John Mahaffie

Know yourself and your times, first

February 18, 2025February 1, 2011 by John B. Mahaffie

The last line in This Side of Paradise is: "I know myself, but that is all". The book is about the coming of age, socially and intellectually, of a young man in the 1910s. Essentially, it takes him the whole book to understand himself just a little. In trying to do so, he also has to work hard to understand his times. Those were fast-changing times: a shifting mix of remnants of the Victorian Era, Edwardian Era sensibilities, and the opening of the Jazz Age.

Most of us face the same problem in getting to a deep or deeper understanding of ourselves, what we believe in, what our times are about, how society is changing, and what it means to us. And in all that, we’re expected and we need to, be able to understand how the future is emerging.

Most of us cannot stop what we are doing to try to know ourselves better. Nor can we stop all planning and action until we understand our world and our times. But we need to keep trying to develop that understanding. It will strengthen our insights on the future (and the present). Time spent thinking with some care about these things is important to everyone, and it deserves a commitment. You can argue it is part of your work—most any professional work. Don’t neglect it.

Offsetting your suburban, middle class, white collar bias

February 18, 2025January 18, 2011 by John B. Mahaffie

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!

Take a walk in their shoes

February 18, 2025September 25, 2009 by John B. Mahaffie

A key to success in communicating about change is to know as much as you can about what others are feeling and thinking. So take a walk in their shoes.

There’s probably a gap between your views and what’s on the minds of the people you are trying to reach. What matters to you may not matter to them, and how they think about things is probably not how you think about things. So you have to try to bridge that gap, and get through to people on their terms.

It takes a fight with yourself to keep that fixed in your mind as you prepare and as you communicate. It helps if you are empathetic by nature. If so, channel that and make sure you get the most out of your natural tendency. If not, you will have to try to bridge this gap intellectually, by preparation and by keeping open the question on behalf of others, “what’s in it for me?” Ask that question, and answer it honestly, not from your point of view, but from the point of view of others who are key stakeholders.

It may be that your instinct in hearing about others’ reactions to things is to think, at worst: “those idiots!” and at best: “those poor, misguided souls.” Neither thought helps the cause of getting ideas about change through to people. Instead, you have to take at face value—as a fact—whatever reaction people have. You have to work with that, not deny it or argue with it. It is part of the system you are dealing with, you won’t change it by dismissing it, and probably won’t by fighting against it. You need to accommodate it.

Also, as I’ve written in earlier posts, you won’t always change people’s minds with a technical, factual argument. You often have to find an argument that works for them, not for you, and it may be an emotional one. Chances are, you have a technical knowledge-base on the question at hand, but don’t assume your knowledge will be effective in changing people’s minds. What’s in their hearts? What are their hopes and fears? Find out! You can be much more effective if you know what you can about that.

See also “Getting to know the anti-you” on finding people who are distinctly different from you that can help you take a fresh perspective.

Also, my Leading Futurists LLC colleague Jennifer Jarratt and I co-authored an essay recently on "Reframing the Future" that elaborates on the importance of understanding what is in people’s minds as you try to get them to explore the future.

Image: Sabrina Campagna, cc license, via Flickr

Ask the right questions

February 18, 2025September 23, 2008 by John B. Mahaffie

Be sure to look at things differently I always try to think, in organizations I am a part of and in the work I do for clients how I should play my role as a futurist. What can the futures perspective add that helps? Should my role be to provoke, to inform, or to bring a fresh perspective? How assertive should I be?

It’s tempting to be a capital “F” Futurist, and play that role, as they say in the theater, broadly. To me that means getting in people’s faces with ideas about a bold new future: transformational changes in technology and society, for example.

But sometimes that’s not what will work well for the situation. People with a futures perspective risk tooting on the same trumpet no matter the question at hand, the setting, or who is there. That can do more harm than good. So, temptations aside, I try often to internalize my futures focus and perspectives, and instead work quietly but persistently to make sure that the right questions get asked about the topic at hand.

In anything we do that involves evaluating ideas, planning, or making strategic decisions, we should work with a checklist of critical questions. We need to make sure people consider the right things, ask the right questions, and avoid mental bad habits and thinking traps.

Some of those questions:

Are we talking about the right thing? Have we opened up the question to the right level? For example, an exploration of workplace safety needs to include a lot more than what’s going on in offices and factories, what about people working from home, workers on the road, and people who work outdoors? It is easy to frame the question too narrowly.

Did we consider all the boundary conditions and how they might change? Our tendency is to look at change inside the system or subject we’re exploring, and hold the rest of what’s going on in the world constant. So, for example, a high school building its curriculum might determine that since China has become a critical player in the world, it should add Chinese language to its curriculum. China’s rising influence is important right now. But what cultures and languages will be important in ten or twenty years? Can we prepare our students for those? In fact, too many businesses put themselves in jeopardy by giving all their attention to today’s problems and opportunities without considering how conditions are changing. The future goes wanting.

Are the right people in the room to discuss this? Having the right people in the discussion matters especially for two reasons. First, you need to have people that bring knowledge, experience, and wisdom to the topic at hand. Second, you need to involve the key stakeholders in the discussions, or risk that they will not accept your findings later.

