thinking differently

Do you suffer from mill-mindedness?

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The Mill astride the river was the town’s heart. Life blood pumped through it in surges of steam, blasts of the shift-change whistle, toings and froings of boxcars and hoppers on the rail spur, shift workers parading in and parading out. Tied up the traffic light? A mill shift was entering or leaving. A man asking credit at the grocery? The Mill cut back hours. New houses going up on the North side? Output and sales are up. Like peasant shacks against a castle wall, the whole town leaned on The Mill, and drew its sustenance from it. Imagine the town without The Mill? You cannot.

You must try to imagine the town without The Mill.

Small towns exist because of a mill or rail depot, a mine, a factory, a college, a hospital, something central that informs, shapes, sustains a community. But America’s ghost towns are often mill or mine towns that lost their mainstays. They didn’t think past The Mill.

Too many companies and sectors have something just like this: a mill, a production line, a critical machine, a cash cow, that is everything. It occupies the front and center of the minds of stakeholders: owners, investors, leaders, and workers. Wall Street sees the firm with mill eyes. Lenders see it with mill eyes. The community sees the firm and itself it with mill eyes.

All of them want The Mill to be The Mill, to churn along, to make money and jobs and community. And all of them define their truths in reference to it. This is mill-mindedness and it can constrain thought and change.

Using foresight to fight mill-mindedness

Foresight can make the difference. Images of different futures are powerful for fighting mill-mindedness.

What is the company (or the town), after The Mill?

Good futures thinking brings a focus beyond what exists now. It can break down rigid mental framing. Without images of something different, The Mill will define everything, past, present, and future.

How to work past mill-mindedness:

Ask these questions of yourself or better, discuss them with colleagues:

  1. What is our mill—that central thing or process that we allow to define us?
  2. Does that thing or process have a secure future?
  3. What would our organization become if we no longer had it?

Exploring the answers means confronting fundamental questions about how you frame and understand what your organization is all about. And answering them sets you up to consider “what’s next?”.

So build scenarios of your future without The Mill. Re-imagine the organization on a new basis. Those thought experiments allow you to see a future that doesn’t depend on this singular force or asset. It gets you past your mill-mindedness.

This blog has dozens of posts about “thinking differently” and on the power of foresight to work past stuck thinking. See: Thinking differently 

My practice as a futurist is centered on helping organizations break down barriers to thought and positive change. If your organization is so afflicted, maybe I can help. Let me know. Email me or call 202-271-0444.

Image: White Oak Cotton Mill, North Carolina, about 1914, with part of the mill village in the foreground. Public domain.

Deep down, it’s about thinking differently

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“A professional futurist is a person who studies the future in order to help people understand, anticipate, prepare for and gain advantage from coming changes.  It is not the goal of a futurist to predict what will happen in the future.  The futurist uses foresight to describe what could happen in the future and, in some cases, what should happen in the future.” — Association of Professional Futurists

That’s a good definition, rooted, as you’d expect, in considerations of the future. And it nicely characterizes what I do. But what’s even more fundamental about my work is getting people to think differently.

When I work with groups to help them explore change, what I realize is how much they already know, at least about the near-term future. But their view is too narrow. They need help: advice, tools, an independent pair of eyes, to see past the immediate, change their perspective, and get somewhere new. They need to think differently.

Foresight is a superb capability. It jumps your thinking beyond what’s in your inbox, beyond what’s going on today that is soaking up your time and attention. It opens up a space to anticipate change, and to do so with colleagues.

But that fresh thinking needn’t only be about the future. Opening a door and looking out, encountering something new, even in the here and now, is already transformational. Of course, foresight helps. It keeps you from falling back into narrower thinking patterns. It helps makes sure you think differently.

There is no everybody — facing your biases about the world

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Humans are good at pattern recognition. But we see patterns based on personal experience and things that are close and familiar. This is called confirmation bias because that act of recognition typically confirms what we already believe. See also: Confirmation Bias in Foresight: Scanning to Find What You Already Believe. That is the biggest and most routine bias in observing change. It's more an instinct and even if people know better, they lapse into thinking that way. 

There is no "everybody"

Converse shoesA great example is our assumptions about Millennials. It's common to see them as tech-savvy, urban, Starbucks-frequenting, plaid-wearing, indie-band-listening. That stereotype is a shorthand we use for understanding and explaining them, but it's dangerously narrow. It has been fixed in our heads and gets reinforced all the time. Then we look for it in the world and say to ourselves, "there's another one".

