The Uncertainty Pandemic: You Have More Control Than You Think | Daniel Burrus | Big Think Edge

To play this very nifty video intro, let me bear with me. Let's see. We welcome Daniel Burrows, who is considered one of the world's leading technology forecasters, and disruptive innovation experts. Over the past 30 years, he has established a worldwide reputation for his exceptional record of accurately predicting the future of technological change and its direct impact on the business world. He is a strategic adviser to executives from Fortune 500 companies, handpicked by LinkedIn as one of their first influencers. Now with over a million global followers, he has given over 3,000 keynote speeches and is the author of seven books, including the New York Times bestseller "Flash Foresight" and his latest bestseller, "The Anticipatory Organization." Burrows is a highly innovative entrepreneur who has founded six businesses, four of which were national leaders in the first year. He has been referred to by the New York Times as one of the top three business gurus and the highest demand. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Daniel Burrow.

I am blown away. Just a few words to preface the discussion for the audience. You know, Dan is well known for being a really accurate predictor of the future. That's not quite what we want to do with him today. Here, we're more interested in getting to the heart of how he thinks about the future and the models that he uses to deal with uncertainty, shifting his decision-making toward certainty in ways that I think will be really helpful to the audience. I know that we're all cooped up in our various home time at a time where everything feels up in the air. But Dan, we have mass uncertainty right now. Uncertainty of levels that I think the world has never seen before.

And I think we're at a point in human history which I would call a defining moment, and my message is, are you gonna squander it? You see, we tend to turn inward at times like this and look at our business, at ourselves, at our family, which is all very good and all very natural. And as a matter of fact, most of us in our lives, in our business lives, and personal lives, are focused on success—a successful company, a successful career. But remember, success is all about you. It's all about how well you've done, your let's say, plaques on the wall and accolades and all the things you've done. And what I'd like us to do now is realize people are hurting, and it's time to focus on significance. Because if it’s consistent about you and your company, it's about everyone else and all the people that you can influence and all the people that you can help.

So now is the time to not squander this defining moment and to ask yourself, what would a significant—let’s take it down to the personal level—what would a significant brother do? What would a significant father do or mom do? What would a significant grandfather do? What would a significant employer do? What would a significant nurse do or student do? It's time to ask that question. I wanted to get that up in the beginning. Secondly, you've teed this up for 36 years, seven books, and you know I’ve been writing an article a week for decades. I've got a track record of being right about the future. How did I do that? The answer is I leave out the parts I can be wrong about. But what's really important—what’s really important—is how much you can be right.

And before starting the six companies and this research company 36 years ago, I taught biology and physics. In other words, I'm a teacher. So I was put on the planet to teach. So I'm here not to tell you today, 'Here are some trends. Good luck! Hope it works out.' I would rather work on your mindset and give you some tools. And we don't have a lot of time together and we're going to open it up to questions and answers. But let me give you a few tools if I could right in the beginning to maximize our time together. Is that all right, Peter? That sounds great.

All right, so let me give you some tools, some specific ones. First of all, we have all of this uncertainty and uncertainty does not empower me. It makes me hesitate. It makes me hold back. It doesn't make me or my people do bold moves. On the other hand, certainty—if I've got a strategy based on uncertainty, I've got low risk. I’ve got a strategy based on uncertainty, I’ve got high risk. If I can help my people find certainty as a leader, I'm giving them the confidence that certainty brings to make a bold move. So my message to leaders is instead of looking at all the things you don't know, which will make everyone stop, go back and begin, what are we certain about?

By the way, let me give you my number one certainty right off the bat. This pandemic will end. Will you be remembered, and what will you be remembered for? Or will you not be remembered at all? You have a choice right now to decide to do that. That's where that significant part came in. And how do you find certainty? Well, the methodology I developed, you know, over 30 years ago, is this: All the trends—and there's never been a shortage of trends. The problem has always been which ones are going to happen and which ones aren't. And I've come up with a solution for that. And again, as an advisor to the Pentagon and many other companies that have adopted this methodology, it's not just my opinion. Hey, it works.

So here you go: All trends are either a hard trend or a soft trend. A hard trend is based on a future fact; it will happen, you cannot stop it. It will happen and there are, by the way, thousands of them. And what that does is it lets you see disruption before the disruption happens and that turns disruption into a choice. I mean, I don't know about you, but I'd rather be the disruptor than the disrupted. Secondly, the other kind of trend is a soft trend, and a soft trend is not based on a future fact; it's based on an assumption about the future and one of the things, and it may or may not happen. And there's a big difference. For example, let's talk about the spread of the virus. We've known since December when it went airborne, that's when it went airborne. It actually morphed—it went from animal to human. This is not a seasonal flu; that's a human flu. This is an animal flu that jumped to humans.

And it's already had two iterations: first was the jump, the second one was going airborne, which is why it's spread so quickly. That's not good, and we know it doubles every three days. In other words, it's an exponential lesson in what exponential is. I've been talking about exponential technology growth for thirty years and that doubling gets us into a curve that right now I'd call the holy cow face when it comes to digital. But unfortunately, the virus is on a curve like that too. Two becomes four, becomes eight. You know it's only three weeks ago that we only had a hundred and some-odd cases in the United States. The latest number is two hundred and seventeen thousand six hundred. By the way, that's predictable if you do the math. I'm pretty good at math.

