Future Savvy: Quality in Foresight

I have a fond little memory from one of the early multi-candidate debates in the last US election campaign. It was on prime-time TV: there were still about a dozen or so candidates in the running, including Obama and Hillary Clinton, each was standing behind a podium, and as the topic of climate change came up they were asked en masse: “So, who didn’t fly here today in a private plane, raise your hand?” The delegates all sheepishly kept their hands down but one – I forget which – raised his. “I came in yesterday,” he explained. (laughter)

So to the Copenhagen climate change summit, and all the luminaries and dignitaries and celebrities landing at København airport, many of them in private jets.

http://www.cph.dk/CPH/DK/MAIN

This tells us something about the future, and what it says is: ‘needs must.’ What are they going to do, row a boat to Copenhagen? Scale that up and you have the real, actual future. People will fly. In fact the entire new global middle class of billions will fly. And they will heat their homes. And they will eat meat, and so on. And any even remotely democratic system that tries to take away this will be out on its ear.

But we will of course move to cleaner, renewable, sustainable systems. How fast this happens depends essentially on money, which in turn depends on political will, which in turn depends on public concern. Money is required to fund new energy technology research, and — the core issue of Copenhagen this week — it is needed to buy off industrializing countries.

There’s no doubt that climate change (manmade or not) is real, and a real danger. But when scientists and academics are worried about it that means little in terms of changes to human practices. When the public gets concerned — as they now are — we get the possibility of fundamental change. This is true of the future generally, not just climate and the environment.

Between the public sentiment and the money lies political will. Essentially the political will of post-industrial economies on the one side, who find it politically easy, relatively, to pay the price of emissions constraints vs. that of developing economies which will be choked economically and therefore politically by those constraints.

Inequality

Correlating degrees warming with ecological and therefore social upheaval is important. But to think that is what the argument is about is to miss the point. The point is global inequality and its future, and how developing economies are not going to allow emissions constraints to further entrench it.

The future goes always to the most powerful side. That’s what power is for: determining the future. The sides are both strong in this dispute, so this battle will not be won or lost in Copenhagen this week. We are still in its early stages. The effects of climate change are incremental (unlike, say, nuclear holocaust) meaning there is plenty of room for postponement even if the planet can’t and won’t ultimately take it. And those who would occupy the moral high ground have burned public and private jet fuel to be there to do it, and will no doubt indulge in a bit of Smørrebrød and Frikadeller too. Needs must.

So expect the political clock to remain stuck as it has been for a while now, at ‘5 minutes to midnight,’ while the issue smolders slowly without definitive resolution — until technology advances get human energy, finally, off fossil fuels and the problem works its way out of environmental and human systems.

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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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The International Herald Tribune (New York Times Global Edition / Reuters Business) last week ran an interesting foresight story headlined ‘Crisis complicates forecasting by luxury brands,’ reporting from the International Herald Tribune’s eighth conference on luxury in New Delhi. The gist was that although most of the famous brands continue to do well despite the recession, luxury sector executives are very uncertain about the future.

Christian Blanckaert, Executive Vice President at Hermès International was quoted as saying: “We have absolutely no visibility into 2009!”

On the one hand, fair enough. This economic downturn is steeper than previous down cycles, and the basic viability of the financial sector has been tested. Access to credit is normally easier in a recession, but in this one it is not. All of which makes luxury spending harder to predict.

No doubt the most unlikely prediction of all would have been that Hermès, Burberry, LVMH, Moët Hennessy, Louis Vuitton, and PPR (Gucci , Yves Saint Laurent) have all recently reported better-than-expected results.

Nevertheless luxury industry leaders have declined to provide investors and analysts with any official outlook. What’s curious, from an industry foresight point of view, is how executives such as Blanckaert thought they really had more “visibility” into any previous year, or that they will somehow gain it again when the financial crisis is over. They will not. The world will continue to surprise them and us. What they will gain, certainly, is a greater likelihood that the standard business-as-usual future assumptions they make will not be upset by reality.

