How can we learn from 2020?

We’ve all learned from 2020 and I hope we take those learning with us. We’ve learned how to be much more responsive and how to adapt to a rapidly changing situation with a lot of uncertainty. That will be something that we want to continue to bring with us to not become complacent and fall back into old ideas about how software should be delivered.

With that being said, let’s talk about my 2021 predictions.

Global uncertainty will lead to ever evolving shifts in software development

My first prediction is that global uncertainty will lead to ever evolving shifts in software development. I think a lot of us want to think that 2021 will be a return to normal, but the reality of the situation is, it won’t. It won’t be necessarily a return to where we were before, it will be a different kind of normal as we evolve out of the situation that we found ourselves in this year and continue to learn new things.

We know that it’s very difficult to predict the future. And now that we’ve had a real core concrete example of that for all of us, I think we should carry that forward and use at least the tools that we’ve developed and the skills that we’ve learned to our best advantage.

2021 will be the year of rapid innovation

My second prediction revolves around rapid innovation for 2021. Reason being, unpredictable market trends mixed with a high level of agitation means that there will be problems to solve and energy needed to solve it.

Situations are continuing to evolve rapidly and many of us have ended up in very different places than we were in coming into 2020. I think people will be (either by choice or by necessity) taking on passion projects with a new found set of skills, a new found desire, and energy.

The result of these new situations will bring facinating innovation. It’s going to be a time when we see a lot of new thinking coming about and there’s going to be a lot of people moving quickly. I think there’s great energy that we can capture and an opportunity that we can take advantage of, so let’s make the most of it.

Laser-focused leaders will prevail

My third prediction may seem a bit obvious, but some of today’s great companies were born out of yesterday’s uncertain times. Right now is a time that’s really ripe with opportunity and we’ve seen a lot of that over the last year. With everything that has been happening, it is easy to get distracted.

In challenging times, it’s ever more present and ever more important to be focused and to stay targeted on the goal. And with this, just so many new interesting revelations, I guess, that we’ve all had about where opportunities are for us to all be better. People who see the opportunities, put all of their energy into them, and drive quickly are going to see some real great opportunity advanced open up in front of them.

Don’t forget what you learned from 2020

The world doesn’t evolve on boundaries of years, but this one has been almost edge to edge in terms of the challenges that we faced. Nevertheless, many of the things that truly came out and that we experienced in the course of 2020 we’re parts of larger arcs of our society.

I’m going to personally try to take everything that I learned over the last year and use it as I think about how to proceed. Let the bad go. All of us have learned so much and if we try to ignore our learnings or think we’re going back to some previous state than we will have lost all of the good things that came out of our condition over the last year.

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