Tech’s stock crash and the Forgetting Trick
Tech leaders often make claims that their track record doesn’t support — but audiences still fall for it every time. Product managers tempted to think the same way incur massive risk.
Big Tech stocks are tumbling on the news that the industry is losing handfuls of money. Just like last time and the time before that and that other time. Each time, tech leaders were able to reassure investors that despite burning cash like it’s going out of style, the technology that would change everything was just around the corner.
How do they, as the saying goes, keep getting away with it?
Well, there’s a trick.
It’s a trick you’ll see often in newspapers, once you learn how to recognize it. In fact, once I explain the trick, you may start seeing it just about everywhere. And I really do mean everywhere — including in your own thinking.
It’s important to understand this trick not only so you can avoid getting tricked, but also so you can avoid tricking yourself.
In the news, this trick is used when discussing traffic-driving topics; known entities that reliably get clicks and eyeballs on the page, year after year. Donald Trump is one example of such an entity; closer to tech we might pick names like Sam Altman or Elon Musk.
On the surface, it sounds like it would be easy to write about figures like that. They say and do a lot, every day. But that very same property is what makes that job difficult. Because they have been saying and doing things for years, these figures all have a history that is a matter of public record. People writing about them want to tell stories — but the stories have been told. Readers already know the ending.
When they want to sell the same story for a second time, storytellers use the forgetting trick.
Age of Mythology
“Nothing pleases people more than to go on thinking what they have always thought, and at the same time imagine that they are thinking something new and daring: it combines the advantage of security and the delight of adventure.” — TS Eliot
The forgetting trick is dead simple: to avoid reckoning with the inconvenient track record of their subject matter, storytellers turn the frame of their story solely forward. The trick is to lay out a shiny roadmap stretching into the future, to distract from the grimy footprints following from the depths of the past.
Because if they did, the storytellers would have to reconcile the roadmap with that track record. And the track record would tell the story for them.
Instead of using that track record, storytellers ground their story in myth. They fill the gap left from excising the facts with allusions to the myth of the Silicon Valley Innovator whose daring vision changes the status quo. Part of the Innovator myth is that they know how to deliver those results, so instead of answering “can this person deliver what they promised” they can treat it as a foregone conclusion and speculate about what might happen if they did.
The forgetting trick is powerful because we want to believe the myth. Audiences love nothing more than the promise that things will be different from how they are today — especially if things can get better without them having to change what they are doing right now.
Of course, those audiences are set up for disappointment when the promise inevitably fails to pass. The forgetting trick deflects accountability until it suddenly doesn’t and your only hockey-stick growth is in the consequences.
Performing Leadership
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair
Elon Musk is not the only figure in tech who, to borrow a term from constructivism, performs leadership. Every executive is expected — and usually held responsible by the company charter — for presenting themselves as a leader who can Think Big by making announcements that improve investor sentiment and, therefore, stock price.
People further down the org chart are still part of this performance. We discuss mini-CEOs without a trace of irony and say that everyone is a leader. We tell the same stories about vision, and play the same forgetting trick. The only thing that changes is the medium through which we tell the story — instead of journalists writing in newspapers, we see product managers preparing roadmaps for their stakeholders.
In this context, the forgetting trick becomes much easier. Past promises and their outcomes are not a matter of public record; with an average tenure on the job between 6 and 24 months and reorgs happening more frequently than that institutional memory rapidly approaches zero. Both the storytellers and their audiences are highly incentivized to ignore the facts and believe the myth. Is it any surprise that we end up playing the trick?
As a result of this trick, the stories that the roadmap tells come out very convincing. So convincing, in fact, that the job already feels half-done. Product managers who find themselves in this position need to check themselves and ask — if it’s that straightforward, how come no one’s done it already?
Big ideas require big behavior change
“We wanted the best, but it turned out like always.” — Viktor Chernomyrdin
The answer, of course, is that it was never that simple.
But by writing a story in the shape of a roadmap, we accidentally tricked ourselves into thinking that it was a roadmap, and that we had done the work through the vision stack necessary to make it meaningful.
When we substituted the generic, all-capable Innovator persona for the reality of our organizations, we temporarily obscured all the execution challenges that would lie between ourselves and “inevitable” success.
The only inevitable result of this process is that product managers end up holding the bag.
I can’t speak for Elon Musk and Sam Altman, but I believe that regular PMs want to do good work and fall victim to the forgetting trick only inadvertently. Anyone who wants to avoid getting tricked in the future would do well to ask themselves these questions:
- Was this person or organization able to deliver on promises like this in the past in full, in part, or not at all?
- If not in full, what needs to change in order to be able to get from here to there, and are we seeing that change?
Chances are that your organization is planning or already implementing some sort of AI project. In which case the questions might look something like this:
- Has your organization successfully implemented any cutting-edge innovations before, or did they all stall at the proof of concept stage?
- Do you know why things turned out that way, and what you need to do differently to avoid the same fate?
Hopefully, you’ll be able to avoid tricking your team next time you’re asked for the Big Ideas. But you’ll definitely be able to avoid getting tricked by headlines offering empty promises.
