complexity

Not good enough

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Not good enough: poor performance on the foresight testThere’s bad news for an awful lot of organizations. Their grip on the future is weak or nothing. They react, instead of responding and acting. Their view is narrow instead of broad. They think they know the future, but their grip on it is superficial at best.

Why? Ideas about change and the future come in little, trivial scatters, instead of being taken up comprehensively. Everything we do is part of a complex of systems. The questions are not narrow or simple, and the assumptions we work and act on are based in ever-changing conditions. But we oversimplify, bound, and narrow our thinking when we need to do exactly the opposite.

In all this, executives may even be rewarded for their narrow, specialized knowledge and abilities. Outcomes and outputs are measured in narrow ways. Progress in some areas completely hides decline, as when the measures are gross and cross-company. For example, an international company looking at its total revenues could see overall growth when in fact its fortunes and businesses are in decline in its base markets. Global growth often masks soft or declining markets.

What can you do about this?

It’s time to change your thinking. Part of this is being humble: admit you are always on a quest to know more and understand change better. Part is to open, and keep open a conversation about change and about your future. Recognize new ideas about the future and reward them. Let in the controversial and the scary ideas that may come with a frank acknowledgement that you need to know more and you need to change.

Break loose from the “what’s wrong let’s fix it” mentality of most managers. While you fix, you also need to change things. Your current reality is not the whole story, and your current view of what needs doing is not enough.

Spend time explicitly talking about where things are going, how your markets are evolving, and what you might do about it. Plan to build for resilience, not based on certainty–you won’t have that, but based on your best sense of the range of possibilities. And make the organization strong–ready it for uncertainty by building in divergent thought, new skills, wider partnerships and relationships, and deep and continuing intelligence on the world–the whole world, and how it’s changing.

Six things fiction writing taught me about foresight

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAI have posted at johnmahaffie.com, the inverse of this theme: Six things studying the future has taught me about fiction writing

I’ve spent a couple of years deep in the ranks of amateur novelists, working on a couple of novels, which I will confess, though I am a futurist, are set in the past, one in 1916, and one in the 1970s. I am still learning the basics by writing fiction every day, but doing it has already paid off for my work as a futurist. How? Several ways.

1. The parts of the story not told
In building a body of work for a futures project, I learn a lot, and think a lot, and develop a lot of ideas. I collect lots of information. I begin to know the “whole” future that my client faces, or at least have a large body of conjecture about it. But like the readers of a novel, my clients don’t want to know everything about the future, just the part that matters and that they can act on. So, overall, what I discovered in writing my novels is, don’t put something in just because you thought of it and researched it, and went some trouble to create it. That’s not your reader’s, or your client’s problem.

2. Things are complicated
Reinforcing the lesson of foresight, and one that I can benefit from learning, relearning, and building upon, is that human systems are complex: there’s never just one cause for a change, the swirl of forces large and small shape and reshape the destiny of people, families, towns, cities, societies, humankind. In building stories about people, you get a stronger sense of that, it’s the combination of forces that create change.

3. Point of view matters
Writers have to work out the point of view, and the voice they use to get across their stories. In foresight, getting the story told, or the forecast communicated, or the call to action made, means understanding who you are exploring the future for, what’s in their heads, and what needs to be in their heads. We spend a lot of time working out what future to focus on, how to frame ideas about change, and whose interests we have in mind in doing so. The first acts of a foresight initiative involve answering the question, “What future?

4. What’s worth exploring is change
There’s not much for the futurist to do in exploring the present, other folks are far more expert at that. Our value is in looking at change and the intersections of different kinds of change. In fiction, it’s also change that matters. If a character doesn’t change, if there are no points of no return, if nothing really happens, you’ve set a scene but not told a story. In foresight, if you get caught up in the discovery of what’s going on now, you may end up a little smarter, but it’s much more valuable to get at vital changes, what they mean, and how things could turn out.

5. Show don’t tell
Good futures work is about conveying insights and wisdom, but also about explaining, supporting, and giving examples. So like the writer admonished to “show, don’t tell,” in communicating about the future, examples and specifics and the concrete do better work than generalities. Concepts and new framings are powerful, but without the support of a “such as,” or “for example” the listener or reader may not get or accept what you are talking about.

6. Story telling is the thing
Futures work includes telling stories, often those are scenarios–narratives of the future. And the more they work as stories, the better a job they do in getting ideas about the future across to people. The scenarios I’ve worked on lately are better stories, with greater attention to real human lives, ideas, and reactions. Too much of my work in the past played out technologies for technologies’ sake, at the expense of true, deep insights on people. It’s not that I didn’t know the importance of people in futures stories, it’s just that I’ve gained strength in know how to focus on that side.

Image: rahego, via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution License

Failure to think in systems

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Far too often, people propose solutions to problems large and small that are narrow and shortsighted. they take a binary view: cause and effect, A by itself leads to B.

