farsight

The last two years have seen an increasingly mainstream discussion about 3D printing technologies, with attendant discussion on how fantastic or underwhelming these technologies will ultimately turn out to be in the future.  From Chris Anderson’s Wired piece a couple of years ago, to the recent coverage in Tech Review (“The Art of 3D Printing”), The Economist (“3D Printing: The shape of things to come”), and BusinessWeek (“CEO Guide to 3-D Printing”).  Of particular interest most recently has been the Tech Review blog exchanges on “Why 3D Printing Will Go the Way of Virtual Reality” (anyone recall the Michael Crichton book Disclosure [not to mention the movie starring Demi Moore and Michael Douglas]?  You’ll be forgiven for not recalling it, but VR played a role).

Scanning across the literature (which is to say, both magazine articles as well as blogs) and listening to folks of various professional stripes, we can discern at least three major images of the future of macrofabrication technologies, three different trajectories into the future.  Each is ultimately based, I think, on different assumptions about:

• The inherent disruptive potential of these technologies
• Likely evolutionary paths of the enabling technologies (such as power sources and feedstocks)
• Assumptions about what individuals will be interested in doing for themselves (and allocating the necessary time and experience for that)
• How the economics of these technologies will compare with classic industrial processes (impacting their diffusion into mainstream or larger scale production chains)

Finally, I think each image is also colored by different types of hope and interests.  Frankly, some people are excited by the idea of “printing” everything you could want in your home, the way you can print documents at home until you run out of paper (or toner, thank you, HP).  Others are not quite as enamored with a complete reversion to ultimate prosumer status and are more excited about the possibilities for community empowerment or improving mainstream economic infrastructure.

Every Home a Factory: This is the image that is most often a vision, a description of a preferred future for macrofabrication.  This is where there is a compact, stylish little 3D printer on a desk in every household, churning out toys, dishware, and parts for every conceivable home appliance.  The economy is digital, dispersed, and driven by networked individuals designing, modding, and sharing digital blueprints.

Neighborhood Assembly Line: Riffing off trends in localization, this image sees the future of macrofab as less about the individual home and more about the community.  Moving beyond just 3D printing, this image describes the presence of more robust fabbing capabilities being available at the neighborhood level, empowering communities to make more of what they need, when they need it.

Reinventing the Factory: Finally, there are images that anticipate that these macrofabrication technologies will rather be absorbed into mainstream manufacturing processes, essentially injecting new DNA into an aging species.  In this image, manufacturing is still centered around large scale machines and fairly centralized facilities, but the “insides” of these places would be wondrous and magical to behold.

Each of these is, of course, an amalgamation of a spectrum of thoughts on the future of these technologies.  The future, I suspect, is unlikely to be a pure version of anyone of these images, given that macrofabrication will be forced to coevolve with many other trends and new developments.  The future, in fact, could carry elements of all three of these.

A friend and fellow trained futurist @leeshupp yesterday posted some thoughts for the new year.  Early in the piece he mentions how so many typical “Top 10″ lists of trends for the new year in fact feature things that have already happened.  His piece got me thinking.

I think the reality is that what most “news” outlets are trying to do is simply different from what trained, professional futurists are trying to do.

Most outlets and pundits are trying to predict what issues will hit the proverbial fan in the next 12 months, or at the very least, what issues will become mainstream or reach crisis mode within those few sweet months.  The whole point is to key folks onto the issues that will dominate the headlines (and, presumably, the private conversations of the powerful and influential) of the next year.

But why would you feel like you’re getting a leg up on an issue that is supposed to dominate the headlines of your community or industry sometime in the next dozen weeks?

Let’s be a little more pragmatic.  Short of true black swan events or just plan randomness, most of the social, economic, and environmental issues that come to bedevil us don’t appear out of nowhere.  Many of them have been developing for some time.  If you’re only just swinging your policy or strategy apparatus around to it now, now that partisans are duking it out on the floor of some legislative body or now that protestors are lining the streets, you are way behind the development curve on that issue.  That issue is, as we like to say, topping out on the s-curve.  You’re not shaping that issue (and by extension, your future with regard to that issue), you’re reacting to it.  And at the last minute.

I suppose the idea is: if you’re doing a reasonable job of foresight, of continually assessing how and why the future will be different from today, then you should never be truly surprised by any of the typical “Top 10 Trends for 20xx” lists.  And once that’s the case, then you don’t really need them.

The arrival of a new year inevitably brings the usual raft of predictions and Top 10 lists from media outlets attempting to frame the challenges of the coming year.  As professional futurists, our training is less in making point forecasts for a 12-month period and more about developing a broader and deeper context for change.  Having said that, we can still offer a forecast concerning the social, economic, and political contexts that will be evident in 2012 but which will gain in importance in the coming years.

