The Decisions We Make While Building New Technology

Every decision opens up new possibilities.

It is an idea that can be understood through the butterfly effect. A single movement can create a ripple that changes the trajectory of everything that follows. This idea is often used to describe how something as seemingly insignificant and delicate as a butterfly flapping its wings could eventually contribute to an entirely different weather system somewhere else in the world. In human lives, the same principle can feel familiar. One decision can change where we live, who we meet, what we learn, what opportunities become available to us, and ultimately, who we become.

The film The Butterfly Effect takes this idea to its most extreme conclusion. Its protagonist is able to see how different decisions create radically different versions of his life, with each possibility leading somewhere else. What is fascinating is not necessarily the film's conclusion, but the underlying question: what would have happened if I had made a different decision?

It is a question that most of us have asked ourselves at some point. What if I had taken that job? What if I had moved to another city? What if I had said yes instead of no? What if I had started the thing I keep thinking about? And, perhaps more importantly, what if I am looking around at my life now and I am not particularly happy with what I have created?

How do you change it?

This idea also leans into the feeling of déjà vu and the strange experience of feeling that something has happened before. From a more esoteric perspective, these moments can be seen as little doorways. Moments where you become conscious of the path you are currently travelling, and therefore have the opportunity to either continue along it or choose something different.

But how do we actually switch tracks?

For founders, innovators and anyone interested in building something new, there is a simple principle that any change is a total change.

The ripple begins with you

When we think about making an impact, we tend to imagine scale. We imagine the invention that changes an industry, the company that becomes a household name, the technology that solves an enormous problem. We imagine that meaningful change has to be visible, measurable and significant enough for everyone else to notice.

But the butterfly effect suggests something quite different. A butterfly does not make an enormous impact by trying to be enormous. It creates a ripple simply by being itself. The same is true of us.

You do not have to invent something that cures cancer or ends a war. You do not have to become a global leader, work for a giant technology company or move to a major city to participate in creating the future.

You might open a late-night café or wine bar where people can meet and have space to share ideas. You might start a city-wide treasure hunt club. You might make art. You might build a business. Or you might simply begin living your life in a way that is more recognisably yours.

These things can appear completely unrelated to the grand narratives of innovation and technological progress, but they are not.

The future is not only built through technology. It is built through the thousands of small choices people make about how they want to live, what they value, what they create and what they bring into the world.

One person creates a podcast (like ours) that plants an idea in someone else's mind. That person has a conversation about it over dinner. Someone listening to that conversation decides to pursue an idea they had abandoned. They meet someone new because of it. That person starts something else.

The ripple continues.

We rarely get to see the full trajectory of our own decisions. That does not mean the trajectory does not exist.

If you want different, you have to do different

But there is a practical implication to this idea. If you want to experience a different life, at some point you have to introduce something different into the system.

It sounds obvious, but it is surprisingly easy to spend years wanting a different outcome while continuing to make essentially the same decisions.

The person living the life you want is, in some ways, a different person from the person you are today. They have different routines, behaviours, relationships, environments and assumptions. They make different decisions because they have become someone who makes those decisions.

So if the goal is to create a new trajectory, the question becomes “What can change today?”

It does not have to be dramatic. Move the furniture around. Change your coffee order. Sleep on the other side of the bed. Take a different route home. Rearrange your workspace. Try somewhere new for dinner. Cancel something that no longer feels right. Say yes to something you would normally avoid. Start the project you keep talking about.

These things may not directly produce the life you want. That is not really the point. The point is that you are interrupting the existing pattern. You are creating evidence, both internally and externally, that you are capable of making a different choice.

Sometimes we need a physical expression of an internal decision. This is part of the reason people instinctively want to cut their hair after a breakup, change their clothes after leaving a job, move house after a major life transition or completely rearrange their environment when they feel ready for something new.

The physical world becomes a marker of change.

And while there is no need to cut your hair every time you want to reinvent yourself, there is something powerful about deliberately changing the environment in which your existing patterns have been formed.

Because if we are serious about innovation, we cannot expect to build something new while endlessly reproducing the same conditions that created what already exists.

Technology reflects this

There is an interesting parallel in the way we use technology to understand consequences.

Increasingly, we have tools that allow us to model the potential impact of decisions before they happen. In the insurance industry, for example, mapping and modelling technologies can visualise the potential effects of flooding across particular areas, helping organisations assess risk and determine everything from insurance premiums to lending decisions. The technology is essentially helping us see the ripple before it happens.

But what if we extended that idea beyond corporate risk? What if we had better tools for understanding the long-term consequences of the everyday choices we make?

What if you could see, in real time, the environmental and social ripple effects of buying one product instead of another? Or understand how different choices about energy, transport, food or consumption might accumulate over ten, twenty or thirty years? Technology could become not just a tool for prediction, but a tool for conscious participation.

Rather than asking only, What will this decision do for me?, we could begin asking, What does this decision set in motion? That is a very different way of thinking about the future.

The future is made through small decisions

For founders and future leaders, this matters because innovation is ultimately an act of choosing differently. We do not build new technology by deciding that what already exists is good enough forever. We question it, experiment with it, redesign it and imagine what else might be possible.

The same principle applies to our own lives. Every conscious decision is a vote for a particular future. Some decisions will be enormous. Others will be almost invisible. But each one changes the conditions from which the next decision emerges.

You may not see the external impact today. You may not even know what your decision has set in motion. But that does not mean the ripple is not happening. So perhaps the question is not “What enormous thing can I do to change the world?”

Perhaps it is simply “What is one thing I could do differently today?”

Change the furniture. Change the coffee. Start the podcast. Open the café. Make the art. Apply for the job. Leave the job. Build the thing. Call the person. Take the train.

The future does not arrive all at once. It is built through the accumulation of choices that, at the time, may seem remarkably small.

Any change is a total change. If you want different, you have to do different.

So make one small change today, and see what happens.

We explore this idea further in this podcast episode: