John Mahaffie

The power of silence

February 18, 2025February 15, 2012 by John B. Mahaffie

Insights come more reliably to an undistracted mind. Have you noticed a little magic in the otherwise purgatorial time you spend with the cabin doors closed, approved electronic devices off, between pull back and take-off? Have you noticed that you had a few moments to think? That few minutes is a blessing–it’s time you are given to spend un-distracted by the interruption of your digital daily life. Embrace it!

Yet most of us work intently to optimize our distractions: fine-tuning i-devices with apps and connections, so that we might encounter information all the time. Mobile digital life guarantees that you can have something to distract yourself whereever you go, whatever you are doing. Your thoughts are under siege.

You can even listen to music or the radio while swimming or showering. You can take in NPR or a book on tape while walking your dog or doing yard work. But don’t!

Turn the radio off when you drive, sometimes
Leave the iPod home when you walk the dog, sometimes
Don’t use a shower radio, each time
Clear some time with your thoughts, all the time

You get the picture.

How does this apply to foresight? Thinking about the future is a tough mental game. To effectively explore and understand it, you need to do think about a lot of things at once. You have to think altogether new thoughts. This is equally true for effective analysis and writing.

There are new connections to be made, insights that need time to germinate and ground to sprout in. “A ha!” moments need to break through, from your subconscious. Must they contend with the latest on the Jets or J-Lo? The Dow or the Dodgers? The boss’s memo? It seems they must, until we reach for the “off” switch, or put down the i-thing for a little while. And when you write, don’t always stop to look things up, consult other sources. Sometimes let the ideas flow, the writing come out. Fact check later.

To have some success thinking about the future, you really need to think about it. That includes time away from distractions, absolutely, but it even includes time away from the facts and finds that you may be using to try to understand your future. If you don’t stop taking in information long enough to think about it, you won’t quite get there.

Image: saturn ?, via Flickr, CC attribution license.

Two sides of foresight work

February 18, 2025February 2, 2009 by John B. Mahaffie

Two Sides of Foresight Over a long time as a futurist, I have come to look at futures work as having two sides: analysis and experience.

That is a hard won and only recently-clear conclusion. I think it's valuable to think about the difference, and the critical need for both sides, for doing good foresight work, for dealing with different kinds of thinkers and learners, and for being effective in communicating with others.

Here's how I see it: exploring the future depends on, and benefits powerfully from wide-ranging research, close analysis of what we know, careful consideration of what is more and less certain and what is wholly uncertain, the comparison of alternate scenarios, and so on. We cannot be futurists without putting effort into that work. That is our analysis work. It is, in fact, what most futurists I know do best. (It involves plenty of creative effort as well–don't take the word "analysis" too narrowly.)

But, analysis alone is not all that we need. Too often, especially with today's availability of information, the work of analysis consumes us. We also need to have, and foster in others, experiences in exploring the future. Our careful analysis is unlikely to be wholly successful if we fail to give people some chance to do their own thinking about the future. That is central to effective work with groups. It is also a part of how we need to approach sharing ideas about the future with others. Giving people a futures experience through images, stories, and the chance to question, challenge, and interact, make all the difference in getting through to them with new ideas.

In working on the future, we have to consider our work incomplete if we have only done our careful research and analysis. We have to give the experience side our best creative attention as well. We need to guard time for "playing" in the future–to come with ideas about future possibilities–without an over-concern about plausiblity, liklihood, or data. We need to let the creative ideas flow. Analysis by itself does not get us where we need to go.

Here's one approach that futurists use, as an example. Working with a group, choose a year ten years or more in the future, for example 2024–fifteen years from now. Have groups of 5 or 8 people spend time coming up with newspaper headlines from that year. (Nevermind that we may not have newspapers by then, the front page is a familiar concept for people to play with.) Have them draw front pages on flip charts and then share them with the other groups. The headline creation gets people's playful juices going, and brings out people's assumptions about the future. It gives them a chance to play with ideas about the future, rather than just sitting hearing someone else's ideas. It moves them toward stories from the future, rather than just extrapolated trend data, or technical concepts.

There are lots of techniques like this, and you can create your own. Just be sure they help you break away, sometimes, from just doing analysis, when what you also need is some experiences.

A rock becomes a bear, and a bear becomes a rock

February 18, 2025August 26, 2008 by John B. Mahaffie

Black bear, Alaska Linda Lieberman is a U.S. National Park Service ranger with years of experience interpreting nature for National Park visitors. This Summer, we met her in Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska, and she led us on a glacier cruise where we saw lots of wildlife, including a grizzly bear and her cubs, foraging on the rocky beaches for mussels and other delicacies.

Linda told us that she’s learned from park visitors over the years that the rock you are staring at can become a bear, and perhaps just as often, the bear you’ve spotted becomes a rock.

Humans are superbly evolved for pattern recognition, but we mix into that skill a tendency to see what we expect to see, and sometimes what we want to see. When my family and I are park tourists, we want to see bears—we have years of experience with rocks becoming bears and bears becoming rocks.

Jerome Groopman is a physician and writer who has made a study of how doctors make diagnoses and decisions, exploring his own clinical experience and the luterature of heuristics. Heuristics is a complicated word for how we figure things out, including the patterns and "rules of thumb" we use.

In his book How Doctors Think (2007) Groopman examined our pattern mis-recognition tendencies in the context of doctors making diagnoses. In their frenetic world, they have to make quick diagnoses, and they often get it wrong.

Here are the main ways Groopman says doctors get it wrong. I’ve paralleled what Groopman observes with the parallel errors we can make in exploring the future:

Representativeness—Letting what is most typically true influence what you see and don’t see, e.g. the symptoms commonly associated with a problem will always be there

In futures:

Assuming a different culture, group, organization, or person will do what we would in the same circumstances
Missing discontinuities-clues to potential sudden shifts and breaks in patterns hidden from us by what seem like the much clearer evidence of familiar patterns
Assuming a change you’ve observed is representative of what’s going on, because it’s part of your life or experience, e.g. “everybody is composting household food waste”

Availability—Being influenced by the patients recently seen, e.g. the last five cases had the flu, so this one must also

In futures:

Assuming that history repeats itself
Using a narrow worldview to interpret the unknown—“people won’t like that”
“We tried that already”—something I think is similar to this idea didn’t work before, so it won’t work this time
Straight line trend extrapolation—the trend will continue because of the past record, with do sharp breaks, changes of directions, and so on

Affective error—Making decisions based on what the doctor wishes is true, affected often by an emotional sense, e.g. the patient reminds me of me, the patient is a young healthy guy, and can’t be all that si

In futures:

The thing I know and care about (change in my lifestyle, e.g.) is typical and represents the bigger picture future
Wishful thinking, everything will work out ok
Our product/technology is the future—because we love it, it must be the best fit for the situation and the best choice for the future

Doctors, at least in the U.S. clinical settings, and more legitimately on the field of battle and emergency rooms anywhere, have to make decisions very, very quickly. People engaged in foresight have, and ought to take, the luxury of time to really think about things, catch themselves in these thinking errors, and, if possible, get closer to the truth. I wrote about our speed of decisionmaking in a closely parallel post, Don’t blink.

In exploring the future, we’re prone to each of these sources of error. Perhaps no one’s life is immediately at stake, but the cost of error can still be high, especially in missed opportunities, and in mis-timing an action that counts on a change in the marketplace.

We need to keep reminding ourselves of our human capacity for misinterpreting what we’re seeing, assuming continuity, finding what we’re looking for, and, especially, for wishful thinking.