Future Savvy: Quality in Foresight

Legislation is the route by which ‘the people’ (or powerful sectarian interests, take your pick,) influence the future. It is often underestimated as a future force, or viewed merely as legislators playing catch-up with technology or societal change. But legislation can be far-sighted, and profoundly shape outcomes.

In a fascinating recent development, John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, introduced the Start-up Visa Act to the US Senate, as reported in Inc. magazine.

The legislation is a forward-looking bid to turbo-charge entrepreneurial venturing in the U.S. by attracting foreign entrepreneurs and connecting them to U.S. capital, therein driving new economic growth and local jobs. What’s really interesting is it goes against past common wisdom that recessions are ‘bad for immigration’ (as citizens demand job protection.)

If passed, the bill gives U.S. visas to foreigners who can raise $100,000 from an angel investor or $250,000 from a qualified VC firm. After two years, if the immigrant entrepreneur can create five or more jobs (excluding family), attract an additional $1 million in investment, or produce $1 million in revenue, he or she gets a green card (permanent residency.)

The only current option, the EB-5 business investment visa, requires immigrants to invest at least $1 million in the U.S. and employ 10 people.

Job creation

The  National Venture Capital Association says 25 percent of America’s venture-backed, publicly-traded businesses, incl. Google, Yahoo!, eBay and Intel have been founded or co-founded by immigrants. According to Richard Herman, author of Immigrant, Inc.: Why Immigrant Entrepreneurs Are Driving the New Economy, nearly all U.S. job creation in the past 20 years has come from companies less than five years old.

The history of US immigration policy has been schizophrenic to say the least, with periods of great social openness followed by about-face door slamming. The slamming has always corresponded to economic downturns or anxiety thereto. But here we have the opposite effect. And we have legislators taking a forward view! Both proof that the future is sure to surprise us.

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I’ve been flying across the world recently, which has given me a few quiet moments to read a real bona fide book, and the one I have been busy with is Peter Bernstein’s Against the Gods: the Remarkable Story of Risk (Wiley, 1996). It’s aclaimed all over the place, particularly in risk management circles, but I’d never quite got to it.

Anyway, this is in the intro (p5), and I found it a perfect encapsulation of a core problem in foresight thinking — quantitative vs qualitative methods — well worth retyping out to have on hand for reflection. Here goes:

“The story that I have to tell is marked all the way through by a persistent tension between those who assert that the best decisions are based on quantification and numbers, determined by the patterns of the past, and those who base their decisions on more subjective degrees of belief about the uncertain future This is a controversy that has never been resolved.
The issue boils down to one’s view about the extent to which the past determines the future. We cannot quantify the future, because it is an unknown, but we have learned how to use numbers to scrutinize what happened in the past. But to what degree should we rely on the patterns of the past to tell us what the future will be like? Which matters more when facing a risk, the facts as we see them or our subjective belief in what lies hidden in the void of time? Is risk management a science or an art? Can we even tell for certain precisely where the dividing line between the two approaches lies?
It is one thing to set up a mathematical model that appears to explain everything. But when we face the struggle of daily life, of constant trial and error, the ambiguity of the facts as well as the power of the human heartbeat can obliterate the model in short order.”

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One of the principles of anticipating the future correctly, separating out what will happen from what we think-hope-fear will happen, is to consciously factor in the principle that fundamental human needs don’t disappear. They are bundled, interpreted, and served one way in the present, and this may change in a new era as technologies advance and relationships and associations change. But needs are forever. And often the future goes ‘backwards’ to old, archetypal models that served needs before.

Witness the uptake of ‘feudal’ protection in a competitive, recessionary marketplace, where Wal-Mart is offering rental space insde a new Chicago store to neighborhood businesses. Apparently tenants already include a dog groomer and a fried chicken outlet, and Wal-Mart is going to be inviting in barbers, manicurists, and other local small businesses.

Regional general manager Rolando Rodriguez told the NY Times: “We want the same resurgence of the community…”.

It’s not all about community of course. Wal-Mart is seeking counter-PR to endemic criticism (and evidence) that their megastores kill mom-and-pop shops on which many local jobs and services depend, and is hoping the gambit will revive its six-year stalled bid for the city’s approval of proposed Chicago stores.

Anyway, as one observer, Marissa Johnson, said of the new arrangement: “It’s like sharecropping.”

Yes, this is the return of a feudal model. The lord owns the land and the small guy works his patch, offering a regular tribute. And small guys will jump at it because — in the absence of fundamental challenge to an iniquitous system — having the protection of a lord is better than not having it.

