Posted by Adam Gordon on Jan 30, 2012 in all, decision-making, leadership, managing uncertainty, scenario planning, sense-making
Martin Sheen as Josiah 'Jed' Bartlet. Picture: @Pres_Bartlet
Even by the standards of modern political media prattle, this was odd: the Guardian yesterday invited and ran a “response” to Barak Obama’s State of the Union address, from Jed Bartlet the fictional president in The West Wing.
One should immediately add that the response was not that of Martin Sheen (the actor who played Bartlet) or anyone from the show. It was that of an unnamed tweeter who can be found here.
The reader vox-pop box was quick to cry foul, asking what next: a piece on space exploration by Captain Jean-Luc Picard, or 007’s analysis of the War on Terror?
Fair enough. But if there is a serious point to be made, and I think there is, it is that fictional leaders do have a role in real world business and policy leadership.
Fiction and storytelling is important and enduring in all human societies because it is an excellent vehicle for considering complex human situations, reflecting on competing motivations and interpretations, assessing choices made with incomplete information, and following these through to their win-or-lose conclusion. Fiction allows multifaceted situations to be captured without losing the complexity.
Parallels
Incidentally, this is why scenario method, which tells stories of alternative future situations, is such an effective planning device. But the point here is that fiction captures complex human situations and senior executives would be the first to recognize parallels between the challenges that imaginary leaders are put through and what they do in a real working day.
If fiction captures and communicates tricky situations well, it therein becomes a learning vehicle. Whether reading a difficult modern novel or watching a soapy TV show, we put ourselves in others’ shoes, vicariously experiencing their conundrums and learning from the outcomes of their decisions.
Would-be successful leaders could do worse than take note of the leadership attributes of winners such as Sherlock Holmes or Superman or Andy Dufresne; or unpick the illusions and ultimate failures of dark lords such as Voldemort or Mr Kurtz.
Furthermore, a good way to learn is to judge real performance against an ideal template. (Judging me against my clarinet teacher, for example.) Whether your politics aligns with the positions and preferences of The West Wing White House or not, there is no denying that Bartlet is set up as a model president in a model administration. He is thoughtful, caring, effective; manifests an ideal balance of intellect, EQ, and decisiveness; is respected and loved by his staff who will go to the ends of the earth for him. He is a template leader.
So it’s hardly off-the-wall to wonder what Bartlet would have made of Obama 2012. That said, it would have been far more interesting to know what West Wing screenwriter Aaron Sorkin or even Sheen, rather than abitrary unnamed tweeter, thought of the State of the Union address.
For the record:
The Lion: President Obama. Mangy, patchy, apparently underfed. Definitely caged. But he has a heart. Whether it is the lion heart of the ruler of Narnia … time will tell.
The Witch: Here we have to go with Shakespeare; in fact there are three witches: Romney, Gingrich, Santorum. On Tuesday Obama called for a fairer country. Notice they responded: fair is foul, and foul is fair.
The Warmonger: he that exited the presidency in 2008, having wasted 4,000 lives and $800,000,000,000 on a war as poorly judged as that of Douglas Haig at Somme, 1916.
Posted by Adam Gordon on Jan 23, 2009 in all, innovation, leadership, management, politics of the future
Review: The Age of Heretics, (2nd Edition), Art Kleiner, Jossey-Bass, 2008
One of the conundrums of foresight work is that it demands a macro-perspective, but real change requires focus. In order to get the breadth of view across society and technology to think adequately about the future, the futures analyst is forced to forgo much of the detail, while implementers are thinking: “this 40,000 ft view is very illuminating, but how do I land the plane?” What changes do I make, in my organization, in my industry, on Monday morning, and how do I not get fired for making them?
Kleiner’s updated The Age of Heretics, (2nd edition, Jossey-Bass, 2008) is the modern history of people who find themselves – or put themselves – on the focus side of foresight: who work practically on the ground inside corporate institutions to achieve change, which means by definition challenging the methods and perspectives of their institution. It is not the story of foresight at the lofty level of ideas, but the altogether grittier and more interesting story of how macro-change consciousness meets real institutions, real organizational dynamics, real industry pressures, and real career considerations, in the history of US corporations since 1945.
Kleiner, the editor-in-chief of Booz Allen’s Strategy+Business, is no stranger to the foresight field. He is the ghost-writer behind an eye-popping portion of the futures canon, including The Art of the Long View; The Fifth Discipline, and its Fieldbook; and The Living Company, and so on, (source: http://www.well.com/~art/) so it’s no surprise that the fabric of his text is lush in its familiarity with the players and ideas in the field.
