“Distributed Everything” Started in Silicon Valley

When I first arrived in Silicon Valley, Institute for the Future was up in the hills on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, near Highway 280, barely on the inland side of the San Andreas Fault. I used to joke that, when The Big One hits California, Institute for the Future will have a shoreline view.

IFTF was the first tenant in a new cluster of buildings built by Tom Ford, a former development officer from Stanford, who had the foresight to buy a parcel of land right across the road from Stanford University property. He attracted a new kind of tenant in addition to our little think tank—people who would come to be called venture capitalists. Ford Land Company became a big success, venture capital boomed, and Sand Hill Road is now known as the Wall Street of Silicon Valley.

The Silicon Valley “Wall Street” is beauty on the edge of disaster. Droughts, wildfires, and mudslides loom. And earthquakes are omnipresent here—not only the geological kind but also metaphorical earthquakes of innovation.

I believe that the everyday juxtaposition of awesome beauty and certain disruption is an important reason why Silicon Valley is the birthplace of so much innovation—including the technologies pushing us toward distributed everything. The inevitability that our beautiful world will be disrupted is at least a partial motivator for all of us to innovate.

Silicon Valley disruptors have bloomed, seeded, re-bloomed, and re-seeded in continuing harvests of innovation—all under the certainty of disaster. If you live in a time when each day could be the eve of destruction, having the innovation jimjams is just part of your daily life. In other parts of the world, it may seem easier to fend off outside forces and maintain control through centralized organizations. But if you live in Silicon Valley, distributed everything just seems like what we all need to learn how to do. Distributed means dispersed over space and time. The technologies of dispersion have their roots here in Silicon Valley. Digital connectivity can link scattered people and processes, but it takes special human effort to weave new organizational forms, new business models, and new styles of leadership.

If the many colorful visions of how to improve the world were not so compelling and credible, Silicon Valley would never work. Silicon Valley has already changed the world, and there is strong reason to believe that it will do so again and again. It is the spirit of Silicon Valley that will make distributed everything possible.

There are two very powerful and very distributed clusters of disruptors in Silicon Valley: one obsessed with ways to make the world a better place, the other obsessed by extreme greed. These two loose social networks, whose members have compatible values, don’t particularly like each other, but the world changers and the greedy people know they need each other. And there are some crossovers.

You may have negative associations with the word greed, but if it weren’t for greed, Silicon Valley would not be the success story that it is. Tense relations between the world changers and impatient investors create friction, which sparks the innovators among them to throw hundreds of matches every day on bonfires of disruption.

Fail early, fail often, and fail cheaply is the motto here. Failure is a badge of courage. Success builds on earlier failures. Very little happens in Silicon Valley any more that is truly new. Almost everything that succeeds here was tried and failed many times before. “Our purpose is to fail, but to fail in an interesting way,” said Silicon Valley visionary Alan Kay when he was at Xerox PARC during its prime. Failure is an essential ingredient of disruption, and Silicon Valley is full of people who thrive on disrupting in a climate of perpetual disruption.

The photo on the left side of Figure 3 is the sign as you drive onto the current (relatively new) Facebook campus in Menlo Park, just off Highway 101. The photo on the right is the back of the sign that Facebook retained from Sun Microsystems, which used to occupy the same campus. When Sun was still an independent company, its executives boasted that they expected to be disrupted, were fully prepared for disruption, and that they knew how to “eat [their] own young” in order to survive disruption. In spite of their efforts, Sun Microsystems was eaten by Oracle. The two-sided sign at Facebook is a constant reminder for Facebook employees that nothing in Silicon Valley is permanent. Disruption looms here.

Many books and most corporations focus on trends, which have data, duration, and direction. In the futures field, trends are patterns of change from which you can extrapolate with confidence. Demographic trends (for example, around aging or population flows) are important to track and anticipate, but trends are much easier to identify and follow than disruptions. With trends, you have historical data that is worthy of trust, so you have a pretty good sense of what’s coming next. With disruptions, you have only hints about what’s next, and the hints are often wrong.

Trends are gradual, relatively predictable, and almost-comfortable change. Disruption is extreme and unpredictable change. Disruption is uncomfortable for most people.

This book focuses on disruptions, which are breaks in the patterns of change. Disruptions tend to take a long time to play out and are often characterized by waves of innovation.