Another need that’s not going away, merely being reinterpreted (ironically back to pre-feudal organization) is our need to mark the darkest night of the year with ritual. Yule is the pagan winter solstice rite centered on a December 21 dusk-to-dawn vigil. It was absorbed into Christmas and not widely practiced for centuries. But now, as reported in the big UK media Christmas pregame show, there’s been a great surge in Yule festivities and attendance. By how much depends on who is quoted but nobody is denying the trend — which more or less mirrors the decline in formal Christian Christmas (secular, gift-giving, tree decorating Christmas is alive and well.)

The need is a constant. The rituals will change, often mining the past.

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In Monday’s Washington Post, under an Op-Ed headed ‘Could America Go Broke?’ columnist Robert Samuelson raises the prospect of the U.S. or another major economy defaulting on its national debt. Says Samuelson: “It’s still a very, very long shot, but it’s no longer entirely unimaginable. Governments of rich countries are borrowing so much that it’s conceivable that one day the twin assumptions underlying their burgeoning debt (that lenders will continue to lend and that governments will continue to pay) might collapse… The question is so unfamiliar that the past provides few clues to the future.”

Well, this raises the question of whether the past tells us anything about the future, and if so what? There’s a common wisdom attributed to Mark Twain (why is it that aphorisms are always attributed to Twain or Winston Churchill?) that goes: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” and this is the position that most educated future-thinkers would hold.

So what would the ‘rhyme’ be? From cases such as Argentina, Russia, South Africa, and many developing world countries over the past 50 years: lenders loose confidence in a country’s ability to repay on its national bonds and stop lending; the country is faced with a choice of drastic spending cuts (great social and humanitarian cost) or major tax increases (pointless, because it stifles business, therefore lowers tax revenue) or default. Going broke, into national “Chapter 11,” suing for time and ‘debt restructuring’ becomes the best among the bad options event though it pretty much ensures a deep and dark recession.
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Thinking the unthinkable

Could this be the future of America? As I’ve written before here and other places, after the ‘unimaginable’ Credit Crunch was ignored due to its ‘low probability,’ it’s a relief to know that remote but plausible outcomes with serious consequences are getting attention, at least in the Washington Post.

Clearly major economies are in a more precarious situation than they were 5 years ago. Too much debt is always precarious, for the smallest household or the biggest country alike. On the other hand, an economy’s size and enduring wealth counts too. As Samuelson observes, it created the unexpected effect in Japan’s case where debt at 200% of GDP (America’s is currently about 40%) should have raised the cost of its debt (lower confidence of repayment) but this hasn’t happened because domestic Japanese households and businesses rather than foreigners have easily (and confidently) bought the debt — and this may well hold true for the U.S. too. In other words, the rhyme may go this way.

The ‘more likely’ future is incremental raising of taxes and lowering of public service provision as Western economies incrementally claw their way back to stability. But at least this default wild card on the margins of plausibility has the oxygen of some attention and this is no bad thing. As with all good foresight work, it predicts nothing, but it does allow us to think through the roadmap to the outcome, and press for the right decisions now, in plenty of time and in a measured way.

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The copy of USA Today, slipped under my Chicago hotel room door on Friday—failing which I would have missed the event entirely—marks the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 putting man on the moon (July 20, 1969). It says: “40 years after Apollo 11: What’s our Next Step?” The strap goes on: “The moon again? Mars? An asteroid? Four decades after the moon landing, NASA seeks a new—and affordable—frontier in space.”

The failed “our-future-in-space prediction” cluster is useful because it is the poster child for bad predicting, nothing less than foresight idiocy in its purest form, worth mentioning only because it helps us to see smaller and more subtle future-thinking mistakes we make routinely.

This is what I said in Future Savvy (Chapter 5):

“The forecasts that surrounded the future of space travel and exploration are perhaps the most high-profile and comprehensively poor set of forecasts ever made, and therefore provide a good vantage point to consider what can go wrong in forecasting. From the 1950s, space was a huge topic of interest. All significant earthbound exploration challenges had been overcome, technology was moving rapidly, and what lay ahead, unconquered, was space. The need to explore it was deeply in the zeitgeist.
“At the same time, the Cold War created the specific situation where beating the Soviets in prestige projects was an important priority, important enough to divert massive resources to it. J.F. Kennedy’s rousing (future-influencing) 1961 prediction of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade motivated and galvanized the United States, and the resulting Gemini and Apollo programs made this not only a human achievement but a successful prediction. As a result, analysts of all stripes were quick to project the trend and predict a moon base, lunar communities by 2000, followed soon by trips to Mars and beyond, and on to the limits of space. . . .
“The last man to set foot on the moon was in 1973. The Space Shuttle tried to maintain forward momentum under the guise of scientific research, not without disaster, and an almost inconsequential international space station has been built. To this day there are many who cry into their soup over the lack of space exploration and conquest. So what happened? The groundswell of prediction was wrong because it failed to see that putting a few U.S. men into orbit did not add enough value to enough peoples’ lives to justify the expense—particularly in the economically uncertain 1970s. In the end, the majority of consumers voted with their wallets to postpone, if not entirely eviscerate, human space exploration.”

