Anyone who has seen me speak might get the sense that I’m obsessed with exponential curves. I spend a fair bit of my stage time exploring what exponential change looks like and asking my audiences to consider how exponential thinking might take root in their own businesses.
My main prop during this portion of my talk is Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, which posits that the rate of change in a wide variety of evolutionary systems tends to increase exponentially.
When applied to technology, Kurzweil’s law looks like this — showing a long, surprisingly slow slog from the advent of computing around 1900 (really!) through the mainstreaming of modern computing, then tomorrow’s short sharp rise toward humanlike processing power and beyond:
And it isn’t just machine intelligence that is progressing at an exponential rate. Consider, for example, the number of nodes on the network as the Internet of Things ushers in an age of digital ubiquity.
And the staggering amount of data generated each and every day, a figure that itself grows exponentially as it builds an exponentially larger storehouse of information over time.
But to limit our view of exponential growth to technology is to miss the fundamental fact that change has always been exponential, in every area, and throughout all of the history of the world. Open Philanthropy Project’s Luke Muelhauser has mapped key measures of human well-being over the course of recorded history, finding that (without exception) the Industrial Revolution triggered exponential improvements in everything from life expectancy and economic stability (good) to war-making capability (not so good).
The Takeaway? Everything is exponential. Well, everything except you…
By nature, you are not exponential. I don’t mean this is a slight. As the world changes at an exponential rate around us, human beings remain resolutely linear. As individuals, we move through that world incrementally — step-by-step, one day at a time.
What’s more — and here’s where we can get into trouble in the face of exponential change — we think about the world incrementally, expecting that the future will be informed by the past and arrive as a linear extension of the present.
Within a business context, it’s too easy to argue that leaders haven’t seen the future coming. It’s closer to the truth to say that leaders do see the future coming but, by thinking incrementally, fail to see how dramatically different it will be and how quickly it will arrive.
The answer, of course, is exponential thinking — but this is easier said than done. We’re not wired for it. But we can cultivate an exponential mindset, a form of futures thinking whereby we give ourselves permission to think and act boldly about our place in an exponential environment.
How?
- By studying change
- By embracing ambiguity
- By suspending disbelief
- By reverse engineering your desired future state
- By seeing abundance instead of scarcity
- By collaborating and making connections
- By challenging assumptions
- By asking “what if” and “why not”
- By thinking 10x instead of 10%
- By having conviction and patience
The Bottom Line: Exponential change is deceptive, its outcomes surprising, often exciting and sometimes devastating to those who stick to 1x thinking about a 10x world. By thinking — then acting — exponentially, business leaders can unlock a world of possibilities for the future of their own organization. The future favors the bold.
