Episode #118 - Where Are We Headed?

Transcription:

Sean Riley:

So with all the fancy introductions out of the way, we'd like to welcome to the podcast Daniel Burrus. Welcome Daniel.

Daniel Burrus:

Hey, thank you so much.

Sean Riley:

One thing that you spoke about, which I found very interesting was ... And maybe you can expand on it a little clearer than I will, is the difference, or they're similar but different, that being change and transformation. You were explaining how change is something that you have to do from the outside in, which is why people are resistant to it, versus transformation, which is something that you set in motion. Is that something you could expand on a bit?

Daniel Burrus:

Yes, absolutely. Well first of all, anytime change occurs, it tends to come from the outside in, to either your company, your organization, or to you personally or to your team. It's something that happens and then you need to respond to it. Transformation, whether it is a personal transformation or a business transformation always comes from the inside out. So that helps you to even know whether you're talking about a transformation or a change. And I like that idea of transformation coming from the inside out because it gives you control in shaping your future, rather than just reacting to the things and the forces of change that are around us. The second element of change versus transformation is looking at if it is change, it's similar to what you've done in the past. It's just got a different twist to it. If it's transformation, it is very different.

Let me give you an example. The Blackberry, from Research in Motion, that changed how we did our email because we could now do it on a mobile device, that was also our phone. That was a really welcome change. However, when the first iPhone was introduced and we had the first smartphones, that wasn't a change. That was a transformation because it brought GPS, it brought video, it brought audio, it brought photography. In other words, it was far more than just to an email. It was a transformative device. GPS was transformative. We used to use paper maps. All of a sudden now, hey, we know where we are at any point in time anywhere we are. And that was transformative. So what we want to do is look at our products and services, the new things that we're doing. Are they really just to tweak a little slight addition or have we done something, added an element to it that has transformed that process, that product or service?

Sean Riley:

And I know that one thing you spoke of that I was going to save for a little bit later, but I might as well jump into it now because I'm very curious to pick your brain on it, that you said will be as revolutionary as the iPhone is, ChatGPT and all of these advancements in AI. And I know a lot of people are terrified of it from an aspect of, "It's going to take my job." I write a lot for a living so for me, it absolutely is something and it is worrisome to me because you can just type it in and it will write for you. Could you expand a little bit on that, on how it's not necessarily a bad thing?

Daniel Burrus:

Yeah. Well first of all, technology, no matter what it, is not bad or good, is not evil or good. The same technology that can cure your cancer can actually give you cancer for example. It really depends on the tool. As a matter of fact, I know people that can pick up a smartphone, make a phone call to a customer and make a million dollars. I know people that can pick up a smartphone, make a call to a customer and lose a million dollars. The difference isn't the phone. In other words, it's what you're doing on it. How we decide to implore it, imply it and use it as we apply it. So in when asked in an interview not long ago, will ChatGPT and AI, will that take over the jobs of humans? And I said that humans using AI will replace humans not using AI.

In other words, it's going to be our friend. And you mentioned your writing. What it does is it can very quickly get you 80% there fast, but not a hundred percent. And it's drawing from the internet, which means there's good data, bad data, and incomplete data. And as a matter of fact, it's trained to write really well as you know. So if it doesn't know an answer, it will write a really good answer it makes up. And by the way, it'll sound really good. So part of that extra 20% is checking your sources, making sure that you maintain the credibility with who you're writing for. And then secondly, it's a machine. It doesn't know your audience fully. So that's where you add you. And each one of us, including you, we have our own style, our own mindset, our own insights. So that's part of how you tweak it.

And remember ChatGPT is more than just text to text, meaning I type in something, it gives me an answer. ChatGPT can do text to video. I can type in something and say, "Make a video of it", and it'll do that. It can do an audio recording, it can do a image, make an image for me. It'll do that. It can write code. I know people that are software designers and they were working on creating some code for some new software. And ChatGPT finished the code correctly very quickly. It can write a contract very quickly and actually do it quite accurately. There is ChatPDF. So if you have a long PDF, it can summarize it for you very quickly. So there are many things that it can do. So coming down to your initial question is what we've had with AI is a evolution of AI over many decades and it's been growing at an exponential rate.

However, when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, it towards the end of last year, it took two months to get a hundred million users. Fastest growing software in history is sparking an AI war. What I mean by that is when Chat did that, what happened is we ended up with Google search, which is the trillion-dollar business being threatened. Because it's becoming less relevant, we ended up with all of these companies like Amazon and Facebook and others that have big AI systems now realizing, "Hey, you know what? We've just made them less relevant." So now they're starting to put out their versions and implement it further. As a matter of fact, there's Chat API where you can connect the chat AI system to your database and do it for customer service and all kinds of things. So it is indeed a, I call it an evolutionary revolution. It's been in an evolutionary phase up till now, and now it's just now in a revolutionary area.

Sean Riley:

Interesting. Now, I hope I'm correct in saying this, but would that be ... Because another one thing that you spoke to in your presentation was having an anticipatory mindset and you spoke to why that is so important and you walked people through it. And would that be something we could use AI as an example, anticipating how you can benefit from it versus being afraid of it?

