How to Predict the Future: The 6Ds Framework

What if you had a reliable roadmap to predict the future?

That’s the essence of what I call the “6Ds” framework that allows you to leverage exponential technologies to create increasing abundance in your business and industry.

In today’s blog, I’ll walk through each of the 6Ds, explaining them along the way.

Let’s dive in…

The Progression of the 6Ds

1. Digitization: The 6Ds framework begins with digitization. Anything that becomes digitized, in other words becomes represented by 1s and 0s, enters onto the same exponential growth curve that we’ve seen with computation.

Digital information, products, services, and apps are easy to duplicate, distribute and share—they can spread at the speed of the internet and increase in power alongside Moore’s law (which we’ll learn more about in our next blog).

As we shall see below, successful exponential entrepreneurs figure out how to digitize products and services to put them on this exponential path. Uber digitizing transportation, 3D printing transforming manufacturing, and Airbnb digitizing access to housing. Soon, solar energy on the blockchain will digitize energy, while sensors, AI, genome sequencing, and CRISPR will fully digitize and disrupt the healthcare industry. 

Did you know that biology has been digitized? Our ability to sequence your 3.2 billion nucleotides, upload them into the cloud and analyze them digitally—along with your digital full-body MRI and digitized 100-plus biomarkers—is enabling us to understand your exact health status and predict how to keep you healthy.

If you’re an entrepreneur or an executive in a company, the key question for you to ask yourself is: What product or service do I currently use (or do we currently provide) that hasn’t yet been digitized? And how might I digitize it?

2. Dematerialization: The second step of this 6Ds process is the dematerialization of physical things into bits and software.

This is where all the big, bulky, and expensive “stuff” earlier in our lives disappears and becomes 1s and 0s on our smartphones or in the cloud. The image above brings back fond childhood memories for me of a store called RadioShack founded in 1921, which was then “de-listed” in 2015. RadioShack was where I would go and hang out with my fellow “geeky” friends to look at, play with, and occasionally buy a few pieces of tech. It was Mecca for many of us. It’s fair to say that everything RadioShack ever sold has long since been dematerialized in one form or another.

What are some examples?

Consider the idea that just twenty years ago film cameras, video cameras, video conferencing, GPS, telephone, maps, books, and record collections were expensive and physical things you’d have to carry around with you. Today, all of these things, plus the sum total of human knowledge, are all available to you and 8 billion others on Earth, effectively for free on a smartphone that fits in your pocket. Wow! 

3. Demonetization: The third benefit in the 6Ds process is demonetization. Once you have a product represented as 1s and 0s, the costs of replication and transmission are both effectively free.

In Abundance, which was published in 2012, I did an approximation of the value of all the dematerialized products and services available on my iPhone as compared to the cost of those physical items back in the 1990s. The comparative numbers are shocking. We don’t realize that along with our $500 smartphones comes millions or tens of millions of dollars’ worth of stuff, given to us, effectively for free.

And in addition to that “stuff” is a range of massively demonetized services—from a near-infinite supply of free entertainment on YouTube, to on-demand chauffeur services through Uber, food delivery 24x7, and a myriad of health monitoring and diagnostic capabilities.

Demonetization will not slow down. Eventually, the best medical diagnostician will be an AI able to provide medical services effectively for the cost of electricity. The same is true for a multitude of other professions.

While this may scare some people, this is also the means by which we can uplift most of humanity.

4. Democratization: The fourth benefit in the 6Ds process is democratization—the accessibility of digital products and services worldwide, to 8 billion-plus humans.

The reality is that something once digitized becomes available to almost everyone worldwide, at lightening speeds. The only requirement is a smartphone or tablet and bandwidth to access the bits.

In 2022, Mukesh Ambani, Chairman of Reliance, and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, jointly announced the world’s cheapest smartphone (JioPhone, sub $50).

"Our teams have optimized a special version of Android specifically for this phone. At a time when so many aspects of our lives and work are moving online, it's even more important to make technology accessible and helpful for everyone,” said Pichai.

Couple this with the global roll-out of 5G cellular services, satellite constellations like Starlink and wi-fi networks deployed in every nook and cranny, and you can appreciate how much of an unstoppable force democratization is in our world. Products, services, and capabilities that were once only available to the wealthiest on the planet are now becoming available to Earth’s poorest.

5 & 6. Deceptive & Disruptive: The final two Ds are deceptive and disruptive, which recognize that in the early days of exponential growth change is deceptively slow. The first digital camera took 0.01 megapixel images, the next year 0.02, then 0.04... it all looked like zero... it was extremely deceptive and Kodak ignored its progress. But 30 doublings later, digital photography had improved 1 billion-fold and it disrupted film photography. 

Why This Matters

The key to becoming an effective entrepreneur and leader in these exponential times is to harness the 6Ds and use them to your advantage.

You want to master this roadmap.

So, how will you use the 6Ds to create a world of possibility and abundance?

In the next blog in this series, we’ll continue our tour of the abundance basics and explore a force that underlies so many of the technological advances we’ve seen: Moore’s Law.