How to Figure Out Where You'll Be In 10 Years A method to envisioning your future, and working towards that vision.

Successful people, and successful companies, tend to follow a similar path: The changes they make from year to year seem orderly, but over decades, the changes can take on an unexpected, nonlinear shape.

For example, I began my career as an entry-level analyst at Deloitte. Now I run a thriving growth-coaching business. The leap directly from one to the other seems absurd, and looking back, I couldn't have foreseen or planned it. But broken down into smaller steps, it makes sense: One job led to another, and an opportunity here created a logical new opportunity there. This is the magic of uncertainty: Our paths are forged in satisfying but unknowable ways.

But it can be hard to know what to do with this knowledge — because nobody likes to feel adrift, and especially not entrepreneurs. Leaders shouldn't be content to just see where things go. They don't leave their businesses to chance. They want to anticipate changes, plan for the unexpected, and plot a course into tomorrow. Is any of that possible?

Nobody can predict the future, of course, but I have found a tactic that I believe gives leaders the best possible chance. It comes from John Hagel, the retired co-chairman of Deloitte's Center for the Edge, and he calls it Zooming Out and Zooming In. With this exercise, John invites leaders to take leaps of imagination in which growth is nonsequential and exponential — very different from traditional, linear, do-this-and-then-that, three-year growth-planning projections. The exercise also helps your team develop a shared long-term vision and a road map for making decisions. Having run a number of clients through this exercise, I've found that the results can be transformative.

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So as you look toward your own unknowable future, I suggest Zooming Out and Zooming In. You might see your next big shift before it arrives.

The exercise begins by asking two key Zoom Out questions:

1. What will our industry look like in 10 years' time?

2. What kind of company do we need to become to succeed in that future?

You don't have to answer these questions yourself. They can be answered at a strategic planning meeting with your team or over a period of time. You also don't need to limit this exercise to your team; you should involve anyone who can help you construct this vision. It may be useful to consult with specialists in certain technical areas to help your team think through various scenarios involving your industry's long-term trajectory.

Once you have your answers, it's time to start preparing for that future. Of course, you can't just throw out today's version of your company. But you can start testing your hypothesis and building toward that future — giving yourself the greatest chance to catch a wave of growth.

This is the Zoom In portion of the exercise. John Hagel suggests creating two high-impact experimental projects that can be completed within the next six to 12 months and would move your company toward your Zoomed Out vision. This short-term goal requires an agile approach in proof of concept, experimentation, iteration, and deployment, and it is just short enough to not get bogged down in two-year or three-year plans.

So what does this actually look like? I'll give you two quick examples.

The first comes from my own experience: My company Ferrazzi Greenlight is a management consulting firm, and our Zoom Out vision foresees team coaching that's fully powered by AI. To Zoom In on that, we launched a short-term project that incorporates currently available algorithmic assessments into one of our existing team diagnostic tools. We knew this experiment would be imperfect; the technology just isn't there yet. But implementing it taught us a lot about what's required to achieve our Zoom Out vision.

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Now here's a more complex one. Birdstop is a remote sensing startup, which helps owners of large-scale infrastructure inspect and monitor their assets and operations from afar. In its Zoom Out vision, its leaders see the ability to create on-demand aerial imaging through a cloud-based network of autonomous drones. So for its Zoom In project, the company is building networked drone stations in high-demand zones to test whether its corporate clients would be open to sharing this drone network, rather than having drones operated solely for their own infrastructure observation. If the Zoom In experiment is successful, then over time, these local networks could connect to form a larger mesh that provides the kind of on-demand continuous cloud observations Birdstop envisions.

As you can see from both examples, these experiments aren't trivial. They require real investment, as well as some interactions with clients. To do them right, you'll need to build the right team. Pay special attention to whom you task to join the project: You will want a mix of domain experts and passionate team members from your existing team who can collaborate to solve problems creatively and push through obstacles. (Also consider the vital role of inclusion; you'll want to involve a wide range of viewpoints, which will later translate to a wide team that's committed to the results.) Your Zoom In team should report directly to you as the leader and have the maximum permission possible to try new things and break existing dependencies on established internal processes like IT, marketing, and HR.

In short, you want your Zoom In team to have as much flexibility as possible to achieve its goal.

Will every Zoom In experiment be transformative? No. But that's by design: You're making small, strategic, high-impact annual bets about the future without committing to long-term multiyear projects. But if the exercise proves fruitful at the end of a sprint, resources could be added to accelerate the project's impact. Either way, you'll be cultivating a culture of learning and risk-taking — both of which will benefit your company in the long run.

But here's where it gets really exciting: If you truly commit yourself to regular Zoom In experiments, some of them will work — and some of them will work exceedingly well. In fact, some of them, no matter how small, can snowball and develop into more ambitious projects that can transform your company and put you on a trajectory toward your 10-year Zoom Out vision.

That's what I saw recently with a company called Ognomy. It has the potential to change an entire medical field. But it began as one doctor's little Zoom In project.

Daniel Rifkin is a neurologist in Buffalo who became fascinated by sleep apnea.

