Posted by Adam Gordon on Oct 14, 2010 in all, foresight tools & methods, history, systems dynamics, technology change
I’m going back to the S+B interview with Lawrence Burns, former GM head of R&D, cited in my previous post, because there is more to be had in understanding how systems dynamics has shaped and will shape the future of the automobile industry.
This not only helps us think about automobiles, energy, public transport, and so on, but also about foresight in all industries.
Asked about the likelihood of “transformational” change in the auto industry—given the historical pattern of slow, incremental change we have seen for decades—Burns says:
“The main reason upheavals haven’t happened is that the automobile transportation system benefited from a tremendous self-reinforcing dynamic: the codependence between the roadway infrastructure, the energy infrastructure, and the machines that we created.”
In other words, systems dynamics were at work, in this case dominated by a deeply powerful reinforcing loop:
“As cars became available in the early 1900s, you needed to build roads suitable for them, and the costs of the roads were paid with gasoline taxes… As more cars were manufactured, more gasoline was consumed; the more gasoline was consumed, the more roads were built. The more roads were built, the more valuable a car became. And as cars became more valuable, it led to more cars being bought… Next thing, you wake up and in the United States you have 250 million cars, and they travel on 4 million miles of road, 3 trillion miles a year…
“So we thought about a new DNA for the automobile, but you couldn’t create that just for the car itself. It has to operate within a new codependent system.”
Too smart to crash
What drives this new system, is of course the core of the debate. In Burns’ view the key issue is vehicles will become “too smart to crash,” allowing them to be built without current safety defences, that is, 75 percent lighter, which drastically reduces energy requirements.
“The problem with batteries today isn’t really the batteries themselves; the problem is the vehicle that we’re putting them in. To power a typical car today, you need a battery the size of one or two Sumo wrestlers, and it takes eight hours to recharge, so you need charging stations in garages or on the street. For the 750-pound class of vehicles that we envision, the battery could someday become small enough so that you could easily bring it into your house or apartment to recharge, and it would recharge in just three hours.”
Everything rests on the assumption of whether “too smart to crash” is possible, and the secondary assumption whether consumers will ever really trust this. The former is surely sound, the latter questionable.
But, no matter. At least this view of the automobile industry evolution, or indeed revolution, is in clear acknowledgement that one will not see the future of the auto industry by looking through the lens of a single issue such as global warming, or any single propulsion or other technology.
The car is inextricably tied to the deeper systems it is part of. Any transformational future proposed or envisaged—whether that of Burns, or environmental lobbyists, or public transport evangelists, or any other—has to show how the whole current reinforcing system behind the car is overcome, that is bettered for most consumers and stakeholders, by a new system.
First posted at Forbes Leadership: http://blogs.forbes.com/adamgordon
Posted by Adam Gordon on Oct 11, 2010 in 2015, all, forecast filtering, managing uncertainty, strategic foresight, technology change
I’ve been mulling over an S+B interview with Lawrence Burns, former head of R&D at General Motors, ahead of the release of his book ‘Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century’ (MIT Press, 2010, co-authors Christopher Borroni-Bird and William J. Mitchell.)
Truth be told, the foresight field is littered with predictions about the future of the automobile, from the futurists’ flying car that never happened to the-pumps-run-dry doomsday, and everything inbetween.
The Xiao EN-V concept car. Photograph © General Motors / Wieck Media Services Inc
But, judging by the interview, Burns has a higher-quality foresight view of this industry than most, and this because he prioritizes what consumers really value as a guide to what will emerge over any policy principle or ideological interest.
What do consumers really value? “There’s nothing like the freedom they (cars) provide to let us go where we want, when we want, with the people we want to travel with,” says Burns.
“Ever since people could walk, the ability to move when they want and where they want is something people have found very compelling.”
Nothing new, but what he is warding off, in preparing the ground to looking to the industry future, is views of the automotive future that are ideologically colored, particularly those imbued with the virtues of public transport.
Says Burns, “Three major impediments get in the way of public transportation:
This balance could change — this is what public transport executives seek to effect. But until there is clear reason to see public-transport pain-points diminishing, there’s no reason to see anything but private-dominated transport in the future (other than very dense urban environments such as Manhattan.)
Pain avoidance
Burns places automotive foresight at the intellectual crossroads between what the majority of consumers really want (or what pain they want to avoid) and what pundits and ideologues think would be a better solution. Guess which always wins?
With that issue solved, the question then turns to what these private vehicles are exactly? Here Burns and co-authors have a vision, but it is more “anybody’s guess.” Their fundamental assumptions is that onboard inter-vehicle accident-avoidance technology is watertight, which means cars don’t need all their defensive armour and can so be far lighter, and therefore use less energy, so battery power and life is no longer the limiting issue it is today. See the concept-car above.
This blog first posted at Forbes Leadership: http://blogs.forbes.com/adamgordon
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read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Dec 15, 2009 in all, economy & finance, emerging technologies, lifestyles & values, policy, politics of the future, strategic foresight, technology change
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.
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Mar 30, 2009 in 2015, all, economy & finance, leadership, lifestyles & values, management, managing uncertainty, social change, strategic foresight, trend tracking
The International Herald Tribune (New York Times Global Edition / Reuters Business) last week ran an interesting foresight story headlined ‘Crisis complicates forecasting by luxury brands,’ reporting from the International Herald Tribune’s eighth conference on luxury in New Delhi. The gist was that although most of the famous brands continue to do well despite the recession, luxury sector executives are very uncertain about the future.
Christian Blanckaert, Executive Vice President at Hermès International was quoted as saying: “We have absolutely no visibility into 2009!”
On the one hand, fair enough. This economic downturn is steeper than previous down cycles, and the basic viability of the financial sector has been tested. Access to credit is normally easier in a recession, but in this one it is not. All of which makes luxury spending harder to predict.
No doubt the most unlikely prediction of all would have been that Hermès, Burberry, LVMH, Moët Hennessy, Louis Vuitton, and PPR (Gucci , Yves Saint Laurent) have all recently reported better-than-expected results.
Nevertheless luxury industry leaders have declined to provide investors and analysts with any official outlook. What’s curious, from an industry foresight point of view, is how executives such as Blanckaert thought they really had more “visibility” into any previous year, or that they will somehow gain it again when the financial crisis is over. They will not. The world will continue to surprise them and us. What they will gain, certainly, is a greater likelihood that the standard business-as-usual future assumptions they make will not be upset by reality.
Meanwhile, judging by the conference, the luxury goods industry has a very decent grip on current social and moral trends, and clear insight into the bigger picture of change in its industry over the next five to ten years. As they know from before, what happens in a recession is that luxury goes out of fashion. Conspicuous consumption wanes, or retreats further behind secluded walls. This is a basic pendulum swing that tracks the economy (witness how the early 1990s recession stimulated a return to “values” era after the “me, me, me” 1980s.)
Sustainable luxury
So we are again in a swing to modesty. But we also know that each swing of the pendulum also carries with it the specific issues of its time. Current key issues for consumers in this segment are sustainability, global warming, business ethics, and globalization (or fear thereof).
Therefore the luxury brands will be looking for ways of making, transporting, and displaying goods in an energy-efficient and socially conscious way, including a renewed emphasis on local artisans and traditional craftsmanship that speaks sustainability in both natural and human resources. This will be the basis of the “sustainable luxury,” positioning that the famous houses will define and compete in. Fabulous and renewable – now there’s something you can charge top dollar for.
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