Future Savvy: Quality in Foresight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inequality

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

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

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

Tweet This Post

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.

Tweet This Post

I’m pleased to have been invited to be one of a dozen or so regular contributors to the blog ‘Risk Matters,’ because, well, risk matters. It’s a key part of the reason why anyone or any group would look to the future… which of course also conditions how we look, what we look for, and what we find or miss.

So this stimulates me to put down a few thoughts about risk assessment and its relationship with industry and strategic foresight as a whole. This is a big topic of course, but seeing as the categories are confused a lot, it’s worth tackling even if just in summary terms.

When I reach the topic of Risk Assessment in my ‘Industry Foresight and Business Future Strategy’ MBA elective, I use the ‘Adidas-Salomon: Incorporating Risk into Corporate Strategy’ mini-case [Ref: ICFAI 304-141-1; sourced via Cranfield’s Case Clearing house.]

The case is a useful baseline in risk assessment because it describes the various risks a multinational company typically faces: marketing risks (market change, brand image); operations risks (quality; reliability of processes and suppliers); social & environmental risks (workforce & natural resources compliance); legal (liability, regulation, patent); information technology (compromise or disruption); and financial risks (currency, interest rate, credit).

Business disruptors
In sum these are the things that could damage or disrupt the business. Isolating such factors, keeping vigilance over them, and having thought through or enacted counter-measures in advance, allows the organization to better control or reduce the impact should risk become reality.

All risks are future events, so a risk assessment is undoubtedly a future study, but assuming a company looks diligently across all these categories for potential and emerging hazards, how prepared is it for a changing world? What kind of industry foresight does this give managers? Is a risk assessment a futures assessment?

The obvious first answer is that a risk assessment is only half the equation. It’s oriented to the downside potential of changes not the upside; looking for threats not opportunities. Obviously that means that opportunities are less likely to be identified.

The second thing is that a standard risk assessment operates in the realm of known risks, in known categories, that may cause disruption and damage in a known way. It doesn’t have the mechanism to expand conceptions of what could go wrong, or how it could go wrong, or what the full knock-on effects will be. The types of mental-model-expanding techniques that fuller foresight offers are not built into a typical risk assessment.

Strategy questions
Third, risk assessments never really broach the question: is the business idea or business model good and will it keep on being good? That is, what products or services will be appropriate going forward, or how will models of supply or manufacture or marketing or fulfillment need to change, due to technology change or shifting consumer preferences.

In other words, risk assessment doesn’t ask strategic questions of managers. It is part of the day-to-day management vigilance necessary with reference to the future – the hygiene factors in running an organization. It is about keeping the business going as is, not about changing it for a changing word.

There’s nothing wrong with this. The point is, it’s just ‘first base’ in building a quality view of the future, and therein a robust point-of-view about what to do next. Although no doubt companies such as Google or Apple or Virgin, etc., assess and mitigate their risks, they didn’t become successful in their future by doing risk assessment and saying ‘That’s it, were done. We’re ready for the future.”

Tweet This Post

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.

Tweet This Post

I note from a link on the Ian Miles Futures blog that “2025:  Scenarios of US and Global Society Reshaped by Science and Technology” by Coates, Hines, & Mahaffie, is now available free for full-text download.

For full disclosure, I should say I worked in the Coates office in Washington D.C. during the mid-late 1990s (but got there just after the book was done.)

There are deep and ultimately overwhelming problems with the book itself. It sees science-technology as the primary driver of change, when what science is done and what technology is produced is often the product of policy or economic or values / zeitgeist decisions further up the chain. It also has an astoundingly poor conceptual framework (‘Worlds 1, 2, 3′) for dealing with non-US societies and cultures, and their economic and social development: one that would make Tom Friedman (‘World is Flat’) giggle and Hans Rosling surely cry. Truly there are many reasons they have to give this book away for free.

But its importance is elsewhere. It remains remarkable for one thing — the thing that the Coates & Jarratt foresight firm was known for — a willingness to speculate confidently and in detail (and sometimes even stupidly) about future changes. The book is likewise exemplary in its commitment to concrete, interesting, ‘fearless’ long-range speculation, in a world where most analysts waste most of their foresight ink timidly equivocating and covering their back.