One could go into great detail, but simply put, the intertwined elements resulting in this poor view of the future were:

1. Failure to recognize user utility and the choice consumers make in determining the future. That is, for most people the cost of any space venturing is not worth the benefit (i.e. what benefit?) The fact that we “can do it” is hardly relevant. The real futures question is always: do most people want it? In the 1960s space was “worth it” (particularly in that the goal was clear and bounded) because spending billions on a prestige project made sense at a time of (a) absolute US economic prosperity and (b) ideological dispute with the USSR.

2. Projecting trends without considering the strength of underlying drivers. Space exploration was, apparently, on-the-up in the 1950s and 60s. But trends are only as good as the drivers that support them. When the drivers go away (lack of public support due to cost/benefit issues) the trend stops. In fact, there is no real, dependable, trend to space exploration. There was a blip in the 1960s when conditions temporarily favored a national prestige extravaganza. There wasn’t a trend before, and there hasn’t been any since.

3. Forecasting mired in the conditions or spirit of the present, the zeitgeist. Space was important in the golden-era 50s and 60s; and particularly in that it was arena of competition with the Soviets. But it’s always a mistake to assume the framing conditions of the present will exist in the future, and in this case 40 years later, they most certainly don’t.

Don’t hold your breath

What of 40 years time? It is quite likely that “space flip” flights into orbit will be safe and cheap enough to commercialized in the next decade. Unmanned probes (again safe and relatively cheap) will continue, and popular access to their images and experiences will be greatly enhanced. But that’s all that will happen until such time as costs and other conditions of possibility change fundamentally, which implies a completely new form of space travel, of energy, of materials, and of human resilience and longevity. Not in this century.

Wired Science ran a July 20 article “40 Years After Apollo 11, NASA Maps Out the Future,” which puts the best possible spin on  this unmanned-probe future. It is careful to end without crushing the feelings of space junkies, saying: “Any American landing on Mars through the Constellation program would come some time after 2030.” It won’t happen, and here’s another secret: if anyone is going to land anywhere it will be a Chinese person. China still has prestige projects ahead of it, and human space exploration could be one of them.

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Samuel, L., Future: A Recent History, University of Texas Press, 2009

I recently received a copy of Future: A Recent History to review. True confession: what hit me first on picking up the book was (a) “wow, the title Future is not already taken!? And (b) what a fabulous job the University of Texas Press has done producing this book. It is beautifully designed, with an understated Art Deco motif, and carefully laid out with enough text on the page, on delightfully solid paper stock.
It may seem odd to go on about text on the page, but it’s much easier to read like an adult, in paragraphs. So many books, particularly business books, these days appear produced at 14-point, double spacing, like pre-school readers. Makes you wonder…

Anyway, author Larry Samuel’s project is to investigate the history of views of the future from 1920 to the present. (The book has an acknowledged US-centric focus, partially defended by the notion that future-mindedness is “a principle strand in America’s DNA.”) He organizes the book chronologically into six periods between then and now, and shows, with interesting examples, how each period had its own views of the future, and how the views shifted from period to period.

In tracing the history of “tommorowism,” in this way, Future is on a similar track to the classic book in this field: I.F. Clarke’s The Pattern of Expectation 1644-2001 (Jonathan Cape, 1979). It ultimately makes similar points, although Samuel’s argument is obviously drawn from more recent examples. As Samuel puts it: “A look back on how people looked forward reveals that while it possesses certain common themes … the future is not a fixed idea but a highly variable on that reflects the values of those who are imagining it.”

Happily I can say this chimes exactly with the argument of Future Savvy, particularly Chapter 4 “Zeitgeist & Perception,” where I argued how heavily the nature of the present and its topical issues frames how the future is seen (what is forecast, what is aspired to or feared, what counts as a valid method for thinking ahead, and so on). Which means the framing conditions of the present  should be carefully analyzed in assessing the validity of any future view.

Historiography

Historiography – investigating the meta-conditions surrounding what is recorded and how it is interpreted by historians – what counts as “history” and for whom –  is a well-understood part of doing good history. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent standard “futuriography” in the foresight field, despite it being absolutely fundamental to understanding the value of our own predictions as, similarly, highly determined by the epistemic configurations of their production. It is here that Samuel very competently fills a much needed gap.

The practical implication of this, which Future does not get into – it’s not that kind of book – is that to make better predictions (or make valid assessments of others’ predictions) we need to ask stiff questions as to how much of what we foresee is determined by the perspectives of today, and expect the answer to be “very much.” Understanding the limitations and biases of our own perspective is the sine-qua-non of a robust view of what tomorrow will actually bring.