The following are five key “tensions” that are already evident in Hawai‘i, and which are likely to become more apparent as the current decade unfolds.  Each of these represents differences in values and worldviews that, while often unspoken or unexamined, point to the deeper tensions at work beneath the surface of many community and policy issues we face today.  As always, understanding the deeper motives and differences that exist among us is key to developing truly effective and beneficial strategies.

Generations in Transition: There are now three generations firmly entrenched in the workplace and increasing issues in institutional leadership with the Reluctant-To-Step-Back Boomers, the many Yet-To-Succeed-To-Power Generation X’ers, and the Much-Hyped Millennials.  Many Boomers are not happy with the state of things as they near the latter years of their careers and are not willing to “go quietly into the night.”  GenX has largely been raised to expect somewhat conventional roles and routes to responsibility but have often not been groomed for succession and now wait for their Boomer predecessors.  The Millennials variously expect to have equal voice and recognition as soon as they are invited into the room or are simply charting their own course outside and around the traditional institutions and roles.

Education vs. Training: A key tension that becomes evident in explorations of education in Hawai‘i is the growing divergence between those who believe formal education should be geared toward getting students into college versus those who specifically do not want education to have “college prep” as a formal goal.  From classrooms to boardrooms, there are strong, and growing, differences in people’s beliefs about the formal goals of our education system related in no small part to the social priorities of individuals and communities, expectations about the future of the economy, and differences in the agendas of business, government, and “community.”

Public vs. Community: In many aspects of society today there is a growing disconnect between that which is “public” and that which is “community.”  In the age of the nation-state, “public,” encompassing all citizens of society, was the baseline against which everything was measured or for which things were planned.  Today, in areas stretching from education to economics, there are increasing examples of people defining their interests specifically in terms of community, and sometimes explicitly against the public.  Technology is likely to continue to accelerate this philosophical divergence, allowing communities to act and organize within or without the public or the state.

Widening Cultural Divides: Coming out of the 1970s, people talked about and debated “local” Hawai‘i culture.  Today, the signs point to the continued splintering and hardening of local identities and loyalties, widening cultural cleavages that may have always been present but which we may have not recognized.  We see, and expect to continue seeing, increasingly explicit differences in the cultural outlook and social goals of various Native Hawaiian communities, fragmenting “local” ethnic populations, and the growing populations of in-migrants and recent immigrants.  While cultural “balkanization” need not lead to overt conflict or crisis, cultural differences between groups are important to explore when attempting to craft policy or strategy that impacts society at large.

Diverging Economic Worldviews: There is a growing misalignment between the “economic worldviews” of various groups within the United States and within Hawai‘i.  There are those at the far edge of current thinking, advocating an increasing localization of production and consumption and often intensely interested in disconnecting from the global money economy and seeking various forms of self-reliant and non-money trade economies.  Others see the system-wide redress of the current glaring economic disparities as fundamental to any hope for continued social stability or prosperity, and often identify “big business” and neo-liberal economics as both key symptoms and causes.  Finally, there remain those who seek and/or expect a “natural” rebalancing and recovery of the economic rule set that dominated society coming out of the 1990s and early 2000s.  While those falling in the last group retain the key positions of influence in education, business, and policy, today’s global economic situation is driving those in the former groups to explore and expand their respective worldviews, enabled in no small part through technology and shifting social consciousness.

For the past several decades people from many disciplines and from many walks of life have been coming to the conclusion that the path we set the world on a few hundred years ago, and many of the assumptions and priorities that justified and shaped that path, will lead us to a precipice.  The industrial world that we have built is characterized by inefficient and linear systems, taking enormous amounts of value out of the self-sustaining process evolved throughout the natural world.  Consumption, a necessary aspect of life, has been appropriated as the way to satisfy all personal and social needs and which, like war, we have found can evolve beyond our control to take on a life of its own as its imperatives reshape  consciousness and behavior.

Today, human civilization finds itself standing at a crossroads: if it continues along the current path, a precipice looms.  If it chooses another path: transformation.

But to take that other path requires deep and wide-ranging changes, changes that go far beyond hybrid cars and “socially-responsible” ventures, beyond tax incentives for renewable energy and cities full of imagined victory gardens.  For us, for the massive and industrialized world that we have built, the systemic changes we need are both structural and conceptual.  Everything from transportation to urban design to energy to food needs both larger and smaller changes.  With so many more humans being brought into the material aspects of a “modern” lifestyle, the resource demand required by the current industrial age mindset is ultimately unsustainable.

We need more, new ideas.  And we need to create them together, share them, challenge them, and improve them.  We need to develop and share the ideas that reshape relationships at the level of neighborhoods and valleys, just as we need ideas that show us how to rewire both the systems and the relationships of our civilization, ideas that aren’t simply a rejection of modernity.

The 10 Conference, being held in Leavenworth, Washington, on May 18 – 20, is a place where these types of catalytic ideas will be shared.  Designed and curated by trained, professional futurists, 10 is based on the belief that truly game-changing innovation happens when ideas collide, when distant perspectives are brought together into a single view, and when the mundane is reframed to reveal the extraordinary.

