futuring

Futurists are presentists: The true purpose of a forecast

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The other day my friend Holly asked me about my track record as a futurist. Holly is a journalist and has a knack for asking quiet, incisive questions.

I had told her about co-authoring a book in the 1990s about the year 2025. [2025 : Scenarios of US and Global Society Reshaped by Science and Technology] Holly’s question got me thinking about the purpose of my work.

It’s reasonable for people to expect futurists to predict the future. But accurate prediction is not the real value of our work. What futurists do is very much about today. Forecasts should show the range of and directions of change that get us started toward a desired future. The forecast endpoint is not the point.

There is little point in framing an idea about the future and then waiting ten or fifteen years to see “Did you get it right?” Today is where foresight has its power. 

The best question I could ask when we get to 2025 is: Did people who read 2025 in the late 1990s act differently because of the ideas in the book?

Why did we write 2025? To help business people in the late 1990s understand change and potential for the future in that year. So my book, 2025, published in 1996, was for people in 1996 to understand future possibility.

As the year 2025 approaches, I still expect to be embarrassed about where we were wrong. Most often that will be about what we did not forecast at all and where we were too optimistic. But I should forget about it. That was not the point or the purpose of the book. 

How should you think about this?

When you work with a futurist or engage with the future, know your today reasons. Allow the process to range imaginatively over future ideas. But don’t worry about certainty and accuracy at some future date. Explore what those ideas tell you about what to do now.

__________

For some further thoughts on this, see What do futurists really do?

What is and What if

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In organizations, knowing what’s going on today across the business landscape (”what is”), is essential. Too often the press of daily work keeps an executive from knowing enough.

But understanding how things are changing and the emerging challenges and opportunities in front of you (”what if”) needs attention too. Nearly always, the press of business and immediate demands shut down attention to “what if”.

Here is what is involved:  

“What is” — the operating environment:

  • Due diligence — care and attention to the organization’s interests
  • Industry focus — sector and market knowlege
  • The state of the art — best practices and the latest technology, systems, processes
  • What’s going on — the competitive landscape

“What if” — the future:

  • Leading edge change — emerging change in the market, technology, society, that will impact the organization
  • Emerging and future possibilities — identification of specific opportunities and challenges and potential responses to them

For both, we can’t help but stand in today as we think and work to understand. But we must try to think forward to better anticipate the future.

“What is” functions poorly without “what if.” Taking action in response to conditions today, without thoughts toward the future, is risky. But the reverse is true too. You need to know enough about current conditions to fully explore potential change. 

What to do about it

Broaden your view of “what is” by exploring the environment more broadly, beyond the specific marketplace niche, or issue, or geography you focus on.

Deepen your view of “what if” into the future by: Explicitly testing out ideas about 5 or 10 or more years from now. Ask the “what ifs” questions. Build stories (scenarios) of future possibilities. Draw implications of those “what ifs”.  Attention to both questions will make you stronger and more limber as you face challenges and meet new opportunities.

For more insight on this and a related illustration, see: Management, strategy, and foresight, compared

Don’t be a victim of change

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When you face change, your responses fall on a spectrum. Foresight makes sure you are in the right place.

Reactive — Watching and likely being blindsided by change, and only making a move when forced to do so. Often your action is expensive and not effective. You miss opportunities and risk failure and economic loss.

Responsive — Preparing for and responding to emerging, visible change. You gain agility for responding, and may get ahead of crises and seize opportunities.

Proactive — Anticipating and shaping change. You are ready for crises and sharp change. You can seize opportunities ahead of others.

Never be a victim of change. Anticipate and shape it. Foresight is decisive in making you ready.

Pollyanna had the right idea

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In a controlled study, researchers found people routinely willing to swap similar pens with others, but less willing to exchange lottery tickets. The reason? The lottery ticket in your hand has a potential future value which may—you don’t know—exceed that of another ticket. You don’t want to swap away a ticket that might turn out to be the winner. This happens even if the subjects of the experiment are reminded that probability shows either ticket has an equal likelihood of being a winner.

With pens, you are not likely to come out behind. A pen’s a pen, and neither your pen nor the other guy’s is the key to a future fortune. This shows how potential future regret shapes our decisions in the present.

