A photo exhibition, Facing the Impossible, opened at the end of last year in New York. (425 Broadway, 5th floor, NY 10013; to 28 February 2011.)

Just another photography exhibition in NYC? Well, not quite. It’s an industry foresight story too – the survival and revival of Polaroid analog instant photography in a digital world.

Polaroid, for those too young to have heard of it, is a camera system that produces a picture in a few minutes out the back of the camera, no darkroom required.

Polaroid US brought out its first camera in 1948. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2008, closing down its last production plant in Enschede, Netherlands, making 180 employees redundant. But a group of entrepreneurs and ex-employees calling themselves The Impossible Project acquired the plant and have set about making (and improving) Polaroid film. The company reports that 500,000 packs of film, retailing from $15 to over $100 per pack for Polaroid cameras was sold this year. Revenue for 2010 was more than $10m and the number of ex-employees on staff has grown from 10 to 30.

Now a $10m turnover and 30 employees is hardly a business number of consequence for the world. The point is, conventional wisdom says it should not exist at all. Even Kodak stopped making Kodachrome this year, after 70 years. How can anyone be growing sales of analog film in 2010?

The Message in Red Ink

One might say Polaroid US head office could be forgiven for assuming digital media completely trumped its product and exiting the market. But should shareholders be forgiving? Yes the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy amid various complex management issues, but at its heart, red ink is always the product of inability to see and adapt to the future in time (or poor execution, or both.)

What The Impossible Project saw, that Polaroid itself could not see, was that niche, expert, aficionado secondary markets often remain extant and lucrative well after the mass market has moved on. Of course digital photography is the mass product-and-service market of the future. But in the rush to the future, lucrative pockets of specialization remain and this is one of them.

This principle can be seen in the media industry as a whole. Records and record players have not gone away in a CD and iPod world, they have moved to aficionado markets. Printed books and magazines are going this way too. They won’t disappear but they will be a format for niche uses. This is true across other industries and across history too: transportation, for example, has seen eras when horses and bicycles were primary modes of working transport. Their primary function changed, but this opened up lucrative secondary, leisure, and niche industries.

In adapting to the future, opportunities exist in taking retiring mass-market solutions into new industries, or upmarket into niche areas of the same industry.

Creative Adaptation

The irony in this story is that the Polaroid camera and film was always a niche product. It fought giants Kodak and Fuji for a piece of the mass market in analog photography but never became a mass-market solution. (Its competitive advantage was instant-ness; its disadvantage was price and relative quality.) So it didn’t require any great “shift in DNA” by the company leadership to make the moves that Impossible has. But it did require a leadership willingness towards industry foresight and creative adaptation.

Impossible is doing the basics of providing (and improving) film to Polaroid’s installed base of users. It estimates that 300 million working Polaroid cameras still exist. This is the legacy factor. The future doesn’t move as fast as we think.

But more importantly, Impossible is also actively building a future for itself in its new niche — broader artistic and creative industries. In addition to its project space in New York, it has one in Tokyo (and had an exhibition during the Arles Photography Festival.) It is using these spaces as hub for soliciting alliances across visual creative media, promoting analog instant photography in its relationship with other creative industries, including growing beyond Polaroid’s static image legacy.

Promotional projects during the year included the creation of a special film edition with HUGE magazine (Japan), participation at Photokina 2010 Germany with the first 20×24 camera, and cooperation with the band The Decemberists — all growing the future of the product, reaching out to new users and a whole new generation of users.

Source: tradefinance-jobs.com

I’d give the video a miss. It’s Gen-Y dude-immersion to the like, max, and what co-producer Venessa Miemis has to say is much more effectively communicated on her site, which is:

“All the decisions about where I spend my time, attention, and money say something about me. For example: I buy organic food from local farms and products and services from local businesses —(I believe in building resilient communities by supporting local economy.) I have a garden, I fish, I hunt, I brew beer— (I find empowerment, gratification, and joy from understanding where food comes from and how to get it myself.) I recycle—(I understand that we live on a planet with finite resources and I want to reduce my impact.) I don’t shop at Wal-Mart. – (I prefer not to buy products that were produced in a country where people’s labor had to be exploited so I could “save” a dollar.)”

The well-identified trend to ethical consumption is at work here, but Miemis is actually expressing a far bigger consumer trend that in industry foresight workshops I call “identity-building consumption” (which may or may not be ethical.) Ref: “All the decisions about where I spend my time, attention, and money say something about me.”

Miemis continues: “Now, what does my bank say about me? Nothing.”

How might a bank go about articulating customer identity?

