers to the Internet and local area networks. Yet, despite the massive investments in money and man-hours, within a decade, the need for Ethernet was virtually eliminated with the advent and widespread adoption of WiFi.

      Both these circumstances point up a core irony of technology: While we all welcome the capabilities and conveniences that technology gives us, at the same time it is not something that we can foresee and easily anticipate. Rather, it is something for which it is nearly impossible to plan.

      Consequently, no matter how prescient we may think we are as a society, we cannot foresee the effects that an unimagined technology would have on our lives and infrastructure after the fact.

      This challenge occurred to me while taking a tour of my town’s 45-year-old high school, which is in bad need of replacement. Over the years, the school administration had cobbled together various upgrades to sustain a campus that would provide the most current learning environment. But eventually, they just ran out of options.

      Take yourself back to the late 1960s and try to imagine what a high school building would require in terms of infrastructure 50 years hence. For one, they needed a library with enough shelf space to accommodate thousands and thousands of books.

      So here we are in 2013 and it’s time to replace that dinosaur – a dinosaur whose the library has been renamed the “Media Center,” with a fraction of the numbers of books envisioned 45 years ago. In their places are computer workstations, which no one could have imagined 50 years ago.  

Secretarial pool 
This dinosaur also has miles of unused Ethernet cable that had been strung above classroom ceiling panels some 20 years ago, and a computer center located in the same classroom where many high school girls 40 years ago learned to type in anticipation of joining the secretarial pool after graduation.
      And that’s to say nothing of the changes and accompanying expenses that new regulations and laws would impose on public buildings – including schools – the most prominent of which was the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. In addition, the advances in energy efficient construction alone make replacement imperative, if for no other reason than to save gobs of money in fuel and electricity costs.
      How do we account for changes that we cannot comprehend needing 40 and 50 years hence? If we couldn’t anticipate WiFi less than 10 years before it became widespread, how are we going to anticipate the next unknown technological leap and accommodate it accordingly? Thinking about business, how can we anticipate and incorporate the necessary changes that we cannot know?

      The short answer is, we can’t. But, we must approach unknown change with an open, inquiring mind, recognizing that today’s decisions work best in today’s world. In thinking through those decisions, in weighing the pros and cons of one choice versus another, are we adequately considering unknowns?
      Those “what if’s” can come back to haunt us. Those decisions that involve multimillion dollar capital investments must be made in the context of a discrete time frame, fully cognizant that even that time frame could shift quickly if something as momentous as the invention of the mass assembled automobile comes along to wipe the slate clean.
      Our planning window of opportunity, by the way, shrinks as fast as technology advances. A 10-year planning time frame is a vanishing luxury – if it exists at all.
      At its core, that’s what change is all about. That’s what we need to manage for, no matter the nature of our business. It means we must be nimble, always open to new ideas and new ways of thinking about challenges and potential solutions and opportunities.