So we have a tendency to anticipate having regret in the future. That means regret is not only a back-facing emotion, it also shapes our view forward, and so it shapes our future. The regret we feel can be about a missed future chance, an anticipation of failure, or an expectation that we will come up short in how we handle change.

The antonym of regret is satisfaction, and I would argue that anticipated satisfaction can be a powerful motivator for the future. But we have to allow ourselves to proceed with confidence armed with a vision of a positive future. That means that positive scenarios of our future are a strong motivator.

There’s not likely to be much of an outcome if you go around expecting the worse, starting up with your regret even before things have transpired. This sort of sour approach to the present and the future is nothing but destructive. In my view, Pollyanna had it about right—we need a positive outlook and we can help build that with a focus on the future that gets us to positive ideas about the future. Along the way exploring people’s fears, but also their hopes about the future will help the cause.

See also a recent Time piece, “The Optimism Bias” on how we have an optimism bias and why we should.

I’ve also weighed in before on hope, optimism, and the future:

Planning, scanning, forecasting: It’s the verb, not the noun

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In exploring the future, it’s the journey that counts most, not the plan, report, or briefing you produce. Remembering that is essential. You need to make sure your colleagues, clients, bosses understand that the value and power of the journey is foremost. You don’t want your key stakeholders to wait for the “answers” they think you should produce for them, you want them in on the process.

The process is about rehearsing flexible thinking, alternate views, what ifs, and contingencies. You can’t explore all the possible what ifs, and should not try.

Instead, learn from the thinking you do in exploring a range of possibilities. By that you can get better at facing uncertainty with assurance that you and your colleagues build into your thinking resilience against the unexpected. Chances are, your plans will be robust in a range of different outcomes–you can hope so.

Dwight Eisenhower understood this:

“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of “emergency” is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning”

–Speech to the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference in Washington, D.C. (14 November 1957) [Link]

A great tool for this journey is scenario planning. A set of scenarios is a sampling of a range of what ifs against which you can build some plans and strategies. But your set is never a complete view of the possible future. And most of all, it’s the process of exploring alternative futures with scenarios that matters most. You can find a lot more about scenarios here.

(My colleague Jennifer Jarratt reminded me of this quote, and I am grateful in this, as in so much of her work, for her ideas and inspiration.)

Eisenhower’s little bit of wisdom, like so many quotes, has taken up residence on the Internet in a paraphrase, cut loose from its true moorings in Ike’s speeches and writing. It turns up most often as “Plans are worthless. Planning is essential”.

Image source

Are you the Cat in the Hat?

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The Cat in the Hat is a classic Dr. Seuss character who creates chaos wherever he goes. As I remember the stories, he puts things right at the end, just barely. He’s a care-free, impish character who fascinates and alarms the children he visits—he is a daredevil, an experimenter, and wholly-unconventional. The children in the books act more like straight-laced adults, at least at first. They fix worried looks on their faces and wonder if what he’s doing is going to be ok.
 
In the original Cat in the Hat, the Cat drops in on a brother and sister, home alone. He creates a hellacious mess in their house, and brings in other impish characters: “Thing 1” and “Thing 2” to help generate the chaos. Then, in the nick of time, he returns with an enormous contraption that puts everything right. Whenever I read that story to my boys, I would chuckle when I thought about the Cat and Things 1 and 2 as the leaders of futures workshops and projects in organizations. Maybe I was sometimes the Cat, or an outside consultant (Thing 1 or 2, perhaps?).
 
The Mom is not home, so the element of danger in his visit is mixed with a fear of being caught doing something wrong. This is a lot like the tendency some people have to want to explore the future without actually using the “f” word (future).
 
The cat reassures the children, several times, that everything is going to be ok. There’s a goldfish in the story who’s having none of that, and who is convinced that disaster has struck—perhaps goldfish in a bowl live in a riskier way—they depend on the bowl not being upset. That fish is like the people we always find in an organization who cannot be reassured, only perhaps managed or kept from shutting down good futures thinking. And maybe, like the goldfish in his bowl, they feel more at risk than the others—we need to understand that.
 
As a futurist and regular workshop leader, I sometimes wonder whether we are coming in and creating chaos in the organizations we serve. We need to think about how far we go in upending things, creating chaos, and scaring people. Should we embrace the role or try to keep everyone assured?
 
