biases

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.

Offsetting your suburban, middle class, white collar bias

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If you are reading this, you probably work in some kind of white collar job. There’s a fair chance you didn’t work in a factory when you were younger, though maybe you worked in construction, on a farm, or in food service or retail. If you currently or used to work in manufacturing, you do not need to read further.

So do you have much experience with how things are made? Not having a close, tactile sense of that may limit your thinking about commerce, industry, products, and so on. Or, if you have some grounding in one industry, and how its products are made, you may not know much about any other. I am not judging anyone about this, it’s my affliction too. The closest I got to “production” was helping artisans in candlemaking, pottery, and other arts. And I had a blue-collar summer job in park maintenance. But the first time I saw manufacturing was when I toured the Harley Davidson Factory in York, Pennsylvania, when I was a young adult.
 
Why does this matter to foresight? If you want to do the best you can at understanding the emerging future, you need to try to know something about a lot of things. And this is an example of a gap in understanding that is pretty common among my colleagues and the business executives I work with.
 
I find it easy for my futurist colleagues, and my clients, for example, to focus on potential change in consumer life and lifestyles—we are all consumers. It’s not hard to look at change in the consumer marketplace with a great familiarity about the situations consumers are in, their values and tastes—at least for the center cut demographic of people in one’s own society.
 
But it’s much harder to get people to: 1). Understand and think about the business processes that are behind the scenes, 2). Remember whole groups of stakeholders in how things are changing in the world—the businesses and people that produce things, provide energy, and so on.
 
What can you do about this? I can’t help you fully overcome the problem, but I am a strong advocate for working intently, if modestly, on it. Here are things you might try to do:
  • Take factory tours, [see this site for information on a lot of the public tours in the US], but also try to look for some that are not the official, available-to-tourists tours. If you can get a friend to give you a behind the scenes tour, terrific. Nevertheless, some public tours are terrific. I learned a lot and really enjoyed: Miller Coors, Golden, Colorado, Martin Guitars, Nazareth, Pennsylvania, Harley Davidson, York, Pennsylvania, and Blue Bell Ice Cream, in Brenham, Texas.
  • Go to trade shows—often they are free, and in most cities, nearby. It doesn’t matter too much which ones, branch out from what you know, take some of these in, lurk, talk to people, touch things.
  • Read odd (to you) trade journals from time to time. You may not understand a lot of what you are seeing, but you’ll deepen your sense of what’s out there, and knowing more about what you don’t know is a good thing.
  • You can also look for “how it’s made” videos on YouTube, there are lots of them. But don’t let more web surfing offset time you might take to go and see real things!
  • Interview a friend in an industry you don’t understand, and maybe even take a learning journey with your friend to factories, distribution centers, R&D facilities, etc.
  • Watch “How It’s Made” on the Science Channel
  • Go look at things, explore, and drive around back of things, literally and figuratively
One of the best things my colleagues and I did a few years ago with our multisponsor program group on the future of packaging was take them to a recycling facility in Boulder, Colorado. Though these were packaging executives, responsible, in many cases, for packaging recycling, they found the tour revealing and stimulating.
 
All of this is fun and interesting. You can probably take your family or friends. It is environmental scanning—the non-sedentary kind—and so it is a proper part of your work. It can make a pretty big difference in at least reminding us that there is more—much more—to know. And please, if you find this works well for you, let me know!

Setting aside biases

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The participants in a futures activity—for the activity to be successful—have to do several things. First they must shed their immediate concerns and responsibilities. I once saw an extreme case of the inability to do this at an event in a materials and chemicals firm. An R&D executive, during a discussion exploring issues and problems in society said: “I don’t see what this has to do with fluoropolymers.” His colleagues—many who did not have fluoropolymer responsibilities—jumped all over him and showed him how he needed to think first about how the world and the marketplace were changing, then find a fit with the company’s technologies.

Second, they must suspend their devotion to what their organization does today and allow the future to suggest possibilities that may change the opportunities available to the organization. At a futures conference, one speaker put it succinctly: “We are up to our eyeballs in petroleum—let’s not try to be something we are not.” Yet that firm has myriad opportunities in energy beyond petroleum, and given the Gulf Oil Spill of 2010, had better drop such close focus the existing basis of the business.

And they must, in the case of large businesses, set aside their concerns about how the Wall Street analysts and investors will respond to changes they might make. This is a particularly acute problem for Fortune 500 firms. Shares in those firms are defined and planned components of investment portfolios. If a firm is to transform itself to something new—in other words if the changes it wants to make are substantial—shareholders and stock analysts will react. A blue chip firm feels stuck in that status. How much wiggle room there is depends on the myriad ingredients of Wall Street thinking, on the current investment climate, and on the reputation of the firm and its leaders.

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