In fact, we base much of our view of the Millennials on what is a few percent, total, of people born 1980 to 2000. There is no "they all" you can lump together. What's everyone else born between 1980 and 2000 doing?

The same is true for Baby Boomers, Gen X, Hispanics, immigrants, Republicans, etc. etc. There is no everybody.

What to do about it

1. Check yourself. To understand the world and how it's changing better, examine your assumptions about what's going on. Assess your biases and face them. Write them down, say them out loud. Say, "of course I am biased because I am _________."

2. Step away from your worldview. Do what you can to deepen your understanding of others. This means getting past stereotypes, and wholesale categories. Read and view stories told in others' voices. Talk to strangers. Listen.

3. Walk a mile in another's shoes. Immerse yourself in other communities where you can. Watch and listen. Read and view stories from diverse viewpoints. Follow Instagram or photoblogs from places and cultures and groups far and far different from you. Think of someone quite unlike you. Then, look at things with those different eyes. For example, if you are exploring change for a consumer product, go to a store that sells products like that, "wearing" a different persona. What would that person see and care about? You can't get 100% there, but you will move off the safe zone of things that are familiar and comfortable to you.

4. Be ready to be wrong. Assume your conclusions will often be wrong. This means, despite your hard work at trying to transcend your biases, assume you won't get there every time. Knowing you might be biased will protect you from relying too much on your "certainty" about what's true.

Take these steps and you'll stop just confirming what you think you know. You will start knowing new things.

Another post: Talk to the Frog, has a parable to tell that relates to this post.

The ridiculous scenario

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"Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous"
— Dator's Law, Futurist Jim Dator, University of Hawaii Manoa, [Source] 

Jim Dator says that to be useful, a statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous. But we fight the ridiculous trying to be responsbile thinkers about the future. 

"Don't waste time, that's crazy."

"Let's not get off track here."

"Oh, here we go, this is where the rubber hits the sky!" 

Of course, the ridiculous future is not often what we end up with. So why bother with it? To provoke better insights and action, we have to stretch our thinking. Rather than steer clear of an at-first-ridiculous idea, you should embrace it and play with it.

Until you’ve explored things that at first blush are “impossible” or “can’t ever happen” you haven’t explored the full landscape of meaningful, impactful change. The Wright Brothers told a incredulous world, after all, that humans were going to fly.

An example of a ridiculous scenario

“What if there was zero packaging?” We surely can’t manage unpackaged orange juice. But the concept lets you wonder about a future with far less packaging. Or a system for the containers we use with food and other products to be permanent and reusable. Or a marketplace in which packaging is no longer thought of as a nuisance and waste, but as an investment. So the ridiculous idea bears fruit. And it does so by leaping past thoughts of small-scale changes to show the potential for more transformational ones.

So take this as a cautionary to be sure we don’t too readily only see continuity, that we don’t miss significant threats and opportunities, that we don’t fail to explore the full landscape of possibility. 

NOTE: For more on scenarios, see: Why We Need Scenarios to Be Ready for the Future.

A previous post is similar: “the Unspoken Scenario”. Another is, “Come over to the dark side.” In those analyses, the missing scenarios are “unspoken”–perhaps unspeakable or “dark”. But the missing scenario can also be a wildly positive view of the future. 

You can’t be what you can’t see

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"If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way."
–Seamus Heaney, Irish poet and playwright

"You can't be what you can't see," attributed to Marian Wright Edelman, American civil rights activist, and others.

"To give a thing a name, a label, a handle; to rescue it from anonymity, to pluck it out of the Place of Namelessness, in short to identify it–well, that's a way of bringing the said thing into being" –Iff, the Water Genie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie

Seamus Heaney, Marian Wright Edelman, and Salman Rushdie's Water Genie, quoted above, remind us that until people have a name for something, understand the change it represents, and recognize it as desireable, they have trouble accepting it and taking steps to get there.

To be able to describe not just changes, but outcomes, is essential to progress. Too often, the visionaries among us understand, but the stakeholders we face do not, they can't see it, and don't have the words with which to talk about it.

In foresight, we use scenarios to describe potential futures and often to identify desired outcomes. The more specific and clear we can be about the potential future, the better we are able to communicate with others about it, and identify paths forward. The first step is to articulate the future: you can't be what you can't see.

Confirmation bias in foresight: Scanning to find what you already believe

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Confirmation bias is getting attention in American politics. It is the tendency we have to pre-filter what we see and read according to our established views. Confirmation bias closes our minds to new ideas and other viewpoints. We end up in a protective bubble of our own making.