“Transparency… All I know about the way my bank works is that I deposit my money there, and then they take that money and go make money off of it. Where is that money going? Where is it being invested? Can I have control over how you use my money? Can I set a standard of where I allow you to invest my money, so I can be proud to say my money is being invested in green technology, or local initiatives, or anything that I care about?

“Intelligent Investing Opportunities… Show me opportunities where I can micro-invest in things I care about. Recommend ways I can save money on the things I already buy regularly. Show me how I can leverage my network and invest with a whole swarm of people. (Think Groupon for investing.) And then make each of these investments a part of my digital identity. I WANT people to know. I’ll wear it like a badge. Give me a service that empowers me to invest intelligently and in a way that represents the ethics I believe in, and I’ll tell everybody about it. This information will become part of ‘Social Credit Score,’ which will be more important than our current credit scores one day.

“Social Network Analysis for Co-Production Opportunities… There are a lot of people out there who want to cooperate and collaborate in order to manifest something together and make their lives and the world a better place. How do we find each other? Could a BANK help hook us up and then provide us with the information and resources we need to take an idea to action? Could we display projects we want to work on that are socially responsible and environmentally sustainable, and the bank links us to the investors that can help actualize it?”

Miemes rails against how at Sibos her “Innotribe’s” manifesto was met with no more than a polite “there-there” pat-on-the-head from gray-haired bankers. That’s to be expected. But if there is a solid principle in industry foresight, it is that the next generation wins in the long run (and the long run is becoming shorter.)

Retail banking, like just about every other retail industry, is being sucked with new generations into Web 2.0, the “Social Web.”

And the Social Web is, fundamentally, a self- (and group) identity-building and identity-expression machine.

So the banking sector has to prepare for a near-term future where it plays an active role in the identity construction and identity articulation of its customers. Here they are shown some important ways to do it. That is, they have been gifted a blueprint of the future of their industry.

In its own words: “Global Voices is a community of more than 300 bloggers and translators around the world who work together to bring you reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media. Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard.”

There are of course other places to get local-blog perspectives on current issues and concerns, but this site appears to be the broadest and best, at least at the moment.

.
Why is this important for thinking adequately about the future?

The biggest problem we have in foresight work is the double-whammy that (a) people, on aggregate, choose and make the future, and (b) we don’t know what they will choose because we don’t adequately listen to their concerns and motivations, or worse, are we are deaf to their motivations because they are outside of our frame of reference.

(a) Yes, the future is influenced by new capabilities, driven by new technologies, but technologies come out of societal perspectives (what are we going to invest in or research towards?) and then adoption (which technologies “make it”) is all about social and economic choices. So what defines the future is what most people want. (Not everyone wants the same thing: that’s what politics is about.)

(b) Share of voice is political too, and in our world some people and companies have vast sway over media channels, but most have no voice. But just because they have no voice doesn’t mean they are not making choices as to (a) above. All it means is that if you’re not listening, the future will surprise you.

A “surprise future” = a lack of mental preparation. Without exception.

It is easier both practically and ideologically to listen to ourselves and our micro-communities of associates online or off, which confirms what we think and how we think. It’s much tougher to absorb alternative perspectives. Global Voices is not perfect. It is still, naturally, the preserve of the literate and educated. But it is a first step out of the frame.

.

The harder task in achieving quality foresight is to judge across such lists what is really going to change the world and therefore the operating environment for most firms, and what is just, well, merely of passing interest. The true test is to get trend impact right, not merely to call the trend.

There is no exact science to this of course. But a good heuristic is to judge the strength of the trend (drivers for vs. blockers against) x change to status quo (how new is this really?) x number of people affected. In this regard, a recent FT article reports on a genuinely world-changing trend.

The story is about how Indian television stations, led by Murcdoch’s Star India and Viacom are writing more independent, assertive roles for women in soap operas to reflect new realities in the Indian middle class. They hope to renew viewer ratings, as this clip explains:

New womens’ roles and aspirations have permeated Western society in the past generation and a half, and have profoundly changed everything from dress to daycare. Now the other 5 billion are going there too.

I would not (I stress) expect the Western model to be followed to the letter. Cultures always interpret world trends and technologies their own way. But billions of girls are growing up to be unlike their mothers in key respects, and will demand industries  — not just the media — move with them, and will reward those that do with unprecedented commercial opportunities. That’s a certain future.

.
The point is, this is not the future of housing. Many hyper-efficient solutions have been designed over the years — many such “machines for living in,” that worked perfectly as rational solutions but failed the social-market adoption test, and therefore did not become part of the future. The future is always what we (as a whole) choose from among what designers and technologists can create.

This prototype will fail it’s future-adoption test. Humans don’t live rationally. If I rolled my desk to the ceiling, I’d be showered with papers and headphones and flying coffee cups. You would too, no doubt.