He treated the condition at his clinic, called Sleep Medicine Centers of Western New York, but he knew that only had a limited impact. Sleep apnea is a potentially lethal sleep-related breathing disorder that affects a billion people worldwide and goes mostly undiagnosed. By some estimates, 80% of sufferers in the U.S. never get a diagnosis because of the expense, lack of awareness, and inconvenience of spending nights being monitored at specialized sleep clinics like his.

Rifkin wasn't familiar with the specific Zoom Out/Zoom In method I've been describing, but he did a version of it anyway. About a decade ago, he Zoomed Out — imagining what his industry would be like in 10 years — and believed telemedicine and other digital tools would become commonplace. This could democratize access to sleep apnea diagnoses, he imagined. Millions of people who suffer from the condition could get tested and treated even if they don't live near a physical sleep lab.

Could he accelerate that process? he wondered. He decided to Zoom In. Over the years, Rifkin experimented with several videoconferencing platforms and different electronic medical-record solutions. He found them all lacking and became convinced that, in order to transform the treatment of sleep apnea, he had to create a stand-alone software solution that digitized every step of diagnosis and treatment in the workflow of his practice.

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In June 2019, he assembled a team of 12 people to do just that. During the course of a two-day design workshop at Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, they took apart each step of his medical workflow: initial examination, ordering sleep studies, diagnosing results, and managing patient records. They also captured the user experience for patients, clinicians, and healthcare administrators in a storyboard. Finally, they conceived of a virtual assistant chatbot named "Sheepa" (a cross between "sheep" and "Sherpa"). All of this would become the building blocks of an app, which he would call Ognomy.

In March 2020, Rifkin hired the software-development firm Topcoder to build the Ognomy app. Originally, he'd asked Topcoder to develop a minimum viable product by that June. But of course, shortly after it began work, the pandemic triggered shutdowns worldwide — and that meant Rifkin had to close all seven of his sleep apnea labs. He pushed the Topcoder team to deliver an app within 30 days instead. To meet this ambitious deadline, thousands of developers from all over the world crowdsourced the software development and together created a user-friendly product that was ready to be tested and deployed by late April 2020.

Demand for the app quickly soared, and Rifkin began to see the impact of what he'd done. "We didn't need physical space anymore to practice sleep apnea diagnosis," he tells me now. "Starting a digital practice definitely cannibalized my own practice in the short term, but Ognomy convinced me that I can do the work entirely digitally. Once I saw the power of the app, I began to pivot and digitize my entire practice."

In early 2020, he had thought it would take three to four years for both patients and doctors to get comfortable with telemedicine treatment of sleep apnea. "COVID," Rifkin says, "supercharged that adoption overnight."

Fast-forward to now, and more than 7,600 patients are registered on Ognomy, with new doctors joining the platform through a monthly subscription fee. Rifkin still holds firm to his Zoom Out vision, which goes beyond what he's done so far. He believes that apps like Ognomy will change the way sleep apnea is diagnosed and treated, and that sleep labs will only be used for more complicated sleep studies, like narcolepsy or REM sleep behavior disorder. "Five years from now, I will definitely still see some patients in the clinic in order to maintain direct patient contact," he says. "But I believe a large part of my practice will transition to being the CEO of Ognomy."

When we look at this story through the lens of Zoom Out and Zoom In, we see that he did a number of things right. First and foremost, he designed an MVP that could scale rapidly. His efforts at digitizing his business showed that, to reach a billion people with a product or service, an entrepreneur must radically rethink their delivery model. In Rifkin's case, patients had to live near an urban area or a sleep center to get the kind of great care he could provide. That's no longer the case. "We've democratized access to sleep apnea diagnosis and treatment worldwide, and our market is the world, not just Buffalo, New York," he says.

Second, he worked with a diverse team to get the best results. In his initial design workshop, his team of 12 had a wide variety of skill sets that complemented each other well and reflected the great diversity of patients and caregivers who would eventually be using the app. This last point — that his team was invested in the project because they were representative of the people who would actually benefit from it — is important for people doing Zoom In projects inside large organizations. It's critical that the team be staffed for passion first and then skills. Zoom In projects can often hit roadblocks, so you want a team that is excited about solving problems in creative ways and won't give up when they encounter problems.

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Third, he kept at it. His first Zoom In experiments didn't work, but he felt confident enough in his Zoom Out vision to keep going. Eventually he exhausted all the existing options on the marketplace, which made him feel confident about developing something himself. That Zoom In experiment transformed his business and may well transform his entire medical field.

In this agile journey, you may feel like some of your Zoom In efforts are disappointing or that the technology is not as mature as you had hoped. But don't be discouraged. Remember that exponential technologies grow slowly before they explode. The key here is to continue experimenting with agile Zoom In projects to get closer to your Zoom Out vision. Some experiments will prove more fruitful than others, but your organization will always benefit from a culture of learning and experimentation.

→ Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from Competing in the New World of Work: How Radical Adaptability Separates the Best from the Rest, by Keith Ferrazzi, Kian Gohar, and Noel Weyrich. Copyright 2022 Ferrazzi Greenlight Inc. All rights reserved.