thinking differently

Deep down, it’s about thinking differently

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“A professional futurist is a person who studies the future in order to help people understand, anticipate, prepare for and gain advantage from coming changes.  It is not the goal of a futurist to predict what will happen in the future.  The futurist uses foresight to describe what could happen in the future and, in some cases, what should happen in the future.” — Association of Professional Futurists

That’s a good definition, rooted, as you’d expect, in considerations of the future. And it nicely characterizes what I do. But what’s even more fundamental about my work is getting people to think differently.

When I work with groups to help them explore change, what I realize is how much they already know, at least about the near-term future. But their view is too narrow. They need help: advice, tools, an independent pair of eyes, to see past the immediate, change their perspective, and get somewhere new. They need to think differently.

Foresight is a superb capability. It jumps your thinking beyond what’s in your inbox, beyond what’s going on today that is soaking up your time and attention. It opens up a space to anticipate change, and to do so with colleagues.

But that fresh thinking needn’t only be about the future. Opening a door and looking out, encountering something new, even in the here and now, is already transformational. Of course, foresight helps. It keeps you from falling back into narrower thinking patterns. It helps makes sure you think differently.

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.

Take a walk in their shoes

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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

Presentism

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Presentism is the tendency people have in studying and writing about history to apply today’s values to a prior time. I always noticed this on the TV Show M*A*S*H, which, to me, blended Vietnam-era sensibilities with a Korean War story line. Presentism is one of the biggest dangers in historical analysis, since it can lead to interpretations of past behavior that are simply wrong.

When we explore the future, we can fall into the same trap. One tendency is to look at a single dimension of change, for example, the commercialization and proliferation of a new technology, holding the rest of the world constant. We get today’s world with a twist. We might, through this, have a view of our world with photovoltaic energy, otherwise unchanged, or our world with $500 per barrell oil, otherwise unchanged. So many other things will have also happened that will shape our values, attitudes, behavior, and what’s happening around us. The world is never “otherwise unchanged.”

Another tendency–which is extremely hard to avoid–is to look at future possibilities with today’s attitudes. Routinely, in my work as a futurist, I hear people say that the next wave of computer and communication technology is cold and impersonal. They say, “where’s the human contact?”. But when that next wave of technology arrives, for example when we got instant messaging and mobile telephony, we found that more people were in touch with others, more of the time.

If we take a “one trend future” approach, our efforts will not be adequate. We are likely to overlook countertrends, amplifying trends, social forces, cultural forces, and so on. The ongoing effort in foresight is to try to understand how the future might shape up against a backdrop of social forces and conditions undergoing constant change. That is hard to do, and is surely a task we can never truly complete. But we have to try.

A frank acknowledgement of our “presentism” in discussions with colleagues, and even to ourselves, can go a long way towards avoiding narrow explorations of the future, and can keep us sharp and attentive to the wide sweep of forces of change we need to pay attention to. So ‘fess up, admit your limitations, then fight your way past them. Don’t be a presentist when you need to be a futurist.

Molecular biologist Deric Bownds, in Deric Bownds’ Mindblog, has written insightfully on this topic. [Link]

The power of words

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Thinking about roles

We may often get a breakthrough in thinking by changing the words we use. Linguists and psychologists have long debated how much language shapes how we think, but there’s little debate that it does. A powerful way to break down barriers to new thinking is to reconsider what words we use.I’ve learned a lot about this from a futurist colleague of mine, Mimi Stokes Katzenbach, who is also an actor and playwright. Mimi has taught my colleagues and me new things about how the work we do in exploring the future is about people, roles, and stories at least as much as it’s about data, trendlines, and technologies.

Mimi and I had a conversation this week about roles. In a World Futures Society session on the social future, I had supposed that some people might, because of strong and rising concern for environment, recast themselves from “consumer” to “sustainer”. Mimi seized on that word, sustainer, as a great example of how we can break through to new thinking by changing the words we use.

“Sustainer” is a role word. Having it can move our thinking off of the broad, theoretical noun: “sustainability,” to a role or function we can define and play. If you say “I am a sustainer, not a consumer” you redefine your role, and can have a much clearer idea what you need to do.

We live in roles we play; parent, executive, student, friend, cyclist, artist, and so on. Otherwise, we would not know what we are all about. By creating a “role” word for a situation, we can open up our thinking about what we will or should do.

Mimi’s other observation is the power of a verb over a noun. By transforming a noun into a verb, you move to action. So instead of saying that sustainablity is important to us, we might say that we are going to “lower our carbon footprint” which implies and can define specific action.

The lesson here is to move our thinking from the abstract to the specific and to put people into the change we want to understand and make happen. That’s a critical part of the bigger issue we face in foresight, which is to make the future clear, relevant, and real to people. There are no great changes in the world, good or bad, without people driving them.

Image: gemsling, via Flickr, cc license

In which the futurist contradicts himself

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I’ve written at length about the importance of raising awareness of the world around us, the forces of change, and the emerging future. [See these posts] I have advocated the tools of Web 2.0 as central tools for environmental scanning [see here]. I stand by all of those thoughts, but need to interrupt myself to counterweigh that advice.

Too many of the information tools of our lives raise the risk of destroying our capacity for, or habit of, deeper thought and analysis. What happens is, we get access to an enormous amount of information about specific things: new gadgets, new data, new business models. But the “big picture” goes missing, or we are so overwhelmed by the nitty-gritty that we don’t have time or energy left to consider the broader sweep of change, and its implications.

Fortunately, other foresight tools can come to the rescue. While monitoring trends can lead us to breaking down the future world into bits and parts, scenarios, forecasting, and deeper futures analysis each insist that you delve into bigger picture futures, and build a framework for thinking about a coherent whole. That task demands consistency, thoroughness, and well-thought-out analysis. Most of all, it demands quality time from you. You need the time to focus and get good thinking done.

