What Came First: The Answer or the Question?
Imagine…
What if your iPad or laptop weighed 1.5 tons, and that was considered an amazing feat of innovation and technical ingenuity? No doubt you’d work out a lot more and have bigger muscles. How else would you schlep it? Seriously!!!
To us, that sounds absurd and foolish, but in 1949, that was a vision of the future, and a good one at that, as written about by a leading magazine of the day:
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 19,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1.5 tons.?—Popular Mechanics, March 1949
Seriously...think about it. What were they thinking? Was it a lack of imagination? A lack of vision? Or did they just not have enough “critical mass” in high-tech thinking and dreaming in order to be able to envision the future as we are experiencing it? Or perhaps, they were fenced in and blocked by the vacuum tubes….
This leads me to my Imagine question: what are we missing??
What is it that we are failing to envision right now? Where are we short-changing ourselves, and our clients…maybe even the world…because we just don’t have the ingenuity or creativity to foresee a view of the future that is unlimited by any current constraints? It’s the 30-ton to 1.5-ton conundrum.?
In general, what are we leaving on the table because we limit our thinking to current conventional wisdom…which, despite our DIGIBABBLE hubris, is every bit as limiting as the 30/1.5 conundrum. We stop questioning (yes, I am a cynic and proud of it!) because we are convinced that we have disrupted the world, the category, and the market—only to discover maybe not so much…
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Every time I get caught in the 30/1.5 conundrum (it happens to all of us) I think of this quote:
“The important thing is not to stop questioning.” —Albert Einstein
This, dear reader, is why I started IMAGINE…
TO FIND ANSWERS, YOU NEED QUESTIONS.
I am humbled by all who have joined me on my quest, add to the questions—make them sharper, and don’t get lost in believing that answers have to come first or that anyone has a lock on the right one.?
?And there you have it…next time you think the answer is fewer vacuum tubes or its equivalent, think about old Albert—and never stop asking questions!
And then…share IMAGINE.
What’s your view??
Health Physicist at MS State Department of Health
2 年How are we going to build a Space Elevator? Using what material? Conventional answer: Bucky tubes extruded from a carbonatious(sp?) asteroid once we figure out how to extrude them longer than 6 inches. (There are a whole host of answers on how to get the asteroid into position.) So what is this answer missing? Is there perhaps an even cheaper way to get to orbit?
Helping men and women divorce & recover from a Toxic/Narcissistic partner.
2 年Questions are the best place for learning! Thank you very much for sharing!
Director of Retirement Sales Execution
2 年As usual David, well said and well written. Your creativity often reminds me of other things. Have you ever seen those stories, often from the 40s-60s with the notion, “everything worth inventing has already been invented”? That is a “stop questioning” mind set. With that mind set, the world would have been cheated of the work Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and so many more. Second, in our “DIGIBABBLE”, as you write, world, I like to challenge teammates, and often my four teenage daughters, to ask OPEN ENDED questions. In our life of screens all the time, open ended questions can get us back to meaningful dialogue and conversation. Thanks for your many contributions to make the dialogue on Linkedin richer. Well done and please keep up the great work.
Owner at Custom Designs by Pam
2 年Good thing to ask ourselves regularly so we’re not bound by what we think we know. Really good article!