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 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.
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