This is also a trap in foresight. The act of exploring for information and ideas about change is called environmental scanning. (Also called horizon scanning.) It is the work of collecting information, links, observations, etc. to better understand change and explore future possiblities. Confirmation bias afflicts scanning. It leads us to see only things that confirm our beliefs about the future. In fact, even your set of digital or paper filing categories can trick you into missing other changes. 

Confirmation bias file folders

This is a inevitable risk, and you have do two things to overcome it:

1). develop an approach that ensures you encounter new ideas in new categories. Don't just collect things that confirm what you have already decided is true. Read opposing views on purpose. Move towards divergent thoughts instead of away from them.

2). watch yourself and learn to catch yourself at this. Call out your biases when they happen. Carry your awareness of them into situations like when you will meet people with different world views.

Breaking through your own biases is a win. You should delight in discoveries as you read and observe that don't fit your understanding or or your categories. Get excited about finding out you're wrong. If you can't file it, leave it on the desk top. It's got an important insight for you. Pop that bubble. 

How to break free of difficult history

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Easter Rising ceremony 2012Difficult history is a historical legacy, often of conflict, that still shapes our behavior and interactions. In the United States, there are the lingering effects of the Civil War, even 150 years later, with its legacy in Federal/state and sometimes, North/South distrust, and the history and legacy of slavery. In post-apartheid South Africa, there is the legacy of a system which still shapes relations among the ethnic groups of the country. The world is full of other examples.

Foresight, including shared visions of the future, can make the difference in carrying people past, or at least counterbalancing difficult history. Peter Schwartz, in The Art of the Long View says that scenarios of positive futures helped South Africans see past their divisions as they moved to take apart the apartheid system [See earlier post]. 

Ireland, of course, has its share of difficult history and in particular its history. Ireland's President Michael Higgins, in speaking on an April 2014 state visit to the UK, worked carefully to acknowledge the "common ground we share" [LINK].

A powerful way to build and bring focus on common ground, and to work past difficult history, is to explicitly build those shared views of the future, ideally, positive, intentional futures that serve the interests of what have been parties at odds with one another. This is the one of the powers of foresight.

As President Higgins put it:

"As both our islands enter periods of important centenaries we can and must reflect on the ethical importance of respecting different but deeply interwoven narratives. Such reflection will offer us an opportunity to craft a bright future on the extensive common ground we share and where we differ in matters of interpretation to have respectful empathy for each other's perspectives."

What you can do if you have difficult history to dea with: 

1). Acknowledge your difficult history, surface attitudes and assumptions about it in open, honest conversation. A critical part of this is finding the balancing between honoring history and getting past it.

2). Work with the key stakeholders or factions to find common ground in the future: scenarios of future success that can be shared.  Apologies and reparations may be a part of this, but the great strength is in new thinking–thinking about the future we will share. Dwelling on a dark history without that leaves work undone. Your efforts and energy are best focused on counterbalancing the difficult history that continues to influence things with postive and strong images of the future.

Image: William Murphy, via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution license

Foresight: Seeing the big in the small

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Hop! the following suitcaseA problem I face when deciding what ideas about the future to share is that people tend to have heard of most cutting-edge things I might tell them. Why is that? It’s because the future is well known, or at least specific things about it are.

But sitting just behind the “famous” truths about the future is a lot of critical insight on what the changes that are so well known could actually mean. These insights are most often about a changed system or complex of systems.

Here’s a great example. Designer Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez has developed a rolling suitcase that follows its owner [Link]. The suitcase has a motor, and uses three Bluetooth receivers to triangulate on the owner’s smart phone. What a great idea. Some will find it fun, some mind-boggling.

But when we see a development like that, we don’t really know what it means. What does that add up to? Does it change our lives that much? Does it change anything more than the way you take your suitcase along? Or is it just a suitcase that follows you?

It’s the bigger system that smart things like this suitcase is a part of that matters, not a singular, however delightful, technological development. The work of foresight includes not just learning about a technology like that, but seeing how it fits with other emerging change, whether it represents a narrow example of a much greater possibility. One task is to say, what if there was more of that sort of thing? What would it mean? Another is to say, does this technology prove possibilities that could spread to other uses?

So put that smart suitcase in a wider context. It’s about technology that serves us: quietly, obediently, automatically, conveniently. It’s about adding smarts to ordinary things so that they serve us better. It’s about technologies that anticipate our needs, and respond to them flexibly. And its about harnessing automation outside of the factory–for daily, ordinary, human use.