So I urge anyone working to keep the future in focus to not miss the forest for the trees or even the leaves. Trend blogs and electronic news sources are great for spotting new technologies and other clues to change. But you need to put the story together more comprehensively, too.

You can find some of the people and organizations that grapple with the bigger picture of the future, and work to frame thinking about it in ways that are clear and useful. This is what I try to do in my work, and it’s the hallmark of the sources of insight I find critical. I have added a special page on this site, “Reframers” that offers links to some of my favorites.

Don’t blink: Thinking differently means having second thoughts

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Don’t blink! Malcolm Gladwell’s insightful book Blink on what he calls “rapid cognition” is not wrong, just easily misinterpreted. It would seem to tell people to go with their first “gut” response to something.

But your first response to new information, an issue, or an idea may be too limited, too narrow, and incomplete. The problem is, in your busy life, especially your work life, you may not have time for reflection, or may have lost the habit of letting things steep in your mind. Gladwell doesn’t argue that the “Blink” response is always right, or always useful, only that it’s occasionally, and in specific situations, very powerful. I believe in exploring the future, we need to have second thoughts.

The blink response gives awfully little chance for further intuition to emerge. In our quick-paced world and under pressure for action, most of us are likely to have an inside-the-box response to a problem, and to offer a conventional response or a narrowly-pitched one. Unless you have the mental ability and habit to always think about things differently, you can come up short on breakthrough ideas.

An example. A member of a school committee I serve on posed a question about the school’s annual Field Day. What should the school and parent volunteers do about drinking water for the children, since we have realized the waste problem with plastic water bottles? She wanted to explore having big water coolers and cups for the children to use, instead of buying bottled water. Then the problem was the waste cups. Should we use compostable cups? Recycled-content cups?

No doubt because of my decade of work on the future of packaging, my first response to this question was a technical one. Biodegradable cups are on the market, and we could use them, but we don’t have a composting outlet for collected used cups, and our city incinerates its trash. Therefore, we would need a composting system set up. But this is impractical for now at our school’s scale of need and ability to manage. So we had either no solution, or would best just use plastic bottles and be sure all of them got collected for recycling.

Those were first thoughts. They are normally inside-the-box thoughts, which often have a technical flavor. This is just about tweaking the system as it exists. And it also reflects our routine tendency to respond to the question put before us, as it has been framed for us, and not look under the surface for other ways to think about the situation.

When I let my second thoughts emerge, having given the problem time to sit in my mind, it was possible to move from thinking “what containers should we use: cups or bottles?” and “what kind of cups?,” to “what about no containers at all?”. The solution I proposed is that we get or make portable water fountains that connect to fresh water faucets via garden hoses. There will be no waste. By replacing the Field Day question: “What will the children drink their water from?” with the question: “How will the children get water?” it’s possible to move to a better response. Second thoughts need their chance to emerge.

Permissive parenting and the innovative organization

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While at home the other morning, I walked by my 9-year-old’s microscope left on the kitchen counter. Normally, clutter and forgotten belongings plague me at home, but I had the thought, what kind of Dad would tell his curious son, “put your damn microscope away!”? Wouldn’t that be like Louis Armstrong’s Mom saying “stop playing that confounded horn!” or Albert Einstein’s Dad saying “quit your endless daydreaming and come down to dinner!”?

I think in the US, at least, we’ve unintentionally been stifling curiosity, even for our children. This may be particularly true in a lot of organizations.

How often are people in organizations pressured to quit daydreaming? Is thinking about the future even ok in the corporation? There can’t be too many places where foresight is against the organization’s rules, but there are lots of places where people can just tell it’s not ok to speculate, think visionary thoughts, and in general take their focus off the here and now.

Executives are often rewarded for their expertise and focus on their jobs. That makes it harder and less likely that they will try out new ideas. They won’t feel like they have the right to put their best mental energy on new things, yet that’s the very thing we need them to do.

Organizations are unlikely to have effective, innovative, foresight-oriented cultures if their leaders don’t shape climates where it’s ok to think, explore, wander, experiment, and leave your damn microscope out on the counter.

Getting to know the anti-you

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Children on Losuia Island, Papua New GuineaNo 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.

Love the future, hate the present

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A potential trap in exploring the future is to become impatient with the present. Some of my futurist friends suffer from this, especially the ones with a close focus on technology. I fight it routinely. Understanding the potential for progress can leave us disappointed or even disgusted with what we have now. We can come to believe in an idealized future, and as change unfolds, we wait for things to fall into line with our expectations and aspirations. They usually don't. With technology, we can be fooled. We can think we are seeing the emergence of a big change when it's not there yet. Our enthusiasm is a kind of blindness. The ideal view of the future can trick us into not recognizing the obstacles to change and how human factors can limit, shift, and change the outcome. For example, I meet people regularly who want to chide futurists for having predicted the paperless office. When we futurists and others explored what paperlessness could mean, back in the 1980s and 90s, we were playing out a concept, a what-if. We knew that paperlessness meant the potential to reduce paper, and we have. It did not mean no paper, at least not any time soon. Another problem with the idealized view of the future is that we can become dismissive of people who are not up-to-date with technology or social change. We're inclined to think of the future from the point of view of the leading edge of change, easily forgetting that lots of people are well behind that edge, and may still be adjusting to what we would see as past change. A culture of foresight means having a deep interest in, and excitement about the future, and enthusiasm and vision are great motivators. But we have to remember that all that we have now and are now has to make the transition to that vision. It won't be fast, and it won't be perfect, and it does no good to hate the present.

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