I invite you to join us at the 10 Conference this May, for a gathering of scientists, entrepreneurs, and artists that is more intimate and more rewarding than any other event you will attend this year.

Mahalo.

We had a wonderful time yesterday conducting a corporate foresight training workshop for one of our local clients.  In it, we of course included a brief introduction to futures studies, which included a bit on theories of change and stability (TOCS).

For those unfamiliar with futures studies, it is the academic field supporting the work of the relatively few trained, professional futurists.  One of the core elements of formal futures studies involves theories of change and stability, various models describing how and why society changes.  As Jim Dator, a professor at the University of Hawaii and one of the first generation of professional futurists, maintains, any statement about the future must be based on a theory of change.

The importance of these TOCS prompted me to design a field manual of sorts, featuring the set of TOCS that are most used/liked by a number of academically trained, practicing professional futurists.  The futurists come from both of the major academic, degree-granting programs in the US (U of Hawaii and U of Houston), who have provided the TOCS they like and tend to use as the basis of their work.

Keeping your figures just a little crossed, we should be done with this little book in the next two weeks.  Look for it!

The Future and Trying to Study It

Part 1 of this article introduced the professional futurist and distinguished them from other professionals commonly involved in forecasting the future.  Part 2 will present some of the core beliefs of futurists and will introduce their work.  Understanding these elements is very important for understanding how futurists help decision makers and organizations deal with the uncertainty of the future.

Principles about the Future

As with any philosophy, there are certain principles we can discuss, certain “tenets of faith.”  There are, in many different fields, philosophers and scientists who have eloquently argued some of the following points, so I will stick to brief introductions and spare you the late night, graduate-school debate over the nature of reality and knowledge.  Here are some of the “truths” that I find when I think about the nature of tomorrow and our ability to know it before it happens.

The future is Unwritten
The most important assumption to understand is that the “future” does not exist.  The future is not some event that simply hasn’t happened yet, waiting for the rest of us to catch up to it; there is nothing “out there.”  It is a concept, an abstraction; it is a potentiality not an actuality.  Futurists, therefore, don’t study “the future;” they study people’s images of the future, how their expectations and uncertainty for the future influence their decisions, but most importantly, futurists are studying change.  For a futurist, there is no future reality, no “future facts.”  In stark contrast to prophets and those who believe in prophesy, futurists see the future specifically as unwritten; it is, in fact, waiting to be written, and each one of us is to some extent one of its writers.

There is Not One, but Many Possible Futures
Because the future is unwritten, there are many possible outcomes, many possible futures.  Our choices and behaviors in the present have, to varying degrees, influence over which futures become more or less possible.  Should you take the freeway this morning, or the surface roads?  Do you force your child to eat all their vegetables, or do you let them eat what they please?  When futurists talk about the future, we typically talk about futures in the plural.  We also talk about different types of futures in our work: possible, plausible, probable, and preferred.  Ever participated in a “visioning” workshop?  That was dealing with your preferred future.  And in terms of what happens to you in the future versus what happens to me, the futures of many people and groups are constantly being altered by what both you and I choose to do.  So in another sense, there are many individual and collective futures that are constantly being impacted by behavior and policy.

Those Futures are Constantly Changing
Future possibilities are not static.  With each day, with each choice and each random event, those possible futures are changing.  While today we might anticipate certain future events, next week things may have changed and those events may seem less likely or impossible.  Thus, from one day to the next, the future possibilities that seem to be “ahead” of us are themselves changing.  The forecasts about the future that we make are like snapshots, not of the future itself because it doesn’t actually exist, but rather snapshots of our understanding and expectations about what is shaping the future.  As events unfold or as we gain new information, our anticipation of the future changes, whether it is in the form of our gut instinct telling us something new or some computer model giving us a different number.

These three principles by no means represent all of the assumptions held by professional futurists, but they are the most fundamental and thus the most important for understanding the futurist perspective.

Futures Studies

Academically, futures studies is a fairly specialized field.  As a field, many more people in the general public have heard of quantum mechanics or molecular nanotechnology than have heard of futures studies.  In fact, when I mention to people I meet that I do futures work, they often assume that I work in commodities trading.  Scholars and researchers stretching back several decades and coming from different disciplines have worked to contribute philosophy, theory, and practice to the field of futures studies, but it remains a fairly small field and one that is relatively unknown.  It is unknown enough, in fact, that many consultants and speakers around the country label themselves “futurists” without having any formal academic or professional training in the field.

There are relatively few academically trained, professional futurists on this planet.  Just about all of those graduating from American schools have come from two long-standing academic programs: one here at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and one at the University of Houston at Clear Lake.  While there are, as in any field, talented amateurs or individuals who are simply powerfully insightful about the future possibilities in a particular field, professional futurists are trained to conduct their work for others with particular philosophies and approaches.

