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 Sep 18, 2009 in all, innovation, lifestyles & values, strategic foresight, technology change
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.
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Jun 3, 2009 in all, economy & finance, failed predictions, forecast filtering, Future Savvy, leadership, management, Perils of Prediction
Normally I make a point of not reposting anything put up elsewhere, but this small list of foresight lessons deserves broader attention than just Electronics Weekly. According to EW blogger David Manners, Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, former CEO of Toshiba Semiconductors in his book Chip Management quotes 10 wisdoms of forecasting, see below.
They have a bit of the fashionable “SunTzu Art of War” feel to them, and some of the quotes may be apocryphal. But no matter. What’s really interesting in this very savvy list is how customer-focused the lessons are. As said in Future Savvy, and one can’t say it too many times, what customers (users, the public) want and the cost-benefit tradeoffs they will make is a MUCH more reliable guide to the future than any techno-fantasy.
The wisdoms also reflect a foresight industry insider truism and paradox: you seldom get to the future by asking the customer directly (e.g. in a focus group) what they would like to have. You have to leap for the customer (and use focus groups only to refine new offerings.)
The list:
“1. St Augustine said that it is a blessing from God that we can’t predict the future. If we predict prosperity, we will become complacent. If we predict evil, we will lose the ability to discriminate.
2 Sharp President Haruo Tsuji: ‘You cannot find out what the consumer wants only by doing market research. You need to pull the ideas out of your brain. Manufacturers of the future should not simply respond to market demands, they must create market demands.’
3. Konosuke Matsushita said: ‘Don’t try to fit your business to a forecast. Fit it to the needs of your customers.’
4. Toshiba President Sugiichio Watari: ‘Money doesn’t come falling into the headquarters of Toshiba. If you want money you need to go to the customers.’
5. President Yoshio Tateishi of Omron: ‘Learn from your customers. If you learn from internal resources you will become self-satisfied. If you learn from your competitors you will fall far behind.’
6. Professor Yoshiya Teramoto of Meiji Gakuin University: ‘When companies start a big market research project, it is one sign of the ‘big company’ disease.’
7. Tsuyoshi Kawanishi: ‘The way to predict the weather is to look at the sky. And, every once in a while, you can make your prediction by simply thinking.’
8. President Haruo Tsuji of Sharp says: ‘Don’t be a spider, be a honey bee.’
9. Takeshi Kaneda, a management critic, says: ‘After elaborate research to find out what the consumer wants, Ford produced the Edsel. It was a complete failure. Ford mistook what the customer wanted for what they would really buy. They ignored their insight and relied on consensus. Japanese tend to emphasize harmony and consensus. But insight and decisiveness can be more important.’
10. Someone says: ‘Figures do not lie. But liars often use figures.’”
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.
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Mar 16, 2009 in 2025, all, economy & finance, emerging technologies, forecast filtering, lifestyles & values, Perils of Prediction, policy, social change, technology change, trend tracking
It’s all in a day’s irony when Guinness releases its 250-year view of the future on the day that the UK Chief Medical Officer pleads for a minimum price for alcohol (and Gordon Brown, for now, says no, but don’t bet on that holding for long.)
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.
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Feb 18, 2009 in all, foresight tools & methods, horizon scanning, managing uncertainty, prediction markets
It’s the week of the 81st Academy Awards and this means my automated Internet searches for future predictions are bunged up with blogger & media pundits predicting whether it’s going to be Brad Pitt or Sean Penn; Kate Winslet over Angelina Jolie; Slumdog Millionaire or The Reader, etc. This is just the fun-of-the-fair forecasting of course. But, turns out there are some significant things to talk about from a Future Savvy point of view.
First, there is the prediction game on offer from ABC, taglined: “The Oscars Live Challenge: Think you can Predict a Winner? Make Your Picks Now!”
It’s all part of the marketing drive of course, but, nevertheless how would one play it best and what might that tell us? Let’s assume there is something at stake, like you’re really going to sit in front of the TV and mark off your right vs. wrong predictions, and compare your score with that of your spouse for year-long bragging rights – now there’s pressure – how would you predict? Would you think (a) “this is the best movie so I predict it will win”? Hardly. You would think: (b) “this is the one that I think most people will pick, so that’s the one I think will win.”
You would be making a meta-prediction – going with what you think most are going to choose. In this particular case you would also know that that Oscar winners are chosen by balloting the 6,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. So your more exact question would be: who is this special group likely to choose in each category?