Having said that, the inventive thinking here is intense and admirable. This prototype is like a good scenario in that it functions in the liminal zone between the plausible and implausible, allowing us to consider options and problems (and their solutions) that otherwise we would be blind to.

I can see some elements of this prototype finding their way into urban hyper-density new-build apartments, and when they do it will be fair to say the “futures thinking” was done here, in this project.
.

Charles Munger

First, let me say, what I like about investors (and managers and entrepreneurs) with long-term track records of success, is it means — it must mean, by definition — they have a high quality view of the future. Not only a high-quality view, but a high quality view that renews itself. There is no doubt that Berkshire Hathaway has consistently over time had a better view of the future than most expert forecasters, policy pundits, and futurists. The record is clear.

Anyway, Munger this week offers a parable about Basicland, a C18 Pacific island colonized by Europeans where: “Property rights were greatly respected and strongly enforced. The banking system was simple… Almost no debt was used to purchase or carry securities or other investments, including real estate and tangible personal property…  Speculation in Basicland’s security and commodity markets was always rigorously discouraged and remained small…

“(But) as their affluence and leisure time grew, Basicland’s citizens more and more whiled away their time in the excitement of casino gambling… Many of the gamblers were highly talented engineers attracted partly by casino poker but mostly by bets available in the bucket shop systems, with the bets now called “financial derivatives.”

And so it goes on, telling the history of America and the route to the Credit Crunch, and potential for new misery going forward, via this parable. He uses the parable as parables have always been used, to say something in ‘make-believe-land’ that cannot be said (or will not be heard) in reality. The folly of Basicland’s citizens and government is much easier to acknowledge than our own. Scenarios of the future are similar in function, similarly allowing mental and institutional ‘permission’ to think the unthinkable and ‘say the unsayable.

The worst investor in America

Munger wouldn’t be the first to say: “Change yer ways or ye be doomed.” Isaiah and many before and since have said that. Nor would he be the first old white guy to espouse traditional ways of doing things. We factor that in. But he does look to basics and basics are important in having a high-quality view of the future. They signal the limits of the excess and reversion-to-the-mean imperatives.

I remember in the 1990s, when I was living in Washington DC, and Warren Buffet was “the worst investor in America” for missing out on the dot.com boom and Nasdaq bonanza. He just stuck to his guns saying, time after time, ‘there are no fundamentals behind these valuations (aka, this is just a casino) and fundamentals will prevail, which of course they did.

Now the brains at Berkshire Hathaway are saying that forums where risk, debt, currencies, etc., are up for speculation are ‘casinos,’ and their players therefore gamblers (rather than, as they would have it, ‘investors), and that they produce little fundamental value and fundamentals will prevail.

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.

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.

Picture: londonfashionweek.co.uk

London Fashion Week, the UK’s slice of the $300-billion global fashion industry, starts today with flash of couture, whirring of camera and, no doubt, glug of Veuve-Cliquot. All the sass and celebrity pizzaz, and the actual catwalk schedule, can be found at londonfashionweek.co.uk

So… it’s teen giraffes tottering around in outrageous stuff, the watered down version of which will be pumped through the supply chain until it appears at your local department store in six-to-nine months. Same as it ever was, right?

In fact, not really. One of the gathering trends of the current era, across many industries, is the empowerment of consumers as ‘taste-makers,’ circumventing designers and specialist advisers. This is currently putting fashion executives through the wringer as “who decides” what is good, what is made and marketed, is being wrested from the fashion elite and from fashion intermediaries (glossy magazines like Vogue and Elle) by the “woman-in-the-street.”

The industry’s longstanding top-down orientation — where “we” told “you” what next year’s ‘look’ will be — is cracking as consumers who can easily access, share, and discuss every fashion preference, including their own, now get ‘networked affirmation’ rather than affirmation from the top.

Internet and mobile communications, and social networking technologies are behind this, of course. Access to style and fashion advice now comes anywhere, anytime. The stuffy catwalk shows are not open to the public (ah, the whiff of elitism still breathes for now,) but as a recent story in the LA Times points out: “Images can be seen online minutes after a designer shows them… The Internet makes it possible not only to read about fashion but to participate in it. The use of sites that enable users to create their own fashion-spreads, share photos of themselves in different outfits and elicit wardrobe advice from their peers is skyrocketing.”

The news for elite arbiters of taste in every industry in the 21st Century: it’s game-over. You will have to participate with your customers in their socially-networked formation of perceptions and opinions, a process you will be able to sometimes lead, but more often have to follow.

I’m thinking about this as I see the Guardian today featuring a story about how “Poundland” has doubled it’s profits. Poundland is a copy-cat of the venerable US institution, the “dollar store,” where everything cost the same price, in this case £1.

