At the most basic level, of course, we’re evolutionary creatures and so experience change as part of a biological process. We’re also, of course, sentient, self-reflective beings and so experience change as an intellectual and emotional force, as part of what makes humanity human. Even so, even with our relatively enormous brains, and our sophisticated cultural and social apparatus, we deal considerably better with gradual change, where we can adapt and integrate it into our lives. While our cultural change receptors are tuned very high but create enormous distortion, our biological and social change receptors are tuned way down, and so simply miss much of the input.

This presents an obvious problem, and that problem is our real inability to grapple with, and make sense of, dramatic change – despite living in a culture that worships it. In turn, this inability, perhaps even frustration, manifests itself in futures that are tinged, perhaps even polluted, with sameness.

Of course, much about the future will be the same, or at least a similitude of the same. After all, many forces that shape our lives and experiences are profound, even universal. Love, happiness, compassion, security, and comfort among others all shape the past, the present, and the future. Some sameness is to be expected (and perhaps even hoped for). But with much else, even some big, slow things like demography or climate, the future may look dramatically and incomprehensively different.

My title pulls together two strands of current futures thinking that illustrate this problem. “Welcome to the future” is from a Brad Paisley song titled “Everyday’s a revolution”. “It’s banal,” is from a brief piece by Bruce Sterling that he did for Webstock this year. These two guys are very different, yet they offer surprisingly similar messages, and both are good portholes through which we can look at this difficulty.

Paisley’s poignant (and nostalgic) ballad offers up pieces of the past – the ferocity of the Second World War, cross-burnings in the barely integrated south, lumbering video game machines packed into arcades – and compares them to the now-future:

And I’d have given anything
to have my own PacMan game at home.
I used to have to get a ride down to the arcade;
Now I’ve got it on my phone.

My grandpa was in World War II,
he fought against the Japanese.
He wrote a hundred letters to my grandma;
mailed ‘em from his base in the Philippines.

I wish they could see this now,
where they say this change can go.
Cause I was on a video chat this morning
with a company in Tokyo.

Paisley sings that the future is here today, that “wherever we thought we were going, we’re here”. On one hand this a paean to change, a valedictory anthem of progress. On the other, it’s a about a future that has arrived, a series of wrongs righted, and then completed. There’s no future future to Paisley’s view of the world.

Stevenson, who does clearly possess a sense of the future, but one often moored tightly (if not indefinitely) to the present and past, offers a similar collection of thoughts in his companion piece to his presentation at Webstock in New Zealand this year.
Stephenson is talking about the difficulty of translating our technical future-visions, which generally tend to be about discrete things, into compelling narrative-visions that engage the imagination and make the future something powerful and immersive. He lists five examples of future-things (all of which are emergent): cloud computing, web 2.0 and on into infinity, ubiquitous interfaces, spimes, and augmented reality. Then he combines them, and makes his point:

…She poured a coffee, then touched the breakfast table. “Where are my shoes?” “Your sister borrowed them.” “Again? Where is Susan?” “She’s downtown now.” “Susan! Why did you swipe my favorite shoes again?” “Look at this dress.” “Oooh, that dress is darling.” “It would look even better on you.” “You’re right. Get it for me. You can’t have it.” “Trade you for these shoes.” “Let me check that with Henry. Yeah, okay.” Karen had another sip of fair-trade coffee. It tasted weird, but it was still hot.”

They’re all in that paragraph. All five. They’re phantom far-out notions gobbled up by the real world. They packed in there so deep that nobody notices them. So, yes, I can write about it. It’s just: it doesn’t look futuristic. It looks way too real…

The future is here (or close enough), and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because it’s boring. Adding bits of present/future stuff together doesn’t make it a future you care about.

Stephenson and Paisley are articulating something important for those that care about the future and its role in our thinking about the present. The past can’t be our benchmark for the future, and the future isn’t about individual things or events or technologies. We have to go further afield, we have to look at the future, and at change, in broad strokes, in abstractions, in things that are not knowable or predictable. We have to imagine, and imagine freely.

This is not an easy message for many people concerned with the practicalities of change. How do I manage what’s coming? How do I plan for what I can’t see? What do I budget for it? The short answer, in absolute terms, to all of these questions is: you cannot. But how we choose to deal with that answer depends on how we approach change as a force. One way is typical, with fear. The other is less typical, with imagination.

