Foresight Culture

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

A few weeks ago, I gave a talk to a group of association executives on environmental scanning. My proposed title for the talk was “Environmental Scanning 2.0,” by which I wanted to reflect the potential and power we have in harnessing new tools and the network to make envirobmental scanning much more effective. My host urged me to use a title clearer to my audience, so we went with “Technology, Members, and Effective Environmental Scanning.”

In my view and based on comments I got, the talk went very well. My audience had thoughtful questions. Most of them said they did not currently do environmental scanning, but I think that reflected their assumption that that would entail a somewhat formal process culminating in a report, called “environmental scan.”

I advocated, as I have here on foresightculture.com, for making scanning a daily, continuous habit, a part of building a culture of foresight. I told them about online tools they can use, such as RSS feeds and iGoogle to organize and “push” information to themselves. I urged them to tap the available technologies such as listservs, GoogleGroups, Facebook, etc. to create sharing and collaborative space for the results of scanning. I also urged them to shop carefully among the sources of information and the tools for accessing and sharing it, and to make sure what they set out to do was going to work for their specific constituencies and situations.

Throughout our discussion lingered the question: “Isn’t this just one more task to add to our over-burdened lives?” I tried to show how doing scanning differently could help the cause of busy executives trying to be effective. Inevitably, however, each of those in attendance will have to decide how important new insights on change and better readiness for dealing with emerging issues and opportunities is to them and their team. The value of scanning has to outweigh the added burden.

By making scanning a part of the fabric of each day, it’s my hope people can avoid adding it as a task. I try to be sure to show people how more important than adding new sources information to what they see is attaching meaning to it-meaning for them in their organizations.

I hope my group from that Friday’s meeting arrived at that thought, and understood that new efforts and a clearer focus on how to fit scanning into their work is worth it.

Fred is the YouTube character of a Nebraska teenager, Lucas Cruikshank. I came across his videos because they kept turning up under Most Viewed or Most Popular on Youtube. Most viewed doesn’t make the content of a video valid or even viewable, but in my view, it makes it important to know about. His 19 videos have a combined view total of over 4 million, and Fred’s YouTube channel has 290,762 subscribers, the 4th highest total on YouTube.

A few weeks ago, while giving a talk I nicknamed “Environmental Scanning 2.0,” I was advocating that good scanning includes knowing what the mass of people are watching and liking. That means tv shows you might not like or even approve of. It means what’s hot on YouTube too. One attendee pushed back hard on this, telling me that there was no way she was going to waste her time watching the drivel on YouTube. I thought I had made my case, but stated it again, and got some support from others there. I said that no matter what you think aesthetically or intellectually about the content, it may help you understand your society better.

The Fred videos are kind-of awful, but strangely interesting. I think they are interesting because, even though they are silly satire, they may represent a modern teen’s ideas about life, family, and society. I have a teen, so I’ve become acutely interested in that.

So steel yourself, and go watch a Fred video. Hate it, love it, but surely know about it. Fred’s video channel is here.

The Long Now Foundation, and increasingly lots of others with an eye to the future, humanity’s prospects, and so on, use 5-digit dates, e.g. May 26, 02008. The Long Now website, notes: “The Long Now Foundation uses five digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.”

That’s a bit tongue in cheek. In my view, they very much want to think about the deeper future, and to “leave room” in date notation, for humanity to exist beyond the year 9999.

You might also look for who uses this form of date notation to get a sense of their attitudes and ideas about the future. Anyone can choose to write the date that way, but so far, it probably identifies people as part of a loose affinity group.

I make note of this newish phenomenon first, because you might see it and wonder, and second, because I admire the positive sense it gives, but also the way it conveys so much in such a small way, about thinking about the future. You can have a deep and fruitful conversation about something as basic as how we write a date. Try it with a friend, you’ll see what it brings forth.

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.

A new page here, Reframers offers a list of people who reliably bring me new ideas and fresh perspectives. Most write blogs or regular print/online columns. By laying down their own ideas or linking to and commenting on things they discover, these folks keep delivering me valuable new ideas. It may be their brilliance, their distinct background and experiences, their dogged hard work, or just plain cussedness that lets them do this. Whichever way they get there, I know I get a benefit.