Forthrightly exploring change with people is as scary as it is exciting. Do futurists put things right in the end? Not quite—once the new thoughts are unleashed, they won’t go away and they shouldn’t.
 
Are the people we work with changed for the better in the end? They seem to be. I think the core lesson here is about how we handle the worried onlooker, and the straight-laced, conventionally-minded in the organization. We can’t let them mute or stop the flow of new ideas, but we have to take their fears and biases into account too. Part of building a more foresight culture for the organization is getting a wide range of people with different attitudes about change to at least accept the idea of studying change. Understanding and defining our role in doing that is critical, as is understanding others’ views and biases.

Environmental scanning – Special page

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I’ve been working for some time on a piece Environmental scanning in which I lay out thinking and advice on how to do effective, collaborative environmental scanning (aka horizon scanning) using the tools of the digital world. This work, which I expect to update from time to time, is long enough that I’ve given it its own page on ForesightCulture.com. Click here to see it, or look for the "eScanning 2.0" tab at the top of any ForesightCulture page. 

Please let me know what you think.

Word cloud courtesy of Wordle.net

Thoughts on Why?

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Why? by Charles TillyJust because your careful, reasoned look at the future makes a decision or conclusion clear to you, doesn’t mean everyone else will “get” your reasoning. When you have grasped how things are changing, and decided what should be done that is new and different, you still have to explain your thinking to others.

It’s hard to make change without doing that, and there are some good ways of understanding what kinds of explanations might work. Charles Tilly’s Why? (2006) explains how we explain things, and is a good framing for people trying to get others to understand the basis for conclusions and decisions about the future.
Tilly describes four ways we answer the question Why? Let me use a story from my family to show what each one is about.
A couple of years ago, we decided to dismantle a wooden swing set in our backyard to make room for an addition to the house. At the time, one of our boys was about 7 years old, and he was the key stakeholder in this decision. He was the one who would ask Why?
As I used a crowbar to dismantle the swing set, while my son was out for the day, I tried out Tilly’s four kinds of explanations in my mind. Here they are with my thinking ab out what I would tell my son:
  • Conventions–Connect the decision to common practice, what others are doing, the social, business, societal norms. In my case I framed it as: “You’re a big boy now, big boys don’t play on swing sets”
  • Stories—Use a story to explain the situation, put the decision in a context familiar to the ones you are explaining it to. My approach: “Remember how we’ve been talking about building a climbing wall up to the tree house?”
  • Codes—Frame the decision as essential to legal requirements, social norms, rules, etc. My framing: “If this were a public park, the swing set would not meet safety requirements, and we’d be told to take it down”
  • Technical accounts—Explain the decision technically, with the technical details making the case for a change. My technical explanation: “The pressure treated wood has gotten splintered and rotted, and isn’t safe anymore”
 
In my work with Jennifer Jarratt, we’ve increasingly recognized the value and power of stories. This certainly carries over to explaining the reasoning behind changes that are often scary for people. But stories are not the only thing to reach for. Of the four kinds of explanations, your situation may dictate what you use and perhaps what combination you use. On my decision, I used the story approach, using it to show my son the promise of something better.
It’s critical to remember your audiences when you explore how best to explain things. What we’ve found over 20+ years helping people explore the future is that we often start our efforts with a technical group, one that’s happy and comfortable in having technical explanations for things. The problem arises when they see their stakeholders and ultimately the public as most easily swayed by a technical explanation. For a young boy, at least, the technical explanation would have failed, led to tears, in fact.
Of the four, I am tempted to say that conventions is the weakest, but we have to remember that lots of people, even lots of business executives, have times when they want to follow the norms, and not take big risks or strike out on their own. Conventions may be quite compelling to them. For a 7-year-old, saying “you are a big boy now” rings hollow. He felt like a little boy, and couldn’t imagine life without his swing set.
Codes are important too, because they tend to be fixed requirements. You are not usually in position to change them. But they are not sufficient explanations to really energize people to get them on board for doing something new. Our son didn’t, of course, care about codes, about the law, and so on. He just wanted to have a place to play.
In the end we built a great climbing wall up to the tree house. The decision made sense to the critical stakeholder. The future didn’t look scary or arbitrary.