Imagination engages our biological, slow, integrative change receptors. It short-circuits the feeling of being overwhelmed. A team with shared experience in collaborative imagination, with examining a range of futures – where change matters – isn’t disabled by fear. Instead, they see it not as an externality, but as integral part of what they do, and what the world does.

Therein lies our ability to explore futures that are anything but already here. Or banal.

Although perhaps less so than in the past, imagination has a pretty bad rap. It is seen as soft and unquantifiable. Its very lack of seemingly objective quantification often relegates it to the nursery rather than the boardroom. This is a mistake.

Imagination does what modeling cannot do. It opens up the future to possibility. It can, if used effectively, reach that summit of goal-oriented organizational thinkers concerned with the rapid change of the world: true out-of-the-box thinking. It can transform models into scenes, scenes into stories, and stories into tools. This last point is significant – modeling *is* important, but as an input, not an output.

There are at least two sorts of imagination that we encourage our clients to be on the lookout for. The first type is unconstrained, wild, outrageous. This sort is often only barely grounded in what is actually known about the present and modeled about the future. From this sort of imagination, outlier ideas can coalesce into something useful, occasionally powerful, and rarely (but possibly) transformative.

Unconstrained imagination is frequently at play in the work of novelists working on contemporaneously-sited fiction or far-future scifi. In both cases the result is often the same. We find ourselves sucked in, energized, and in a state of constant comparison: the described ‘reality’ against our own. In thinking about the future, unconstrained imagination is most useful for exploring the outer limits and unnoticed faces of the topic in question.

For example, an educational publishing company in the late 1990s was trying to make sense of a future that looked much less friendly to the traditional world of publisher, middleman, school district, teacher. By focusing on a willful ignorance of the way that world worked, the unconstrained imaginer was able to suggest a radical world of microcontent, microaudiences, and micromarkets that focused the company on what was truly important – not the process, but the content.

The other sort of imagination is disciplined. The key characteristics of this type are a certain boundedness, recognizability, and intuitive understanding. The disciplined imagination includes in its inputs not only an understanding of relevant trends (both macro and micro), but also existing forward-looking work like models, and oftentimes conversations with others thinking about the future of the topic. Despite the source information, the outputs can be quite extraordinarily divergent from what many might have anticipated seeing the inputs separately.

Disciplined imagination is most often found in historical fiction and near-term scifi. In both cases there are tendrils of understanding (and understandability) reaching out from the present to, in the first case, the past, and in the second, the future. While disciplined imagination often can create visions of the future that are immediately appreciable by those of us in the present, they – like modeling – cannot be seen as The Reality.

For instance, in the mid-2000s a private school, a bulwark of Southern California, was experiencing a profound shift in application and admission patterns, ones that suggested a very different future than their 100+ year history. Relying on an understanding of technological, environmental, demographic, and economic trends, the disciplined imaginer created a series of perspectives that helped the school’s officials and trustees revision the future of the school and build in the flexibility to respond to changes. Their horizon was 2050.

How then to best incorporate imagination into efforts to look sensibly forward? Three quick suggestions:

1. Recognize that the best results come from a judicious use of modeling, expert opinion, unconstrained imagination, and disciplined imagination. None alone can give you as full a picture as is possible with all working in concert. Of course, none or all, can guarantee a particular future.
2. Imagination’s best role is to suggest alternatives, and oftentimes much fuller alternatives than other methods. Develop a way to both encourage, and then capture the results of, imaginative exercises. Consider, as some of our clients have, videotaping, short story composition, roleplaying, and frenzied whiteboard sketching sessions.
3. Disciplined imaginers often come from within, or have invested significant time familiarizing themselves with the issues; unconstrained imaginers often come from ancillary areas or disciplines. Develop a quick question to identify these folks, something like: “It’s 2030 – what does X look like?”. The answer to that question will reveal both an imaginer and a type.

There are a number of techniques for working with imagination, both unconstrained and disciplined, but the most important first step is to make room for it. If the goal of looking towards the future is preparation, and preparation for what is ultimately unknown, then imagination offers a valuable tool for suggesting parameters – perhaps not all the parameters, maybe not even any of The Parameters, but ways of thinking about and anticipating parameters.