Pic: Andrew Fox, The Guardian, August 4, 2009

The merchandising of these stores is not unsubtle. There are definite too-good-to-be-true loss leaders, but these more than offset by the many items that cost pennies wholesale. Fair enough. And recently reported doubling of profits is because more people are buying at these stores (downshifting) due to recessionarly squeeze and/or because of the current “sense of thrift” in the zeitgeist which makes pennywatching more “the done thing.”

But neither merchandising, nor consumer psychology is our primary concern here. From a foresight point of view, the point is that forecasts of 2010 that were around around a decade or two ago didn’t quite get around to saying anything about Poundstretcher leading a healthy economic life. It’s as unsexy as anything, compared to “peak oil” or advancing “singularity,” or nano-babble, and so on into the glorious future – or its polar alternative: crash & burn, soup kitchens, urban warlords rampaging, and so on.

But here we are coming to the end of the decade and a basic retailing gimmick for the squeezed middle-class consumer is well trafficked and very much part of the future. Yes, it’s success correlates with tougher times, but economic cycles will be with us repeatedly through the rest of the century and beyond.

This doesn’t mean there won’t be breakthroughs in technology or in consumer behavior. In fact, looking at the picture, one surely would not have got a pound for any amount of plain bottled water in a retail environment 20 years ago. Things do change. They just change slowly, or unevenly, against the gritty reality of savvy agregate choices made by a wary (global and growing) middle class.

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.

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.”

It was in this spirit that I picked up the UK launch issue (aka May 2009) of Wired. Actually it’s not the first launch. Wired was in the UK ten years ago, but Condé Nast withdrew it in the dot.com crash. In the US at the time, I remember when Wired, the poster child of the Silicon Valley / Nasdaq bonanza, was almost as thick as a phone book each month. But those days were soon over.

Anyway, who could resist an offering that was about to tell me about my “Life in the future. “Fake Meat, Robots and Electro-Sex: the World is About to Change.” On the cover are, I kid you not, flying cars!

Now, I wouldn’t take this stuff seriously for a moment, if everyone else promised not to. But they don’t. So here we go. In the “What’s Next?” cover story 46 experts make 99 predictions about the next 40 years, and none of them will happen, or not in the time frame expressed.

Oh, moon settlement?

I shrink from sharing the list. Meal replacement patches, check. Moon settlement, check. The male pill, check. Every techno-fantasy of the jockish sci-fi world, check. Well, let’s stop on the male pill for a moment. Can we not do it? Sure we can do it – today. What’s stopping it is not technology. It is attitudes (machismo, essentially). So Wired experts are telling us that this will go away in a decade. Puh-leez.

I hardly need mention there’s no method given behind any of these expert forecasts.

Don’t you think Wired should be asking themselves why, in 2009, they are producing 186 pages of dead tree and carting it around the country in carbon-emitting trucks? Technology-vision may lead you to a view of the future. But it’s unreliable. The future is determined by what consumers are ready for. Well, that’s one of the 20-or-so key forecast filtering principles of Future Savvy.

Perhaps we should look at the cover story for what it is really about – which is selling magazines. Because, there’s no doubt that tech is changing, and many new capabilities are coming on stream, and this is very, very fascinating to imagine uses for. And this fascination is what Wired packages and sells. Don’t bet any money on the predictions though, certainly not their timeline.

But sturdy in some areas

Aside from the predicting lark, it’s a good magazine of its kind. The features are well-conceived, well-written, for example, one about how the BBC iPlayer business was built; a feature on sea salvage; a profile of PayPal founder Elon Musk; the David X Li formula and how it mis-calculated risk, and so on. Great stuff. Actually quite a sturdy business-oriented-view of techno-change, if you can get past the boys-with-toys riff of the magazine as a whole.

So, actually, much to like. Just, please, don’t think a lad’s mag is going to tell you anything coherent about the future.

Amazon the new Wal-Mart? pic:Huffington Post

According to yesterday’s LA Times Amazon says the whole thing was a cataloging error. But when author Mark Probst had previously contacted Amazon for an explanation, he got this: “In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists.”

Aside: Everyone is trying to figure out what Twitter is good for, or how it will be used, and it has become clear that one application is to quickly aggregate mass protest, evidenced in the anti-Amazon outrage, see Twitter “Amazonfail.”

Author Maya Reynolds has been connecting the dots in the future of publishing, watching Amazon move via acquisitions such as Abe Books, Audible, BookFinder, BookSurge, Brilliance Audio, FillZ, GoJaba, Library Thing, Mobipocket and Shelfari.