What trained professional futurists are doing, each with their own particular focus and strengths, is based on three related things: working with theories of change and stability (TOCS), adopting a very transdisciplinary search for perspectives and answers, and continually and widely scanning the horizons for new developments and emerging trends.

Theories of Change and Stability
Why do societies rise and fall?  Why do some technologies take hold and change the world while other promising techniques remain curiosities of history?  Why do people change or refuse to change certain behaviors?  While the clients that futurists work with are typically interested in the answers to questions like, “How will social media make our work look completely different?” futurists themselves are drawing on broader theories and reflecting on a larger history to answer the question.  In the case of social media, after deconstructing the ways people are using it, comparing it with other technologies that create or prevent similar activities and interactions, considering elements of human and organizational behavior, considering historical technology adoption cycles, and then examining the leading edge of the technology and what might become mainstream in the next few years, the answer ultimately might be, “not that much.”

While the specific topic under consideration is clearly important, futures work in one way or another draws on formal theories of change and stability to help construct future possibilities.  In various ways futurists are employing the ideas and frameworks that attempt to explain change in things as big as civilizations and global history to things as small as “Kindles® vs. Nooks®.”  Futurists are also shaped by this in a more fundamental way: when the topic or client they are working with does not have any formal theories about change, they then look for those relationships in the world that might be shaping change, trying to construct a context that helps the client define and examine the forces and patterns of change.  In either case, the almost unconscious emphasis is on an understandable notion about how and why things could be changing.

Transdisciplinary
Futurists are by training, and often by personality, transdisciplinary, looking to more than one discipline or profession for both perspectives on an issue as well as methods for creating answers.  In part this stems from futurists seeing the world on a broad scale and thus recognizing that not only is everything related, most of the issues we are concerned with are actually so complex and interwoven with other issues that trying to treat each one by itself is unhelpful and often misleading.  Additionally, different disciplines bring different insights into human behavior, the nature of society, and the patterns of change found in the natural world.  For example, to explore the question of “what is the future of health care” could involve perspectives and knowledge from information technology, genetics and biology, medicine and medical practice, architecture and urban design, economics, public health, religion, and politics and public policy.  Thus, in an age of hyper specialization, futurists are unusually well-positioned as integrators of knowledge and individuals who can see the “big picture.”

Scanning
Futures scanning is the most basic activity that all futurists conduct on an ongoing basis, and can reasonably be compared to breathing for most futurists.  Essentially, futurists skim incredible amounts of news and media for information on trends, emerging issues, and new lines of thinking.  While video clips over the Web have become increasingly pervasive over the last couple of years, for most of the history of futures studies scanning has meant reading.  A lot.  Scanning is such a fundamental and important activity for futurists because with the rate of technological change, the growth in connections between people around the world, and the explosion in the ability of individuals to create and share information, new developments and ideas that could impact an issue are constantly emerging and can emerge from a variety of places.  By constantly scanning across many subjects, futurists are continually expanding our notion of the possible.

Part 3 of the article will lay out some of the benefits organizations realize when they work with professional futurists.

I just finished reading Michael Jacobides’s article on strategy in Harvard Business Review, “Strategy Tools for a Shifting Landscape.”  I admit to being intrigued by the subtitle, “In an age when nothing is constant, strategy should be defined by narrative – plots, subplots, and characters – rather than by maps, graphs, and numbers.”

I was intrigued for a number of reasons touched upon in the subtitle: I love strategy and our firm deals with strategy development for organizations, so I’m always on the look out for new perspectives on the issue; the idea of narrative, of story, is also a big winner for me, and over the last decade more and more people have come to focus on “telling a story” (witness the critical mass of story-telling consciousness reached by TED); and finally, I like maps, especially “strategy maps” and other attempts at visualizing strategic thinking.

According to Jacobides, “Traditional strategy tools carefully organize data about the competitive landscape, but they create static categories and visual representations.”

He says, “My recent academic research suggests that companies should tackle the challenge of developing strategy head-on by describing the underlying logic, story lines, decisions, and motives of all the players that are creating and capturing value in a business.  Instead of drawing and analyzing a map or plotting numbers on a chart, executives should use words to create what I call a playscript: a narrative that sets out the cast of characters in a business, the way in which they are connected, the rules they observe, the plots and subplots in which they play a part, and how companies create and retain value as the business and the cast change.”

But I’ll admit to being disappointed by the article overall.  While there are definitely elements within Jacobides’s discussion that I think point to some potentially important innovations in developing strategic thought, overall I found the concept of “playscripts” vs. “maps, graphs, and numbers,” at least as presented within the article, not nearly developed enough to frame a new approach to identifying, analyzing, and developing strategy.  To me, the concept of playscripts as a tool is still vague, despite my being able to see the series of questions Jacobides presents as useful in a process.

There are, however, three issues that he hits upon that I believe all new strategy frameworks need to address, for many of the same reasons that Jacobides himself cites early in the article.  These issues are: complexity and change; narrative and story; and mapping and visualization.

