Posted by Adam Gordon on May 21, 2010 in all, design, innovation, lifestyles & values, scenario planning
I’m taken with these pictures of an experimental apartment created by institutes at the University of Karlsruhe, as featured in ArchDaily and Detail.
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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.
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Posted by Adam Gordon on May 18, 2010 in all, economy & finance, foresight tools & methods, leadership, policy, scenario planning, strategic foresight, systems dynamics
The short-term future in South Africa is the Fifa Soccer World Cup, and at the moment it is really hard to get anyone to see or think beyond it. Football is life. Nevertheless a few hundred intrepid thinkers gathered in Cape Town earlier this month to consider South Africa in 2030, under the auspices of the World Future Society, South Africa Chapter, and its very capable leader Mike Lee.
I was lucky enough to be asked to do the opening address at the conference, and even luckier in that this Web site: South Africa – The Good News summarized some of what I and others said:
“Adam Gordon, Foresight Project Director and author of “Future Savvy” gave us some pointers:
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“The ‘BIG’ question he asks is ‘when do we influence the future and when do we adapt?’ There are big predictable forces out there (like population growth / the diminishing availability of oil etc), and there are big unpredictable forces out there (ja, well no fine!). Importantly, we can design our ability to influence and we can design the way we adapt. It is critical that we are able to do both.
“But managing the future is more than just about scenario planning, it is also about the implementation of the plan. It is about developing a methodology that prioritises, engages with stakeholders, and enables proactive actions on the ground.
So how?
Some important considerations (from various speakers):
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“What is critical is the foresight process, it must be well-informed so that the implementation strategies that follow have buy-in, are doable, are relevant and far-reaching. There is a very real danger of visions being disconnected, unachievable and, at the end of the day, a pipe-dream.”
Dr Elizabeth Dostal talked of a stakeholder democracy in which she promoted the design of a matrix that recognised different stakeholder levels on the vertical axis and different environmental dimensions on the horizontal axis. A multi-level, multi-dimensional model.
“Imagine” she said, “putting four Nobel Peace laureates together and asking them what the causes of global conflict are. One may argue poverty, another ideology, another resources, and another greed. In no time, they would all be in different silo’s defending their view, in one sense they are all right, but in another sense they have not looked at the whole picture. A multi-level, multi-dimensional model would reveal this, the gaps in their logic, and the opportunities for agreement.”
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Apr 14, 2010 in all, forecast filtering, Future Savvy, managing uncertainty, Perils of Prediction, scenario planning, strategic foresight
I couldn’t resist reposting this yesterday’s bit o’ fluff from the cleantech news portal Greenbang, itself reproduced from Forum for the Future, first, well because it cites yours truly; but even more agonizingly because the headline is exactly what I should have called Future Savvy if I knew the first thing about marketing, which I obviously don’t.
So may I say, this is what I was trying to say: When trying to predict the future, watch for dog poop!
Or perhaps: apparently helpful guides to the future are often dog poop disguised as chocolate, and here’s how to know the difference.
Something like that.
Note that this Greenbang story, below, is damaged by letting the most extreme predictions (the howlers) stand in for the general item. Prediction howler-spotting is sobering, but misses how many people got the future right, or right enough to make excellent decisions, and therefore overly damages the foresight field.
Also, howlers are actually the low-hanging fruit. Being future savvy is ultimately about the more subtle job of correcting weighing apparently very credible and well-founded predictions, some of which are excellent, but others of which are far flimsier than they appear.
There are various other minor problems such as not knowing the difference between the Gartner Hype Cycle and Zeitgeist bias, etc. And I would never call myself, not even in my most self-deprecating moments, a “futurologist.” But anyway, as I said, just a bit of fun:
Greenbang (13th April 2010) by Trish Lorenz & Martin Wright: Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” Niels Bohr’s words are a wise warning to reckless forecasters.