She is among various industry watchers who claim, with fair evidence, that Amazon is following a “Wal-Mart” strategy – the well-documented essence of which is to gain enough retailer power to be able to pressure suppliers (telling them what to make or what to charge, or exacting special discounts) to achieve better retail prices and get more retailer power, in a reinforcing spiral which, inter alia, squeezes all the healthy mom-’n-pop-shop diversity and other balances of power out of the industry.

In a post of July 08 she paints the full dystopia scenario:
“1. First, the smaller presses, POD presses and e-publishers will disappear as Amazon’s margins squeeze them out of business. Amazon will help the process along by offering better terms to authors if they will use BookSurge’s POD press and Kindle’s e-book to publish. Even if authors don’t embrace Amazon initially, as their publishers go out of business, they will be forced to do so.
“2. Brick-and-mortar stores have two constraints which Amazon does not: (1) limited shelf space and (2) a limited geographic range. Bookstores carry books “on spec,” filling their shelves with stock they hope readers will seek. Amazon, on the other hand, has unlimited virtual shelf space and unlimited geographic reach. Amazon does not have to warehouse stock. They can wait until a book is actually ordered and the money is in hand before using a digital file and BookSurge to print the book. Because they cannot match the deep discounts Amazon offers, bricks-and-mortar bookstores–already under siege–will be squeezed out of existence.
“3. Like Wal-Mart, Amazon will continue to apply pressure on publishers to give more favorable terms. Wal-Mart’s suppliers used cheaper materials and out-sourced to cheaper overseas labor. As the publishing houses’ profit margins are squeezed, their cost-cutting efforts will take three directions: (1) Focus even more attention on signing best-selling authors whose work is guaranteed to sell; (2) Begin to pressure their mid-list authors to accept lower advances and lower royalty percentages; and (3) Sign fewer and fewer new authors because of the uncertainty and the expense of growing a new writer.

Where will they go?

“4. Mid-list authors and new authors, unable to either find a publisher or unwilling to accept the low royalties, will seek to self-publish. Where will they go? Since, by that time, most of the self-publishing houses will have gone out of business, they will go to Amazon’s BookSurge or to Amazon’s e-book division, Kindle. Amazon will welcome them.
“5. The next death on the food chain will be the publishers and agents themselves. First the mid-level publishers will die. Well-known agents and the larger houses will be protected for a period of time by their best-selling authors who are loyal to them. However, as those cash cows die off, so will the agents and larger houses. A new paradigm will emerge: Amazon as both publisher and retailer.
“6. Eventually Amazon will have so much power, they will be able to decide WHAT is worthy of being published. Welcome to the future of publishing.”

Is this the future of publishing? The logic of unregulated industry power suggests it is. But Future Savvy says response – regulation – is also likely. As with Microsoft and many before them, when Amazon gets too powerful, anti-trust regulators should be in business. But only if their hand is pushed. Articulate and persuasive dystopias such as Reynolds’ are the single most powerful mechanism by which the word is spread (spread it! forward it, tweet it!) so that enough consumers get to see and believe threatening future outcomes early enough, and pressure regulators to act.

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.

Guinness' view of the pub of 2259. Image credit: Chris Bainbridge

The Guinness Pub-of-the-Future is a St. Patrick’s day (March 17) promotion. Nothing wrong with a little bit of fantasy foresight. But what they come up is so “20th-century-futurism” it’s hilarious. Among various reports on the project – for example in the Telegraph – the following features are foreseen:

- robotic doorman, greets you by name
- cash obsolete; orders via RFID; payments deducted automatically
- your product tailored to you on the spot
- touch-sensitive tables, send your order straight to the bar
- socializing via virtual / hologram technology
- a running tally of the number of units consumed.

Yawn. Even on it’s own terms (minimal constraints of realism) this is a totally derivative piece of foresight. These “innovations” are the staples of an infotech view of the future, and they have all been thought and spoken of countless times. Also many of the elements and services cited are already here, or not more than a decade away. What we have is the current pub assumptions + digital steriods, while the year 2259 will be, truly, another world.

The limits to growth
But all this leads us to more interesting industry foresight problem. Will there be pubs in even a generation, never mind 250 years? What the Telegraph dryly observes at the bottom of its report is that 39 pubs are closing every week Why? A number of driving forces are coming together:

First is strict drink-driving limits, which makes “the local” literally local or nothing. Second, pubs in the UK have traditionally been a refuge from housing that was poor and/or underheated. Unprecedented waves of affluence (credit-crunch notwithstanding) have led to widespread housing “do-ups.” It’s now a valid option for most people to spend their leisure time at home and entertain at home.

Then there’s the where’s-my-friend trend. You’re likely to go down the pub if your friends are there, but not if they are where most people’s friends are: on Facebook.

