Try telling that to a bunch of squirming 11-year olds. I don’t remember much about the book, but the places that the hero Christian visited along the way obviously etched themselves deep into my psyche.  The “Slough of Despond” was clearly the inspiration for the “Trough of Disillusionment” on the Hype Cycle, so I though it might be worth looking back to see if some of the other locations on Christian’s journey offer us any insight into the side roads and less-traveled paths of the technology pilgrimage.

My favorites::

Doubting Castle – those top executives who never exhibit the enthusiasm you’d hoped for. The only way out according to Bunyan is the key “Promise” – commit to what you can deliver, but keep it realistic.

The Valley of Humiliation – to avoid that “oh @$%&, my project’s a disaster” sensatation, make sure you evaluate the real benefit to your organization rather than being driven by external hype, and re-evaluate periodically as you learn more (see next entry).

Wicket Gate – pilgrims can only enter the straight and narrow path to the Celestial City through this gate. Innovators should use their own “stage gate” process to build in decision points about which innovations to continue with and which to put on hold until they mature further.

What else should we watch out for in the technology adoption landscape?

In a non-tech corporation, the biggest problem in your business-IT function isn’t controlling the hype of an over zealous IT industry anymore. Maybe it was a decade ago, but not today. Many of the incumbents are happy to keep taking repeat maintenance revenues for the stuff you already have without offering game changing innovations or seriously helping you to internally-market new ideas. They are battoning down their revenue stream hatches, waiting for the recession storm to pass.

So if you hope to ‘leverage the downturn’* by introducing major new technology enabled business process changes, business model changes or competencies … where will the energy come from?  Mature, large company management cultures are usually dominated by silo complexity and political inertia. Add the fear of recession job losses and they can go into a glacial torpor – the hope being that ‘if we change nothing we might survive’. Nobody dares take a risk that would mark their card personally, notching them up the the HR department’s severance-list spreadsheet .

Right now, I think some industry hype is a valuable thing. It’s maintaining a sense of momentum under very difficult circumstances. It creates a sense of compulsion – to investigate at least, to experiment hopefully and to implement perhaps.  So think twice before hitting out at cloud hype, green hype and social media hype. These are high energy sources that might overcome inertia and help your industry move on to a new level of performance over the next few years. Like all energy sources they are precious and deplete all too rapidly.

If you think hype offends, try moving your project idea through the business case approval process, to action, during the trough of disillusionment.  Or wait 5 to 10 years until the plateau of productivity is very firmly established…. assuming your position and your company survive that long.

Innovators question everything – including the received wisdom that hype is a problem. Exploit this powerful market/social force to your advantage, rather than sitting on the sidelines hoping the recession will just go away.

Hype will help power the creativity in ‘creative destruction’. One person’s hype is another person’s evangelism anyway. Hype forms in our collective social excitement about the new and the novel. It is both necessary and inevitable – so use it.

* I so dislike this expression but it’s short and functional

The graphic above was originally drafted to be an end-piece for the book – a ‘photocopy and keep’ aid to help people remember the realities of the Hype Cycle’s twists and turns as they wrestle with project situations and perhaps need to regain their perspective.

For both Jackie and I, this was our first book and of course we learned a lot in the process of writing it.  One of the lessons is that not every idea and observation you have really fits the work neatly. So you have wield the scissors occasionally during the drafting process to cut things out.  Sometimes that can hurt a little – when others tell you something really has to go. Our wonderful supporting professional writer Kent Lineback helped us to make the harder decisions. One saving phrase nowadays is “it can always be used in the book blog – it won’t go to waste”.  So here it is.

In future posts – I’ll take you through ‘the rules’ one by one. Stay tuned.

P.S.  Why rules for ‘riders’? Jackie was originally keen to call the book ‘riding the hype cycle’ but our editors convinced us that sounded a bit too passive. They proposed we center it on ‘Mastery’ instead becuase it creates a better sense of control.  I took some convincing at the time – but I am now very sure it was the right decision.

This is a line from Eva in the novel “We Need To Talk About Kevin”, referring to her expectations of motherhood. In a series of letters to her estranged husband, Eva deliberates on the lead up to her son’s Columbine-style shooting of his classmates and teachers. I received this strangely compelling novel as a present from a literary-minded friend who periodically expands my reading palate beyond my usual diet of airport thrillers, business books and the occasional seasoning of sci-fi. The scarily honest insights leap from every page of this novel, but this one about dangerous expectations made a connection for me to the world of business and technology.

In Mastering the Hype Cycle we talk about the myriad reasons that expectations grow so high so quickly, including the role of imagination:

We’re free to imagine the possibilities because, in large part, there is little else at this point in the life of the innovation to base our judgment and expectations on. The innovation is all possibility unencumbered by real experience.