And you want to see where you are in 30 days with a doubling every three days? You take whatever number you've got now, multiply it by 1024 and you’ll find out where you are thirty days later. By the way, that's not good. Now here's the message: that's a soft trend. It's not a hard trend; that's not a future fact. You see, knowing the difference makes all the difference. Why is it a soft trend? Because you can change that exponential curve. And how do you do that? You get people to distance themselves. You get people to lock down. You stop people meeting in groups. That's how you can take that exponential curve and flatten it or change it.

You know, China—we hear about how China has already turned it around and people are going back to work. What did they do? After 400 cases, they locked down ten million people. Lock them down. That's how they're going back to work. That's how they got control. By the way, we're not locked down fully in this country yet; what we're doing is we're being agile instead of anticipatory. And I would like, and my mission in life is to get us to become anticipatory, not just agile. Here's what I mean by that: agility is reacting as quickly as you can to problems after they occur. It's Advil, it's after it happens. It's an afterword for disruptions—reacting as quickly as you can after disruption disrupts. And by the way, that's good—you should be good at being agile, not putting it down. That's half of the strategy coin.

The other half, though, is to be anticipatory—using hard and soft trends to anticipate problems before you have them. Increase album to use hard and soft trends to anticipate disruptions before they disrupt so that you have a choice. And so it's a very powerful strategy. So agility right now is not working for New York, it's not working for Louisiana, it's not working for Florida. By the way, it's not working for most people on the planet right now because we can't get ahead of it fast enough unless you become anticipatory. So let's take a look at the states that have not locked down yet. Many states, as of this recording, have not locked down. Florida has just now decided to do that, although they have left churches and synagogues to be open, which is not good, frankly.

So what do we know? Well, the reason they're doing that is there's no problem in many states. We're only going to lock down where there's a problem. That's reactionary. It's already too late; it's already in those other places. We don't have testing yet. We don't know where it all is. It is already there. We have an iceberg, not a pyramid. I use that metaphor because you can see a pyramid and you can see almost all of it. An iceberg, you can see a little bit. Right now, this whole thing is an iceberg until we have deployed testing. So if you want to be anticipatory and get ahead of it and flatten that curve, you make sure that you lock down where it's not happening yet so it doesn't happen there.

And you've seen governors and many governors in different parts of the country start locking down ahead of time. Good for them; it will keep a lot of people out of the morgues. The legacy of the people that are not locking down, unfortunately, is going to be a bigger list in the morgue. I'm sorry to say that, but that's the way it is because the numbers don't lie. You can see them yourself. So hard trends and soft trends are really powerful. Digital disruption, when this ends, when the pandemic ends—and it will—digital disruption will not stop. Digital disruption will continue.

But what I want to let you know is disruption itself is a soft trend. The technology is causing it are hard trends. For example, we're putting more and more in the cloud. Is the cloud getting full? I don't think so. We're gonna continue to put more in the cloud. Will we say AI is gonna take too many jobs? Let's just not do AI anymore? No, we're not gonna do that. Those are hard trends that will happen. What we want to do is connect—there's another teaching for you—a trend by itself has no value until you attach an opportunity to it.

So when it comes to AI, which will exponentially get better, what do we want to do? Well, we want to use it for augmented thinking, meaning I want AI to help me make better decisions rather than—you don't need me. Let me give you a quick example. I'll pick a healthcare example since a lot of us are focused on what's happening with healthcare right now. AI can look at an x-ray, an MRI, and know more than any radiologist. It can; it's better than any radiologist right now. AI knows more about unconscious than any individual. So I'm going to give you three choices. Let's say you know someone with cancer, heaven forbid. And I'm gonna give you three choices: one, an oncologist that's world-renowned, a fantastic oncology choice; number two, just AI that knows more than that oncologist about treatments; choice number three, an oncologist that has access to AI.

Now you start to see the future of how we're going to work. It's augmented thinking. Our cars going to be autonomous like many of you think? And the answer is, well no. My track record of being right is based on some principles that I teach in my books. One of the key principles is the both/and principle versus the either/or. We think it's going to be either this or that—either no autonomy or full autonomy. They're all autonomous. No! Can you imagine Lamborghini selling a car you can't control? It's got nice seats. Can you imagine a school bus driver full of kindergarteners with no human on there? It's just driving by itself. I don't think so.

You see, where does that mean we won't have autonomous vehicles? Yes, we will—gotta put them in the right places. See, the key is thinking it through: where's the best place for that and where do we want humans to be? So the future is going to—let me give you one dealing with the pandemic. I've been talking to a lot of businesses recently, and one of them I was interviewed for was the National Convenience Stores just last week. They ran an article for all of the owners of convenience stores because the presidents and the owners are concerned. They know they're going to be laying their people off. Less people are gonna be getting gas, coming into their stores. People are hunkering down. How do we do that? How do we communicate as we hunker down?

And in that interview, I said now you got to hire people. That's what I said. Yes! Instead of being a convenience store, what you have to do is think of yourself as a necessity store. There's going to be predictably a lot of Uber and Lyft drivers that aren't going to be taking people to bars and restaurants. They'd still like to take something somewhere. Give them your supplies to take to customers. So now instead of them coming to the gas station, you're going to them. Change your product mix in your store: maybe a little more extra-strength Tylenol and a little less cigarettes. You get the idea. Maybe we now have new customers, like nursing homes and places that we could be delivering necessities to.