The social-legislative clock
Fourth, no matter how you dress it up, pubs are retail outlets. So, like all retail they are under the cosh in a Wal-mart / Tesco world. The price gap between store and pub has become too great for most consumers to cross with good conscience.

Which brings us to the current price-floor legislation bid. Alcohol is a huge social cost in terms of health care and violence. Drink costs the NHS £3bn a year, and the total price of alcohol to the taxpayer is estimated at five times that. Eventually these costs will become unjustifiable so, like smoking before it, the social-legislative clock is ticking for booze. As the 2-martini lunch has become the 2-seltzer lunch, the trend to social stigmatization is clear, and legislators will follow (not with Prohibition, but with a much more subtle community-endorsed squeeze).

Like the good politician he is, Gordon Brown won’t let his party get ahead of the trend. But the trend is clear and it bodes ill for pubs.

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.

Conference: March 19-21

Tim Brown of IDEO, the the industrial design firm, recently published a Harvard Business Review piece Design Thinking – investigating designer-methods in business innovation. At Davos last month there was a “Global Agenda Council/ Design,” featuring Newsweek’s Bruce Nussbaum and built-environment design firm ARUP’s head of foresight, Chris Leubkeman. (The general agenda may be found here.) Next month, the Association of Professional Futurists are having a “Futures by Design”  conference in association with The Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA.

And so on. I’m going to be blogging more about this. But for now I wanted to put out a note-to-self I wrote on the issue about five years ago, trying to briefly define how the fields relate to each other, and what the crossover is. Here goes:

The tools of design and planning dovetail closely with those of industry foresight. The overlap and interaction between these two disciplines is not commonly understood, and so the methods and process insights from design professions that could augment the range of strategic foresight tools is often ignored.

1. Beyond aesthetics
Sunday supplements and glossy magazines often use “design” to mean style and fashion. While aesthetics is important, good design means much more than how products appear. It is about creating better processes, interactions and solutions for human benefit. This often involves experimenting with new technologies, envisaging possibilities under conditions of uncertainty and complexity, exploring and comparing alternatives, and determining the best and most durable solution for the long term.

2. Future focus
Whether planning a building, or redesigning a product, or innovating a process, the designer is called on to anticipate a solution that caters to future needs ­ often responding to futures issues, for example environmental-sustainability pressures and changing social values. In other words, design methods, like futures tools in general, form the bridge between current products, systems and practices and what it will be required and desired in the future.

In achieving this future focus, designers, like good “futurists,” must use techniques of imagination, creativity and intuition to generate and evaluate future outcomes. Like futures professionals, designers are called on to practice original thinking, imagine the world differently and see possibilities that others don’t. They are required to take risks, negotiate change and challenge the status quo under conditions of ambiguity and uncertainty. And like good foresight work, design succeeds only if it finds the right tradeoffs between technology possibilities, economic realities, and social needs.

3. Rendering
More than merely anticipating the future, designers and planners are practical agents of visual imagination, creating the blueprints for the objects and experiences of tomorrow. From product creation to urban renewal, designers and planners have tools and experience translating abstract future concepts and ideals into visible or tangible form ­- “making the invisible visible.” Through this rendering function they are primary agents in articulating the future, and therefore in helping us see and negotiate (or refuse) the transition.

4. Systemic innovation
Design is about systems and practices as much as products: better-designed systems improve utility, cut costs, and improve resource use. Designers play a key role in the organizational innovation process as a whole, including the development of integrated product and services, or inventing new types of value chains, alliances, and collaborations.

In sum, much of what foresight professionals are trying to do every day is already being done by design professions. Their methods and process insights should be integrated into the foresight field as a whole.

The environmental pitch is a new salvo in the old “war on drugs,” which has been waged backwards and forwards, over decades now, without being won. It’s worth stopping to think why it has not been won, because it’s a salutory lesson in thinking about the future. It has nothing to do with the morals of “pushers” or willpower of “addicts” or the “the youth of today.” It is perfectly explained by the reinforcing loop (aka viscious/virtuous cycle) that dominates the drug-prevention system. This can be diagrammed as follows:

Alternatively the identical idea may be represented as a “fixes that fail” archetype, as defined in “The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook” (Peter Senge et al, Doubleday, 1994, p125).

For more on systems thinking see The Systems Dynamics Society. The role of systems thinking in improving our understanding of change (or non-change) is also the topic of Chapter 8 of Future Savvy.