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There’s an interesting Information Week article Google Tracking System Suggests Swine Flu Is Spreading posted yesterday (April 29) that investigates the possible predictive power of Googling (human search) activity, suggesting increased searching / monitoring of swine flu on Google could be predictive of rising levels of infection. Google says country-specific (Mexico) data for 19-25 April shows a spike in flu searches.

Pic: thisislondon.co.uk

Google introduced “Google Flu Trends” (US) in November as a way to visualize correlation between flu infections and flu-related searches. It maintains search levels provide early warning of flu spread because search data can be gathered and analyzed almost instantly, unlike traditional epidemiological reporting methods. (More on the goal of the project is in a post on swine flu on the official Google blog.)

The predictive power of Google spikes is hardly clear. Yes, a spike could suggest increased levels of infection. But it could be cause by media coverage and rising levels of pandemic concern.

Google predicts “no pandemic”

More broadly, however, the Google search phenomenon, and information saturation that goes with it is, I believe, highly predictive in epidemic situations. It predicts they are very unlikely. Generally, knowledge is power. Specifically deep and easily searchable public knowledge of where the epidemic is, and what to do to avoid it, and avoid spreading it, is a new condition in human history, one which in fact reliably predicts that no pandemic will happen. Yes, strains become more virulent and dangerous and even drug resistant, and yes, airlines transport it around the world in hours. But the power of knowledge in the labs and in the public at large is immense and ubiquitous in a way it never was before.

One of the debates in futures studies is how much and in what way to look at the past as a guide to the future. Paul Saffo says: look back at least as twice as far as you are trying forecast, and I agree with that. In thinking about a major modern global health epidemic our minds are in fact deeply conditioned by a 90-year-old event: the 1918 Influenza Pandemic that killed an estimated 50 million worldwide. In that epidemic there were particular conditions, not least four year of devastating war where more were lost to disease than fighting; associated drain on resistance and infrastructure; and forced mobiization of troops under poor conditions, that greatly facilitated the spread of the disease. Most importantly, ordinary people were operating in a knowledge vaccum that is unimaginable today.

This is not to say that we should not be vigilant and prepared. But the future that we most likely face is many-and-regular outbreaks like the swine flu, the avian flu, and so on, which we will move fairly quickly to contain. The dystopia of world pandemic is appealing to the health crisis community and its service providers, but the future will not be history (1918-1920) repeating itself.

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One of the more alarming mistakes in foresight work is that forecasters don’t see themselves as operating within their own world view, and the preconceptions and priorities of their own time. In fact the very idea of foresight – why do it and how to do it – has changed quite markedly through human history. Knowledge of this historiography is of course important in assessing current forecasts. This is why Oona Strathern’s A Brief History of the Future (Robinson, London, 2007) is an important book.

One doesn’t start reading a “Brief History of” book in a series that includes A Brief History of the Birth of the Nazis and A Brief History of British Kings & Queens, without a certain trepidation. But, in fact, A Brief History of the Future is well-considered and well-written summing up of the characters and concerns that have shaped and continue to shape the future studies field.

Strathern, is a British journalist-turned-futurist, based in Vienna. One of the key attributes she brings is a journalist’s (and sub-editor’s) critical “don’t-bullshit-me” faculties, which is welcome in a field that is often short on common sense.

The book is hardly brief (at 300 pages) so there’s no sense that it’s a potted history. And it’s not compromised by what one – alas – expects of this kind of setup: pandering to all characters in positive or equal terms. In fact a key value of the book is its clear-headed and plucky judgment of who the key figures are (and who are not) and what their contributions have each been (vs what they might have thought they were). It is also unusually even-handed in balancing US and European inputs.

The book follows the obvious structure, starting with the oracles of Ancient Greece, Plato, moving through Leonardo de Vinci, and Thomas Malthus and so on through to the 19th century (Jules Verne, Karl Marx, etc.) and on to the present. In this Strathern argues for and operates with a wide definition of futures work – including in the dreamers, social reformers, and sci-fi writers in addition the more formal analysts and planners.

20th Century Weltanschauung
The book really hits its straps in the 20th century – in discussions of Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Arthur C. Clarke, Herman Kahn, Buckminster Fuller, Alvin Toffler, Isaac Asimov, Margaret Mead and many lesser known figures. What is most interesting here is how the links between foresight approaches and the evolving broader existential and political “weltanschauung” of the century is knitted together, inserting “futurology” into the 20th century world of ideas at each point.

Although the book deals with institutions of foresight pretty well, the one angle I missed was the development of foresight education over the past 40 years. Part or full university degrees in foresight methods are an important part of the evolution of the field. Much has been learned in the debates over what and how and where to teach it. Ironically, the book – as intelligent a summary of the “future studies” field as you will find – would be an ideal text for an introductory course in such a curriculum.

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