For example, it is an oft noted truism that one of the most difficult things to model is weather. We understand – in a physical sciences sort of way – the weather system. There are many variables, many of them dynamic, and modeling dynamic variables leads one immediately down a nonlinear path resulting in torrential downpour on the one day you were convinced by the weather guy to leave the top down on your convertible. That’s the weather, now imagine something vastly more complex, where we don’t even know what all the components are, where we’re unable to predict interactions and reactions except maybe at the grossest levels, and you’ve got climate change.

Yet, our reliance on fast silicon convinces us that more processing power will allow us to really understand what’s going on with climate change. Certainly, the folks at DOE think that the Berkeley Lab’s ESNet project (superfast connectivity, massive parallel processing) can get us pretty far down that path. Despite the fact that we may be able to model storms in the Atlantic over the last 1000 years, until we understand how humans – then and now – interact with that system, how oceans store and release carbon over millennia, how solar radiation affects upper atmospheric change, and a host of other issues, the models aren’t entirely useful. We still have much more fundamental work to do that has nothing to do with gigantic models before we’re remotely in the position of being able to say that we not only understand the climate, but how it is changing, and most importantly, what it’s going to look like in the future.

While the power of models to accurately describe a future state is wishy-washy at best in describing physical systems (where at least in theory all of the components can be identified and characterized), when humans are added to the mix things get really unstable. The problem, of course, is that humans are notoriously unreliable variables in unconstrained systems.

Modeling the specific actions of a floor manager in a factory is possible because there are only a select set of actions permitted by the system. Modeling the actions of an individual going about his or her day is something else entirely The latter example is one of a relatively unconstrained system). Now add 4 billion more individuals, throw in a variety of competing, overlapping, or contradictory social, political, and economic systems, some diverse and varied geography, as well as specific understandings and expressions of self-interest, and you’ve got a very different animal indeed.

Modeling at that level is only meaningful in the very broadest of terms. Understanding requires something else entirely, and something that sits at the very heart of useful futures work: imagination. That’s where we’ll pick up next time.

Building and nurturing organizations that are sensitive to both sorts of change (and what happens between them) is arguably the most important task a leader has. It is, of course, made vastly more complicated, difficult, and downright confounding when we face up to the prickly fact that change often comes from places we don’t anticipate (or…if it does, its manifestation isn’t at all what we supposed).

A useful exercise for any group (although individuals can reap some benefits from it as well) is a mental stretch called ‘coffeehouse’. A little background: although known in Turkey and elsewhere for a couple of hundred years previously, it wasn’t until the mid-17C that England got its first coffeehouse of any note. A hundred years later there were well over 500 of them in London itself. The story isn’t the near Starbuckian spread of nouveau coffee proprietors and their dens of caffeinated city folk), but rather the change catalyzed by their very existence. For instance, the coffeehouse sits at the beginning of – among other things – the insurance business, the stock market, and the encyclopedia. In addition, of course, coffeehouses also offered one of the greatest bastions of democratic assembly in the early modern period, something that would on to quite literally transfigure the world.

So, ‘coffeehouse’ is an exercise in exploring possible unintended consequences and then bringing into focus ways in which your individual enterprise might be affected by this change. Here’s how it works: gather a group (4-6 is ideal) and postulate an absolutely far reaching and hardly imaginable change in an industry completely separate from yours (if you’re in paper think farming, in farming think fashion). Map out together the possible effects, drawing closer and closer to those that would impact your stakeholder’s stakeholders, then your stakeholders, and finally you. Ultimately, as you’ll see, you’re collectively exploring an answer to what almost might be called The Question: how does change, that I can’t even see, affect everything I do, every day?

There are many, many coffeehouses out there, and a regular effort to explore ways of thinking about them – even if you’re not addressing the particular one you’ll see next – incorporates a central tenant of both futures thinking and risk management: change is inevitable, your response is not.

Building a business plan to support a new policy, particularly one that is distinct from status quo, has to be responsive to this orientation while still providing an actionable roadmap. We’ve found the best way to manage the enormous financial, political, and frequent social risk that new policy development entails is through the identification and use of trend clusters.

Trend clusters are the result of broad-spectrum environmental and narrow-band industry scanning. Current trends coalesce into clusters that then drive the emergence of new trends that become instrumental in the policy’s successful realization.

