by Tim Hughes | @Timothy_Hughes | LinkedIn
The thing we come across the most is excuses.
“I don’t have time to update my LinkedIn profile” … You mean you don’t have time to speak in an authentic way to 565 Million potential customers?
In this article we explore the psychology behind some of the excuses we hear.
In their book, “The Future of The Professions” by Father and Son writing team of Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind they discuss the different types of bias, especially bias to change.
Sales and Marketing has continually evolved. When I started working there was no internet, no computers and no emails. We researched names from books, wrote on paper our letters, that were typed up by a typing pool. If you wanted information on a product or service you called up and asked for a brochure, which if you were lucky, arrived 3 days later.
In terms of time, writing is only a fairly recent phenomenon, the first script was developed in about 3500 BC. In the middle of the fifteenth century, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. In 1965, Gordon Moore predicted, what became as Moore’s Law. Which is the fact that the number of transistors in a chip would double. The PC was launched by IBM in 1981. The internet launched in the early 1990s. Now we just reach for our mobiles, the Wi-fi and the Internet. We have had continue development and you can see that development is accelerating.
To quote Peter Drucker“The only thing we know about the future, is that it will be different.”
So what about this bias and the types of excuses?
Some of the biases that Susskind and Susskind mention in their book are:-
Status Quo Bias This is where somebody continues to do the same as they have always done. This often manifests itself where people say their vertical won’t change or is immune from change. Always be suspicious when somebody says they are different to ever other industry. The only way to work is through cold calling, when they have never used social selling or are using some social media clown’s method.
Irrational Rejection– This is the dogmatic dismissal of something that they have no experience of. Often this is based on a fear of the unknown. Social media is rubbish, when they don’t use social media.
Technology Myopia– This is where somebody under estimates a technology based on today’s rather than tomorrow’s capability. For example dismissing the opportunity of a video call, because you have a poor experience of Skype.
Technology myopia also exists where people cannot see that a small group of early adopters can still turn into mass market. Nokia had an iPhone type of phone in research and development for it to be rejected by the user forums. It was made of glass after all, what happened if you dropped it, there was no keyboard and the screen would get smeared. Only for Apple to launch a similar phone to acclaim.
Retrospective Modernism– This is a definition defined by Frederick Maitland, where people are limited in their view of history as they can only look back using a lens from today.
A slightly different bias is
AI Fallacy– Is another bias. This is the mistaken notion that the only way AI can develop is by replicating human thought and tasks. Watson can beat the world’s best chess player, it does this by computing muscle, rather than thinking like a human chess player. The mobile phone only replicated something we had already, the cordless telephone. It is only now that the technology has matured that we have Shazam, Facebook, Snapchat all things that didn’t exist before the iPhone. Tom Goodwin in his book “Digital Darwinism” talks about how the electric motor is a copy of the stream powered motor or the electric light is a copy of the gas light. The first electric lights had the light switch on the light filament, the same as a gas light. Putting it on a wall by a door was rejected by the inventor. Why would you want to do that? We always switch the light on at the fitting, like we did with gas lights.
And So the Future?
Kurzweil claims that by 2020 (using Moore’s Law) that the average desktop computer will have the same computing power as a human brain and by 2050 the average computer will have the same computing power as all the human brains on the earth.
Maybe it’s time for us all to revisit some of our current working practices?
People who read this article also read these:
http://www.social-experts.net/why-you-should-use-influencers/
http://www.social-experts.net/automation-makes-you-look-amateur/
http://www.social-experts.net/seo-vs-intent-data/