We do live in an age of accelerating change, an age of increasing complexity, and the last couple of decades have seen an increasing awareness of the complex systems within which we actually live.  Change, as Jacobides points out, is something to be counted on rather than discounted.  The classic five-year strategic plan, linear in structure and thought, akin to describing a trip down a long highway replete with signposts and milestones, can still be found in organizations everywhere, despite their very rigid and static nature.

All new planning systems truly need to be built around the ideas of complexity in life and with an assumption that change is constantly happening.  Networks, relationships, and interactions are important to understand and are key elements that create the complex systems in which we operate.  And change, be it linear trends, cyclical change, or disruptive wildcard events and black swans, are important aspects of a continually unfolding future that more strategy frameworks do a poor job of incorporating.  Despite the fact that we all learn that economies go through cycles, when was the last time you saw a strategy that truly anticipated the swing up and the eventual swing-down of the economy?

Narrative and story-telling is another issue that I think will be increasingly important for organizational strategy.  As we well know, humans are natural story tellers and stories do indeed offer a vehicle for encapsulating and communicating a complex set of relationships and events in a format that we excel at sharing.  But here I don’t mean the literary novel as story, or even the text-driven format as story.  Stories were first shared vocally and aurally, then visually, and then finally in text.

Jacobides describes words as more powerful and flexible than value curves, and I would agree.  But he also chooses words and narrative over other planning approaches that generate “static landscapes” and “still pictures.”  I argue that narrative is something that weaves together other elements to create a story.  A children’s book is typically 90% picture, 10% text.  Narrative, in the sense of text, intrudes only enough to move things along.  Increasingly, presentation artists advise a similar restructuring of our traditionally bullet list-heavy and mind-numbingly boring PowerPoint talks.  Narrative, in the sense of a parent’s commentary, inflection, and emotion, often provide equal or greater context and interest for the young reader.  Narrative is key; the written word less so.

This is important enough that I want to point out that I think advances in recent years in moving to graphical representations of strategy and away from the classical text-driven strategy document with its endless pages of paragraphs and bullet lists, is a distinct improvement.  People can recall a strategy map; no one ever remembers what’s in those strategy reports.

And this brings me to my last point, dealing with mapping and visualization.  I am a supporter of the current trend in innovating in visualization: of data, of ideas, and of communication in general.  I was an early fan of the Norton and Kaplan “strategy maps” and remain a fan of the many various visualizations people employ to improve thinking, conduct discussions, and communicate concepts, everything from causal diagrams to roadmaps.  I agree with Jacobides that in many cases these graphics can end up being static documents that never change, in the way that the classic text-based strategy document is, but I think they are a vast improvement over “just text.”

But unlike Jacobides, I am not so ready to dispense with maps and visualization; instead, I think his insights into narrative and story, of focusing on relationships and motives, and of expecting continuous change (in much the way that a story is truly about a period of change in the lives of the characters; the difference between a story and an entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica [hardcopy edition]), should be incorporated into the other strategy frameworks he contrasts.

Short of seeing a more fully-fledged tool of his playscript approach, I would recommend applying the narrative construct to the process of strategic thinking within your organization, using the questions to structure some of the process, but also adapting your current visualizations and maps to reflect more of the complex relationships and interactions that characterize the world in which you actually work.  As for anticipating continual change and ensuring that you are not creating “static landscapes,” the central truth is that anything set to paper, be it a diagram or a paragraph, immediately becomes a snap shot of thought and attention.  Short of an autonomous program that continually rewrites its strategic maps based on new information and experiences (sounds a lot like a person), the most logical recourse is to look to process and practice to overcome the inherently static nature of words and pictures.

Part of what prevents a plan, any plan, from becoming a static document is process.  If planning is an event, then the documents it produces only have an opportunity to adapt at the next event (typically the annual planning event).  If, instead, planning is an ongoing and regular process, then plans begin to reflect the continually moving thought and sensing of the organization.  As an article by Verne Harnish in the March 22 issue of Fortune recently pointed out, effective executive teams have a “bias for action,” continually and constantly revisiting key strategic questions rather than putting them off until the once-a-year retreat.

The “future” can take many different forms, among which the most common are the possible, the probable, and the preferred.  Different cultures, industries, and personalities are drawn to some types of futures over others.  Nonprofits and charitable organizations tend toward “preferred,” while many financial services firms strain after the “probable.”  Professional futurists, working with many types of public and private organizations, often deal with a fourth type of future: the “official” future.

The official future is the line of greatest expectation; it is the future that people expect to happen.  While we all talk amongst ourselves about disastrous events and exciting future “what-ifs,” most of us hang on to a more “practical” expectation of the future.  Think about the place where you work and you can probably quickly identify and describe your organization’s official future.  Significant or dramatic change, the kind that forces hard decisions, is usually not a key part of that future.