Maybe when the pandemic is over, we will be remembered as doing something significant. Maybe when the pandemic is over, we will never go back to being a convenience store. Maybe we'll be a necessity store from then on. By the way, I'd rather be that! You see, what I'm doing is changing how you think, and it's a fundamental principle within being anticipatory versus reactionary, and it's a very powerful way to look. So hard trends have three categories: demographics, which is playing a big role now as we look at older people who tend to get sick and die more with the virus than young—although the young are not immune, we know that already. We also know that regulations, government regulations, is a hard trend, and technology is our trend. Those are three major categories.

By the way, you might think regulation—how could that be? Let me ask you a question: are we going to get more regulations on cybersecurity? Yeah, of course! Well, that's our trend. You see, there are some regulations we'll debate and they may or may not happen. Okay, they go in the soft trend aisle. But there are all sorts of regulations coming up that you can count on that are based on hard trends that you can't ignore. When you know what they are, you can start using it, finding advantage in those, and even funding. I'm giving you a fire hose, I understand. I'm giving you a lot in this short amount of time.

But what I wanted you to do is to realize that when you create a list of certainties—things you are certain about instead of uncertain about, when you create a list of things that you can do instead of all the things you can't do, when you create a list of all the things you know versus all the things you don't know, all of a sudden, you can start to find a path forward. So when we're finished with this, you might want to take a little bit of time and step back and think to yourself: everyone, every customer, everybody's hurting right now. Everybody! And instead of going to them with something to sell, why don't you go to them with something to give? Why don't you think about how you could play a significant role now in their life instead of being a customer role or a transactional role as I have in the past? What if I redefine my role and stop looking for just the money and start looking for becoming significant to them? I would like you to become indispensable.

Why don’t you think to yourself, what would it take for me now to do something that would become indispensable later? Because it will be later. The world is not gonna end; this is tough, I'm not putting it down at all. I want your family to be safe. I want you to be locked down. Treat this with respect, as you know this is a big deal. But we will get to the other side. And you know what? People will have needs. They'll still want to walk on the beach. They'll still want to go to a restaurant. They still want to go to the bar. This is where I go on vacation. The world will come back. How fast it comes back—that's how fast we decide to take action based on what we know instead of what we don't know.

Peter, I've been just kind of going along here, and I have talked to you and know you from the past. And I know you're a sharp guy, so you probably got some questions in there. I'm gonna just open and let you ask.

We absolutely do, and actually you have covered a lot of the questions that I had already written, so I'm gonna go straight to the audience questions, which are pouring in. The first question involves conspiracy theorists. What do you make of them, and how do they factor into a world in which you need—if there are no facts that we agree on, how does that disrupt your model?

Yeah, well first of all, there are many facts that we can agree on. Now, I've been giving many, many speeches around the world. I also do consulting, as you know, but you know, probably since 2008, every single speech—which is over a thousand—I’ve had, last time I was in Beijing, 14,000 in the audience. So I've had some good-sized groups and every single audience, when I’m done, I have them write down one hard trend certainty that they know will happen and a related opportunity. I collect them and then give them all back a couple weeks later after I look through them and separate the soft from the hard. There are thousands of future facts—not hundreds, not five, not just ten.

And one of the things that I've done in my speech is to relate to your question is I've always asked how to state something that hasn't happened that isn't happening. And then I’ll use—but it'll be based on what I call a hard trend—and I'll ask the audience, "Okay, raise your hand if you think that's not going to happen." And to this date, I've never had one hand go up because you know the future truth when you hear it. So you know the future truth when you hear it. And my message for those listening right now is to cut through, stop giving your opinion, and start talking in certainties—hard trends, future truths—and people will start to understand and start to get it. For example, how right now we put out fires, which cost billions of dollars a year and a lot of deaths, as you know? We put out fires with helicopters dropping water, and we have a tanker go over and drop retardant on it.

Well, why don't we use a drone? By the way, a drone could be as big as a 747. I mean, you could have different size drones. And instead of having a person in there, let's not risk a human life. But if we have no human in there, and instead of having gasoline engines, why don't we have a bunch of Tesla batteries in there? And so that we can get really into the flames and have infrared sensors so you can tell where the hot spots are to put the chart in the right places. Why don't we have the whole thing, including the propellers, all with the coating of the same thing that's on the bottom of the Space Shuttle because that's how it goes through reentry? It doesn’t burn up. You could do a nano-coating of that. By the way, anything developed by NASA is owned by the American public. So that technology could be applied at nano levels around that entire thing so it can’t even get hot, it can't burn up, and get right down. Plans that will be a billion-dollar company, I'm describing right now. It will save billions and billions of dollars.

And those drones may be big ones; it may be small, whatever. Now, how many listening to this think, “Well, that's not gonna happen; we're gonna keep using helicopters and those big planes?” Well, you can already see you're starting to—if it can be done, it will be done. If you don't do it, someone else will.

So yeah, but right now there is no company offering innovation as a service. In other words, there are a lot of companies that have trouble innovating. Could you, Peter, and I use global resources of people, that are engineers and designers and Mensa members to create a virtual problem-solving team that's global, and we provide innovation as a service to companies that have trouble innovating? There is no company doing that right now. Raise your hand if you think, “Well, that's not gonna happen.” You see, if it can be done, it will be done.