Quality, reloaded

Evocative, concrete speculation is important, even if it is wrong. It is commonly misapprehended that the purpose of foresight work is to “predict the future,” (and someone with this perspective is going to pop up in 2025 and say “so, how right or wrong was this book?”) But, nobody can be right. The real value of foresight work is other: to know as much as we can about the present, and the forces and factors changing it, to be able to preconceive the full range of possible future outcomes that pertain, in order to make decisions today towards an outcome we prefer. (Who “we” are and what “we” prefer — social welfare; shareholder value maximization; environmental sustainability, etc., — will vary hugely among interest groups of course.)

This preconception (of a range of scenarios, if you like) is what allows truly effective discussions and debates to take place in considering alternatives, and therefore promotes better decision-making regardless of whether the scenarios ultimately turn out to have been, in themselves, ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ High-quality scenarios are to be preferred of course, but quality is in the ability to stimulate and provoke management attention to the right areas in a timely manner, not in having been right in prediction. As Coates used to say (and I echo this to my Industry Foresight students): “You don’t have to be right, you just have to be interesting.”

Tweet This Post

I’ve been following a fun little foresight project organized by Rohit Talwar of “FastFuture” contributed to by many members of the Association of Professional Futurists, which looks at new jobs that may emerge in the next 10-20 years as the result of science and technology advancement.

One of the benefits of thinking about science and technology foresight in terms of jobs is that doing so encourages a reality check, forcing the question: will someone get paid to do this, if so, by whom and why (how will it be profitable to the job giver?) In other words, the question is taken beyond whether one can imagine a job that will need doing or a job that someone might like to do it – that’s just mental bubble gum – to the more interesting and taxing issue of whether such need will justify enough paying customers such that the job will exist at all.

Of course, in all this science and technology progress will make new products and services possible partly by reducing the price point of providing them.

Not all of the jobs of the future listed below, I feel, pass this test. But many do. And it’s an interesting thought experiment. It’s a work in progress (see below.) The list as exists so far is:

1.  Body Part Maker
Due to the huge advances being made in bio-tissues, robotics and plastics, the creation of body parts – from organs to limbs – will soon be possible, requiring body part makers, body part stores and body part repair shops.

2.  Nano-Medic
Advances in nanotechnology offer the potential for a range of sub-atomic ‘nanoscale’ devices, inserts and procedures that could transform personal healthcare.. A new range of nano-medicine specialists will be required to administer these treatments.

3.  Pharmer (sic) of Genetically Engineered Crops and Livestock
New-age farmers will raise crops and livestock that have been genetically engineered to improve yields and produce therapeutic proteins. Works in progress include a vaccine-carrying tomato and therapeutic milk from cows, sheep and goats.

4.  Old Age Wellness Manager / Consultant Specialists
Drawing on a range of medical, pharmaceutical, prosthetic, psychiatric, natural and fitness solutions to help manage the various health and personal needs of the aging population.

5.  Memory Augmentation Surgeon
Surgeons that add extra memory to people who want to increase their memory capacity and to help those who have been over exposed to information in the course of their life and simply can no longer take on any more information – thus leading to sensory shutdown.

6. ‘New Science’ Ethicist
As scientific advances accelerate in new and emerging fields such as cloning, proteomics and nanotechnology, a new breed of ethicist may be required. These science ethicists will need to understand a range of underlying scientific fields and help society make consistent choices about what developments to allow. Much of science will not be a question of can we, but should we..

7.  Space Pilots, Architects and Tour Guides
With Virgin Galactic and others pioneering space tourism, space trained pilots and tour guides will be needed, as well as designers to enable the habitation of space and the planets. Current projects at SICSA (University of Houston) include a greenhouse on Mars, lunar outposts and space exploration vehicles.

8.  Vertical Farmers
There is growing interest in the concept of city based vertical farms, with hydroponically-fed food being grown in multi-storey buildings. These offer the potential to dramatically increase farm yield and reduce environmental degradation. The managers of such entities will require expertise in a range of scientific disciplines, engineering and commerce.