The common thread he follows – through figures like Herman Kahn, Willis Harman, Amory Lovins, Oliver Markley, and so on, is that of the heretic, the maverick against the machine. Intriguingly, along the way, Kleiner gives us a worm’s-eye view of the genesis of many new management ideas, from “lean production” to the “balanced scorecard” to “scenario planning’ – showing how they emerge from and have been engendered by the forces of institutions in productive conflict with their heretics.
The political history of truth, and its future
Philosopher Michel Foucault catapulted our understanding of institutions as a political field, using insights from the history of prisons, hospitals, and asylums to show the relationship between power and knowledge in the evolution of institutional forms. But he never dealt with the modern business corporation. It may be overstating it, but not by much, to say that Kleiner updates Foucault for corporate America. The themes he carries: the role of the deviant, transgression, the evolution of truth, and discursive struggles between insiders and outsiders, are highly resonant. In his previous book, Who Really Matters (Doubleday, 2003) Kleiner developed other parts of this same perspective: showing how every organization’s identity and choices can be understood as driven by the interests of its core group – its powerful insiders.
The Age of Heretics is an engrossing history of change-agents in companies in strategic and organizational transformation. But it’s not just a history. In the future – while the names of the players, and their issues, and the institutions themselves will change, the productive articulation between the heretic and the institution will remain the format of change in big groups. So the lessons of the book are well taken and very highly recommended.
[This review, authored by Adam Gordon, first appeared in The Association of Professional Futurist's Compass Magazine]
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Jan 13, 2009 in 2015, 2025, all, emerging technologies, failed predictions, forecast filtering, innovation, Perils of Prediction, scenario planning, strategic foresight, technology change
Microsoft - Computer Electronics Show 2009
Product prototype communication is a close cousin of scenario building. Typically the company creates their product or service in action, in the future, being used by happy customers, their “preferred future” scenario. Prototype communication doesn’t typically build in alternative scenarios, the litmus test of strategy-based scenario work. It’s more a kite-flying exercise, designed to put out a future-oriented message to stakeholders and the public, garner broad feedback, and (if you’re powerful like Microsoft) put up “this-is-the-future-of-the-industry” markers.
Nevertheless, with the caveat that they are one among many plausible outcomes, product showcase scenarios can be an eye-opening guide to what’s actually possible and what the future will be like.
A newly released Microsoft “Future of Computing” video, showcased at CES 2009 in Las Vegas in the past few days, is an example. The 10-minute piece, presented by Janet Galore, Program Manger: Strategic Prototyping, takes us through a scenario of interactive education in the future (when, exactly, is not said but the implication is it’s not too far off) showing how participants would find, use, and share information across devices and across platforms.
What we see is a tablet PC that can communicate seamlessly with other electronics and interact with Web info on the fly. Okay nothing new there. What’s interesting is how it’s all held together by surface computing, a smart desk with a screen, which allows information to be viewed in the process of collaboration, sharing, and filing. In some futurist fantasies it is thought that communication is ideally invisible (my phone e-handshakes your phone without me doing anything, etc.) But actually humans mostly seem to prefer to see what’s happening, and to have the choice to interact with what is happening while it’s happening – not least so they know what machines have done and don’t have to pull their hair out before they find their precious work buried four subdirectories into the Temp folder… sheesh. But I digress.
The scenario focuses on organizing and sharing multiple inputs, therein making a pretty clear statement about the future: what will be really valuable is not access to information anywhere, anytime (an assumed, table-stakes factor), but a way to share and collaborate with the information in an productive way. It refreshingly assumes that whiz-bang graphics – they are there too – are the easy stuff, but that collaboration and teamwork are the hard things to get right, and the truly valuable service given the chaos of billions of voices and trillions of data objects that pertain in any human-work future.
The other real strength of the prototype and related scenario is its close attention to natural (or, at least, strongly socialized, conventional, classic) human ways of doing things, which are slow to change, and therefore will change slowly. The smart desk is something one can really see oneself sitting around, because this is what we already do. Also this future of computing envisages no stylus, no mouse, no magic wand to master. Rather, we move digital stuff around the desk with our hands. We point to it and we shift it. That is, digital capability accommodates and interlaces with Stone Age human and organizational patterns. That’s why this view of the future is persuasive.
