Future Savvy: Quality in Foresight

College graduation is a fabulous time and place to think big, and therefore a good place to have a futurist do the thinking. Peter Schwartz recently gave the valedictory address to the 2009 graduating class of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (he graduated there in 1968) and offered a grand 10-point challenge list for techies of the future:

Allowing for the usual pep-talk style of these things, it’s possible to boil the list down to five key things, which will indeed be essential to technology enabled industry and social change in the lifetime of today’s college graduates:

1. Non-pulluting, inexhaustible energy. Schwartz mentioned potential sources including fusion and gasoline-excreting molecules. “We need something new for the long run, and it will require new physics, new chemistry, new materials, new biology, or likely some combination.”

2. A “bio-industrial revolution” to make production of goods more energy efficient and environmentally sustainable.

3. Advancing understanding of the human brain, and developing new means to combat aging effects.

4. Improving agriculture to raise yields while reducing environmental costs.

5. Better urban planning, civil engineering, and smart architecture for more sustainable cities.

A fairly well known list – yet these are the key issues. But the most interesting thing of all that Schwartz said was this:”graduates should not assume they can do it alone. Collaboration is a key ingredient of progress.”

“At some point in the next few years, probably by the time you are 30 … you will have to make a life trajectory decision that no one tells you about: Are you mainly going to work on your own or work through others?” Schwartz said. “Many engineers, scientists, artists, poets, writers have great lives working mostly by themselves. But there are many things you cannot do on your own. If you want to lead research teams in larger organizations, or design and construct new buildings, or make movies or start new businesses, the skills of human collaboration are essential to success.”

In other words, collaboration – the means to and willingness to and resources to collaborate (globally) – is a key enabler of important breakthroughs. In theory everyone knows this and everyone agrees. But how much of competitive and legal process is all about protecting individual or national work, that is disrupting collaboration?

So in addition to the grand technology challenges for coming lifetimes, I offer a similar grand policy challenge (perhaps for Kennedy School grads of 2009): create the policies that genuinely promote and encourage collaboration. Do not encourage people, or companies, or countries to see benefit in working on their own. Facilitate and reward information sharing at every level… and then the Rensselaer grads and their equivalent around the country and the world will really be able to create the future that Schwartz envisions.

For event report see Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute http://news.rpi.edu/update.do?artcenterkey=2585

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Apocalyptic predictions are designed to be wrong. The point of doing them, as with “1984,” “Brave New World,” “When the Wind Blows,” etc., is to raise consciousness to negative outcomes and engender action so that the prediction, by succeeding in purpose makes itself incorrect in fact. “The Age of Stupid” is this all over. See the trailer here:

There is also a documentary about how the movie was funded and made.

Set in 2055, post the environmental global climate change collapse, it features last-man-on-earth (Pete Postlethwaite) as an archivist in a tower refuge somewhere in the Arctic north of Norway sifting through records of human life before it was wiped out, trying to find out why people did nothing to stop the eco-catastrophe that was imminent. The plot device allows filmmaker Franny Armstrong, (director of McLibel, 2005, about environmentalists who successfully challenged McDonalds) to showcase a selection of real reportage and news clips from today to withering effect. Like any good scenario it gives granularity: dates, names, actions, timelines. It points fingers and mentally readies the reader-watcher to act.

By all accounts this is a punchier movie than Al Gore-fronted “An Inconvenient Truth (2006),” and punchy is what is required to effect the goals of a future-influencing forecasting, that is, an assault on the powers that be and/or on public complacency.

By the way, if you want to see the best activist consciousness-raising movie (ever!) see Pete Postlethwaite in the anti-Thatcherite “Brassed Off.”

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I’ve been quite careful not to use this blog as a “brag wall” for Future Savvy. I can say reviewers have all been glowing, without exception. But this review, below, which recently appeared in the St Andrews Management Institute’s Vector Magazine, I felt was worth reposting here because – more than just saying nice things – it also captures the essence of what the book is trying to do. Here it is:

Book reviews by SAMI fellows and associates
“Future Savvy” by Adam Gordon (American Management Association, 2009)

“Forecasts and predictions are ubiquitous. We are bombarded with views of the future on a plethora of subjects from myriad sources, with a diverse set of motivations and self-interests. Adam Gordon seeks to provide a practical users guide to the assessment and interpretation of all things about the future, with special emphasis on the cautions and ‘health warnings’ that need to be applied, so as not to be misled by forecasts. However, the author is careful not to veer towards over-cynical dismissal of all future projections; rather, he seeks to provide guidance to the reader on how to apply the necessary caveats, and in the author’s words “profit from change”.

The book covers a very broad field, from the basic issues of the misuse of data and statistics, covering the quality and validity of data as well as their misinterpretation, through technology forecasting, trend and horizon scanning to quantitative modelling and scenarios. The one theme common to all these activities is the need to be alert to bias, whether it be a deliberate motive to influence behaviour through a dire prediction; or a bias inherent in futurologists needing to see rapid and pervasive change in all areas of society – if it exists or not – and evangelising it.

The track record of much futurology is mixed. Well-known examples are quoted: television did not lead to the end of the cinema industry. Nor has space exploration led to people taking foreign holidays on other planets – yet! Bias may also lie in the beholder. The ‘Zeitgeist’ tendency, whereby we are all influenced by contemporary perceptions, affects not only how “experts” and professionals see the world, but also how the audience receives the views of the future – often with unprepared minds. The internal “official future” of an organisation can pose a real blind spot to its progress.

The weaknesses of much quantitative modelling are highlighted, with such forecasts only being as good as the assumptions on which they are based, but which are often not overtly stated. In contrast to the conceptual and practical errors inherent in much futures output, the role and advantages of scenario planning are emphasised as a tool for challenging assumptions and developing alternative futures: “It’s better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong”.

The penultimate chapter takes examples of relatively recent forecasts from a range of organisations, whose subjects range from US agricultural production to UK dementia sufferers. These are subjected to a form of ‘retro wind-tunnelling’ to illustrate the deficiencies in their construction and how they would have benefited from the application of methodologies described earlier in the book. The final chapter provides a summary checklist, or framework, to apply in evaluating forecasts and future predictions.

Adam Gordon has written a shrewd and perceptive book that deserves a wide readership, especially among managers in both the private and public sectors, as well as the familiar ‘general reader’. Those wishing a more detailed technical guide to the various forecasting and futurist methodologies will need to consult other standard works. Professionals in the fields of management and strategy consulting and scenario practitioners might well be familiar with many of the points made in the book. However, those with some savvy might do well to recommend the book to their clients.

Michael Owen, 20 April 2009

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