Foresight Culture

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. [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?

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

Image: by fdecomite, via Flickr, creative commons license

On 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

"We never get together like this"

It is my privilege and delight to regularly be a part of workshops and gatherings in organizations focused on exploring the future and looking for new business opportunities. One of the things that happens at so many of these events is that people talk about how great it is that they have spent time thinking beyond their day-to-day concerns. They never do that.

They say it’s great to sit down with people from across the organization—out of their “silos”. They never do that, either. They come away happy, enthusiastic, and energized. That happens even if they have discovered tough new challenges and risks that they face.

That is the promise of foresight, done well and with the right people. That’s why you should do it. It leads you to have conversations you don’t normally have, with people you may not engage with enough, about a longer term future.

The other benefits and rationales for exploring the future are real, and valuable. But just getting the conversation started is where you begin to reach for the promise that engaging your future offers you. 

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

Just 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.

• 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”

Linda Lieberman is a U.S. National Park Service ranger with years of experience interpreting nature for National Park visitors. This Summer, we met her in Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska, and she led us on a glacier cruise where we saw lots of wildlife, including a grizzly bear and her cubs, foraging on the rocky beaches for mussels and other delicacies.

Linda told us that she’s learned from park visitors over the years that the rock you are staring at can become a bear, and perhaps just as often, the bear you’ve spotted becomes a rock.

Representativeness—Letting what is most typically true influence what you see and don’t see, e.g. the symptoms commonly associated with a problem will always be there

In futures:

• Assuming a different culture, group, organization, or person will do what we would in the same circumstances
• Missing discontinuities-clues to potential sudden shifts and breaks in patterns hidden from us by what seem like the much clearer evidence of familiar patterns
• Assuming a change you’ve observed is representative of what’s going on, because it’s part of your life or experience, e.g. “everybody is composting household food waste” 

Availability—Being influenced by the patients recently seen, e.g. the last five cases had the flu, so this one must also

In futures:

• Assuming that history repeats itself
• Using a narrow worldview to interpret the unknown—“people won’t like that”
• “We tried that already”—something I think is similar to this idea didn’t work before, so it won’t work this time
• Straight line trend extrapolation—the trend will continue because of the past record, with do sharp breaks, changes of directions, and so on

Affective error—Making decisions based on what the doctor wishes is true, affected often by an emotional sense, e.g. the patient reminds me of me, the patient is a young healthy guy, and can’t be all that si 

In futures:

• The thing I know and care about (change in my lifestyle, e.g.) is typical and represents the bigger picture future
• Wishful thinking, everything will work out ok
• Our product/technology is the future—because we love it, it must be the best fit for the situation and the best choice for the future

Five 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

I have been travelling in the Yukon, and exploring the history of the 1897-98 Gold Rush. I have not put careful thought to my work in foresight, but have dwelled on the work of Jack London, who, like my great grandfather, headed for the Klondike Gold Rush. I like London’s prose, and something about the empty, bleak landscapes of the Yukon and the rough life of the Klondike, inspired him in a way that inspires me. In his short story, In a Far Country, He wrote something worth thinking about:

“When a man journeys into a far country, he must be prepared to forget many of the things he has learned, and to acquire such customs as are inherent with existence in the new land; he must abandon the old ideals and the old gods, and oftentimes he must reverse the very codes by which his conduct has hitherto been shaped. To those who have the protean faculty of adaptability, the novelty of such change may even be a source of pleasure; but to those who happen to be hardened to the ruts in which they were created, the pressure of the altered environment is unbearable, and they chafe in body and in spirit under the new restrictions which they do not understand. This chafing is bound to act and react, producing divers evils and leading to various misfortunes. It were better for the man who cannot fit himself to the new groove to return to his own country; if he delay too long, he will surely die.”

Guilty as charged! Even futurists can fall into the trap of denying the forces of change, wishing they didn’t exist. What happened to me is that I caught myself being unwilling to look at how a system is changing because I didn’t want it to change.

I am a big fan of baseball, and spend a lot of time helping my local Little League. I’ve read deep into the history of the game-it’s well over 150 years old, and I’ve steeped myself in the traditions of the game. One of baseball’s qualities, and one that is important to many of its fans, is how little it has changed over the decades. Valid or not, students of the game compare statistics from today’s players to those from decades ago. We assume continuity, and even that there has not been significant change to the key things that shape the game.

So a few months ago, an Association for Professional Futurists member passed along a journalist’s request for ideas on the future of baseball. I knew I could and should answer, and some of my colleagues told me they were sure they would see my ideas enter the mix on the Association’s listserve. I stayed silent.

I realized a little later that I clammed up because I do not want the game to change. That’s an awfully dangerous frame of mind for a futurist. But I am glad I recognized what was happening to me. It’s a danger we all face. Most importantly, it puts us in a purely defensive position when we have the chance to shape change. Instead of positive ideas for change, we’re likely to resist, cast doubt, and work against change. That usually doesn’t work, and we lose the chance to be part of shaping our future.

Fearing change

It’s normal and natural to be cautious or fearful about change. So we often fear the new. But often it’s the old that will get us. Old views, old ways, old systems, old attitudes can be dangerous.

A big part of improving foresight is helping ourselves and others get unstuck, change our mental models and points of view, and changing the language with which we speak about the world. In business fearing change can be about holding on to the big legacy of sunk investments and to deep-rooted practices that probably have to change.

The culture of a business is not what’s rigid, necessarily, it’s the practices-the ways that culture is manifested and carried out that are. Learning to get unstuck means recognizing those things, and being willing to confront them. A good foresight culture makes doing that a part of its culture.

Image: Boston Public Library

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