Foresight helps you get un-stuck

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stuck bikeFive or six times a year I lead workshops with groups in organizations. Usually the stated goal is to find new opportunities for growth, based on the trends and forces the organizations face in the next few years.

One nearly universal discovery they make, however, is that they are stuck. There are lots of reasons why an organization might be stuck, but this post isn’t mainly about those reasons, it’s about the need to recognize “stuckness” and use foresight to help get un-stuck.

A stuck organization sees itself with little room to maneuver, because of sunk investment, market expectations, leadership of limited vision, commodity status of products and services, internal silos, and so on. While the organization feels stuck, it’s also under pressure to find revenue growth. Trying to grow with a straightjacket on is not fun.

Exploring the future offers an organization the chance to get un-stuck. Taking a futures view lets an organization see past the limits it feels today, and think about a future where the conditions have changed. It can show how the organization can take the initiative to break out of its constraints by changing what it does, how it thinks, and its place in the marketplace.

In getting ready to get un-stuck, you need to answer the question, “what is on the table for reconsideration?” and find out if you have the right and authority to challenge the organization’s thinking, and how much of the operation you can work on. If you’ve been charged only with exploring potential growth opportunities for one division, you probably don’t have permission to reconsider the entire organization, but that may be essential to getting un-stuck.

If you don’t have the authority to reconsider a big enough part of what the organization is doing, then the problem you need to work on is getting that permission, and getting the right people in the room to rethink what you are doing and where you want to go. You may even want to stop a process that’s underway that only looks at the future of one division, and instead get a bigger mix of people from across the organization in the room to explore future opportunities.

It’s nothing but painful to open up a foresight process that leads to revolutionary thought, when there’s little or no chance of making real change. Get permission and get the organization un-stuck.

Image: JasonRogers, via Flickr, cc license

Environmental scanning: no excuses

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Environmental scanning is a grand name for a simple, routine process. It just means regularly monitoring what’s going on across a broad landscape, to better understand the trends at play and the forces of change you face. Most people do some of this naturally, but they can come up short in getting enough of it done, and done well.

Environmental scanning is a regular topic on this blog [see here and here]. Here we’d like to focus on how you can do it effectively and easily–the tools are close at hand, the habit is straightforward to adopt–there are no excuses! It used to take more time, more impetus, and greater expense to do broad environmental scanning, but it has gotten easier. A decade or more ago, you had to subscribe to and and read a range of newspapers, magazines, and newsletters to do scanning. The focus usually was print media. The work of processing, filing, or commenting on an environmental scanning discovery involved typing or handwriting something, and physically handling the paper.

We at Leading Futurists were practitioners in those days and have no nostalgia for that paper-driven rigamarole. Much more importantly, environmental scanning used to be constrained–by sources available, by depending largely on print media, and by time. Now we can range with our scanning nearly anywhere, and have tools close at hand to smooth the way. You can get newspaper stories daily from the Hindustan Times, a daily photo from Accra or Kiev, a range of newsletters on cutting edge technology, or diaries and blogs from people young and old around the world.

Here are some ways to leverage the Internet to empower your environmental scanning:

  • Use a feed reader (rss-aggregator) such as Bloglines or Google Reader. There are web-based readers and ones that are resident on your computer. Based on news sources and blogs you want to monitor, they gather new content each time there are updates and new postings, and present them to you in an easy to read, keep and delete, and file system. Nearly any online newsource or blog makes its feeds available to these programs.
  • Use email newsletter subscriptions. Since your email program has filing, forward, and other capabilities, you can use it to get, process, and keep track of information and ideas in your scanning. There are thousands of electronic newsletters available, and you can find things of specific interest or more general exploration of ideas, lifestyles, etc.
  • Use email alerts–Google’s is called Google Alert. They let you establish a regular, automated search and get an daily or weekly email when there is new online content under that search. You can search the whole web, or just blogs, news sites, and other categories.

For any of these approaches, make sure you open up a wide view. Include visual sources such as photoblogs in your regular scanning [see here]. Be sure you are including information sources outside your industry, sector, professional specialty, and so on. The “inside” stuff–your routine radar screen–is not where you need to know more. Surprises good and bad are likely to come from off that radar screen. Open up a bigger one, or another. Don’t get caught unaware. Scanning is not hard to do–there are no excuses!

Update: Please see also this special page on environmental scanning.

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