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Dec 15, 2008 in all, decision-making, failed predictions, forecast filtering, Future Savvy, managing uncertainty, Perils of Prediction, scenario planning, strategic foresight
One of the questions I’m asked a lot is whether Future Savvy would have helped to predict the credit crunch. My response, as in this INSEAD interview, has been that the book gives readers the tools to judge the merits of predictions, so wouldn’t have directly helped predict the financial crisis, but it would have been a key resource in drawing attention to the poor view of the future that bankers and regulators were acting on.
In many ways, focusing on whether “this” or “that” is predicted, or not predicted, is to put the cart before the horse. The horse is the adequacy of our approach to anticipating outcomes and the quality of our foresight as a whole. When this is good, the cart – not missing important changes – will follow.
Credit: http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog
In this, it’s important to realize that many did predict the financial crisis (as many predicted 9/11 in various ways). Sticking with the financial crunch for now: it has generally been portrayed it as a “why-didn’t-anyone-see-it-coming” event. It wasn’t. Hats off to The Times for their October 12 piece: “10 People Who Predicted the Financial Meltdown.”(Summary here). Allowing for a fairly loose definition of “predicted,” the article shows that among those who foresaw the crunch were: Vince Cable, deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats (2003); US congressman Ron Paul (2003); Stephen Roach, senior executive at Morgan Stanley (2004); Christopher Wood – chief strategist of a broking firm in the Asia-Pacific Market (2005); and Nouriel Roubini, economics professor at NYU (2006)… and there were many others.
A different problem
So this reframes the problem entirely. It’s not that the predictions were not there. It was that not enough people believed them and, particularly, important decision-makers didn’t believe them or didn’t have the institutional capacity to respond. So there are two halves to the problem: the ability to see the full spectrum of what may happen, including unexpected outcomes; and the ability to act on what we see. Quality in foresight work – the raison d’etre of Future Savvy – makes it possible to see more outcomes more clearly, and to act with more confidence in choosing what to prepare for. (In the real world we can’t prepare for every outcome.)
There was a good letter published in the FT from eminent futurist Peter Schwartz on December 2, which describes this very well. It shows predictions for what they are (one-horse scenarios), and how decision-makers are typically bound into inaction or wrong action not only by working on the basis of a wrong prediction, but by the predictive mindset itself. This mindset – the habit or culture of picking “one right answer” in the face of a complex situation with many competing outcomes, prematurely closes alternatives and leaves us open to surprise. As Schwartz says, as scenario planners have always said (and he was one of the people who defined the field in the first place), a compelling set of alternative future scenarios encourages decision-makers to recognize unlikely and unpopular outcomes, along with expected outcomes, and therefore to be able to respond earlier and more effectively whatever happens.
Scenarios also contribute to the “act” side of the problem. In a well-done set for the banking industry, a financial-meltdown scenario would at least have been in play, institutionalizing the consideration of less unlikely, less popular outcomes in company and government forums, forcing serious consideration of necessary strategies and contingencies, and therein creating the ability to act early and effectively without having predicted the crisis.
The letter is well worth quoting in full:
Sir, The real question regarding the financial crisis is not, as the Queen asked: “Why did nobody see this coming?” In fact, any number of thoughtful people in academia, politics and business had been compiling the data and sounding warnings for several years.
The question we should be asking is: “Why didn’t decision-makers believe that a global financial meltdown was increasingly likely and then act on that belief?” Or, to put it another way: “What would it take to make decision-makers both believe and act?”
The problem is that decision-makers believe that they are forced to pick one right answer: the most likely scenario. Their approach to decision-making does not afford them the opportunity to consider apparently low probability but highly consequential scenarios. The answer, therefore, to the “believe” half of the question is a decision-making process that considers several scenarios: compelling stories about alternative futures that incorporate the analysis of “outliers” and describe three or four plausible paths forward.
Good scenarios force decision-makers to challenge their own assumptions and reconsider what is possible. As a result, they can take seriously those scenarios that seemed less likely at first, but whose plausibility increases over time.
The second part of the question – “What would it take to act?” – is much harder to address. Suppose that Ben Bernanke or Hank Paulson had come to believe a year or two ago that the house of cards was about to collapse and trigger cascading, global failures. What would they have done, given the realities of the complex interconnected systems at the heart of the problem? Perhaps if they had good scenarios with appropriate indicators to start with, they could have rehearsed different strategies and contingencies. Importantly, these decision-makers could have used these scenarios to persuade others on all sides of the issue also to recognise the complexity of the impending crisis in a more timely way. It’s never easy to convince everyone around you that the game they have been playing to their great benefit is about to change. But with a shared recognition of the magnitude of the risks and the ways they might unfold, they could have acted far earlier to prevent some of the dire consequences that have occurred, let alone what is to come.