What’s going on? In future situations that are heavily dependent on aggregate human choices – which is very many situations – the savviest predicting strategy is to figure out the choices most people are going to make. Oscars aside, figuring out the choices most people will make on any issue – hybrid cars, tighter securities legislation, public health care, etc. – is an excellent guide to what will really happen. It’s a mass market-led view of the future to be sure, but that’s exactly what makes it dependable in mass-opinion situations. (Not all situations are determined by mass-market choices – predicting a presidential election winner is; predicting a superbowl winner is not.)
Playing the game
I had a shot at the Oscar prediction game, joining the alleged 1,680 other “players” who were then online. From what I could tell via the rather gristly Flash interface is that the game is not (yet) “social” in that you can’t see what other people are predicting – there is no access to aggregate opinion. No matter. One can instantly get this in hundreds of prediction market forums right now, for example Intrade, where the price of each outcome in each Academy Awards category directly reflects how strongly players as a whole have bid up that outcome.
At Intrade, at time of writing, Slumdog Millionaire is at $87.30 (max is $100; the other 4 movies share the remaining $12.70). When used as a prediction this means that the aggregate opinion of people staking real money has been effectively captured: it is that Slumdog Millionaire is 87% likely to be the choice of the Academy members in its category.
This is a guide to Oscar night that I would not bet against if I wanted to hold onto my bragging rights. Even in situations less overwhelmingly agreed on by players, it has been shown that prediction markets, tapping the aggregate “wisdom of crowds” (working like “Ask the audience” on Who Wants to be a Millionaire) are a fabulous tool for capturing what most people think will happen, resulting in excellent predictions. Caveat Emptor: prediction markets are poor at predicting long-term, open-ended situations, particularly where the outcome alternatives are unknown or can’t be clearly bounded, as blogged a few months back.
Posted by Adam Gordon on Nov 20, 2008 in all, failed predictions, foresight tools & methods, Future Savvy, lifestyles & values, policy, social change, systems dynamics
The foresight news story of the day is undoubtedly the breakthroughs in stem cell use in facilitating human organ donation. Instantly one can add decades to the human lifespan in places where this class of treatments will be available and affordable. But that’s a topic for another time. What I’ve been mulling over is a Columbian government media tour in the UK, aimed at drawing middle class “recreational” drug consumers’ attention to the environmental cost of drug production, particularly cocaine. As reported in the Guardian yesterday (November 19), Columbian VP, Santos Calderón told a police conference that 300,000 hectares destroyed each year in Columbia for coca plant, that is, 4sq meters of rainforest for every gram of cocaine produced. (Savvy says: what’s the validity of these numbers and who do they favor? Place a question mark there.) But it’s probably safe to assume the profit motive behind drug production overrides Green sensitivities, and the environmental cost is severe.
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.”
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Jul 18, 2008 in 2015, 2025, all, foresight tools & methods, horizon scanning, strategic foresight, trend tracking
More on the Media Futures Conference – having yesterday got sidetracked into pushing back at misconceptions about citizen journalism (based on lousy forecast filtering) – now I’m actually getting to what I intended to talk about…
Early in the day, as a warmup I think (but for me this was the juice) there was a “Research in the Real World” section. It started with a presentation by Alex McKie reporting on a tour she made across the UK, where she interviewed people asking them what their “three wishes for the future” were. This was followed by Gill Wildman and Nick Durrant of Plot, who presented interviews where consumers were asked where and how they used media, and what they wanted from it.
The research is anthropological, no more or less than a customized field trip: going out, seeing what people do, and how they live, and what’s important and meaningful to them – and then thinking how one’s own area of interest (e.g. product) fits into this, or could fit into it in the future. That gives some clues as to what people will adopt and/or buy – what the market will “pull”.
The futures field lingo for this type of work is “a learning journey,” a process usually omitted in the helter-skelter of tracking new technology capabilities and other apparently more profitable lines of research. There are some good writeups of future learning journeys: one that comes to mind is “The Moen Story” Johnston, R. & Douglas Bate, J., The Power of Strategy Innovation, Amacom Press, 2003, Chapter 5. Another is “Conduct Reconnaissance into the Future,” Sull, D & Wang Y, Made in China, Chapter 3, HBS Press, 2005. I recently saw that Christus CEO Tom Royer said his medical institution had conducted learning journeys (to Canada and India) as part of its Futures Task Force II scenario building process.