“Combining a nuclear reactor with a home boiler is no longer a problem. It would heat and cool the house, provide unlimited hot water and melt the snow from sidewalks and driveways. All that could be done for six years on a single charge of fissionable material costing about $300.” — Robert Ferry, US Institute of Boiler and Radiator Manufacturers, 1955
“Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality in ten years.” — Alex Lewyt, President of vacuum cleaner company Lewyt Corp, also 1955
Lewyt and Ferry both stumbled into a risky habit of all amateur futurists: extrapolating from present trends. In this case, they were caught up in the surge of excitement over the rise of nuclear power. They were not alone. In the tech-fuelled optimism of the ’50s, magazines, radio and the infant TV were buzzing with predictions of flying cars and lunar settlements.
They had fallen victim to what later became known as the Gartner Hype Cycle. This maps the enthusiasm and subsequent disillusionment typical in the introduction of new technology — a useful reality check for those caught up in “irrational optimism.”
By contrast, there are those whose feet are too firmly rooted in present realities, and fail to see how innovation can combine with social changes to speed the widespread adoption of new technology.
“The Americans need the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.” — Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer, Royal Mail, 1878
“The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty, a fad.” — President of the Michigan Savings Bank, advising Henry Ford’s lawyer not to invest in Ford Motors, 1903
It is difficult to consider any factor that doesn’t apparently exist at the time of making a prediction, but that’s essentially what looking ahead requires. It wasn’t all that long ago when people were predicting a bright future for teletext and fax machines. Few would have anticipated that both would be made almost obsolete by the internet and email. And yet the weak signals were there for those who chose to hear them. A fax machine, after all, is simply a modem with a rather complex print interface attached. It only evolved as it did because people were unused to reading information solely on screen, and computers were too big to carry around with them. Once laptops took off in the early ’90s, the fax was doomed.
“There is no reason why anyone would want a computer in their home.” — Ken Olson, Chairman, Digital Equipment Corp, 1977
Australian Senator Dr Russell Trood sums it up neatly when he says: ” ‘Nowism’ is a serious occupational hazard for those in the prediction game.”
Today’s futurologists no longer try to predict a single outcome for the future; instead they map a variety of scenarios. For Adam Gordon of Future Savvy, scenario-based thinking gives people “permission to think through alternative outcomes without necessarily predicting them.” Instead of trying to forecast precisely what might happen, he says, “we can ask ‘What if it does?,’ and then explore the outcomes and our responses.” Such thinking characterises much of the strategy adopted by forward-looking governments on tackling climate change.
James Goodman, head of Futures at Forum for the Future, agrees: “People think it’s the output that’s important, but actually it’s the process.” And, he adds, “All future planning has uncertainty at its heart.”
Or as Martin Raymond, Strategy and Insight Director at The Future Laboratory, says, “We always try to spot the dog
poop in our forecast.”
Greenbang Editor’s note: This was a guest article by Trish Lorenz and Martin Wright at Forum for the Future. This piece originally appeared in Green Futures, which is published by Forum for the Future and is the leading magazine on environmental solutions and sustainable futures. Its aim is to demonstrate that a sustainable future is both practical and desirable — and can be profitable, too.
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Nov 24, 2009 in all, failed predictions, managing uncertainty, Perils of Prediction, risk management, scenario planning, strategic foresight, trend tracking, wildcards & black swans
We owe a debt to Nassim Taleb for memorably encapsulating the demerits of predicting by extrapolating trends as “The Turkey Problem,” and now seems the moment to reiterate it:
Imagine you are a turkey. Every day someone comes to feed you. Every day you get bigger. Your portion sizes get bigger too, brought by a nice man at regular intervals. You extrapolate the trend and you confidently predict a bigger you, with more to eat. Regularly too.
