forecast

How a futures scenario is like a Rube Goldberg contraption

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One of the delightfully crazy makers who built a device for the Nabisco Cookie vs. Creme Challenge uses a hatchet and an electric router to get the creme, which he hates, off of Oreo cookies, which he loves. Here’s the Youtube video. It’s great fun to watch, but these Nabisco Challenge devices sure seem to be pointless stunts. This guy has built a classic Rube Goldberg contraption.

But crazy, single-minded, pointless stunts have something in common with some of the scenarios futurists build to help explore the future. They are a big “what if”. What if you used a hatchet to get the creme off an Oreo?

The Oreo-cleaning guy won’t make his fortune with this machine, and people don’t normally want or need a machine to get rid of the creme. His effort is an exploration of an intricate technical system, done for fun, but it’s fun with a payoff. He learned a lot about mechanical systems, and automation, and the need for a robust mechanical set up for the success of his machine.

In buidling scenarios, particularly the “ridiculous” what ifs we sometimes use to explore deeply into different possibilities, we’re building a contraption to show something that probably won’t ever come to pass.

If we pose a “what if” that says, “the end of paper,” and then explore thoroughly a world without paper, we don’t have to believe that in 20 or 30 years there will literally be no paper. No, we can believe, and learn more about a future, in which there is far less paper. But drawing the sharpest contrasts, and understanding the most about the potential, may lead us to set our scenario as an extreme, an absurd world that we don’t really believe in.

The key, of course, is to make sure people know the difference between an experiment and a forecast, that they know you’ve built a Rube Goldberg story to try some things out, and that no, you don’t think in the future it will altogether be like that. Some of the best scenarios are that kind of experiment, they aren’t forecasts, but we can learn a lot from creating them.

Foresight illustrated: Making change — Beyond the low-hanging fruit

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For exploring and explaining sustainability, I developed the diagram at the right. It is a forecast. It focuses on change over time, showing rising degrees of transformation starting in the 1990s, and continuing to about 2025.

In the recent past and today, most green efforts involve things we can do easily, such as replacing incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs, selling more gas-electric hybrid cars, and buying carbon offsets for some of our impacts on the planet. Those steps are valid efforts to be greener, but they are Low-Hanging Fruit—that is, they can be done at only slight expense or inconvenience.

In some places, we can say we are Getting Serious, with initiatives to install alternative energy, increasing regulation, and more economic incentives. Cap and trade systems for emissions are a “getting serious” initiative. For some people, Getting Serious also includes changing their lifestyles and consciously trying to reduce their carbon footprints, for example, by eating more locally-produced foods. Voluntarily home-installed solar panels are another example.

A further stage we can anticipate is Big Systems. Mostly aspirational, that is when we will or could substantially replace carbon-based energy, require people to change their lifestyles, radically cap emissions, or force reductions through regulation, and so on.

You can argue with the years spanned by each period. You can also challenge the forecast: Will we really get serious, and ultimately make big systems change? But the years are approximate–I only mean for them to help people think about the changes we are seeing and can expect to see over the next 15 or 20 years. The chart has proven useful to our clients, and I thought it worth sharing here, as well.

You can also look at this chart a different way. Considering only the vertical axis, it differentiates our degrees of willingness to change. Then, the bottom is easiest, the top, hard to imagine. That is why most people expect that the big systems change will happen gradually over the next generation. That is a reasonable expectation, but our situation with energy and other systems may force Big Systems change sooner than we want, and sooner than this chart suggests.

I’ve already found this basic breakdown, Low-Hanging Fruit, Getting Serious, and Big Systems, to be useful in looking at other kinds of change, too. Examples include primary education, where teachers have begun to introduce some experiential moments in their classrooms—e.g. showing video clips, role-playing, but our classrooms are still typically four walls, one adult, and kids in chairs. Big systems change might mean immersive learning using virtual reality, or sending older students out to teach themselves using a city as their classroom.

