10 years

Over lunch at Dots, Antony and I were reminicising about how we first met. 

Back then, I was the MD of a small digital agency and Antony was something senior in PR. We both worked for the same holding company. We were asked to form a group, along with various others, to figure out what impact the Internet would have on the holding group.

Antony joked yesterday that we were in the group because we knew what a website was. This wasn’t far from the truth. The whole industry was really struggling to adapt to digital. 

But going on from the themes of the conference yesterday: difficulty of change, how we move towards the future and so on, here’s the interesting thought… If we could have told the group back then exactly what was about to happen: from social media to Uber, to hacktivism, to Egyptian revolutions, to how young people are interacting, would we even have been believed?  And would the companies involved managed to cease the opportunity?

Why’s this interesting (to me at least)? Because it underlines that thinking about what is going to happen is not always the problem. Often, it’s reacting to those ideas that is.