Gartner’s Hype Cycle as myth

Most people in business know about Gartner’s hype cycle, many of them believe it, and some act on it, for example through corporate investment decisions and buying Gartner’s services. It’s a story (more accurately, a trope) that meets my know/believe/act criterion for myth. 

From https://www.gartner.com/en/marketing/research/hype-cycle

The hype cycle is based on the notion that all technologies move steadily through a fixed series of stages, “the five key phases of a technology’s life cycle.” Here’s a Gartner phase summary:

1. Innovation Trigger: A potential technology breakthrough kicks things off.
2. Peak of Inflated Expectations: Early press produces stories of success – often accompanied by scores of failures.
3. Trough of Disillusionment: Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver.
4. Slope of Enlightenment: More instances of how the technology creates real-world benefits start to crystallize and become more widely understood.
5. Plateau of Productivity: Mainstream adoption starts to take off. Criteria for assessing provider viability are more clearly defined.

It’s a very simple story. A technology is the protagonist, and there are no antagonists. Other players like the media, producers, and the market are mere context. All the uncertainties about technical feasibility, scalability and performance, regulatory context, funding and cash flow, customer acceptance, and so on, are hidden.

The hype cycle is framed in terms of perception and adoption evolving over time. However, time is not quantified and equal lengths on the x-axis may be wildly differing lengths of time.  

The y-axis definition is vague but relates to “visibility” (which can be quantified) or “expectations” (which can’t). The story assumes that all stakeholders’ perception of a technology is the same: entrepreneurs, incumbents, governments, investors, NGOs, etc. – all have the same expectations and/or visibility at the same time.

There is just one path: one peak, one trough, ending at a plateau. Some Gartner material hints at multiple cycles (e.g. for “long fuse technologies”), but the poster chart is clear: technologies don’t disappear along the way – so just persist and keep paying for the reports, Dear Client, your product’s plateau of productivity is sure to come. The story privileges innovation: once technology’s been triggered, its future is firm. The peak is a peak, and the trough is a trough; juddering and fluctuating for an extended period of time isn’t contemplated. Technologies don’t get stuck, and don’t regress; and they don’t appear suddenly on the plateau (though in fact, as Dedehayir & Steinert point out, they sometimes do if one carefully analyzes multiple Gartner reports).

This is a fundamentally optimistic worldview, not unlike the hero’s journey: After setting out with high hopes there’s a major set-back, followed by a steady climb to enlightenment culminating in an indefinitely idyllic life on the plateau of productivity.

The hype cycle purports to explain how technology develops in terms of how it’s covered in the media. Since the model is so influential, however, I suspect that the hype cycle itself frames how tech stories are told in the media. It has the makings of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Similarly, hype will lead innovators to invest more heavily in R&D, which will lead to more hype; and a technology perceived to be moving into The Trough could encourage investors to withhold funding, deepening the trough through a vicious cycle of disillusionment.

I try not to make value judgments about whether myths are true or false; it’s enough that they’re known, believed, and acted on. However, I can't resist pointing out that there seem to be significant concerns about the hype cycle. Dedehayir & Steinert’s well-cited 2016 paper reports “incongruences” in Gartner’s work on the hype cycle; that seems to be a polite way of saying “b.s.” (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2016.04.005; if it’s TL;DR, just look at Section 3.1).