So, yes, these are simple charts. We could make them more complex by filling in details of all agents and institutions at work in drug supply, demand, and prevention – but this would only elaborate, not alter the logic of the system. Either way, the chart allows us to see the wood for the trees, which is that drugs and their prevention are in a reinforcing loop. While it appears that preventive laws and their enforcement will lower drug use, in fact law enforcement constrains availability, pushing up the price, which makes production more attractive, which creates incentives to farm (incl, in rainforests), which raises supply, which leads to drug pushing (marketing by another name), which leads to drug trial, usage and addiction, therefore social concern, and therein renewed pressure for stricter legislation and crackdown, which sends the loop round once again. (There are many side effects of this main loop, including increased street crime – funding drug habits; the creation and enrichment of gangs and warlords; and so on.)

Scratching doesn’t help

Nobody in their right mind wants this to happen. But even a kindergarden child can see that policing and jailing, like a good scratch, feels good in the short term but just drives the wheel of the problem in the long term. What are the alternatives? From time to time pressure is brought to bear on production, for example, trying to obliterate coca or poppy fields, or disrupt supply chains. But this is also hopeless because as long as there is a good price to be had, the systemic reality is that drugs will be grown, produced, and shipped. What shows great promise is tackling price. The legalization lobby is all about capping price by making drugs legal, supervised, available, and free (or low-price), removing the superprofits from the industry and thereby blunting the primary interest of drug bosses and warlords. (This is what happened when Prohibition was repealed).

From a systemically informed viewpoint, only a solution that changes the system (interrupts the reinforcing cycle) can change the future. In other words nothing significant will occur in the future until the system changes, and removing drug barons’ price interest is the only way to do it. Until this happens the savvy forecast must be: no change.

Educating consumers

But the public is not ready for such policies. So we are left with the holding pattern we are in. And this includes exhorting the consumer, as Vice-President Calderón is doing. (The same story and interview was featured earlier this week on Radio 4′s “Today” Show.) He’s targeting the middle class, occasional, and recreational drug users who, he says, otherwise recycle, and compost, and “drive a hybrid” and buy fair trade coffee, and so on, and so should be desist from drug use because of it’s environmental impact.) This is not the first time that consumers have been “educated” – school and public education programs consistently target, inform, and discourage consumers and would-be consumers (including, of course, in the laughable “Just Say No” campaign.) All good or at least harmless work, in a good cause.

Into this Calderón has added a new-to-the-industry category of demotivator – the environment. Sure, this should work in giving middle-class consumers pause. But if environmentally sensitive cocaine customers are a big part of the market — and it’s hard to tell if they really are — expect producers to just respond with Green reassurance, real or fake: “No trees were ploughed under in the creation of your snort.”

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.”

No longer. The paradigm was broken by the Hans Rosling (Gapminder) video “Debunking Myths About the Third-World,” 2006. By Rosling’s own admission, his analysis is not based on new or better data. The (UN) data has always been there (yes now it’s becoming more available). But the seachange is new software which makes it easy to filter and present it in dynamic, graphic form. And, no surprise, this is popular. According to Gapminder, this video has seen by 500,000 people, not bad for a 20-minute treatise on perceptions of developing world countries.

Data turned into dynamic moving pictures is, one might say, required in our era (trends: visual literacy, short attention span, computing power) so thankfully we can expect more of this. What’s important, for forecast evaluation purposes, is the power of explanation and mental-model challenge that the improved communication provides. As Rosling says of his Swedish graduate students: “Their problem was not lack of data, it was preconceived ideas” (an outdated world view of “1st world” vs “3rd world.”) An endless amount of poring over dusty tables of figures would be unlikely to change that. But it’s hard to watch Rosling’s moving bubbles and not have one’s paradigm shaken.

Another site, in a similar vein, is worldmapper, a University of Sheffield initiative. Worldmapper communicates hundreds of world indicators, from infant mortality to military spending and so on, by manipulating the size of territory of each country to indicate presence or absence of the variable in question, as the following maps show:

Prisoners as percentage of population

Girls not at secondary school

Strikes and lockouts, 2002

Again it is basically UN data that is being sourced, but now presented in a way that cuts through the obscurity tells and the story much more vividly. As we know, humans “get it” better and faster via images than via words or figures. It challenges our perceptions in a way that figures in dusty tables cannot. They payoff is it’s harder to miss what’s really going on. So we have a better view of the world: our mental model aka ‘paradigm” more closely approximates reality. That means we will make better assumptions going forward which will, on balance (no guarantees of course), convert into better predictions.

This is the item:

There’s nothing new about this of course – the product has been around for a while, and ways to take vinyl and digitize it have been offered since the CD became the music industry standard in the mid-1980s. What’s interesting is that it is still being offered in 2008, more than 20 years after the technology transition. And still being bought, despite a sticker price of gpb 299 (nearly $600. In fact, this is the special newspaper-tie-in deal price.) The producers and marketers have, no doubt, done their homework: there are still enough people out there with vinyl records to justify a product and a campaign, including big newspaper spots that don’t come cheap.