Instead of focusing on a policy’s desired end state, we build policy business plans with an eye towards these policy-rich intermediate clusters of trends in the short and medium term. This orientation manages risk, while allowing policy makers greater flexibility to adjust targets and intentions in response to emerging trends (whether political, economic, social, or technological).

The result is a policy process more sensitive to change and thus more likely to affect the sort of change desired by its advocates.

There is a recent Pinyon white paper [pdf] on this approach, and I’d recommend a quick read if you’re interested.

With one exception: it is impossible to know the future.

Instead, like quantum physicists, we imagine a cloud of potential futures. Certainly some are more likely than others. It is much easier to imagine a future a hundred years out with jet packs than a return to steam power. Could our world – due to silicon eating nanobots, religious fervor, sentient machines, or whatever – revert to early industrial ways? Sure. Is it likely? Not really. However, that particular future is not impossible. Flipping that assertion around, however, doesn’t work. We’re unable to say that the future will not be one of steam-belching carriages.

Because the future is unknowable until the moment it becomes the present (again, similarly to quantum observation) it makes sense to develop approaches and strategies to maximize the emergence of a number of desirable futures. Companies accomplish this through strategic planning, governments through policy work, households and individuals through hundreds of conversations and decisions. It is something that makes us uniquely human.

So…why are we so bad at it?

I’d argue that despite knowing better, we (whether a government, a company, a family, or just you or me) create a vision of a future, plan our way to that future, and then go about following the plan. The difficulty comes when things change. Our frame of the future – like cognitive frames more generally – often doesn’t permit the possibility of a new vision of the future. We continue on while the probability of our envisioned future gets more and more difficult to bring about.

In the world of policy, where vast amounts of political and financial capital are often invested in singular visions of the future, the disconnect has profound repercussions. Elsewhere, many companies have responded to repeated (and expensive) disconnects by keeping future visions to a few years out, and then building organizations that can maneuver successfully within that context. Families and individuals are more flexible simply by virtue of the level of resources committed to the future vision.

In all cases, much is being left on the table.

Futurists often claim that their most important role is to change minds. That’s true, but our larger task is to help our clients recognize the boundaries they’ve imposed in crafting their future visions, assist them in exploring an entire cloud of available futures, and make decisions that help them prepare for a range of beneficial futures.

Our colleague John Mahaffie has written some on the role of frames and reframing in futures work, and I recommend it. We’ll feature some of our own thoughts on reframing later.

There is a strong correlation between levels of education and economic performance of a country (see chart below), and this will continue to strengthen as progress is continually redefined along the upper right quadrant of the axes of knowledge and services. Paying for academic performance and participation is an indication of two seemingly opposed forces. Firstly, there is the globalizing prejudice towards market solutions. The current economic downturn will slow this, but only temporarily. Secondly, there is an internal state planning or management calculus at work that incorporates education into the basic managed components – like health care or military service – of a nation’s or community’s place in the world.

More broadly, we will continue to see increasing experimentation with economic-oriented solutions to social and civic concerns. These experiments are likely to be driven by two strong forces: 1) a recognition that economic motivation works, often where social and community pressure fails, and 2) as the market continues to exert influence on transparency and equity, a desire for an appreciable, quantifiable, and demonstrable return on investment.

Futurists make their bones (as well as their daily bread) with trends. Identifying, understanding, contexualizing, and helping others explore trends is what we do, whether we do it for clients, colleagues, or the public. Merriam-Webster’s various definitions for trend all come back to movement over time. We pay attention to trends, to the movement of ideas, technologies, inclinations, and cultures over time in an effort not to predict the future, but to define a sphere of inquiry and imagination (another word that has gotten a bad wrap recently). At the same time we train ourselves to anticipate not only the possibility, but the probability, that something we’re not even watching, or doesn’t exist, will suddenly change the game entirely.

The thing with trends, of course, is that they are many. Many won’t have significant impact at all on the things we study. But the future, like the present and the past, is a systems affair. The point isn’t in significance per se, but in influence. And it is here that even the trendy matters. For instance, the iPhone was (still is?) trendy in a sort of ‘let’s laugh at the the too cool crowd’ way, but at the same time it represents potentially dramatic and influential trends (e.g. information ubiquity, social omnipresence, human-machine interface).

It’s easy for serious people talking about serious things to want to stay away from the trendy, even if it might be really important. But trends are another matter entirely.