Official futures are often based on fairly simple forecasts about trends and issues, whether they come from intuition or from government statistics.  In most respects, official futures look a lot like Today, just more of it.  More people.  Higher taxes.  Faster computers.  Official futures are important because they reveal what people assume will happen in the future, but also because they become the assumptions about the future that people absorb, through daily conversations, images and commentary in the media, and lessons in school and training.  Official futures can blind people to the real uncertainty in the future, but they can also become a straight jacket and a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What is Hawai‘i’s official future?

Hawai‘i suffers from a curious intellectual and emotional malaise when it comes to the future.  People in Hawai‘i talk a lot about the future, lamenting about brain drains and the price of gasoline, but the general image of tomorrow, our official future, is curiously uninspired.  While historians from a different generation might have attributed this lack of future inspiration to our tropical and languid climate, some modern residents speak resignedly about the long shadow of our short plantation past, while others say that things are indeed bad, but not bad enough to provoke real action or imagination.

Whatever the causes, Hawai‘i’s official future is fairly easy to identify and even easier to summarize: Hot, Crowded, and Expensive.  This is the future that everyone laments; and which everyone expects.

Hot, Crowded, and Expensive is our future that is a lot like today, just with more of everything.  It is a future built on a number of simple forecasts and expectations, assumptions about the things that define and will continue to define life in these islands.  This is a future in which we expect things to get more uncomfortable, but still livable.  It is a future that expects some change for the worse, but counts on enough stability to keep our daily lives pretty much as they are today.

Our official future expects the continued slow growth in our population, reaching some 1.4 million people by 2030.  It expects the quick aging of our population, with Baby Boomers over 65 growing by 104% by 2030.  Alongside these changes in population, the official future expects the ever-increasing development of a finite land base, with housing starts and construction figures seen as important indicators and key components of our economy.  With ever-increasing development of a finite land base comes the expectation of skyrocketing property values, something dramatically evident in the changes in valuation over the last 30 years.  And following population growth and development come cars.  More cars and more traffic is an expectation that everyone shares, and which most of us dread.

This official image of the future also assumes that tourism and government will continue to be the dominant employers and contributors to our state GDP, in part because we can’t imagine another set of industries that could thrive.  While small groups of people push elements of an “innovation economy,” most people don’t know or care much about such things.  And while everyone loves Lost and the idea of film and creative industry, in our official future we don’t really expect to become a Vancouver of the Pacific.

Likewise, while the economy-related notions of “food security” and the “21^st century ahupua‘a” have gotten a lot of press in recent years, Hot, Crowded, and Expensive does not expect agriculture to be a major economic or geophysical element of Hawai‘i’s future.  While folks love the idea living with the land, eating organic food, and enjoying food security, they simply don’t expect Hawai‘i to dramatically expand its farming base and produce even 40% of its own food stuffs.  People like “green” imagery; they just don’t actually expect us to truly become green.

Our official future also expects life to continue to get more expensive for those of us living here.  Beyond just ever-increasing property values, we fully expect the price of oil to keep going up, reaching (in the “reference” forecast) $130 per barrel by 2030.  We expect the cost of gasoline, of travel, of shipping, and even of the consumer goods themselves (which require petroleum for their materials and production) to keep going up.  In our official expectation, the costs of lighting our homes, traveling to work, and clothing our families will keep going up, forever.

Education is always a hot topic, and everyone says it is the key to Hawai‘i’s future and everyone says they want real change.  But Hot, Crowded, and Expensive projects today’s inequitable and socially balkanizing system deep into the future.  All of us who can afford it are trying to send our kids to one of the private schools, while those who can’t but don’t want anything to do with the state’s public education decamp and set up their own educational enclaves amongst the charter schools.  In the bigger picture, few of us are happy with this long-term trend, but we all expect it to continue and we go on playing our part in perpetuating it.

And finally, as we all reach for our A/C switches in synchronicity, we all agree that Hawai‘i is hot, and getting hotter (and not in a fun, Rio de Janeiro way).  Average mean temperature in Honolulu has gone up about 4 degrees in the last hundred years, and with continued development (using concrete to rebuild our environment) and global climate change, we expect that number to keep going up.  Based on their “middle” forecasts, scientists expect the world’s temperature to go up another 2.5 degrees by the year 2100.  And when you talk to folks here, people may question the causes or pace of climate change, but no one is claiming that Hawai‘i is getting cooler.

You find elements of this official future in many places: in conversations with friends around coolers in the garage; in the stories and images in the media; in legislation that gets passed; and in the choices and behaviors of both decision makers and everyday people.  You find it in our propensity to complain about major social and economic issues, but never mobilize long enough to drive systemic change.  You find it in our habit of asserting that we can’t afford to own a home or send our kids to college while driving down the road in a tricked out Chevy Suburban with illegal tint and low-pro tires, returning from the mall with Starbucks in hand.  And you find it in our skillful ability to stymie and block any new development or initiative for change, a skill now found among both the decision-making elite as well as grass-roots activists.