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Jul 24, 2008 in all, foresight tools & methods, scenario planning
I was struck by this picture
which is produced by a group called Squint/Opera, as part of a set of images of how London population would adapt to raised sea levels. The images, set in the year 2090, are on exhibition at the Medcalf Gallery in Clerkenwell, and the full set can be found here.
The “Flooded London 2090″ images are, of course, a scenario of the future. They evoke a time long after the impact of global warming / a rising sea has past. People have adapted and London is a tranquil utopia. It is not all bad – the rat race gone – swept away with other forms of current (2008) worldly obsessions in a kind of Noah’s flood. The world has become a slower, less complicated place.
As a piece of futures work there are various things to say. First of course, this is a scenario not a prediction. Nobody can predict 2090. Yet, as a scenario, with that intrinsic license to explore the margins of plausibility, it fabulously fulfils one of the primary functions of scenarios: to evoke a mental and possibly even an emotional response. Most scenarios – for example about global warming – are backed up by data and spreadsheets and citations (often necessary and correct) but these images tell the story in a somehow more direct and therefore compelling way, and the old adage a picture is worth 1000 words was never more apt. As all classic scenario analysts, from Pierre Wack to Peter Schwartz to … etc, say: a good scenario should provide a gentle jolt to management – forcing them to consider unexpected events and outcomes and prepare themselves mentally and practically to respond, and these images do that.
Scenarios: the artistic function
Now the question I pose myself – and anyone out there reading – is what is the relationship between scenario’s and art? Is the picture of the future that jolts – whether in a written narrative form or by pictures or film – not jolting in the same way as art does and for the same reason. Isn’t this the classic defamiliarization function of art (possibly mixed with social critique. Here of course it is not merely a warming about global warming that is being communicated, but also commentary about the pace of life, stress, time-crunch, and how this may not be so in the future. Everyone sees the future as more, faster, complexity. But maybe it is not.) Anyway, these images are a scenarios, and they are art, and all good scenarios should work in part “artistically” to defamiliarize the world as art does. (For background on Schklovsky and defamiliarization in art see here)
Squint/Opera is an interestingly multi-disciplinary group. It is a film and media studio that makes visualisations about the built environment, in their terms: “combining humour and narration with imaginative design, innovative visual effects and illustrative techniques.” A scenario firm, in other words, with apologies to the scenario planning traditionalists.
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Jul 11, 2008 in 2015, 2025, all, failed predictions, forecast filtering, foresight tools & methods, Future Savvy, managing uncertainty, Perils of Prediction, strategic foresight, technology change, trend tracking
This is a how-to book: how to evaluate predictions about the future – how to assess which ones are credible and/or how credible they are (how likely the future will turn out similar to the prediction). It is not just a guide to bad forecasts, it is also about how to identify and extract what is valuable in any forecast. This benefits readers who are required to manage professional or personal situations that depend on correctly anticipating change. Whatever we want to achieve – help a company be more profitable – solve the world’s problems – develop their career – success depends on a good reading of the future. There are many guides to the future (predictions) but no guides to the guides. This book fills that gap. It helps readers assess predictions so they can make better judgments about the future for themselves and their organizations.
Decision success always implies congruence between decisions and the world in which those decisions play out. If we decide today to launch a product, buy a house, study for a degree, build a new light rail system, or take any similar decision of significance, the environment of tomorrow will be a key factor in the success or failure of that decision. What we do will be tested by the future conditions that emerge. Where there is a good “fit” between the initiative and the environment it plays out in — “the right product at the right time” — we can expect success. If not, we should expect to fail. Our decisions are only as good as the view of the future they rest on. All opportunities and successes and profits are realized in the future. All threats, failures, and losses are in the future.
In a fast-moving world, we know that the future environment will be different to that of today in big or small ways. New technologies, market shifts, changes in legislation, or evolving social values damage or destroy the traditional good fit we have between ourselves and the world. To achieve “future fit” we therefore use forecasts to position ourselves and our organizations, creating (or renewing) the fit between our initiatives and environment. In some cases we may be strong enough also to influence future events and outcomes for our own future benefit, and forecasts help us do this too.