What if you did this a little more at home? One last thing on fake news and all of that—it's kind of a fun political game to play, but right now it's a matter of life and death. And it's easy to take—knowledge has two components: context and content. So if you take the content, which is a fact, and you add context that skews it, you can get people to—you create misinformation. By the way, misinformation is not correct; disinformation is believed misinformation. So I can get people to believe the misinformation by changing the context to the fact done politically on both sides, by the way. I'm not just picking on one side or the other right now. We've got to put all that stuff aside and try to get to what do we know? What are our facts? We need the facts, and actually, trust is the glue that holds a knowledge economy together. Trust is the key. So we've got to be elevating trust rather than lowering it, and this is big stuff.

No, I love that. I love that dichotomy of thinking of context and content and getting to the—you know, distilling it down and really asking yourself, do we know—I know what the fact is involved here and do I understand the context in which this fact is being presented? I think that that's a really elegant, simple way of thinking about this.

Here's another question from the audience: What are the key questions you ask yourself in the interest of being more anticipatory? What are the models of self-reflection that you're using and inquiry on a regular basis?

You know, thank you for that. Well, again, I'm trying to not be self-promotional here, but I have written many bestsellers, New York Times best-selling books on it, so you check all of that out or go to the website. But what do I do? I do what I want you to do, and that is there are things that you have to manage in the moment, and there are crises that happen, things that you couldn't foresee. But most people spend most of their time crisis managing, putting out fires, reacting as quickly as they can.

So what I like to do—and I like to practice what I preach—is what I'd like you to do. And that is I'd like everyone listening to this to take one hour a week, at least one hour. By the way, one hour is doable; maybe not two or three, but you can do one. And I'd like you to unplug from the present, unplug from the present, and plug into your future. It's where you're gonna spend the rest of your life. Maybe I ought to think about it a little bit.

And instead of it being all, "Well, the only thing we know about the future is death and taxes," when you start looking at the hard trends that we are completely certain about, and you start getting good at doing that, which you can if you decide to learn that—that's what I would like you to do: become anticipatory. Then you'll have a list of things you know instead of things you don't know. And remember I said you need a related opportunity in that hour. If you did that, what you will do is you will come up with a list. And remember, you'll have opportunities, not just trends.

And you know what? You do? Pick one and do it because if it can be done, it will be done. If you don't do it, someone else will. The cost of not doing it may be greater than the cost of doing it. Because why? Because we can see disruption before it disrupts. See, what I really want us all to be is positive disruptors, and you need to have a little time to do that.

Well, I didn’t—a cab driver think of Uber? Well, I didn’t—did Mary think of Airbnb? I know exactly why they were really busy doing what they always do. So if all of you continue to be busy doing what you always do, that's my biggest fear for you right now, by the way. If you continue to do this, busy as you are now—you’re even busier, or maybe you've got a lot of free time—you don't know what to do with your time.
I got something for you to do, because you can busy yourself right out of business, right out of a job, right? There's opportunity. You've got to look for that opportunity even in this time. And there's an old saying: you know, a problem is a terrible thing to squander. You know, and we've got a big problem right now, so let's not squander that moment.

This dovetails with another question we've gotten from a small business owner who has said, you know, my small business has been decimated. How can I apply anticipatory thinking to shore up my business right now while I'm dealing with all of the immediate realities of being in crisis? And I think you sort of addressed that.

Yeah, no, no, that's a great thing because in that question he used the word shore up my business. And shoring up your business is looking at your business as a convenience store owner. Remember that example I gave you? A convenience store owner would shore up being a convenience store owner trying to protect and defend being a convenience store and probably have big trouble. What I want you to do is not shore up your business. I want you to step back and think bigger about it. And again, it's not just about hard trends and soft trends.

Some of the things that I teach is how to take your biggest problem and skip it. How do you do that? The problem you thought you have—that's not it. That's why you can't solve it. There's another one that's totally solvable. You've got to get down to the real one. So instead of being in crisis, which is shore up, how would you look? Have you step back and think, wait a minute, how could I expand out? How could I grow?

See, I've been actually for the last three weeks, every hour on the hour for ten hour days, I've been working like crazy, helping people, helping companies, Fortune 10 CEOs down to entrepreneurs, convenience store things—all this stuff, every hour I'm talking to some different group helping them think this through. And by the way, I haven't charged a dime for any of that work, and I'm working my butt off. Why am I doing that? I'm trying to practice what I preach. I'm not coming to you looking for a handout; I'm trying to do something that helps you do something significant. We can help each other.

So let's step back, not crisis manage and shore up. Alright, well, then this is— I've got another question that sort of dovetails off that one, which is somebody writes in and says, "I don't have the luxury of not putting out fires right now." You know, what do you make of that when the crisis seems so overwhelming and there is so much? You know, I imagine this must be the way it is in the airline industry or certainly if you're a cruise ship executive, or you worked on a cruise line. What's your counsel for that sort of sense that there is not an hour in the week? You know, and that the fires are burning too bright?