So, is the futurist saying that it’s all doom and gloom?

Not at all.  Hot, Crowded, and Expensive is our official future, a set of assumptions and expectations built on simple forecasts and extrapolations that most of us carry around with us.  It is what we consciously and unconsciously expect to happen, regardless of what we would like to happen.  Hot, Crowded, and Expensive is the image of our future that casts a long shadow over our hopes and aspirations, causing many people to believe, and thus act as if significant positive change is not possible.  But as with all official futures, these images and assumptions can be challenged and changed.  This is the work of futurists, helping others understand, anticipate, and shape change.

How futurists can do this for Hawai‘i’s official future is the subject of a future post, but for starters, we can begin with a basic phenomenon found throughout life, that of an action causing a reaction.  Professional futurists are trained in school to expect and look for trends prompting counter trends.  Just as opinions provoke counter opinions, every trend interacts with the wider world and often gives rise to a counter trend.  Often, these counter trends arise from people’s reaction to that trend, with people deciding to work against it.  Smog and air pollution are an example of a trend (pollution) fueling a counter trend (environmental activism and regulation) that significantly alters the original trend.

Official futures, based on simple extrapolations of current trends, often fail to account for how trends provoke countering responses in the environment and in society, sometimes leading to a diminishment or even reversal of the trend.  As we question Hawai‘i’s official future we can start by considering the counter trends that may become important enough to chart an entirely new future.  Ultimately, our goal is to develop and pursue an insightful and inspiring preferred future.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”  Charles Darwin

“What is a futurist?”  This is a question I am often asked as a member of the world’s relatively tiny community of academically trained, professional futurists.  Accompanying this question will be an array of looks, from fascination and interest, to skepticism and out-right condescension.  Looks of interest often come from folks who spend their working days fighting operational fires; they’re intrigued that someone specializes in looking at the long term.  Looks from the other end of the spectrum tend to come from other forecasting professionals whose fields, shall we say, compete with each other to predict the future for clients and employers.

In fact, most people I encounter have never before met a real academically trained professional futurist, and most have never heard of a field called “futures studies.”  For those who have heard of “futurists,” they have often come across people sporting that title quoted in magazines or books, predicting the big trends of the future.  Based on these passing impressions, people generally expect futurists to dazzle with flashy images of a future with flying cars and android servants.  In fact, most folks assume a futurist’s job is to predict the future.

I’m a Futurist, Not an Economist
The reality is, as with so many things in life, both more prosaic and more useful.  A futurist is not trying to predict the future; they don’t believe that true prediction is possible.  A futurist uses theories (of change and stability) to develop plausible possibilities about what tomorrow will look like (and why).  The futurist uses these to expose you to new ideas about what drives change in your world, to expand your understanding of what is possible, and to motivate you to to take action to influence what ultimately comes to pass, that is, to shape the future you want to see.

My teacher, Professor Jim Dator, has been known to say that “everyone is a futurist.”  Indeed, in some way, every day, everyone on this planet thinks about “the future.”  But, if everyone thinks about the future, and if most academic fields work to understand and anticipate their slice of the world, what then is a futurist and what distinguishes them from, say, an economist or a policy analyst?

Whereas an economist might be asked to forecast next quarter’s unemployment rate or a policy analyst asked to anticipate the effects of a new government program, a futurist will be asked by a client, “how will changing economic trends interact with several new government policies to produce our future?”  While some futurists develop specialty areas, say the future of energy or transportation, what distinguishes the field as a whole is its constant attempt to connect the knowledge of many fields to create a larger and more complete picture of the forces creating change.

In order to answer these types of questions futurists have to become broadly familiar with many issues, and deeply familiar with questions about how things interact and create change.  Clients, faced with making decisions in the face of genuine strategic uncertainty, are often unsure about how exactly the many driving forces in the environment will interact to produce a particular future.  Working at the intersections of many fields, futurists connect the concepts of the economist with those of the sociologist and the scientist to uncover the often hidden relationships that generate critical change in the client’s unique situation.

To push the earlier example just a bit further, an economist will often work on producing forecasts of something like GDP growth for the next eighteen months.  In contrast, a futurist will work on identifying and playing out developments that could fundamentally alter the structure of economies, things that could reorder business rules and relationships, things like personal fabrication or distributed personal energy.

In other words, a futurist’s job is not to make forecasts assuming that today’s systems will work exactly the same way in the future (it’s the same factory, just with new stuff running through it); rather their job is to question those assumptions and anticipate how and why those systems will themselves look different in the future (maybe we’re not using factories to produce stuff at all…).

When your question is about how something works today or over the next 18 months, be it the book publishing industry or petitioning for community grants at the legislature, you seek out a subject matter expert, someone narrowly and deeply knowledgeable about how that specific system operates, that is, how decisions within that issue get made or how outcomes are produced.  As you start to hit the three year mark, however, contemplating changes beyond the next couple of years, then the futurist’s perspective and approach to anticipating change begins to add an increasing amount of unique value.

