Mastering The Hype Cycle

Don’t even bother to make a half hearted attempt at adopting the innovation on this wave, you will be certain to fail. Decide when to go and then put your full energy into it. Innovation isn’t easy. Changing anything, particularly in larger organizations will always turn out tougher than you initially expect. Staying the course will require your full concentration. Don’t wander, don’t delegate too much – if you let your attention drift sudden subtle changes in the wave could throw you off balance. There are many unknown twists and turns you must be alert to and be prepared to take quite suddenly in order to keep the initiative afloat. This is continuous learning.

For an overview of ‘Rules for Riders’ see previous post

I really owe it all to Miss Mackie, former headmistress of the City of London School for Girls. Once a week she instructed our class of energetic 11-year olds in English literature, keeping us pinned silently to our desks by force of her imposing presence. The book open in front of us was John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, an allegorical tale from the 17th century that is apparently such a significant work of literature that it has never been out of print.

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?

As I have mentioned before in this blog, the search phrase ‘next big thing’ is a very useful one for emerging trends and technologies tracking.  Yes, its a cliche and used way too much by journalists – but their headline quick fix is your radar tracking gain.  Here’s a small collection of recent references I pulled up today. Caution: this is reportage not analysis!  I am not endorsing the veracity of any of these claims.

Enjoy

• Microholographic storage
• Trade show text message content tagging
• Fashion industry surgical masks
• Space based solar power
• Non-food based biofuels
• Augmented reality advertising
• Africa
• Bovine audio players
• Smartphone malware
• Taiwanese Submarines
• VOIP telephony speed dating
• Waterproof OLED
• Fennec – ‘the firefox for phones’
• Eco-friendly clothing
• Aboriginal fusion cuisine

Generally speaking the hype cycle is much better for tracking a generic market innovation (e.g. ‘mobile email’) rather than products or companies (e.g. ‘Blackberry’).  However the hype cycle is a bit of a Swiss Army Knife – usually fairly useful when you don’t have the perfect tool for the job.

With that in mind I have been playing with public data about the Google Chrome browser to see if it helps evidence a hype cycle curve for that piece of software.  I used Google Trends (search volume) as an indicator of social excitement and browser share as an indicator of market penetration and real progress. It seems to work fairly well.  Remember – the Y axis of the cycle is ‘Expectations’ – there is no perfect measure for that so we must look for proxies and markers to build evidence.  The Hype Cycle is, in the end, mostly a qualitative management tool for expert judgement.

However – here is the indicator curve I plotted from the data.

So what can we learn from the green line that combines the two factors?  Chrome appears to have had a short sharp rise to the peak of inflated expectations – and a quick fall.  We might expect that, because it’s only an incremental innovation (another browser) not a breakthrough, but Google is a major and closely followed company.  Chrome didn’t spend long in the trough of disillusionment – barely 3 months. However it seems to be following a long slow crawl out of there – up a shallow slope of enlightenment.

I’ll try to revisit this in few months time, to see what happens next.

Once you have decided that this is the right innovation wave, you must judge carefully when you will you go with it– before the peak, at the peak, after the peak? Perhaps you want to wait until almost the trough. Maybe you should take it easy and ride this one in on the plateau. Make an active decision based on your needs and circumstances. Many factors and other priorities in your organization have a bearing. Even if you are usually an aggressive risk taker, your energy may have been sapped by the last couple of waves and it could be time to take a breather, to let your organization’s heart rate settle down so it is ready to accept more change. Don’t let hype dictate your timing decision.

For an overview of ‘Rules for Riders’ see previous post

Every now and then you need to inspire your internal audience and remind them what the power of the microprocessor will make possible. Moore’s law isn’t done with us yet. Here are some links to videos – not all of them brand new – but still likely to help drop jaws and get people talking.

Actor 2.0 (and higher res close up here )

Kick ass robot

Beyond wearable

Minority report prequel

Immersive reality

If you have others that made you say ‘wow’ out loud recently – please let us know.

In my working lifetime I’ve lost count of the occasions when I have faced senior decision makers who, with complete conviction, declared a technology would never be significant for their business.  Like the marketing executive who told me the Web was just like Prestel and equally doomed to fail.  And another who suggested the only people likely to use their mobile phones to access data in an airport would be the ‘sandals and ponytails brigade’

Well – even Email was hyped once. As this Honeywell advert from 1977 demonstrates.

‘What the Heck is Electronic Mail’

Thanks to Thomas Noggle – a Gartner Emerging technologies best practices council research specialist in the US -who brought it to my attention.

