Foresight Culture

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.

I introduced some thinking on the future of news in a previous post. I will continue to work through this question in a standard futures way. So I’ll first lay out thinking on the biggest uncertainties and the driving forces shaping the news business, and then develop some brief scenarios of the future of news. Please note, my examples here, and my experience, are from a US perspective. I would love to hear your thoughts on what is the same or different around the world.

In this post, I offer some of the critical uncertainties for the future of news/journalism:

Centralized or decentralized—over the past few decades, especially, we have grown enormous media businesses such as Time Warner, Clear Channel, etc. But the digital world is pushing out new kinds of news and media that can be small-scale, even the work of one person, yet still have an impact. The news (arguably) site of Matt Drudge is an example. Will we see a future with individual citizen journalists and small teams of individuals producing what we consume as news? We are already seeing that happen. But perhaps also we will see new kinds of big news media organizations. The Huffington Post, a kind of mega-blog, is a great example. So are the online efforts of the well-established news media, including the New York Times, the BBC, and others.

 Who pays? Readers, advertisers, government, philanthropy? Print media has been sustained by print sales and ad revenues for a long time. Both are suffering from the availability of new digitally. The news industry is looking for new sources of revenue, including toying with charging for online access. In the past few years most made their content free, presumably to build online readership in hopes of pay-to-read revenues later, or, hoping to make money on online ad sales. U.S. Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) has drafted a bill to make it easier for a news organization to become a not-for-profit, under U.S. law.

Print vs. digital—How much news will continue to be consumed in print, versus in electronic form? The balance is clearly shifting, and people’s reasons for buying print news in newspapers and magazines are changing. We also face uncertain future pressures to reduce print for environmental reasons. Finally, eBooks such as the Kindle are making an attempt to shift readers off print while still giving them a portable, print-like reading experience. How far will this shift take us?

Mediated/edited vs. “raw” information—The long history of print media has meant that the information we consume is selected and edited, with supposed objectivity, by professional journalists, or, at least, by people who publish for a living. That’s changing with the Internet. Much more of what we consume is loosely edited or unedited, inconsistently contextualized, not fact-checked, and idiosyncratic to its producers: website operators, bloggers, blog commenters, and so on. What could it mean to shift away from a journalistic approach to news production—what do we lose?

Broadcast versus collaboration—While traditional media is broadcast—a media entity prepares and shares the news with its readers, the Internet enables news media to be collaborative, with the readership participating also as contributors, commentators, and so on. That is the power of the digital world in the context of news media. Does that new capability outweigh concerns about loss of objectivity and professionalism? (Thanks to Maxine Teller, MiXT Media for focusing me on this concept)

Objective versus agenda-bearing—So too we worry about the objectivity of what we read. In theory, the traditional news media has been objective, and people worry that the new media news sources have a political bias and agenda. We should remember, of course, that the traditional media is not objective, and comes from a tradition of politicized, agenda-bearing, sometimes “yellow” journalism. Can the public learn to sort out for itself the political or commercial agendas of their news sources?

Local versus national, international—Local news remains critical, but covering it well is expensive. It’s cheaper to draw content from national news sources and republish it in various formats and forms. Can we sustain adequate coverage of local news, especially, of information people need as citizens, consumers, community members, and so on? In my city, Washington, DC, there are interesting examples of online local news coverage, including some with original content, advertising, and substantial readership. See, for example, DCist. DCist often gets the story out first, and has a way of covering local events, crime, culture, and so on, with broad reader participation. Is this the future of local news coverage?

Journalism as business versus public good—Finally, while the news business has been a business, some analysts think it is truly a public good—something essential in society that the market will not necessarily produce enough of. With that in mind, they are looking at ways to enable not-for-profit news media to success and thrive, and even how to turn some commercial news enterprises into 501(c)3 organizations.

These uncertainties are dimensions of the range of possibility for the future of news. They are not binary, either-or propositions. However, for the purposes of exploring the possibilities, we will push deeply out to the ends of the spectrums implied here, to contrast, for example, a print business versus a digital one, or professional journalism versus the “citizen journalist”. Our actual future will almost certainly be a blend of these things.

• Who discovers/edits/shapes/contextualizes our information
• The divide (apparent or real) between commercial and non-commercial information
• What is true, objective, etc. vs. what is shaped by an agenda, and, more importantly, what we do about that as consumers of information
• Timing/time, when something arrives in the news, (i.e. is published) it’s supposed to be a “truth”. It’s now possible for anyone to “publish” anything. So now we have to accumulate information, weigh its validity, and/or wait for confirmation from other messages. “Published” can no longer equate to “true” (if ever it should have).
• Coverage—how we are sure that information comes to light that should, with a question of whose “beat” is it, versus depending on “crowd-sourcing” for our news—millions of people, anywhere and everywhere, become the beat reporters, sharing information though social networks.

For about 18 months, this blog has focused on how to use the tools and techniques of futures research, to improve foresight in organizations. I will continue to publish on that subject. But I have decided to also share my thinking on critical forces, trends, and issues here. So there will be a balance of posts on the "how tos" of foresight and on futures topics. 

Let me know what you think, what you’d like to read more about, and so on, below, where it says "Leave a reply".

Last July, I posted an item [Link] that used a Youtube star as an example of a mass media phenomenon that, whether you like it or not, is something you probably should know about. If millions of people are watching something, shouldn’t a dedicated trend watcher and environmental scanner know about it? 

I intend now to edit the old post a to obscure the name in question, I’ll use an asterisk for the letter "e". The Youtube star is Fr*d, and he’s drawn even more hits to this blog because he is no longer posting his videos regularly–the fans are hunting hard so as to not miss anything new, apparently. I don’t want to mislead Google searchers and bring them here for the wrong reasons. I don’t like to edit an old post, and won’t make a habit of it, but this seems to be the right thing to do.

Not that, of course, the need to do this proves the point of the original post–there has been a serious lot of interest in this Youtube star, and you probably needed to know about him.