All enterprises benefit from narrowing down what they must adapt to and plan for – all effort spent preparing for a future that will not emerge is a waste of personal or organizational resources. Good forecasts are a key ingredient in limiting the vagaries of uncertainty, and therein working smarter not harder, avoiding surprises, exploiting new opportunities and plugging weaknesses in fitting in with the future, and where possible influencing the future to suit the organization. This is true not only of business. People and institutions of all types position themselves for success by anticipating and adapting to events, or shaping them. Whether it is an NGO raising money for developing-world children, an urban planner advocating a light rail system, a homeowner deciding to sell a house, or a student making a career choice, identical principles apply — a higher-quality reading of the future operating environment in which these decisions will play out is what separates winners from losers. We should all be vitally concerned with forecasts as we are all effectively betting significant resources on their validity.
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Jul 9, 2008 in 2015, 2025, all, decision-making, failed predictions, forecast filtering, foresight tools & methods, Future Savvy, horizon scanning, leadership, managing uncertainty, Perils of Prediction, scenario planning, strategic foresight, strategic planning, systems dynamics, technology change, trend tracking
The book Future Savvy shows readers how to critically judge forecasts for themselves. These are the chapters that take the reader there:
Chapter 1: Recognizing Forecast Intentions, deals with considerations of how forecasts come about, who makes them, and with what intention. Those who research and produce forecasts, those who invest in understanding trends and drivers of change, and those (including the media) who bring the forecasts and their implications to our attention, inevitably have reasons for doing so – to benefit from the knowledge by seizing opportunities or avoiding threats or by affecting outcomes in the world. Understanding a forecast’s “return on investment” gives us an important vantage point in assessing the merits of a forecast.
Chapter 2: The Quality of Information, shows how a forecast communicates information between forecaster and reader subject to the same standards of accuracy, truth-telling, and bias-control by which one would judge any communication. Forecasts can be very different in methods and goals, but all forecasts lay claim to factual truth, particularly truth in the data, and the argument deals with the various ways in which data can be less solid than it looks, even with the best intentions.
Chapter 3: Interpretation and Bias, considers how data – whether good or bad in itself – can be interpreted or misinterpreted in forecasting, that is, the “political” aspects of forecasting. Just as there is no value-free look at history, so too there is no value-free look to the future and asking the right questions allows us be ready to mentally rebalance forecasts that are presented.
Chapter 4: Paradigms and Perception, investigates how predictive statements are exposed to a broader form of interpretive bias that has to do with the forecaster’s mental model or “paradigm,” and the “zeitgeist” (spirit of the times) when the forecast is made. This chapter investigates situations where forecast failure is caused by failure to escape society’s current mental models – which often do not hold through the forecast period.
Chapter 5: The Utility Principle, considers economic and market forces, and the role of consumers, in promoting or resisting the future. Without reigning in creative thinking, some simple economic filters inevitably apply direction or timing realism to futurist flights of fancy.
Chapter 6: Drivers, Blockers, and Trends, consider drivers and blockers of change, and how viewing these dynamics improves forecast assessment. It identifies the roles of Drivers, Enablers, Friction, and Blockers acting on events to cause change or resist it, and problems in dumbly projecting current trends.
Chapter 7: The Limits of Quantitative Analysis, discusses the role of statistical analysis and quantitative modeling in predicting the future – where this is possible and useful and where it is not, and why not.
Chapter 8: The Systems Perspective, investigates “system effects,” which occur whenever different elements or variables that may appear isolated are in fact linked together, such that changes in one element cause changes in others. Anticipating future behavior of any variable hinges on identifying the broader systemic elements influencing it and failing to do this is a big part of what causes forecasts to fail.
Chapter 9: Living with Alternative Futures, investigates non-predictive ways of approaching change – where the tone is more about managing uncertainty than predicting the future. It acknowledges unfathomable complexity of most future questions and provides perspectives that raise chances of success in an inherently unpredictable future.
Chapter 10: Forecast Filtering in Action, illustrates the processes of the book by applying them in case studies to real-world sample forecasts that decision makers in business and policy areas might find themselves interacting with. This demonstrates how real everyday predictive material may be probed and critically evaluated, following the principles developed in previous chapters.
Chapter 11: A Forecast Filtering Checklist, is a cross-cutting checklist which summarizes the principles of the book in one convenient, thematic list.
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