The face in the picture looks just like the ones who are all using Email today … to type hostile copy and block business cases for corporate exploration of Twitter, Second Life, Blogging, Wikis and the rest. However there is a difference 20 years on from this ad…  today’s CEO knows tech adoption timing can be a matter of significant competitive difference. Those who sneer and obstruct without careful research and analysis will be remembered.

A recent TechCrunch blog post by Sarah Lacy used the headline ‘Bloggers: Let’s band together and stop the hype cycle’ . In the piece she is really reacting to the extremes of buzz building and then cynical critique of new ideas by silicon valley commentators online. Pointing to examples like Google, Twitter, Youtube and Loudcloud she is basically calling for bloggers to give start-ups less of a roller-coaster ride for the sake of ‘writing a provocative headline’.  We have read Sarah’s article and there is a lot to agree with her on – though the title perhaps overstates the case.

The hype cycle is a fundamental phenomenon – based in human psychological responses to the new and novel. It forms from the interaction between two forces moving at different speeds, neither of which can be avoided if progress is to be made. It can’t be stopped – though it can be moderated.  If you are involved in buying and applying technology innovations  – your management actions should be designed to make sure the traps of the cycle are avoided and that the worst effects of its highs and lows are moderated.  We have spent many years working on those aspects and that’s why we wrote our book about mastering them.

Here’s our response to Sarah (posted on TechCrunch):

I like your thought provoking viewpoint Sarah. However the Hype Cycle is really an inevitability when any substantial technology based innovation is introduced to a market. It can’t be completely stopped because its existence arises from a fundamental mismatch between the speed of social excitement and the slower pace of engineering progress & market penetration. We explain this in our book about the Hype Cycle.

We believe its effect can be dampened by thoughtful management and mastering it includes learning how to use it to your advantage. It is very important to note that a certain amount of hype can help overcome corporate adoption inertia – so hype is not all bad.

The rise of web based social media is sometimes having an amplifying and sharpening effect on the shape of the curve – I think you are seeing that. This is especially true when the situation is self referential i.e. social media hype about new forms of social media. We probably all have a lot to learn in our use of blogging, twittering and the like – as our societies explore and mature into understanding cultural best practices for these media.

As you get ready to go, remind yourself of the key behavior that will help differentiate you from the competition – you choose the innovation wave, it doesn’t choose you. No matter how inviting it looks – if isn’t the right one, don’t go with it just because the crowd of surfers around you seem to be doing so. If everyone else takes this one and you miss it – the next one might be yours while they are all beached. Sometimes groups of people do all make the same mistake at the same time and perhaps they will all wipe-out. Think independently.

For an overview of ‘Rules for Riders’ see previous post

[Disclaimer - this post DOES NOT constitute an update to Gartner's hype cycle position on microblogging*]

One of the many indicators that the peak of hype has been passed, is when the tenor of media articles about the technology innovation starts to turn sour.  Sometimes that is centered on the lead player in the emerging market for that innovation – which of course requires the analyst to think carefully about whether it is just that company or the generic innovation as a whole which is losing its initial lustre.

With that in mind, here’s an excellent reference example headline that caught my attention yesterday: ” ‘Twitter Sucks!’ The Backlash Begins”

In this article, the New York Observer journalist cites a number of major news media articles about Twitter that have a negative tone – from The Telegraph to CNN. She has even found a Twitter Backlash blog.

Remember the innovation is microblogging (and there are competitors) – so let’s forget the company name for a moment.  This technology innovation example is particularly interesting because the technology is of direct relevance to journalists and media people in their own jobs. So naturally they will discuss it more and the situation is unusually amplified. As they compete for audience attention we will tend to see more extreme hyperbole and backlash. That helps make this innovation a particularly clear reference example, as it passes through the early stages of the Hype Cycle.

We can also see how the web itself is improving the tools to help innovation managers and analysts track technology zeitgeist. I was prompted to read the article becuase I have a daily Google Alert for any mention of the Hype Cycle.  The journalist can quickly follow a hunch (that there is a growing backlash) and find a number of examples to fill her article. She points to a spike in the Google Trends graph for the term ‘Twitter Backlash’ . The mood is encapsulated in the special purpose vehicle of a dedicated public blog. I doubt that blog existed two years ago and I doubt it will be active two years from now – but it will probably be captured for the historical record by systems such as the Internet Archive WayBack machine.

All off this evidence helps form a ‘digital contrail’ for the flight path of the technology – making it far easier to track than when Jackie first described the Hype Cycle in 1995.  Which means that thhe productivity of hype cycle trackers should be improving and you should be able to watch more things with higher frequency for your company.

So what are you waiting for?  Update your own company hype cycle chart of key technologies that matter to your business – right now!

* Gartner’s 2009 Hype Cycles – which will include our updated position for microblogging, will be published late Summer.