The reason why is actually quite simple: with each month and year that you move outward into the as-yet unwritten future, more and more variables, possibilities, and indirect relationships come into play in creating the future.  Before long, even the most gifted subject matter expert could not possibly keep track of the number of possible developments from diverse (and future) actions, technological developments, and random events that could potentially rearrange the rules of the issue they study.  Uncertainty and the range of things that could possibly shape our future increases dramatically the further ahead we look.  In futures studies, there is an illustration that is often used to visualize this: we call it the “cone of uncertainty”. Essentially, the farther from today you get, the more uncertain is the future.

Well-trained futurists really are excellent big picture thinkers, drawing on a wide variety of knowledge to make connections between things you yourself don’t have time to look at and to create a context for you to better understand how and why important changes will ripple through your business.  Futurists are, in many respects, skillful integrators of multiple issues, perspectives, and possibilities.  While your job at work might keep you focused on managing the minutiae of the marketing department, part of the futurist’s job is to stay focused on the many developments and relationships reshaping the larger environment, which will impact your customers and your organization, which in turn will impact your marketing department.

For Hawai‘i this futurist perspective is becoming much more important as this new decade of the 21st century unfolds. The time has come for more people to become aware of futures studies and to better understand the value that professional futurists bring to strategic discussions.  The questions of “who are we,” of “who do we want to be” as the world reshapes itself, are pressing questions for which we as yet have no clear, shared answer.  Yet the forces shaping tomorrow are shaping that future right now, and collectively we have to do a much better job of aligning our society with these “tsunamis of change.”

The last few years have seen an interesting convergence in trends in movies and TV that has resulted in programming that educates people on the complexities and interdependencies of our modern civilization.

The first trend comes from the disaster movie genre, which made a come back after 2001 and has been basically going strong ever since.  The Sci-Fi Channel (now Syfy) aired a number of not-so-memorable flicks like Earthstorm, Meteor Storm, and Megafault, while other shows like 10.5 and 10.5: Apocalypse aired on major networks and movies like The Day After Tomorrow came out in theaters and continue to be staples for cable channels like FX.

At about the same time, the zombie horror genre began making a come back and helped to kick off what is now recognized as “survival horror.”  In addition to George Romero’s “Dead” movies, video games like Resident Evil spawned a series of zombie/action movies that continues to be produced.  Movies such as 28 Days Later played off of the zombie genre and placed the protagonist in a world emptied of everyone except the manic infected.  The sequel 28 Weeks Later debuted in 2007 and showed the characters attempting the repopulation of a deserted London.  This trend culminated that year with the release of the newest adaptation of I Am Legend, in which one man (Will Smith) finds himself the last surviving human after a viral plague transforms everyone into manic mutants (vampires in the original book).

At this point in 2007 a third trend emerges, that of the post-apocalyptic/post-human world, perfectly timed with the appearance of I Am Legend.  In 2007 the book The World Without Us by Alan Weisman was published, exploring what would happen to our built environment if humans suddenly disappeared.  The following year the History Channel aired what is claimed to have been the most watched program ever on the History Channel: Life After People.  Competitor National Geographic Channel aired Aftermath: Population Zero that same year.  Life After People has since been turned into a popular series and a host of similar “what if” documentaries exploring major disruptions to civilization have been produced, such as After Armageddon and Aftermath: World Without Oil.

Even reality TV entered the arena in 2009 with The Discovery Channel’s The Colony, wherein a group of people had to figure out how to band together and survive in a city after calamity.

Fueling at least some of these trends has of course been the mainstreaming of environmentalist concerns, most recognizably in the sustainability/green movement.  Debates about climate change, dependency on oil, and seemingly unsustainable industrial practices have heightened interest in the processes and systems that maintain modern developed life.

Finally, the very popular show Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe has done an excellent job of educating people on the many critical but thankless jobs that have to get done to make modern life possible, jobs that are often invisible to the average person going about their urban day.  Along with the many other shows on the Discovery, History, and NatGeo channels that document how food, energy, and machines are produced and maintained, Dirty Jobs calls attention to the many critical links that keep things flowing in society.

Aside from the entertainment value of it all, together these trends have converged to produce a healthy amount of programming that often does a very good job of not only explaining the intricate relationships between people and systems that makes modern civilization possible, but also leads the viewer on an exploration of the implications of those relationships, specifically highlighting the fragile nature of certain key aspects of our built society, and our civil nature.

This kind of understanding about our world, as well as the practice of considering how and why things could change to disrupt these vast and complex systems, is very important as we move deeper into the 21st century.  The success of many “movements”, sustainability not least among them, will depend upon more and more people explicitly and intuitively understanding the systemic relationships that define our modern world and through which flow our decisions and actions.