I’ve been trying to come up with a layman’s analogy to use in explaining to skeptical executives about how dramatic the Internet of Things’ impact will be on every aspect of business and our lives, and why, if anything, it will be even more dramatic than experts’ predictions so far (see Postscapes‘ roundup of the projections).
See whether you thing “Collective Blindness” does justice to the potential for change?
What if there was a universal malady known as Collective Blindness, whose symptoms were that we humans simply could not see much of what was in the world?
Even worse, because everyone suffered from the condition, we wouldn’t even be aware of it as a problem, so no one would research how to end it. Instead, for millennia we’d just come up with coping mechanisms to work around the problem.
Collective Blindness would be a stupendous obstacle to full realization of a whole range of human activities (but, of course, we couldn’t quantify the problem’s impact because we weren’t even aware that it existed).
Collective Blindness has been a reality, because vast areas of our daily reality have been unknowable in the past, to the extent that we have just accepted it as a condition of reality.
Consider how Collective Blindness has limited our business horizons.
We couldn’t tell when a key piece of machinery was going to fail because of metal fatigue.
We couldn’t tell how efficiently an entire assembly line was operating, or how to fully optimize its performance.
We couldn’t tell whether a delivery truck would be stuck in traffic.
We couldn’t tell exactly when we’d need a parts shipment from a supplier, nor would the supplier know exactly when to do a new production run to be read.
We couldn’t tell how customers actually used our products.
That’s all changing now. Collective Blindness is ending, …. and will be eradified by the Internet of Things.
What do you think? Useful analogy?
