Daily Inspiration: “Don’t get trapped in a state of ‘perpetual pilot purgatory’ – because the future won’t wait on your indecision!”

“Don’t get trapped in a state of ‘perpetual pilot purgatory’ – because the future won’t wait on your indecision!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

I’m in Austin, Texas today, and later today will be the opening keynote speaker for the Schneider Electric 2019 Foxboro & Triconex User Groups meeting.

Essentially, a room full of industrial engineers from the chemical, energy and other processing industries. The big issue on the table? The Industrial Internet of Things, also known as #iiot

The phrase ‘pilot purgatory’ came up in one of our pre-planning calls, and it immediately caught my attention. It turns out that it is used quite bit around this topic – Google it!

And it directly relates to the ‘Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast’ part of my innovation mantra – specifically, the ‘start small’ part. I advise many of my clients that in order to deal with a faster future, they need to start a whole bunch of small scale projects, not necessarily to have a home run win, but to learn about the things they don’t know – so they can better plan for the future.

Just don’t get stuck there! That’s pilot purgatory!

Now that I have a wonderful definition off what I see around me, I know how to better spot it. Organizations who are wallowing in indecision, unable to make the big, bold commitments to get them forward into a faster future. Incessant, never ending test projects that somehow never make it out of the lab. Small innovative teams that can never scale what they’ve learned into the rest of the organization.

It’s a deadly trap, because while you spin your wheels, never really moving forward, the future continues to happen all around you.

There are huge opportunities for #IIOT in process manufacturing: – condition based maintenance alerts (i.e. temperature and vibration sensor alerts on machinery), production flow monitoring and exception management, and even cobot management.

But to do it right takes big commitment, big money and big engineering architecture.

That requires a decision that its time to move out into the conceptual phase and into your eventual reality!

The future? Get moving!