Dateline: June 18 2030
There’s an adage in business: “Where there’s mystery, there’s margin.” In other words, if you know something your competitors — or customers — don’t know, you can profit from that information. Knowledge is power.
At least that used to be the case; now not so much. The internet, social media and artificial intelligence have democratised data and information, and now everyone has access to everything. Knowledge is no longer power, it’s ubiquitous. If you need to know something, just grok it.
It’s the same with markets. Superior market information guaranteed you a profit. You could source something at a lower price, and sell it at a higher price to someone with less perfect knowledge. Simply being the first to know about breaking news or market movements could give you an edge, and provide you with arbitrage opportunities.
Some people lament that information democracy and intelligence ubiquity have upended industries and destroyed markets. Certainly that’s the case in the financial sector. But it’s also created new opportunities.
Power has shifted from those with the knowledge to those with the skill. When everyone knows everything, power lies with those who have the skills to execute, to act, to build. The new secret sauce in business isn’t a recipe or patent, it’s the ability to turn that data into a successful operation.
To take one extreme example: everyone knows, at least in theory, how to land a giant rocket, but very few teams can actually do it, reliably, and make it cost-effective at the same time. Those are skills honed by trial and error, forged by failure and encouraged by ultimate success.
And that’s where the mystery lies. Not in what needs to be done, but how to do it. That’s where the margin is.
First published on Mindbullets June 19 2025.
Everyone’s an expert now
Dateline: August 7 2025
Here’s the thing: now that knowledge is universally accessible it doesn’t take much more than a few hours of surfing the interwebs to glean insight into the most intractable conundrum. You can even acquire a valuable new skill by watching a few YouTube vids on the subject; DIY-as-a-Service.
It’s no longer rocket science to learn all about, well, rocket science. Which makes everyone an instant expert, and happy to demonstrate their expertise on Twitgram and FaceApp. Except they’re not. Informed opinions are not the same as unassailable facts. Faced with an inexhaustible smorgasbord of facts, opinions, analysis and speculation — and fake news — we’re often seduced by confirmation bias, rejecting anything that doesn’t reinforce our internally sacred beliefs.
What complicates the issue is that we’re encouraged to ignore conventional wisdom and become mavericks in our quest for innovative solutions and new business models. Especially when the old paradigms no longer work. In those situations often the “expert” can tell us all the ways something will fail — but they fail to see how it might work, if we can forget the past.
“In the mind of the beginner, almost anything is possible,” said one sage, and that’s true, though you might have to fail many times before you find the formula for success.
But rejecting dogma isn’t an excuse for turning ignorance into a virtue. Don’t let the Dunning-Kruger effect sneak up on you — that’s where you know just enough to think you know it all — and respect real expertise for what it can bring: a shortcut to more informed decision-making and better solutions.
Like Richard Feynman, I’d rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned; but let’s not make a hero out of stupid, even if they are sometimes right.
First published on Mindbullets, August 6 2020.
• Despite appearances to the contrary, Futureworld cannot and does not predict the future. The Mindbullets scenarios are fictitious and designed purely to explore possible futures, and challenge and stimulate strategic thinking.
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