Yes, well, let's take the virus and the spread to cities. When we are not anticipatory, we're reactionary. We run into bigger and bigger and bigger problems like we have in New York as an example and others. In other words, we got—we were behind the curve, and we were reactionary to it, and we couldn't react fast enough. I would still be having trouble reacting fast enough instead of getting ahead of it. So in other words, if you’re too busy fighting fires, here's my prediction: you'll have more fires, and they'll get bigger. Right? You're gonna have more fires.

You need—see, a lot of people say, "Oh, I can’t find an hour." You won't find it. You got to make it. You aren't gonna find it. There ain't no finding; you have to take—look. Someone interviewed me a couple years ago and said, "What's your most important program?" Because they know—I mean, I've been a tech guy for a long time, and like I had a robot in my own back in the '80s, so I've been through this for a long time. And they said, "Well, so what is it?" And I said, "My calendar." Because if I don't make an appointment with myself, those things don't happen.

So if I'm writing a book, I got to put in the appointment to write it, or I'll have a day where it didn't get written. If I want to exercise, I better make an appointment or I may not get to the gym. If I'm going to want—I'm not just crisis manage; I want to be an opportunity manager instead of a crisis manager. I'd better make an appointment for myself, so that hour—so look, I know you've got so many fires you're going nuts. I don't want you to go even more nuts. Crisis managers don't do well in the long run, especially when you're in a situation like right now.

Try it—step back. I would like—what is anticipate or predicting the problems you're about to have and pre-solving them so you don't have them in the first place. Much better than dealing with them as they keep coming in. Right? Right, no, I think you're exactly right. That there really are two sides of the same coin. You know, if you're not thinking ahead, then you're just going to be stuck in place.

Another question from the audience: Let's see—what are the most important actions businesses can take to anticipate current and future icebergs? How do you identify something that has a lot more problem than you can see? Are there attributes, are there indicators, things you can look to, reference points?

Yeah, there surely are. Most of us are not looking at the future very much at all, especially for black swans or those icebergs, because again, we're busy sewing and doing our thing, managing our businesses and so on. And there's usually somebody in the organization that tends to be more future-oriented. One of the things that I teach is that you can do a time travel audit, and a time travel—some people are, by the way, some teams some businesses are past-oriented, some are present-oriented, and some are future-oriented.

So the past-oriented people, you know, they still have a flip phone, and they think the future's going to hell because of all this technology and all this stuff, and it's all just going downhill. The people that are future-oriented, you know, they get the new stuff even if you didn't buy it for them. And you see, they're already on that front end. Pick one of those people and let them spend an hour a week looking at that horizon because the more you look, the more you see. For example, when the pandemic was happening, and China was walking down—that was already happening, it was already spreading. We knew it was airborne.

South Korea—or pardon me, yeah, South Korea was walking down right away because they were starting to get into difficulty. And yet we continued to—for it took us another month before we started limiting flights from Wuhan and China to New York, whether it's direct flights. So how many flights came in? Well, I can tell you right now, I see—I'm a numbers guy—at 300 people a day arrived for a month. Well, why do you got a trouble in New York? So in other words, we—that was already happening. We knew it was airborne; we know about pandemics and you can see those things.

Could we have done something sooner? And instead of saying, "Well, instead of not 1st of January, no," but it would have helped through Bennett by the 15th of January, or every day counts when it doubles every three days and we don't have testing. Now again, I'm picking on an example trying to be current with our situation, but that black swan—you can see the black swan when it gives birth. And you can see the black swan as it rapidly grows and starts getting giant.

And actually, we know all about pandemics. There's a whole—there's a history of it. For example, when you have an outbreak—when you have an outbreak—what do we do? Well, do you want to contain it? It's called quarantine. If the outbreak gets bigger and bigger, and actually, that outbreak becomes global, we call it a pandemic. Meaning it's an outbreak that's happening all over the world. So a pandemic is really just an outbreak that we're used to dealing with, and there's already been this exact same variation of this same virus, but it's a variation of its ours and other ones that have happened, and they were fairly well contained quickly. They didn't get all the way to that bad, bad level, and they weren't as contagious as this one.

So the Chinese and South Korean and other countries have a little more history on this; we could have learned from that history. So anyway, what we're learning now is how to be ready for the next one, but black swans—those things that you can't see, the next one may not be a pandemic at all. It could be something else. We just have to be looking a little more over the horizon.

Let me give you one more example for everybody, and that is a tsunami. That's that big wave that comes in and can take out a village or something. Well, you know a tsunami is traveling at a couple hundred miles an hour, and it's only about a foot high out in the ocean if the energy is in speed. But as it gets toward shore, it slows down and it gets higher. So those that are by the shore looking around don't see those waves coming in. But those that look out at the horizon—oh, look what's coming in! Let's get out of here.

I would like you to be a little bit more looking up at the horizon every now and then as you look back at your business and your feet and where you currently are standing. It's good to look ahead just a little bit to see what's coming. Maybe we'll learn how to do that.

A little more on the sort of challenges of looking ahead, time scales make a big difference in anticipating and preparing for the future. You know, if you're preparing for something that's not gonna happen for 50 years, you know, that’s one thing versus something that might, you know, reasonably pop up in the very near term. How do you counsel companies, individuals to think about time and to try to get a better handle on what is the scale they're actually dealing with? You know quite famously, Bill Gates has been shown predicting this exact phenomenon that we're in during a TED talk five years ago, but he didn't say it was gonna happen in five years. He didn't say it was gonna happen soon. You know, how can you get your hands around that sort of nebulous uncertainty of time?