9.  Climate Change Reversal Specialist
As the threats and impacts of climate change increase, a new breed of engineer-scientists will be required to help reduce or reverse the effects of climate change on particular locations. They will need to apply multi-disciplinary solutions ranging from filling the oceans with iron filings to erecting giant umbrellas that deflect the sun’s rays.

10. Quarantine Enforcer
If a deadly virus starts spreading rapidly, few countries, and few people, will be prepared. Nurses will be in short supply. Moreover, as mortality rates rise, and neighborhoods are shut down, someone will have to guard the gates.

11. Weather Modification Police
The act of stealing clouds to create rain is already happening in some parts of the world, and is altering weather patterns thousands of miles away. Weather modification police will need to control and monitor who is allowed to shoot rockets containing silver iodine into the air – a way to provoke rainfall from passing clouds.

12. Virtual Lawyer
As more and more of our daily life goes online, specialists will be required to resolve legal disputes which could involve citizens resident in different legal jurisdictions.

13.  Avatar Manager / Devotees – Virtual Teachers
Avatars could be used to support or even replace teachers in the elementary classroom, i.e., computer personas that serve as personal interactive guides. The Devotee is the human that makes sure that the Avatar and the student are properly matched and engaged.

14. Alternative Vehicle Developers
Designers and builders of the next generations of vehicle transport using alternative materials and fuels. Could the dream of underwater and flying cars become a reality within the next two decades?

15.  Narrowcasters
As the broadcasting media become increasingly personalized, roles will emerge for specialists working with content providers and advertisers to create content tailored to individual needs. While mass market customisation solutions may be automated, premium rate narrow casting could be performed by humans.

16. Waste Data Handler
Specialists providing a secure data disposal service for those who do not want to be tracked, electronically or otherwise.

17. Virtual Clutter Organizer
Specialists will help us organise our electronic lives. Clutter management would include effective handling of email, ensuring orderly storage of data, management of electronic ID’s and rationalizing the applications we use.

18.  Time Broker / Time Bank Trader
Alternative currencies will evolve their own markets – for example time banking already exists. (Time banking facilitates reciprocal service exchange based on units of time.)

19.  Social ‘Networking’ Worker
Social workers for those in some way traumatized or marginalized by social networking.

20. Personal Branders
An extension of the role played by stylists, publicists and executive coaches –advising on how to create a personal ‘brand’ using social and other media. What personality are you projecting via your Blog, Twitter, etc? What personal values do you want to build into your image – and is your image consistent with your real life persona and your goals?

I added a few of my own to the database (trying to avoid repetition) which would both be needed and economically justifiable:
(1) Organ Agent: person who sources and negotiates real or artificial organs on behalf of those in who want them. Interacts with donor, manages prices or bids if applicable, negotiates with hospitals, and so on.
(2) Automated Systems Monitor: person who oversees automated systems (e.g. smart highways) and intervenes and corrects as necessary. “ASMs” would each need specific expertise in their field — transport or manufacturing or surgery or whatever is automated — but would share the specific skill of being a complex-automated-system monitor, evaluator, and emergency troubleshooter.
(3) End-of-Life Planner: person who helps people plan and manage their own death (combating the fact that medicine/technology will be able to keep most people technically alive pretty much forever).

You can add your own thoughts by taking the survey at http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB229HP2J3ALX closing date: August 19th, 2009.

Tweet This Post

In all the predictions of the future that I have ever read or heard, and all the scenarios I have been exposed to, it’s almost unheard of to see one that says “the squeezed middle class keeps their eye on a good deal, as they always have.”

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.

Tweet This Post

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.

Tweet This Post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tweet This Post

A basic tool of foresight work is horizon scanning, that is, scanning for signals of change, early portent of trends, straws in the wind of change. Futurists do it habitually, and if not habitually then – the wisdom is – do it routinely by consciously scanning sources of information you don’t normally. Buying an agricultural weekly or teen idol rag at the airport, rather than your standard dose of the Economist.

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.

Tweet This Post