Another example is corporate change. Companies routinely innovate on the margins, e.g. by introducing a new product at relatively low risk, before truly getting serious and challenging their broader strategies. Low-hanging fruit means brand extensions, or adding related and complementary products, for example. Big systems change means entering a new market, radically changing the mission and product mix of the company, and so on.

If you know you want to get beyond Low-Hanging Fruit, and want or expect to have to make Big Systems change, you need to begin the process of comprehensive change now. In that sense the bars on my chart are deceptive. You can’t wait until 2012 to launch big systems change for sustainability. The work, the discussion, the plans, the research have to start now.

It is better to be wrong, than silent

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Wrong!At the center of exploring the future is a permanent need, one that transcends everything else. That is the need to think new thoughts. The one certainty about the future is that things will be different. Because of that, we need to be sure we try out new thinking, even though we are unsure about what could happen. It is better to be wrong than to be silent.

We have to allow ourselves to explore what could happen—since we cannot know what will happen. There is no right answer waiting to be uncovered. That is the nature of foresight.
 
But it seems hard to just speculate, and that often keeps people from exploring and sharing ideas about the future. Fear of being wrong is probably the biggest obstacle we face in exploring the future.
 
What can you do about this? First, set a tone that says to your colleagues: “let’s share our ideas, even if they seem ‘out there’. Let’s try out ideas, without fear of judgment or contradiction.”
 
It’s important to let the ideas flow, at least for a time, and not shoot them each down. You will need to stop those that would say “no,” or “impossible” to interesting ideas. They are stifling an important process in the organization.
 
Second, you will need to set clear expectations about exploring the future. You need to help your colleagues understand that the future is a range of possibility, and that in exploring the possibilities, we sometimes try out ideas beyond what people may expect or be comfortable with. That has to be ok.
 
Above all, don’t let people fall silent on you. Help them know and feel that it’s better to be wrong than to be silent.
 
Image: Gwire, via Flickr, cc license

Crying “Wolf!” about the future

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Hurricane IkeOn September 12, 2008, the day before Hurricane Ike hit the Texas coast, the U.S. National Weather Service told people in low-lying, thinly-protected Galveston that "Persons not heeding evacuation orders in single-family one- or two-story homes will face certain death.” [Link] My futurist friend Andy Hines found it bizarre to watch for hours as that phrase, “certain death” scroll across the tv screen in his Houston home.

Though things looked dire even before the storm hit, the Weather Service’s alert was an extreme statement to make. Hurricane paths shift moment by moment. They might have more accurately said that residents “face the risk of death”. It was clear they were saying it that way to scare people. Should they have? Were they “crying wolf!”? (As of this writing, we don’t know how many people in Galveston might have lost their lives. It seems likely that rescuers will discover more losses and that dire warnings were appropriate.)

In communicating about the future, should we exaggerate for effect? How, and how much so can we do that and not be crying “Wolf!” Are the recurring jokes and complaints to futurists; “what happened to the paperless office?” or “where’s my jetpack?” because we too often forecast something that does not happen? We risk losing our influence if that keeps happening, but we also lose influence if what we say is simply not interesting or compellingly different from what people are already thinking about.

I urged people working to explore the future, in my piece on  The 27 Habits of Highly Successful Futurists, to not be afraid to exaggerate for more effective communication and to get people thinking, but to also always know when they are exaggerating. That’s because there is a fundamental difference in the work of exploring the future between making a forecast—a statement about something we expect to happen—and exploring possibilities—asking “what if…” questions to try out new ideas about the future.

The key is be clear yourself and to make clear to all others what you are doing. If you make a forecast, give it with your best thinking on degree of likelihood and your level of confidence in the outcome happening. If you are exploring “what ifs” make sure everyone knows that, and know what the exploration is for. Then you can making more striking statements and not take the risk of crying "wolf".

Our most compelling work is usually an exploration of a world transformed, or a mind-bending new technology taking a place in people’s lives. But we have to know, and reveal, whether we think that transformation is likely, or low odds. I think good futures thinking demands the “exaggerated” views of the future, otherwise we can’t catch the notice and imagination of others. But I know it also demands careful reflection on and explanation of the drivers of the change, and clear assessments of the change’s likelihood.