Yeah, thank you very much. Well again, first of all, when it comes to hard trends, let's stick with those for just a second. These are the things that we know—if you go back to 1983 when I started their research company, I had that, you know, hard trends and soft trends. So we can see what will happen. And I had the problem, how do you tell the timeframe? And I came up with a solution for that back then, so let me share it with you now. And that is there are three digital accelerators that give you amazing predictability as to the when. One of those I discovered in ’83 was very obscure, and nobody much knew about it then. It was Moore's Law, which all of us know about now.

But I'll tell you, in '83, not many people were seeing that, but I came across Moore's Law—processing power doubles every 18 months as the price drops in half. And I thought, wow, I nailed it! Because imagine way back in '83, I could know in the year 2000 how powerful a computer would be and how much it would—if I know how powerful it will be and how much it will cost, I could predict how you'd use it. I did it; it was really accurate. But I needed more than Moore's Law.

So there were two other ones that I came up with: the law of bandwidth and the law of storage, which tracked closely—not identical to that exponential growth. So if you're looking at why didn't a polite—you know I've worked with Microsoft all the way back to the '80s. I think I first met Steve Jobs in '86 at the Hotel del Sol. You know, I've been around and doing this stuff for a while. Why didn't a police the iPhone a year earlier? I know exactly why they did it—the three digital accelerators weren't there yet.

But predictably, they knew when they would be. In other words, the customer experience wouldn't work. And with storage and processing power, it wasn't quite there yet. But we know when it'll be. It's around a predictable curve, just like the virus doubles every three days unless you do something about it. So we know when to release it. I mean, why hasn't Apple put out their next big thing? They're waiting for those three to get just right so that you'll have a good experience. By the way, they're closed. So you can get that predictability.

So now, what about the black swan? Like Gates and your comment about he didn't give us when that would happen; he gave us—he did give us a hard trend: we will have one. But we didn't know when. That's why you need the side of the coin—that's the agility side. I didn’t say it’s all just that; there are two sides to the coin. One is you better be agile; you better be able to react. Things happen. These black swans or sudden emerge. And the minute they start emerging, we better be taking an eye on them and we better see, you know, let's work hard trend/soft trend and let's start using that so we can start anticipating them and pre-solving predictable problems.

You need to be agile. You all need to get better at it, but you also need to be anticipatory. It's not this or this; it's this and this. We've got a couple of questions that go back to the topic of quality data. This seems to be, you know, and it makes a lot of sense. There’s obviously a lot of questions now arising about how accurate China's numbers are, you know, and obviously, in the broader context of fake news and disinformation, you know, what do you—for the average person or even the average businessperson, what sort of data hygiene do you recommend? How, you know, in verifying the basis on which they are establishing some of these facts and which, you know, they're interpreting the change curve of some of these facts? You know, what's your counsel?

Yeah, thank you for that. Well, I think first of all you've got to get to a reliable trusted source. In other words, one that has to have verifiable and gets in trouble if they can't verify their data. So, you know, you've got to find verifiable sources. In other words, it takes usually a little cross-checking. In other words, instead of here it is, I've got to check to make sure—for example, virus doubling every three days. Well, I don’t want to read that one place and then start telling you that. I've got to check multiple sources.

And by the way, I check global sources so that I can make sure, "Yeah, okay, that's what we're dealing with." Instead of, that's just what one person said. Most of us, you know, spread what one person said. So we do need to look at different sources. Secondly, make sure that you're looking at sources that are not in the business of, again, that are not held accountable for their information. For example, there are some—I won't say who, but there are some news channels that have to really verify and verify their stuff before they share it with you because if it's found out to be faked, their news anchors get kicked out, or they get, you know, booted because they now don’t have a bet.

There are others that are really entertainment shows that are about getting you all riled up, all that kind of stuff. So I'm not saying who anybody is; I'm just saying be careful of your news feed and what news you're getting because today—this we're not talking life and death, so let’s pay attention.

You're right, and yeah, this, I think, puts a real—puts it in really stark contrast that, you know, the information you consume really can have life-and-death consequences. One other quick comment I'll just make—this is a good thing to be thinking about. There's a difference between fixing the blame and fixing the problem. And if you're fixing it—and I'm talking about you or anyone—anybody listening to this. If all we're doing is blaming, we're actually making the problem worse. For example, education—I’ll pick a benign issue here—maybe it's not about the virus. And now less that education has been having difficulty, and many of us are probably concerned about the future of education, where it's going, are our kids really prepared for tomorrow, and so on.

So if I start saying, “Well, you know, the teachers are underqualified,” and all that kind of stuff in blaming the teachers for not preparing the kids for the future, who is my enemy? Well, the teachers. And I'm not gonna convince them to do anything because now I've said, “You know, you're wrong and I'm right.” What I want is everyone on the side of a prosperous future. So actually, I'm working with some groups that I've worked with—the union groups and management—and actually had them come together and work together because I didn't represent either one; I represented a prosperous future, and both had to change or they wouldn't get there.

And they're doing some amazing things together. Matter of fact, I’ve got a—I’ll be writing an article about that, how they're changing the whole world of union and management because it was what they were focusing on, hard trends. They were focusing on future facts. And instead of this is a negotiation, it's we're right or you're right and all of that, it was no— instead of taking sides, instead of fixing the blame, what’s the real problem? And if we continue to go in the direction we're going, are we going to be prosperous? And the answer is, well, predictably no, we're gonna have any more problems.