They fail to think about how things are part of much bigger systems with complex interacting forces, players, and parts. This happens in businesses, in families, and at the regional, national, and global levels. 

Sometimes this is simple narrow thinking or ignorance, but often today, at least in the US, it comes from partisan politics. How the public understands the issues or how opponents will characterize your decision later becomes more important than what's really true. And for similar reasons, politically, the short term usually beats the long term.

That is why shutting down the US Federal Government looks like a reasonable tactic to some people. They have not thought about how it would affect things beyond the political tussle underway right now. In fact, a US Federal Government shutdown would have a steep price tag–rather than reducing the budget deficit, it would increase it.

Some other examples. In the budget debates, it's easy to say that US aid to poor farmers in Asia and Africa is something we just can't afford right now. Their plight–however unfortunate–should not be our top priority, when our resources are limited, we should invest first at home. 

Yet that aid is integral to critical things: the supply of affordable food in those countries and in the global marketplace, political and economic stability in multiple countries, the ability of people in those countries to afford US products and services, and so on. Investing in African poor farmers is investing in the US. 

Arguments about issues like this are often touted as "common sense." Usually that means using a rationale that comes from a different context. For example, politicians like to say "I have to balance my checkbook each month, why shouldn't the Federal Government have to balance its budget?" But clearly, the US Federal Government and an individual's family finances are not the same thing.

Such arguments also tend to focus on the near term at the expense of the long term. Another example: arguing that we cannot stop burning coal for energy because too much of our electricity is generated from coal to stop using it. Doing so would weaken the economy now and in the next few years (never mind the critical need to move to alternative energy and the potential growth from transforming our energy systems).

The response to failures to think in systems has to be to regularly, and clearly offer a "Yes, but….." and to show people what else is affected, and what else is at stake. It will also make a difference to elaborate on the future outcomes of a decision by describing what is likely to result in the system and related systems that the decision will affect. A scenario or set of scenarios can be a powerful tool for doing that.

Image: Elsie esq. via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution license.

What to expect when you go futuring

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Perplexity, among colleagues, family, they may think you’ve gone ’round the bend!
Complexity, behind most anything you explore, since you are opening up questions, digging deeper
Uncertainty, more than you had! More than answering questions, you’ll be raising new questions
Fear, if you do a good job. If there’s none, you probably haven’t asked big enough questions
Fun, if you let it happen. There should be laughter, even if it comes out of serious questions
Ah ha’s, breakthroughs in your thinking, new insights
Empowerment, you’ll discover new things to know about your future, to act on, to believe
A new mindset, you won’t look at things the same way, and you’ll see forces and trends everywhere
Addiction, for you and colleagues, you’ll not want to stop! (I hope)

Get comfortable with complexity

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Last week I wrote a post about getting comfortable with uncertainty, and helping others do it too. This week, I'd like to turn the focus to complexity. 

When I was fourteen, my brother Jim and the McCarthy boys and I got hold of an old Briggs & Stratton, 2-stroke, lawn mower engine. We planned to use it to build a hovercraft (this did not work out). In tinkering and fiddling to see if we could get the engine to work, I discovered that there are two adjustment screws: the idle valve and the idle speed adjustment. One screw, I could manage: adjust up or down. But immediately, with two, we had a much more complex situation: the possible adjustment combinations grew exponentially, if I have my math concepts right. I learned something about complex systems, right then and there.

When people are trying to understand change, they can easily fall into the trap of assuming one thing is responsible for what has happened; one force or one incident changed things, like one of the two engine adjustments, up or down.

People want to latch on to the first "cause" they think of, and often assume that it caused the outcome or change. We get in this habit, and our news media reinforces it–so often they boil things down to a simple cause and effect story. But there are always other forces at play, and good foresight means acknowledging that, and trying to understand more about more of the factors involved.

So what to do about this? Some possibilities: 

  • Watch yourself and your colleagues: see if you are inclined to stop when you get to a (single) explanation, as with saying why today's Dow Jones went up or down. This isn't good enough. Keep the discussion going, and figure out more about what is going on. Keep saying, "what else?"
  • Raise awareness. Find stories you can share with colleagues that show why they need to understand the complexity at play, and illustrate how things don't have a single trigger or cause. Best of all are examples from your own organization or your sector, where it's clear that a range of forces and trends are at play
  • Go visual: draw diagrams, showing the multiple causes, effects, and relationships involved in a trend, or change, or issue. Your visual learner colleagues will really get it then

But don't worry, you don't have to become expert in complexity theory, or systems thinking. Just keep asking questions, and thinking, and discussing. You'll like what you get.

And by the way, I never did master the 2-stroke engine. I have a rechargeable electric mower now, with no adjustment screws at all. 

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