Disruptions often start as responses to particular problems but almost always spark unexpected changes. Despite its sense of immediacy, disruption is often a process that takes a long while to play out—disruption doesn’t just suddenly pop up and then disappear.

When disruption first breaks out, it is hard to tell just what the core disruption will be. Early waves of disruption may look much different from what happens later.

Most people in today’s organizations are not prepared for a global future laced with disruption and extreme dilemmas that have no easy answers. As former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said right after the vote for Britain to leave the European Union in 2016:

The political center has lost its power to persuade and its essential means of connection to the people it seeks to represent. Instead, we are seeing a convergence of the far left and far right. The right attacks immigrants while the left rails at bankers, but the spirit of insurgency, the venting of anger at those in power and the addiction to simple, demagogic answers to complex problems are the same for both extremes. Underlying it all is a shared hostility to globalization. (Blair 2016)

Despite the trendy “shared hostility to globalization,” top leaders will deal mostly with dilemmas that are increasingly global and flow across national boundaries. Dilemmas are problems you can’t solve, problems that won’t go away—yet somehow leaders must learn how to succeed anyway. Future dilemmas will be embedded with both hope and fear—but the fear will be biting and the hope elusive.

If a leader characterizes a dilemma as a problem that can be solved, the failure to solve it is likely be remembered and probably will be punished. When dealing with extreme dilemmas, leaders will need to learn how to thrive in the space between judging too soon (the classic mistake of the problem solver) and deciding too late (the classic mistake of the academic). Dilemmas are gnarly.

The word disruption is out of fashion, I was told more than once as I was writing this book. Some friends suggested that I stop using the word, since it has been used in such cavalier ways recently. Even in Silicon Valley, a constant churn of jargon-laden innovation-speak, the word disruption has been overused and under-defined. Zoé Bezpalko, a young Silicon Valley friend of mine born in France, said to me with a twinkle in her eye: “Oh, haven’t you heard? Disruption is now passé. Now, it’s all about invention.”

I kind of like that shift—and I certainly like the word invention—but I don’t want to give up on the word disruption. Instead, I want to make it clear that I’m using the word correctly to mean a break in the patterns of change. In this book, I’m talking about really serious breaks in the patterns of change—beyond trends and the watered-down pop definition of disruption. Leaders will need to face up to disruption, not just call it by another name.

How can leaders learn not only to cope in the VUCA world but also thrive? The leadership literacies I am proposing will actually work better when the world is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

As a rule of thumb at Institute for the Future, we look back at least 50 years every time we do a ten-year forecast. We look for patterns of change. We look for thresholds of change. We look for signals that precede the future. We look in particular for what seems ready to take off, even if it has failed many times before. We look for stories that connect to the signals and give clues about how this particular future could come to pass. As novelist William Gibson said so eloquently, “The future’s already here. It’s just unevenly distributed.”

Here is a summary of the core disruptions I am forecasting over the next decade:

To understand the future, leaders need to listen for signals while filtering out noise. You can listen only for things you are able to hear, however. Leaders need to be tuned to listening for things that don’t fit in interesting ways—even if they don’t fit that leader’s preconception of how they are or how they might be. Leaders must be sense makers in a world that will differ profoundly from what they have experienced before.

Much of the present is noise. And, to make it more complicated, the future that is already here often will take a long time to scale. The signals of the present need to be considered within the context of the past, the constraints of the present, and the opportunities of the future. On rare occasion, an author is able to make sense of the noise of the present and reveal the directions of change.

Kevin Kelly does just that in his book, The Inevitable: Understanding 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. This amazing guide introduces the technologies that will challenge us over the next decade.

Increased sharing both encourages increased flowing and depends on it. Cognifying requires tracking. Screening is inseparable for interacting. The verbs themselves are remixed, and all of these actions are variations on the process of becoming. They are a unified field of motion.

These forces are trajectories, not destinies. They offer no predictions of where we end up. They tell us simply that in the near future we are headed inevitably in these directions. (Kelly 2016)

I am focused on the leadership literacies that will be necessary to thrive in this kind of world.

The connective media of today are just beginning to turn into the next waves of much more intense disruption. I think of today’s internet as the world’s largest market test for the futures that are about to happen. I am inspired by one enveloping disruption that will amplify everything else over the next decade: the future force toward distributed everything. (See Figure 4.)