Alright, if we work together in new ways, actually we could thrive. Yeah, we—freight. Yeah, this is a moment to sort of reframe your vantage point and sort of come, you know, identify where there is actually common interest to be pursued jointly. Well said, Peter. As a matter of fact, I'll get back to one of the first phrases I gave everyone because it ties into exactly what you just said, and that is look, we're at a human defining moment in history. This is a defining moment. Will you squander it? Will you hunker down? Will you prop up? Will you be in a protect and defend mode? Will you be in a blame mode? Or will you rise to significance?

Will you step back and realize, well, this is a chance to reevaluate my life, reevaluate my career, reevaluate what I'm all about, rethink about my future? What if we took you, put you out to ninety-five years old and if you look back at what you did, would you be happy? And if the answer is no, now's a good time to be thinking about what you should be doing because I'd like you to be happy back there when you get to that point. And what do you need to do right now to make sure you get to ninety-five? By the way, hunker down is—

It's really resonant, Dan. I mean, I personally—I know and just in these last several weeks that the temptation to go into that crouch position, you know, and just sort of try to survive, you know, your way through it, not really take any proactive response is very tempting.

Yeah, why can I give a couple of minutes of just some things that we do know that would be good for people to personally do right now in this crazy time? That would be great, actually. You know, we have this— you know, we're gonna run into the hour we've got a bunch of questions.

Okay, alright, we'll take your questions. Go ahead.

Okay, but now this is sort of—in vain, we have, you know, over a dozen questions asking some version of your predictions of how life is going to change as a result of this. What, you know, and what changes are just the ones of the moment and which ones are gonna last? And then there's another one that sort of comes in at this—will we see change? What varies depending on geography and context? So maybe you could just sort of walk us through how you're seeing a post-pandemic world and how that world looks from various vantage points?

Yeah, thank you. And I'm helping a lot of executives think that through. So one Fortune Ten C-suite that I just had a meeting with—virtual meeting—their question was, "Well, all of our workers are having to work remotely right now. Will we, can we get rid of having offices? Will we never go back?" Because now we're having to work remote. And what I help them to see is, well, that's going to—the either, it’s going to be this or that.

And again, as an accurate 36-year track record to be in right, the key is never think this or this; think this and this. So what's happening now is, first of all, we're learning how to work remote, so we will do more remote work when we get back. However, we're going to be back in offices, but in a new way. Here's my point: there are some people that would rather read a book than listen to it. Why is that? They learn differently. And there are some people that can work remotely and thrive.

There are other people that are really valuable people, but they need to be with other people. And I know that is a fact. I've done a lot of work with companies that research this stuff. And I've even had some employees like that that just need to be with other people, and they're fantastic. But when they're by themselves, they just can't work. So what we're gonna do is we'll know what those people are. We're going to learn who the remote workers that thrive are and hold the remote workers that are really good. But we want to bring them together.

And by the way, even when the remote workers need to come and get together every now and then, but not just for low-level communications. What we're going to realize is that there are times when we should be getting together eyeball to eyeball and times when we do a video conference; sometimes when we just do an audio conference; sometimes when I just send you an email. Right now, there's no guidelines; we just kind of throw it all out there. But we're learning—Benna learn—is now there's a time for video versus audio versus a handwritten note versus an email versus a conference where we get together physically versus a virtual conference.

We'll have more options. So as you look at everything, don't be thinking either this or that. Also, human needs will continue to exist. You know, people will still want to use Botox. People will still want a new suit and a new dress. People will still want to go on a date. You know, I mean, we still have life going on—things will be different and things will also be the same. Thirty years from now, will people want to walk on a beach? Will people that have kids hope they'll have a prosperous future and want their future to be good?

And you know, I mean, we have certain things that have been eternal, just like leadership principles. There are some leadership principles that have been great since the dawn of time that will be great as far out as anyone could ever see. There are other leadership principles that were great in the past that are hurting you now. It's good to be thinking those through to know which ones to get rid of because they're like an anchor holding you back and which ones are the new ones that will help propel me forward.

So in other words, there will be changes, yes, but right now a lot of the forecasts that I see coming from people do not have a track record and are using the either/or. Right? And there they will be wrong; and you know they've been wrong before; they'll be wrong again.

Well, speaking of being wrong, what other questions the audience involves which companies or industries do you foresee going under in this environment? Is that even—is that pattern even evident yet?

Well, let's pick one that is pretty obvious that's struggling—the airlines. Alright, there are some scenarios on that. First of all, they're not going to be able to survive without health. So either we decide—and I'm not just saying the US, but for those of us from other countries, your airlines got trouble too. So either the government's going to say we're going to throw them a lifeline, or what will happen? Well, there'd be new airlines; they'll be new companies. Those brands will cease to exist and they'll reemerge as a new company. So one of the two will happen. Why? Because we're gonna have airlines—people are gonna want to fly.

So there are restaurants and there are bars that will not make it. By the way, there will be restaurants and bars—they may not be by the same company. It may be by the same owner who had to close down and then, when things came back, started again. So there's going to be businesses that don’t make it; there are going to be some lifelines we're throwing out there. But we've got to be careful with what lifelines we're giving and who's getting them and what they're being used for. And again, there’s gonna be a churn, but there’s still—what I’m getting at is there’s the needs are still there. It may reform it.

