The butterfly effect and tech: forecasting the future makes no sense, but I’ll give it a shot anyway

On 7th March 2018 at The Financial Times as part of The butterfly effect and tech / A-B Testing, Ads and other 3rd Party Tags

The butterfly effect theory has taught us that it is extremely hard to calculate things with certainty. The amount of changes in recent years in almost every important subject area (culture, politics, economics, and technology) seems to confirm MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz’s theory. But in order to decide what is needed to sustain in our world of tech, we paradoxically need to do exactly this - forecast the future. Given that there are currently a lot of butterflies out there, we can predict with certainty that uncertainty won’t diminish. To sustain in tech we should, therefore, have a look at underlying principles that help us get a certain sense of control and thereby cope with uncertainty. My favourite top three principles are agility, flexibility, and openness. By using an area of tech I know pretty well, the CDN market, I will explain why I think these principles are important to sustain in the ever-changing world of tech.

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