Aiming At The Future And Missing It

We are living in an exciting time.Technology has taken us to that height which was looking incomprehensible some time back.So magical & enticing is the devolopment that sometimes it makes us to lok at the devolopment & make so many predictions which may not come true completely.It is like though we know where we are heading to but the picture is still unclear.In our over enthuisiasm to see the trend & predict something new we tend to forget the fundamentals that shape the human beings,the society & the organization.

Let me site two trends which have caught the imagination of everyone, and reams of paper & loads of webpages have been written on them.

The first & the most glamorous of these is undoubtedly the e-commerce or doing business online.The basic premise on which this concept is that if you have a net connection,a desktop which can help you to go online, you can do commerce on line.You can buy & sell everything on the net even if you don't have the requisite infrastructure.

But sometimes it is amzing how simplified we have made the process of going to a mall & shopping there & comeback.Is buying & selling all about going to shop,see the product to buy,choose,pay???Does it happen so linearly or sequentially????Is it so automated ?? What about the intangible factors that contribute to this process like the ambience of a mall,the chatting of people all around,the feeling that someone gets when he or she tries out a new pair of clothes,the pampering of the cutomers by salespeople, so many to count about.

But that is not the case.Common sense tells us that shopping is not at all an automated process wherein everything is done sequentially.You may go to a shop but in place of buying clothes as the next action you may meet an old friend & then get into a long converstaion or you may go to a section which is not meant for you.

Take another example of a trend which was predicted to change the way we build organizations,change the way we work.It caught the imagination of the futurists so much that the doomsday for the huge organization was predicted to be very near & the future organizations, it was hoped will be built of people who will be mobile,who will work from home or any place they feel like working from.

But contrary to all the predictions, still we have huge organizations where people go to work daily.Still we don't find much people taking an intrest in this HOT DESKING concept wherein if you have a gadget to connect to your office network, you are no longer required to come to office.You can always work from home or any place for that matter.

What is it that is missing in the above cases????If online retail was & is the future, why do we have so many huge companies investing so much on opening big malls?Why a large crowd everyday throngs the mall.Why in the morning you find people waiting in the bus stop with laptops to catch their office buses.They could have very well worked from home.

A little bit of closer look & the most important thing that will be glaringly visible is that while predicting the future & understanding the trend of the devolopment of technology & it's impact on society we have missed out an important aspect of the way we human beings live which has to do with our social activeness.No one goes to a mall only to buy or sell.People go to malls to mingle with the crowd,to get a feeling that they are not alone on this earth.Same is the case with people going to work.No one works because of the work only,but because they get a recognition in society ,they get to mingle with people,they get to build a social network of their own.

The moot point here is that when ever we have a new technology coming up we tend to look the other way & ignore the social dimension of those activities for which the technology is meant to be used and indulge ourselves in predicting the trends.It is great to find out the trend & predict acordingly,but we have to be very careful accordingly,else we may take some fads to be the trends.

No one denies the place of technology in our growth story.But to be sure about our future let technology devolop taking into acount the social aspect of the activities.Let a hundred technological devolopment blossom,but let there be a part for social aspect also.Let both the social dimension & technological dimension compliment each other,then only we will have a clear trend which we can be confident to predict.