But what happens is … Thanksgiving. Or Christmas
Taleb, N., The Fourth Quadrant: a Map of the Limits of Statistics, Edge Foundation, September 2008
The hard reality for those who predict the future by extrapolating trends (and those gullible enough to believe them) is that even if our turkey had excellent data points (carefully observed and accurately recorded in, for example, a time series analysis) and, moreover, even if our turkey was a mathematically sophisticated — not merely simply projecting trends, but applying all the latest modeling techniques, from moving averages to compound regression — he is still going to be wrong about the future. Dead wrong.
All the data analysis in the world, all the fancy computer software, all the consulting time paid for, and he is still a dead duck.
Ouch. The lesson: there may be (or, vexingly, may not be) something outside the trend, a framing condition, which where it does exist is invisible within the trend projector’s mental model. The only way to get a view of the future that is “robust to Thanksgiving” is (a) to question assumed framing conditions, for example through properly done scenarios, and (b) to hold a view of the future which assumes fundamental ‘game-changing’ surprises can and will occur.
If, as they say, “the trend is your friend” it is assuredly only your fair-weather friend.
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Nov 19, 2009 in all, decision-making, emerging technologies, failed predictions, foresight tools & methods, Future Savvy, Perils of Prediction, scenario planning, strategic foresight, technology change
In a recent Times article ‘The future was never going to be the C5‘ actor-comedian Ben Millar offers a familiar criticism of foresight work. Inter alia he says: “For all our achievements in art, science, and technology, the human race has always been spectacularly bad at predicting the future. Literature is littered with shockingly wide-of-the-mark utopias, dystopias, shiny suits, flying saucers and whole meals contained in a single pill. As a child of the Seventies, I was taught that as an adult in a world run by machines my main challenge would be how to spend my endless hours of leisure time…”
Yes, Ben. I’m sure you know this has all been said before ad nauseam. But more importantly, 40 years on many lessons have been learned, and it wouldn’t run foul of quality journalism standards to reflect this.
First, let’s be clear: nobody can predict the future. Anyone who says they can is a charlatan. Also, yes, unconscionably dreadful and irresponsible predictions have been made and are continually being made. But there are three problems with the ‘no-flying-car-so-there-we-can’t-predict-the-future’ argument:
(1) The kinds of predictions Millar cites are a product of a particular moment in Western thought and therefore foresight. The 1960s and early 70s were a time of Post-War American emergence, unleashing for a while a techno-futurist predictive rapture, most of which has indeed proved to be rubbish. There are still people, very famous talking-head futurists, promoting techno-rapture for the 21st century (caveat emptor) but as a whole the foresight field has moved on to become much more circumspect about what can be predicted.
Balancing techno-fantasy
Foresight practitioners are these days more likely to balance technology wowee with economic, social, and environmental friction; see systemic (often indirect or counter-intuitive) effects where once only simple cause-and-effect was seen; and create scenarios of key alternative outcomes rather than predict one.
(2) The second thing that is missed in gleefully deriding foresight work, is how many people and institutions get it right, or right enough. It’s axiomatic that in order to be successful a person or organization must have correctly assessed both key changes and rate of change in their operating environment. To take a famous case, as quoted in Future Savvy, while Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1972 erroneously forecast super-sonic passenger air travel, Herb Kelleher, founder of SouthWest Airlines, foresaw the low-cost air travel industry. Bingo. Billionaire. Similarly, behind every success one can find future thinking that, while sometimes latent, was present and correct.
(3) The purpose of foresight work is misunderstood. We cannot predict the future and it’s pointless to try. We can only assess signals of change, trends, and potential for surprises and reversals, including challenging our all-too-easily calcified mental models, and take this into a process of understanding alternative outcomes and pre-considering best strategic actions. In other words, actively stimulating the investigation and analysis of future conditions in order to create the basis of better decision-making today.
In fact sometimes the ‘strategic conversation’ that results from poor predictions is instructive to managers. As I say to clients: the goal of foresight work is better decisions not better predictions.