The unformedness of our expectations at the Peak is a key element in our later disillusionment. We have sense that a trend or an innovation is a “big thing”, but most attempts at quantifying what that big thing will actually deliver sound hopelessly mundane. So the promise remains unformed – “something large and amorphous, a vast big thing so marvelous that I could not even imagine it,” as Eva puts it. When the promised event or innovation does arrive, unformed expectations become “finite and fixed” reality. And reality is all too often mundane.

I remember calling my mother after a Gartner conference during my early days at the company, still on a high from a week of client discussions about the wonderful possibilities for all those emerging technologies. During the call my mother was commenting about the shocking price of brussel sprouts in Romford market, when I was hit with the realization that for most of the world, even the developed world, technology really doesn’t matter that much. If it can’t keep the price of brussel sprouts down, it’s not that relevant. My world of technology felt suddenly very distant from that of my mother.

I was reminded of that conversation as I was finishing up the slides for the Emerging Technologies Radar presentation for the Gartner Mobile and Wireless Summit in Chicago next week. One of the next big things Gartner has been talking about for several years is what we have characterized as the Real World Web – that is, the linking of physical objects and places into the previously virtual and cerebral world of information technology. Various forms of this concept have been discussed for over 20 years, since Mark Weiser introduced the notion of Ubiquitous Computing at Xerox PARC.

The latest version of the Real World Web slide has photos of Smart Spud and Crackless Egg technologies from Sensor Wireless. These are collections of sensors and transmitters shaped in the same size and form as their live-produce counterparts. They travel through the supply chain registering the stresses and strains, bumps and bruises of each part of the process, to help identify problem areas and decrease the amount of damaged items in the future. It is a very real example of what embedded sensors can to today to drive cost savings to businesses and consumers. It’s also incredibly mundane, and probably not something articulated in the early, grand, unformed visions of Ubiquitous Computing, the Real World Web and similar concepts. But the mundane is enduring, pervasive and profitable.

Turns out that technology is about the price of brussel sprouts, after all.

Anyway, roughly in the order I just described – sharpen your pencils and start sketching or updating your cycles for:

Network Coding

Nanomedicine

3D TV

Home Networking

Netbooks

(yes – those last two still news to many outside tech as the cycle progresses towards mainstream)

Last week I passed by a sad sight in Hounslow, London UK  that I just had to photograph and share. If you have read chapter one of the book you will know the case.

When you are deciding what to cut from your portfolio in response to the recession, beware the strategic consequences of of ‘giving up in the trough’

For example, the first books on AJAX came out about October 2005 and Don Tapscott’s ‘Wikinomics’ came out December 06. These are relatively recent examples of key milestones in the evolution of technology concepts that will one day be adopted by many if not all corporations. Business and professional textbooks contain recipes for corporate cooks. A concept can almost mark its true birth around the first formally published books. They crystallize the idea and indeed often provide the first accepted naming and surrounding terms for the innovation. Luckily for those researching Hype Cycles nowadays, we are in the AA (after Amazon) era. In the many years before Amazon the simple question ‘is there a book on this?’ could take hours or days to answer. Today – if you can’t find references to a named innovation with an Amazon book search, it tells you something important. That the innovation (if not trivial) is still at a very early stage in its evolution and probably only suitable for aggressive Type A companies. Without a book there is no collection of case study material, frameworks, methods, tutorial and other transferable learning. So adoption will be limited to the brave innovators not the followers.

In recent review of the book, Britton Manasco rightly advises marketers to watch for the Trough as “True thought leaders will see this coming and prepare their prospects and customers for the coming slide in market excitement.”

In an exceptionally thorough white paper that predates the release of the book by a couple of months, Roger Warner of Velocity marketing agency provides marketing advice for each stage of the hype cycle. It’s clear he has plenty of first hand experience of working through the cycle a few times, based on the examples and the depth of the insights he gives. Each stage has multiple recommendations, targeting everyone from the truly visionary leaders who create the trigger:

“During this stage, you need your vision and your story to win. You also need to your language to win. In new markets, nothing has a name yet. If you’re there early, you need your names to be adopted by the industry.”

to those who arrive later to the game:

“Marketing on the Plateau may sound like a maintenance job but actually, it needs to be just as creative and visionary as any other stage. The idea is to differentiate with new spins on the same basic themes and issues that have now been accepted by the market.”

In an aside, Warner questions the naming of the plateau: ”A plateau doesn’t sound like a very exciting destination after all that suffering. Gartner could have chosen a better term for this phase, but you get the idea.” Interesting point. Perhaps we should have called this phase the “Plains of Productivity”, where the grass is green and the herds roam in comfort. Or perhaps the slightly negative connotations of a plateau (as in “career plateau”) are actually appropriate. It’s at this point that so many people start to feel a stir of longing for the thrilling roller coaster ride of the early phases, and abandon the comfort zone to seek out the next new thing.