Daniel Burrus:

Yeah, exactly. Well, first of all, just to talk about the concept of being anticipatory, there's two ways of dealing with rapid change that's taken place, which by the way is not going away. And one of them is being agile and agility is a reactionary strategy. It comes from sports and that is to react as quickly as you can to a disruption after it disrupts. To react as quickly as you can to a problem after it occurs. The more agile you are, the faster you react, the better. However, because change is accelerating so fast and we've got this ChatGPT and generative AI creating this revolution, again, that's huge, once in a decade type revolution, just being reactionary is not good enough. So the other thing that I was teaching them is how to be anticipatory, how to anticipate problems before you have them, so that you can pre-solve them and move forward faster.

How to anticipate disruptions before they disrupt. So disruption becomes a choice. You can now either be the disruptor or the disrupted, but there will not be an in between. And very briefly, let me just share that you can do that by using the methodology I've created, which is every trend fits into one of two categories. It's either a hard trend based on a future fact that will happen, which means it cannot be stopped. Quick example, we went from 3G wireless to 4G wireless to 5G wireless. Is that it? No. Next will be 6G followed by seven. And we're putting in more data in the cloud. Is the cloud getting full? No, not at all. And in generative AI and AI, is it just going to go away or will it continue to advance beyond exponential rates? And the answer is it will continue to advance, which means ignoring it is at our peril.

Instead, what we want to do is use it to our advantage. Or the other type of trend is a soft trend. That's based on an assumption that may or may not be true. It may or may not happen. Both have value. I taught the audience. Hard trend and soft trend by itself does not have the power yet. You need to at attach an opportunity to it to burst it into life. So once you identify a hard trend, then what is the opportunity for you? Because you know it's based on a certainty that will happen. If it's a soft trend, meaning it could be changed, what is the opportunity for you to change it to your advantage? So two things that are key, that I'm teaching in this podcast as well as to the audience, all trends are either hard trends or soft trends. And a trend by itself has no value until you attach an opportunity to it. Then it bursts into actionable life.

Sean Riley:

Okay. Well then we touched on AI a good bit. But as a futurist who could speak to some of these things, I know you said you only like to speak out to about three years or so, three to five. Could you give us a couple in addition to the AI that would be either soft or hard trends that we can expect in the next three years?

Daniel Burrus:

I think what you're going to see is in the next three years, we're not going to just change, but we have the ability to truly transform every business process. How we sell, how we market, how we communicate, how we educate, how you pick, how we sell, how we market. And so actually the tools, a lot of it is coming from generative AI and some of the other AI tools, but there are other tools like 3D printing and many others, that can allow us to do things that were impossible before. It will allow us to transform all of our processes. So if I look at hard trends and soft trends, the hard trend is all business processes, products and services have the ability to be transformed now and wield over a three, four year time period. The soft trend, will your company transform your processes?

And the answer to that is, I don't know. That's why it's soft. You may ignore it at your peril. You might keep doing what you've always done thinking that always worked, but it won't work going forward. I would like us to embrace the transformational changes that are taking place, to go back and make a list of the things we are certain about. What are those hard trends that are technology driven? What are those hard trends that demographics is bringing us? Because we know that baby boomers are not going to get chronologically younger, for example. There's a lot that we can predict accurately and a lot of problems we could pre-solve or let play out. There's even regulations you can predict. For example, will we have more regulations in cybersecurity? The answer is yes, that's a hard trend. So I may not be able to predict all of regulations going forward.

Of course not. I can't predict everything now. But a list of things that I do know that I am certain about is very powerful because strategy based on certainty has low risk. Strategy based on uncertainty has high risk. So I want to have a list of those hard trends, those things I'm certain about, to work off of and the related opportunities. So if we look at technology, and by the way, your listeners could go to burrus.com, B-U-R-R-U-S.com. On the front page, you can download my list of the 25 technology hard trends that are shaping the future. It's free, doesn't cost you anything. I suggest you do that because you can see there's far more than just AI that's shaping our future. And there you go. I'm giving you a big list that you can get for free.

Sean Riley:

That's fantastic. And you actually touched on one that you didn't reference that you were on top of involving video during your presentation, that you had spoken about Blockbuster and the advent of streaming back before it happened?

Daniel Burrus:

Oh, yeah. I've again got a big listen. Matter of fact, I gave a speech to the American Book Sellers Association in 1993. 10,000 people in the audience that sell books. And I said, "Within two years, you'll see the first virtual bookstore." And if you listen to the audio tape of that speech, you will hear me describe what Amazon.com ended up becoming. And they did start two years after that. So again, instead of me just saying, "Boy, I'm really good at this", I'm saying that there is a methodology that you can learn to do this with. And again, I've written thousands of blogs at burris.com. You could go there. You could go to Amazon and find my books, Flash Foresight or my latest one, The Anticipatory Organization. And if you want to learn more, you could go there and find out far more.

Sean Riley:

That's terrific. Daniel, we really appreciate you taking some extra time to come on here with us. And maybe after we close out, I'll ask you for some winning lottery numbers or something like that that might help me in the short term.

Daniel Burrus:

Well, you have to leave out the parts you can be wrong about it.

Sean Riley:

Thanks, Daniel.

Daniel Burrus:

You got it. Thank you