Are we overly influenced by our past interests and sunk investments? For example, if a company is underway with construction of a new facility, it’s hard to break loose the thinking to explore ideas free of the assumption that that facility must be a central part of the organization’s future. Of course, sunk investments matter, and an organization’s assets have to be considered in a view of its future, but they should not make people blind to true change in the world. There’s an old saying that if you have a hammer in your hand, everything is a nail. That’s dangerously narrow thinking, a trap for organizations trying to move successfully forward.

Do we really all understand each other and our assumptions about the future? It’s critical to get everyone’s assumptions about the future out in the open. They powerfully influence perspectives on the future, what information people connect to the problem at hand, and the decisions people make. A frank and full discussion of the future—and there are lots of great foresight tools for facilitating those discussions—can help get those assumptions out of people, discussed, and considered.

Are we accounting for multiple perspectives? For example, on a particular question related to technology, we can tend to respond from the point of view of technology, with technical questions, ideas, and details. What about the personal/social perspectives? What about the institution’s point of view. Hal Linstone laid down some great thinking on this as the TOPs perspectives, Technical, Organizational, and Personal. Ensuring you consider all three can make a difference in the validity of your exploration and decisionmaking.

Are we really looking at the future? This question is best answered by testing the thinking that you are doing. Are you exploring the possibilities and your aspirations out to the year 2018 or 2023? Can you describe some possibilities in a future year? Are you really talking about a changing world, or are you just talking about catching up with the unfinished business and the unmet needs of today?

You can have your own list of questions, in your mind, or made explicit with your colleagues. Either way the goal is to be sure you don’t focus too narrowly in your thinking or focus on the wrong things. Our fast-changing world makes that too risky.

Seth Godin was on this same wavelength in a recent post on, “Seth’s Blog”.

Image: by fdecomite, via Flickr, creative commons license

Getting to know the anti-you

February 18, 2025April 1, 2008 by John B. Mahaffie

No one is "normal." I count realizing that about myself as a useful bit of self-knowledge, and I think in my work in foresight, it is critical. First, by being different, we each have the chance to bring a fresh perspective, and different information to what we do. If you are in an organization that constantly consumes data about averages, such as market survey figures, your views and experiences bring a useful and different perspective. But if you let yourself think you are "normal," you are viewing the world with a bias. We each see things from a unique point of view, potentially at the expense of other views. That is why you should get to know the anti-you. In anything you encounter, it's natural and right to have your personal reaction. So let that happen. What do you think? Would you buy this product? etc. But then, try to channel the values, feelings, worldviews, and choices of others. Say, "OK, that's my view, what would people in other places think?" Here's where you can try to bring in the perspective of your anti-you. Think of someone you know and understand well, but who has a different set of views and experiences. For exploring technology, social change, and so on, in the United States, I often think about my mother-in-law, Nancy. She lived in a different place and had a very different perspective on life from mine. Because I knew her extremely well, she could help me understand things from a different perspective. We lost Nancy just recently, and I will very much miss her unique perspective. A friend, Lauren Albert, whom I've been corresponding with about foresight, likes to use characters she knows well from literature to look at things from a different perspective. How would Ishmael from Moby Dick react? What about Elinor from Sense and Sensibility? Literature is a great source of different perspectives. I often also try to think about things from a non-Western point of view. I studied Anthropology in college and graduate school and was steeped in the practice of non-judgmental exploration of cultural differences. In my futures work, I think about the perspectives of a poor child in the developing world. I don't know any of those children personally, but have travelled and met and seen people with strikingly different lives from mine. It's powerful to draw on what awareness I can of their very different lives. I keep pictures on my office wall of a village I visited in Papua New Guinea, and a group of kids I met there (see the image above). Perhaps they've helped me over the years to fight the tendency to think narrowly about the world and how it's changing. I am committed to letting them help as often as they can.

Looking at the world through a different lens

February 18, 2025November 13, 2007 by John B. Mahaffie

Nokia’s Jan Chipchase travels the world, exploring often subtle cues in societies, and taking pictures of them. His blog Future Perfect, is a marvel to look at. It often is not clearly meaningful at first glance, but there’s always something to ponder. He doesn’t explain everything, you have to do your own thinking, but he can add a dimension to your understanding of different settings and societies. Chipchase is part of Nokia’s comprehensive effort to explore societies and lifestyles on the ground, country by country. Few companies have invested as much as Nokia has in doing this. A few months ago, I noticed that a couple of Chipchase’s pictures looked familiar. He had been in my neighborhood, near the subway entrance, and had photographed a sign warning of neighborhood police surveillance. His visitor’s view gave me a new view. My city is now heavily surveilled by the police and probably multiple Federal agencies, since I live in Washington, DC. We are building communities that are closely monitored by technology. What will that become in 5, 10, 20 years? Will there be people-focused, positive capabilities? Is it all just an emerging police state? Does it change social behavior, expectations, the sense of a right to privacy? It surely does.

Even in your own neighborhood, you can try to open a different pair of eyes and perhaps discover something new—a clue to change, and a clue to the shape of the future.

Chipchase sees the world through a distinct lens—his way of looking at things, and through his camera lens. It’s a different way of exploring the landscape—especially distinct from analyzing aggregate evidence of trends and change.

It’s easy to bring a camera most everywhere you go. You may see something that merits a picture, a picture you can look at later, try to interpret, share, and communicate with. There are no pictures of our future, but a picture from today can powerfully capture an insight on change that’s unfolding now.

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