Defining Visions
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| DEFINING
VISIONS ZONE |
| PURPOSE: The aim of this zone is to
clarify what is meant by 'vision' and to analyse the role that this plays in
decision-making in general and in the
telecoms industry in particular. |
| CONTENT: Several examples are given to
illustrate the meaning of 'vision'. These examples also show how our usage of
this term differs from that in everyday speech. In addition, it is shown that
under conditions of uncertainty, decision-makers have no option but to
construct their own visions of what will happen in the future. |
Introduction
Changing Visions in Mobile Communications
Uncertainty and Vision
How Are
Visions Constructed?
What is a ‘Vision’? A Vision is a set of images of
future states of affairs. Our Vision tells us what things will be like in the
future and what we need to do if we want to achieve our objectives.
The concept of Vision as used here is significantly different from that
which is used in everyday discussion. Popularly, ‘vision’ refers to
remarkable insight. The president, whether of a country or a corporation, who
has ‘vision’ is commonly thought of as someone who knows what needs
to be done and, equally importantly, someone who gets it right. According to
this popular conception ‘vision’ is something good and a person who
has ‘vision’ is a valuable commodity.
The problem with this conception of ‘vision’, however, is that
it ignores the importance of uncertainty and how, in reality, we are
forced to deal with uncertainty. Several examples will make the reality of
uncertainty clearer:
| Vision Failure
|
| Alexander Graham Bell offered to sell his
patents for the telephone to the telegraph company, Western Union, for $100,000
since he shared the widespread belief that there would be little demand for the
telephone which at the time could not be used over long distances, provided
poor reception, was expensive and heavy, and required the use of a deep
voice |
| Thomas J. Watson Snr, the leader of IBM until
the mid-1950s, predicted there would be a total demand in the US for only a
handful of computers. |
| The inventors in Bell Labs of the transistor
thought that its use would be limited to telecommunications and that it could
not be usefully applied in consumer electronics. |
| Andy Grove and colleagues at Intel bought back
the rights to the first microprocessor (invented by Intel in 1971 by Ted Hoff
who produced it for a Japanese calculator company, Busicom) since they thought
that, in addition to calculators, it may have profitable applications in simple
products such as traffic lights. |
| Although one of the inventors of the laser came
from Bell Labs, the laboratories’ patent authorities at first refused to
apply for patents on the laser on the grounds that it had little to do with
telecommunications. |
As examples like this clearly show, our Visions of the future are often
at odds with the reality that unfolds as the future becomes the present. This
highlights the uncertainty that we frequently confront in trying to
decide what will happen in the future and what we need to do now in order to
achieve our objectives. The importance of uncertainty is further illustrated by
the history of mobile communications.
The importance of uncertainty and changing Visions in this sector is
illustrated below.
| Visions of
Mobile Communications |
| 1970s- 1980s Despite inventing the
cellular mobile system in the 1970s, Bell Labs downgraded research on radio
communications which it deemed to be an inferior transmission technology.
|
1984 At the time of its divestiture a
senior executive of AT&T expressed the company’s view that there was
little future in mobile communications (Financial Times, February 22,
1999).
“When I joined Ericsson in 1984 Radio Communications was
something odd happening on the outskirts of Stockholm”, Kurt Hellstrom,
President, Ericsson (Financial Times, July 26, 1999). |
Early 1980s AT&T asked consultancy
company McKinsey how many cellular phones there would be in the world in 2000.
McKinsey’s answer: total global market=900,000.
In 2000 there are
about 400 million mobile phones globally and about 180 million PCs (The
Economist, October 9th, 1999). |
| 1992 GSM standard agreed by European
standards bodies and firms. |
| 1994 Sam Ginn resigned as CEO of Baby
Bell Pacific Telesis to head the company’s spun-off mobile operations
renamed AirTouch. But AirTouch’s share price languished. |
| 1997 Demand for mobile telephony
exploded. |
| 1999 Vodafone acquired AirTouch forming
the largest global mobile telecoms operator. Players talked of possibility of
mobile replacing fixed communications. |
| 1999 The UMTS third generation mobile
standard agreed by Europe, Japan & US, making high-speed internet on mobile
phones possible. |
As these examples clearly illustrate, key decision-makers can get it
wrong. It is necessary, therefore, for a realistic concept of Vision to include
the possibility of ‘Vision Failure’ and, in response to
failure, ‘Vision Revision’.
How do we make decisions under conditions of uncertainty? If we took the
reality of uncertainty – as illustrated by the above examples –
completely to heart, the ‘fog’ of uncertainty would totally
immobilise us. Like a polar explorer caught in a blizzard without a compass we
would not know in which direction to go. But if we responded in this way to
uncertainty we would seize up and decision-making would be impossible.
So what do we do? The answer is we create Visions, or images of what the
future will be like and what we need to do if we want to achieve our
objectives. To go back to the polar explorer metaphor, we substitute our own
Vision of how the land lies for the certain, but absent, compass. The advantage
of creating a Vision is that it reduces the fuzziness of the future and in so
doing enables us to act more decisively despite the uncertainty that surrounds
us. However, the danger is that our Vision may lead us into the temptation of
thinking that the world is clearer and more predictable than it actually is. In
order to implement the dictum ‘lead us not into temptation’ it
becomes necessary for us to undergo a Vision check,
that is a process that allows us to stand back from our Vision and to
interrogate it in the light of the available evidence and alternative ways of
thinking, and then, if necessary, engage in the further process of Vision
revision. This is the purpose of the Vision Check
venue on this site.
But how can we stand back from our Vision and interrogate it? In order
to answer this key question it is necessary to delve more deeply into how
Visions are constructed.
The building blocks of Visions are beliefs; beliefs about how things
will unfold in the future and why, and what we need to do to achieve what we
want in the future. But this puts the question one stage back: how are beliefs
constructed? Unfortunately, there is no simple general answer to this important
question. It depends very much on the beliefs and whose beliefs they are. In
some cases beliefs may result from theoretical and/or empirical scientific
research; in other cases they may result from intuitions, hunches, gut feelings
or even guesses. Furthermore, it is impossible to be certain that the beliefs
in question are true. Even where beliefs are based on scientific research we
know that scientific advance frequently involves the replacement of one group
of ‘truths’, established under a corresponding set of paradigms and
theories, by another group of ‘truths’ supported by a different set.
.
But if it is not possible to establish unequivocally whether a set of
beliefs is true or false, how can we stand back from our Vision and its
underlying set of beliefs and interrogate it? The position taken here is that
the best we can do is make the beliefs that underlie our Visions as explicit as
possible. Knowing as we do that beliefs often turn out to be inappropriate or
even incorrect, we can then be more open-minded about the adequacy of our
beliefs and more willing and able to revise them as circumstances change or we
learn more about them.
The
TelecomVisions website is designed to assist in this
process of Vision and belief interrogation as it applies to the
global
telecoms
industry over the next 5 to 10 years.
For a more detailed analysis of Vision and more examples, see
Martin Fransman, Visions of
Innovation, Oxford University Press, 1999.
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