Future Savvy: Quality in Foresight

The futurist Edie Weiner says, if one wants to see the world, and therefore the future, as it really is, one must look “through the eyes of children or aliens.” That is, strip away our “educated incapacity” – the mental disability that comes with being over-familiar with a situation and therefore embedded in its associations and traditions, which makes it hard to see future change.

I was reminded of this when, as my wife and I were talking happily about the Obama “Yes-We-Can” victory speech, our 3-year-old daughter piped up: “Bob-the-Builder”! [The economy's in crisis, can we fix it?] “Yes we can!” [The war in Iraq, can we fix it?] “Yes we can!”

If this means nothing to you, see http://www.bobthebuilder.com/ca/english/index.asp

This is not subtle stuff, this speechwriting. And politics is nothing if not the art of appealing to the 3-yr-old in all of us. But, as they say, “a win is a win.”

Anyway, it is for the foresight community to to get past the day’s euphoria and ask, what does this mean for the future? I think the win has trend tipping-point implications and allows some future-thinking insights to be accumulated.

The “Hawaiian” Future

One of the things Jim Dator and the Hawaii Research Center for Future Studies have long been saying is, “the future of the world is brown.” The running, long-term trend they are referring to is the movement of power and money from the white West to the brown East, and (eventually) South. And, on similar lines, we have seen rise in number of inter-racial couples (and more acceptance of), and the strong fashion and pop-star chic-ness of being “mixed” race. This aspect of the world’s future has been more obvious, earlier, in Hawaii than other places in the US (and the Obama-Hawaii connection is pertinent here), but now it’s mainstream. This in itself is a lesson that the future is to be seen earlier in some places than others. Anyway, November 4, 2008, is surely the moment where the trend tips and accelerates.

This is not to be naive. Nothing about the result is going to kill racism or ethnic affiliation. The world is a competitive place, and people organize and identify into groups to compete (and restrict access to benefits) more effectively. Whitey halls of privilege will continue to exist. Islamic identification and action will continue to be a huge force, and so on. But now that there is (and in future always will have been) a black person in the world’s top job, nobody can ever look at another person of color and see an intrinsic limitation on what that person can do, be, influence, or own.

Images of the future

For at least half a century the world has known this in theory of course. But theory doesn’t move the world. Pictures move the world. That is, pictures of the future bring the future closer. Obama making the president-elect victory speech, or seeing him and his family move into the White House, will undo more mental models – more educated incapacity – in the area of race than anything that has gone before. For driving the future, the Obama success image is more powerful than a thousand well-meaning affirmative-action programs.

The ratchet effect

The other, simultaneous, foresight principle at work is that change proceeds by ratchet effect. Sticking with politics, the Suffragette movement gathered momentum and finally swept aside millennia of tradition after women were seen to do traditionally “male” jobs during WW1. Here again we have the change-power of images of the future. After women were seen in these new roles there was no way to put the genie back. Yes, social changes can be reversed or stalled (Roe vs Wade is in the mire) but once the image of the future is out there, and minds have absorbed and habituated to it, it may be opposed but never removed. And this is what November 4 promises: visually ratcheting forward the world-wide acceptance of the potential of all people regardless of race as fact not theory – thereby tipping and accelerating the long-term trend to “The Hawaiian Future.”

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Tags: change drivers, forecasts, future, mental models, paradigms, social change, trends

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