Tuning in
No question this type of research is often tedious. You have everyday people umming and aahing inarticulately and often unimaginatively about their preferences and problems, and hopes for the future. In fact the conference audience were impatient about having been presented with the interviews in raw form. But it is precisely in the careful listening that much about the real future is revealed. It is a vital ingredient in thinking about the future, and reigning in poor forecasts.
In the event, the consumers (in Plot’s terms “the people formerly known as … users”) were revealed as media wise, but often their savvy to screen out the information firehose. Although media types were thinking about the cutting edge, real people were articulating the need to be informed in a way they could manage – not too much or too little – and to be able to trust the news source, and be exposed to stories that move or inspire them.
Learning journeys are a very dependable way to think about the future by checking our industry insider preferences against the preferences of real people out there. Any prediction that makes assumptions about the market without this perspective is heading for failure. But there is a wrinkle, and it is this: market research – even this deep market field trip research which is much better than focus groups – is seldom enough to adequately anticipate the next new thing. It tells us what lab fantasies or executive business model fantasies will not fly. But it doesn’t help us make the jump either. Experience is that consumers want what they already have, maybe a bit better, maybe a bit cheaper. Market research did not see the Walkman. And as as Hal Sperling of Chrysler said: “In all the time we spent developing the Minivan, not once did we have a soccer mom come and ask us for one.”
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Jul 17, 2008 in 2015, all, emerging technologies, failed predictions, forecast filtering, innovation, systems dynamics, technology change
I was at the recent Media Futures Conference 2008 in London where a lively cross-section of delegates spent their time – as to be expected, this is the topic-du-jour – pondering the impact of social networking-based “citizen journalism” on the traditional media. In the era where everyone can “publish” all the time, what is the role and purpose of, for example, the BBC? As major news sites are scrambling to allow reader’s views, or eyewitness pictures and so forth, do they become dissolved in a sea of chat, blog, and tweet?
I don’t think so. There are many new communication modes to explore as established media outlets get to grips with the micro-publishing and social networking technological possibilities and consumer preferences, but the fear that traditional journalism or traditional media is “under threat” is, to me, overblown. Yes, anyone can publish news and views anytime, but most strive to put their 2c worth on the media sites associated with the major newspaper and electronic media brands. Why? To benefit from (a) the visibility, that is, presence of many readers, and (b) the editorial quality – the brand promise – of the established media outlet. A submitted picture that is seen, for example, on The Guardian site, is worth a thousand pictures on mynonameblog.com. This is all-the-more true if the publication editors flag readers attention to the citizen journo contribution: giving it an editorial stamp of approval.
The power of hubbing has been talked about a lot, not least by management guru Michael Porter, and there can be no doubting the reinforcing feedback loop at work in hubs. In this case, where more readers are that’s where more writer-contributors want to be, which makes the hub more valuable to readers, etc. What’s most valuable to readers in a world of a billion potential journalists? Little doubt it is what has always been valuable to readers, that is, the activities of editors providing oversight and quality control: filtering, choosing, framing and balancing information and viewpoints. Any content that is not subject to oversight is, well, just someone yapping.
From origination to “hubbing”
What will surely happen to the main media outlets is that the percentage of own-originated content will go down as the percentage of publicly contributed content goes up. They will have to adjust their game to include wider information quality management. In addition to providing what they always have (quality and timely and relevant content) they will need to be able to function less as own-content originators and more as hubs – providing editorial-quality oversight and therefore attracting many readers in the virtuous-cycle spoken of above. But they will still be in business, and still in essentially the same business of information collection, editorial processing and oversight.
The citizen journalist may effect what the media outlets says and does – for example by providing evidence that must be included in a story – but this does not change the balance of power. The value of the editorial oversight and synthesis is higher than ever. This is what branded media providers offer and the citizen journalist cannot. The principle of anticipating the future here is this: where a service provides a value, the service-provider will continue to exist into the future. Nothing has changed in the value of editorial oversight, in fact, it is more valuable than ever. That’s why major media outlets will be part of the future.
This is not to say the current major media brands will survive – they may well miss or mismanage the transition to information quality hub function – and fold, as brands or as companies, as new ones emerge. The general news brands may also, over time give way to narrower topic niche brands. But the concept of a centralized quality-enforcing media hub is not dissolving into citizen yapping any time soon.
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