Back-street abortionists
The reality is that there is good and bad foresight work. Yes, some futurists are the technical and moral equivalent of back street abortionists. But the good work remains, and quality foresight is a critical advantage to decision-makers. The key thing is to be able to tell good foresight work from bad.
Simplistic trashing of foresight work en bloc ignores the weight of case evidence that people and organizations can improve their management of future uncertainty and/or create a situation where they manage the future better than competitors. Further, it encourages managers to fly blind into changing environments, often resulting in spectacularly poor decisions that deeply and widely punish their dependent stakeholders.
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Oct 19, 2009 in 2015, all, economy & finance, failed predictions, foresight tools & methods, managing uncertainty, scenario planning, strategic foresight
One of the benefits of scenario-based future thinking is the ‘permission’ to think through alternative future outcomes without necessarily predicting them. ‘Predictors’ focus, by contrast, on isolating the highest probability future in order not to have to think through or plan for less likely outcomes.
Predictions of the dollar’s demise are as old as the greenback itself of course, but over recent weeks the specter of the dollar heading way way below its trading range — a dollar crunch — has entered the zone of the credible, or, in scenario terms, the ‘cone of plausible uncertainty.’ That means decision-makers with lots at stake are taking it seriously.
Like the British pound, the dollar has been under a cloud due to perceptions of economic fallout from the credit crunch and global recession, but particular questions about the US currency have recently surfaced, driven by reports [Robert Fisk's 'The Demise of the Dollar' story in The Independent (Oct 6)] that “Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council” (Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar).
The subtext is far from merely financial. Practically, it would mean that on any day, the real cost of oil to US consumers and businesses would go up or down depending on the strength of the currency. This is something America is not used to. But, more deeeply, dropping dollar-denomination of oil is a direct shot across the bows of Washington’s say over oil affairs, and the hegemony of the dollar as the dominant global reserve currency.
De-dollarizing oil would not in itself push the US currency below its 25-year range. But it is portentous of the clear trend to a genuinely multi-power world, for better or worse, in which the dollar will get no favors. That will push the dollar down, at least while the news and fallout make their way through the financial and real economic systems.
Rumors of de-dollarization have been hotly denied, as further reported here, but as the Independent points out, denials are to be expected, and are always issued in these situations. They mean nothing. Even cub reporters know that.
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Scenario thinking
What’s particularly interesting to me is that a ‘scenario’ of dollar demise has become not only plausible in the mainstream view of the future, but scenario thinking is being used as a way to consider the nature of this outcome, and how best to respond without predicting the outcome either way. As recently as directly pre-credit crunch, the media question would have been: ‘what is the best prediction for the dollar (or the housing market, or credit default swaps?) and that, rather then scoping out the implications of the lesser-likelihood, would have dominated the discussion.
So, what struck me forcefully in the Business Week video interview above, where BW Chief Economist Mike Mandel interviews the news magazine’s Economics Editor Peter Coy (see Coy’s underlying story here), is how the less-likely, non-predicted, but very significant outcome is actively addressed:
Says Coy: “It’s so hard to know what the dollar is going to do. We don’t argue that we know… what we do is we say, ‘it could happen’ and let’s take that possibility seriously, in the same way we should have taken the possibility of falling housing prices seriously…”
This is not formal scenario-building of course. But it is, fundamentally an adoption of the framework, saying in the classic ‘scenarios’ way: “we can’t predict if it will happen or it won’t, but if it does it will have significant impact. So let’s just ask: ‘what if ‘ it does and explore the outcomes and our responses. What will the word look like? What would be the implications, the knock-ons and spinoffs? If it comes to pass, what would be wish we had done today?”
Perhaps failing to predict the credit crunch has dented predictors’ halos enough to cause a mini-zeitgeist-shift towards the only real way to cope with important uncertainty: exploring all outcomes that pass the plausibility and significance test, whether or not we actually believe they will happen.
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