What does this tell us about the future, and about predictions? It illustrates a key principle in thinking circumspectly and more accurately about the future. Legacy investments and legacy situations are a reality. They often represent a significant slice of daily practice or market share, well beyond the time when things have, officially, moved on. For all practical purposes, in any future the past continues to exist for a long time.

A slow and measured exit
This is common sense. But often missed by breathless techo-forecasters whose eyes are fixed on the next new thing. The implication of many forecasts is, when a new technology emerges into the market (which often takes longer than expected) that is also when previous solutions fall away. Not so. Yes, sometimes a new product is clearly advantageous, and adoption is rapid and pervasive. But when there are real investments in prior systems and technologies, these typically work their way out of people’s lives slowly, often over generations. The transition takes longer than we think it will.

While they are still part of the picture, legacy systems work against change (“This is working fine for me, why should I shift?” or “I’ve invested heavily in this, I can’t afford to shift”). On the other hand, as evidenced by the LP2CD in 2008, opportunities in the legacy system, or in facilitating a transition to the new system, may exist and be significatn long after everyone’s attention has moved on.

There are legacies in all kinds of products and services. A case that is currently pertinent, as discussed in Future Savvy, is the existence of deep legacies in the automobile industry and gasoline-petroleum supply chain. Both petroleum supply constraints and carbon emissions worries are driving hybrid engines, new fuels, and renewable forms of energy (technology is not the obstacle here) but the reality is that we are all deeply invested in a legacy petroleum-automobile system, from the well to the refinery to the factory to the forecourt. Even when new / alternative energies are proven, reliable, and equal in price and performance, the legacy will continue to exist, and it will erode gradually, as companies or consumers slowly renew their investment over time. Of course regulatory or social pressure can accelerate the incremental process, but nothing can make it vanish.

This means, in this example, there’s no possibility of a sudden change in individual land-based transport solutions. Whatever comes along will have to emerge into and live side-by-side with past systems and infrastructure for a very long time.

Legacy as luxury
Here’s another principle of legacy systems surviving into the future. There are many examples where a surpassed technology remains in existence, but moves into a niche or luxury market. The car replaced the bicycle and the horse, but both continue to enjoy massive popularity. In the developed world, more bicycles are sold than ever in history, but these are primarily for exercise or leisure. Horses, once widely distributed through society as instruments of work, are still part of a very active industry, but this industry is about leisure and/or gambling. Similarly, electricity replaced candles as our primary means of illumination, but candles are everywhere – associated with mood and romance rather than functionality. Ball-point pens squeezed the fountain pen off the table, but that merely freed the fountain pen to become an icon of status and refinement.

So far so good. Tracking technology change is an important stage in scanning the external environment and anticipating sources or change and/or disruption. But no technology ever changed itself. History is littered with fabulous mind-bending, world-changing technologies that didn’t make it out of the lab. In fact, technologies only change because humans or human institutions want them to change AND (two separate hurdles here) they allow them to change.

Most people, most of the time, want technologies to change because they change for the better, improving products and services and/or making them cheaper. Companies want new technologies because improvements offer new sales options and (sometimes) industry competitive advantage, among other things. Societies express the desire for technology to go forward by stimulating and facilitating change in many ways (for example through government or industry funding of R&D or protecting intellectual property or making capital markets more transparent.)

Technology filtered by human choice
Once a technology breakthrough emerges, that’s hardly the end of the story. In fact it is still very much the beginning. New technologies of any importance are subject to public scrutiny and choices. Individually, or as a society, we ask ourselves, is this technology good for us? Debates happen, and power and politics and regulation takes its course, but one way or another technologies that most people like – mobile phone’s for example – will go forward while technologies such as GMOs will stall. Also, in a market economy, technologies are inescapably subject to consumer economics: those that raise user benefit (pass a buyer;s cost-benefit analysis) will be adopted. Those that don’t sit in the lab.

In other words, technology possibility is a matter of science and engineering, and the possibility frontier is expanding all the time, but the road from possibility to actuality is the rocky road of human ideas, preferences, and choices. Technology change means technology adoption, that is, it is a form of social change.

Why is this distinction important? Because one of the main reasons forecast fail is they see the technology possibility frontier as the future, underestimating the forces of social triage. There are two sites that I love that illustrate this wonderfully. Check out Paleo-Future (A Look into the Future that Never Was) and Modern Mechanics (Yesterday’s Tomorrow Today). Both are crammed with failed forecasts of this type. This is not to say that we cannot forecast usefully – much more to come on this in this journal – but it does give us pause in viewing many of today’s techno-inspired forecasts which make the same type of error. (Pics credit to the sites mentioned.)