And by the way, we'll use technology. Let me give you a—I don't know, we're getting short on time here. Any more good ones?

This one is a very practical one, but the questioner wants to know they have family across the country that are still skeptical of how serious this is and what they need to do in order to prepare. The questioner wants to know, is it possible to leverage your time travel audit as a tool for helping their family members—their skeptical family members—get on the same page as far as the level of concern that they need to be exhibiting here?

Wow! First of all, that is a great question, and the person that answered sharp picked that up. So congratulations, you're getting the point! Yes, really important. You see, you have people—again, past-oriented, present-oriented and future-oriented. And so if someone with a future-oriented mind is talking to somebody to the past about, "Hey, you got to be doing this," implying that you're doing it wrong, they're gonna hunker down more and change less.

What you have to do is walk into their time zone with them and walk them into the future. Let me give you an example, a business example. For let's say that I'm an air conditioning heating guy coming in to talk to you about your system. Well, I don't know whether you're past, present or future is the customer. So I’m gonna bring in my three-ring binder, and I'm going to bring in my iPad. And I'm gonna get in, and it won’t take me long to see what you are; I can just see your tech. I can just talk to a little bit and I’m going to bring up what you’re familiar with—let’s say your past.

I'm future; I'll bring up my three-ring binder and my glossy pictures to talk about what we could do for your house. Because now I'm jumping into your time zone with you, instead of just bringing out my iPad and saying, "Let me show you how it works," which makes you hunker down. And what would I do as I start? I'd say, "Hey, I got this really great system that was really cool that lets me show your house in three dimensions and show you far more than this picture could. I show that to you now."

What you're doing is getting permission. You're getting permission to take them into the future. So instead of trying to yank people into the future and they aren't gonna like it, what I would like you to do is to jump into their time zone with them. And so in other words, the conversation is, why are they distrusting the facts? What are they listening to? What radio shows and news shows are they getting their information from? And take a look at the solid numbers just in New York alone and just say, "Look, three weeks ago there were 100 cases; look what you got now. Is this real or is this thing?"

And by the way, do you think it's gonna end tomorrow? See, one last one that can help all of us—the best answer is a question because it pulls the answer that you already know out of you—pulls the answer out of you. We got just enough time. We begin with a fast example of that because actually, it’s a big concept they just gave you that—it’s powerful. There was a neighbor kid a couple years ago, he was crying outside. He’s normally a happy kid. I went out and I said, "What happened?" He said his dog died. And anyone who has ever had a pet knows it’s part of the family.

And he looked up at me with these big tears and he said, "Mr. Burrows, do you think there’s dogs in heaven?" And I said to him, "Would heaven be heaven without dogs?" And he started feeling better already because he already knew the answer. I didn’t say it—argue Catholic or Protestant. You see, wrong question. What we want to do is ask the question of your relatives that pulls the answer out of them that they already know.

I know we don't have a lot of time. Think about that just gave you a big—the final question of our session, which is fortunately an optimistic one also from a viewer who wants to know what most excites you about the future after this pandemic? What is it you think we can look forward to positively that could come from this?

I can tell you exactly what that is. History, and even though my—again, I taught biology in physics; I had a minor in history. I love history. What history has shown me is that when things—when humans are at their best—always—when things are at their worst, humans are at their best when things are at their worst. I think we're going to see a people reevaluating, like I talked about earlier. People rethinking where they are and what they're doing. We're going to see and get inspired by people stepping up to the plate, even putting their lives at risk, to step up to the plate after themselves but for you and for others.

And I think the human spirit and our ingenuity and our creativity is what excites me the most. And our ability to not just sit back and passively receive the future but to actively shape it intentionally. I would like us to be shapers. I would like you to be a positive disrupter, creating the transformations that need to happen because everything could be better. Perfection is impossible. Let's go out and be positive disruptors.

I love that! That is a very hopeful, optimistic note on which to end. I want to point out to all of our viewers today that, Dan, you're actually hosting a webinar tomorrow—where can our audience get more details about that?

Yeah, thank you. It's an open webinar, and I'm not promoting or selling anything. I'm just trying to help people. There'll be a lot more time for question and answer, and that is about the defining moment and what you can do now. It's at Burris.com, B-U-R-R-U-S.com forward slash webinar. And if you go there, you can find out how to get in. It's tomorrow at 10 o'clock a.m. Pacific— you can do the time zones yourself for the time; 1:00 o'clock, they're out in New York. You can join me there, and you can always find other resources at Burris.com.

Terrific! Well, Dan, thank you so much. And also for our audience, we are doing our next webinar tomorrow at 4 p.m. with the CEO of Kenza, which is a health company that has generated these connected thermometers that have been providing a lot of valuable data about the outbreak all over the world, connecting from the point of measurement right into the cloud. And that fellow is endorsing and he'll be interviewed by an actual medical doctor, Akash Goel from Columbia Presbyterian. So that's at 4:00 p.m. Eastern tomorrow and so we'd love you to join in. And Dan, once again, thank you so much for making time for us today.

My pleasure; thank you all. Alright, bye-bye everybody. Thank you!