Image: Nasa

Understanding change through phases, eras, timelines

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Change doesn’t really happen in phases or eras. But in our understanding of it, it does. In exploring the future, it’s essential to frame or reframe how we think about change over time. That includes explaining the past and the present as part of a continuum leading to the future.

Using a timeline gives people something to test, add their thinking to, and talk about. A named set of phases or eras is a language people can share in exploring change with others.

As we work to understand how the future will emerge, we also often have limited or faulty understanding of the past and the present. A timeline helps us settle our understanding of the past and present to enable clearer thinking about the future.

As a futurist, I sometimes develop a timeline with a set of phases or eras to explain a trajectory of change. I also borrow and adapt those of others. A classic one is the American generations, the Silent Generation, Baby Boom, Baby Bust (or Generation X), and Baby Boom Echo (the millennials). That framing has been powerful and useful to look at values, attitudes, and lifestage experiences. Its power in how it has helped people explore American society is clear. Think of how quickly you can open up a conversation, for example, by saying “the Baby Boomers ….” Others know what you are talking about right away.

Here’s an example of a timeline (not yet with dates assigned) that I’ve been working with:

Media World Timeline

Part of the value in these frameworks is the simple fact of giving names to things. Having the short-hand for the post-World War II generation, the Baby Boomers, lets us learn more about that generation, discuss it, argue about it, and so on. Using the concept of a “post-modern era” or “the Industrial Revolution” lets people play with a provocative idea in the context of past, present, and future social change.

There is also plenty of danger in using schemes like this. They are, of a necessity, simplistic. Some arise to help consultants and other authors sell books or seminars. Some are nonsense. But some are profoundly useful. We have to simplify our view in order to understand it. So long as we know we are simplifying it, and so long as we don’t let the pretty scheme we’ve developed or borrowed become a mental cage, we should get the powerful benefit of these frameworks for thinking about change.

Trying to leave in all the complexity of a changing world makes it really hard for people to understand and think about change. The risks in simplifying and generalizing our views is a problem to be recognized and discussed, but that doesn’t invalidate having those generalized views in the first place. It’s hard to do without them.

Small questions, big answers

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My old archaeology professor, John Witthoft, shared a bit of wisdom I have not forgotten in the nearly 30 years since I took his classes. He said, “ask a small, simple question, and you will find a great complex of things to explore.” He knew that too many of us undergraduates would reach for huge topics like the decline and fall of empires, when we were likely to have greater success, and get more out of, a paper on how metal smelting enabled greater technological advances, or the role of the horse for plains Indians, for example.

So it is with studying the future. In exploring the future, we are too often faced with the impossible: imagine and understand “the future” –the whole thing! That’s just too much to undertake. It’s certainly not helpful to people trying to get a stronger sense of change and the possibilities for their product, their sector, their profession, their community, and so on. The enormity of the task is too great, and too often people will give up trying to understand the future. There are simpler ways to get the conversation about the future going.

I suggest starting with a small question or a small “what if”. It will open up a big world of thoughts and perhaps answers. It will drive your thinking to the bigger questions, but they’ll have a purpose and a focus. Try using “artifacts from the future”. Wired has a regular feature on those “artifacts”. They publish a back-page Photoshopped image that showcases a future possibility. A recent one showed produce for sale, but the produce comes from “Ventria Bioscience” and Monsanto, and includes the Pizzamato, a pizza flavored tomato, and the Cinna-Del, an apple with cinnamon flavor. The “artifact” images are usually subtle but powerful, and the few details brought forward each are worthy of a conversation. These small details open up a big range of thinking, and I would argue, lead more naturally to a sense of future possibilities than a great thick report on the global future can.

So in exploring the future, don’t aim too high too fast. It’s important to put the focus on something we can think about and understand. Maybe it’s a simple artifact or prosaic detail of daily life. Those are things that mean much to people. And pictures are ideal.

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