Meanwhile, judging by the conference, the luxury goods industry has a very decent grip on current social and moral trends, and clear insight into the bigger picture of change in its industry over the next five to ten years. As they know from before, what happens in a recession is that luxury goes out of fashion. Conspicuous consumption wanes, or retreats further behind secluded walls. This is a basic pendulum swing that tracks the economy (witness how the early 1990s recession stimulated a return to “values” era after the “me, me, me” 1980s.)

Sustainable luxury

So we are again in a swing to modesty. But we also know that each swing of the pendulum also carries with it the specific issues of its time. Current key issues for consumers in this segment are sustainability, global warming, business ethics, and globalization (or fear thereof).

Therefore the luxury brands will be looking for ways of making, transporting, and displaying goods in an energy-efficient and socially conscious way, including a renewed emphasis on local artisans and traditional craftsmanship that speaks sustainability in both natural and human resources. This will be the basis of the “sustainable luxury,” positioning that the famous houses will define and compete in. Fabulous and renewable  – now there’s something you can charge top dollar for.

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Publication of the Institute for the Future’s “Map of Future Forces Affecting Sustainability” on the same day that it is revealed that Sir Fred Goodwin (50) of failed & baled Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) will get a £693,000 (about $1,000,000) a year payment for the rest of his life, gets me thinking about short-termism and its entrenchment.

The IFTF’s full map is available for download here.  Quick aside: these maps, putting complex forces into visuals, have defined IFTF’s public (and client, one presumes) communications for over five years, and have raised the bar of excellence in the foresight communications. The company has produced many such outstanding maps, some publicly available.

The new map and Sir Fred-gate are unrelated of course. But here was the connection for me: The IFTF map lists six “Key Driving Forces” (2007-2017) in the area of sustainability, and the first is:
“An Imperative for Looking Long: The 21st century will test our ability to grasp the future impacts of present choices, but even as we struggle to incorporate future knowledge into our day-to-day decisions, we’re tuning up our bodies and minds and even our cultural frameworks for a much longer view.”

My question is, “really?” Is the long view really a driver – something that will drive change and shape the future? Or do we hope it is. Are we trying to talk it into being?

No question that the long-term view is crucial. Solving just about any social, technological, or environmental problem requires sustained long-term action. And everyone who works in foresight keeps evangelizing long-termism. But, in fact, what we have in industry and government is rampant short-termism and there is no indication this will change, despite the crisis and many heartfelt calls.

Linking big to long

The problem with Sir Goodwin’s package (in career and in retirement) is that the reward numbers were based on short-term company returns. “Hey, we made lots of money this year, so you get a big bonus, and you get a big bonus,” etc. But a few years down the line  – in the long term – it turns out that no bonuses were valid (if a bonus is, truly, a reward for success).

Put it another way: in finance, as in other aspects of society, technology, and the environment, we don’t know if we’ve succeeded or failed until the long-term numbers are in. Few would have a problem with handsome rewards for a valuable job well done, but those rewards must surely be delayed, and delayed, until we are in command of the long view of the performance.

Easy in theory, hard in practice. Perhaps impossible in practice when most politicians and legislators are themselves on a short 3-7 year cycle, like CEOs. I have some inkling from the IFTF map that the thinking is that life-extending technologies will improve to the point where people will really see themselves in for the long haul, and so adopt a longer perspective on benefits and rewards.

Time on the clock

Perhaps. But, life-technologies aside, plenty of decision-makers – Goodwin included – still have a lot of time left on the clock and that doesn’t appear to stop them chasing and cashing in short-term incentives at the expense of the future. Or legislators (and the public who votes them in) structuring performance rating on our immediate perception of their performance.

What we have, and what we have increasingly had (the trend) over the past few decades, is systemic short-termism. Winning in the next annual report or the next election is what what leaders’ rewards are based on. Incentives for politicians or business leaders or even scientists or engineers to make a better world for 2025 or 2050 are negligable.

Until there is reason to anticipate that this fundamental underlying short-term incentive structure and mentality changes (that is – convince me – who will change it and how?) the future savvy perspective must say that the “long-term imperative” remains a nice sound-bite, but not a material driver of anything.

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