This way of thinking has helped people move from the notion of a 3D printer — device that “prints” objects — to the idea of additive manufacturing, where complex objects can be produced flexibly, even custom, by laying up material, instead of carving it away or molding it. It led to further thoughts: if you can print a plastic object, why not food, or human tissues?

So when you see news like the story of Hop! the following suitcase, the thing to do is to think: what else could be like that? What is this helping us learn to do and learn to imagine. So we can thank Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez for a smart suitcase, but we can also thank him for stirring our imaginations and inspiring more ideas and innovation.

Image: Gizmag.com

Use foresight to challenge organizational instincts

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In watching the organizations I serve confront change and make strategy, I have realized that each of them works intently to do the right things, day by day. They follow their instincts and often those instincts are cautious or self-protective or defensive.

Confronted with a changing marketplace, rising competition, or new technology, they often respond by trying to do what they already do, only a little better. Pride and instinct focus them on working to get better at the game they already play.

This instinctive focus is made of: trimming costs, improving products and services, winning a larger market share, raising profit margins, looking for brand extensions or product extensions, and seizing more of the space in their sector.

Some of this may be future-focused, but it takes a narrow view even then. It assumes continuity in the marketplace.

But we don’t have continuity in the marketplace. At best, a continuity view will get you a few years’ relative success. Meanwhile changes will emerge while you’re busy keeping things going. It’s like the firemen in a steamship, deep below decks, shoveling in coal to keep the screws turning, but with no pilot at the helm.

So as the old cliche says, an organization needs to “get outside its comfort zone”. It needs to examine its instinctive behavior, and find out if the focus is too narrow, too short term, or too routine.

Some simple things about foresight will help:

1). a long-term view makes it likely that you will look beyond the known and beyond only playing out the game that you are in now

2). a broader view of the forces, trends, and players that are part of your organization’s environment will help you see past the customary boundaries that you think are shaping your destiny

3). a more creative view of the future and possibilities for your organization in it can help you see things that don’t yet exist, and that could present great challenges or big opportunities for your future

So don’t rely only on your instincts, or better yet, change those instincts: let in the impulse to challenge everything, and keep a focus on change, and changing how you think and what you do.

Several years ago I wrote a post that gets at organizational timidity in a slightly different way:

https://foresightculture.com/2008/06/04/as-long-as-you-do-whats-conventional-you-wont-be-accused-of-a-blunder

Image: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Midwestern Division, via Flickr, cc Attribution license.

Sensemaking and strangemaking

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At the 2012 Association of Professional Futurists Professional Development day in Toronto, July 2012, we explored design thinking and its role in futures. In the orienting discussions that led off our design work, we talked about the roles futurists play in helping people explore our changing world and what it means. And that role is a frequent topic of this blog, too.

I had not before used the term “strangemaking,” but our design-focused presenters, including Greg Van Alstyne, of the Ontario College of Art and Design, Strategic Innovation Lab, and Lloyd Walker, Precurve, who is a long-time futures colleague, talked about how part of the work of foresight is “strangemaking” which designers sometimes refer to as meaning to make the familiar, strange.

Exploring the future should include strangemaking. And then, on the other hand, it should also include sensemaking. I guess that looks like a contradiction, but the view is clear: when an organization is too focused on what it knows, too narrowly following and building within the familiar, it needs to think new thoughts, try new ideas, and so make the familiar strange for a while.

Meanwhile, most organizations are confronted with an awful lot that is strange or unclear. Usually that is what lies in the blurry periphery of what they know and can see and understand. For them, a big need is sensemaking. They need help, help that a futurist, among others, can offer, in getting clear on the changes surrounding them and in finding new ways of thinking about their interests, their stakeholders, their markets, and so on.

So, on balance, what is my job as a futurist? I think it is to draw the strange in for a close look, let it be strange and new to people, but then before long to help them understand it.

So let’s help people:

1). Make the familiar strange, by showing some surprising but plausible ways it could change, keeping the focus on what isn’t true today but what could be true in the future. That will even mean spending time looking at extreme possibilities.

2). Make the strange familiar, not by avoiding it, or ignoring it, or trying to force it into something it’s not, but rather by framing up a view of the future in a way that helps people understand and interpret it.

That balance of purposes is a thought that futurist Peter Bishop, the leader of the University of Houston Futures Studies in Commerce program crystallized for our Toronto gathering. It’s not sensemaking or strangemaking, it’s both. Thanks Peter!

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