An exercise: take something unimaginably trendy (but not the iPhone since we’ve already done that), and think about what else it might have to say about where we might be going. Extra points if you can work something out for Rock of Love Bus.

Ignoring context, and assuming singularity leads to the most frequent expression of analytical failure, what we often mistakenly call the law of unintended consequences. It is true, of course, that regardless of how carefully a system is studied, it’s entirely possible that consequences will sneak in that no one saw coming. More often, however, it’s simply that people weren’t looking in the right place. Systems thinking requires a broad perspective.

Context and consequences are worth paying particular attention to in the emerging debates, discussions, and policy formulae around just what to do about climate change.  Both get fairly narrow play almost everywhere at the moment, a problem exacerbated by the amounts of money at stake and the opportunity that exists everywhere for rhetorical theatrics.

Two recent reports out of many are worth noting. The NYT, in a piece a couple of days ago drew attention to the fact that there are about $60 million worth of projects that are ‘shovel-ready’ for stimulus funding that will almost certainly be underwater in 50 to a 100 years.  ‘Shovel-ready’ has emerged as the euphemism recently for projects that are ready to go the very moment stimulus money reaches state coffers. In other words, shovel ready projects will almost certainly get done (or at least started) because everyone feels the pressure to be seen doing something now.   It is true that stimulus monies are intended to stimulate the current – not the half-century – economy and real people will be working on these projects now, not in 50 years.  But…spending time and money on infrastructure that will cease to exist in half a century ignores the larger context at the expense of the smaller.

The second item is a report out of the Partnership for European Environmental Research (PEER). PEER spent some time looking at policy integration across Europe, particularly as it had to do with climate change.  What they discovered is not all that surprising: climate change is moving up on everybody’s agenda. The real crux of their report was not that climate change is the cause célèbre of Europe – that’s old news – but rather that there is significant disconnect between traditional policy areas and climate change policy. Focusing on climate change policy – in isolation – is actually counterproductive.

This represents an enormous risk for the United States. The first battlefield is – of course – cap and trade. Nowhere are the dangers more acute in moving forward without a deep appreciation for context and consequences. The problem on the table is one that took years and years to develop, will take centuries to solve, and has to be addressed with one eye on the present and one eye on the future.

The great challenge for governments and companies is the same when it comes to climate change: What is true, what does it mean, and how best to proceed? Neither side offers much help here.

It is possible to believe that the science is right, that anthropogenic warming is causing change, and that this change will be harmful to ecosystems, to humans, to life as we know it. It is also possible to believe – at the same time – that economic growth and its ability to improve the lives of vast numbers of people is critical, that human ingenuity and our ability to adapt quickly is a hallmark of our species, that self-interest is more than an historical idée fixe. In fact, we think that holding these two beliefs simultaneously offers the developed and developing worlds the only clear framework for addressing climate change.

The world is not coming to an end. It is changing. Nations and companies have an obligation – one born both of self-interest and community – to mitigate the rate of that change. Too much change, too fast, destroys those systems and processes that sustain, enrich, and encourage our lives. Lowland flooding, projected at a 2° C rise in climate temperatures, has effects – particularly in a global economy – well beyond the immediate.

Nations, companies, and individuals have a tendency – not constructed in response to some grand strategy, but as a characteristic of who we are – for adaptation. Adversary creates solutions. Whether it’s a barter market after Hurricane Katrina, a Jewish-run education system in Auschwitz, or something as comparatively banal-seeming as retraining or retrenching after an economic downturn, we adapt. To ignore this, as much of the debate on appropriate responses to climate change has, is to neglect a significant variable – one that is at the heart of who we are.

Adaptation and mitigation, to a greater or lesser extent, are frequently cited or discussed in serious engagements with climate change. Less frequently mentioned is the role of self-interest. It is here that we think most current climate change debate falters.

Climate change is a global issue, yet nations, companies, and individuals live their lives promoting interests that are concerned with the immediate and local. Rare indeed is the entirely altruistic act; what comes first is what matters most…and with a timescale that reaches well into mid-century, climate change isn’t it – despite the protestations of the apocalyptic oracles or the ‘green’ commitments of most companies.

Nations have interests that do – purely and simply – conflict with those of current and projected climate change agreements. This remains true whether the nation signs-on to such agreements and then either fails to meet the requirements or ignores them (both are happening now with Kyoto), or fails to join, thereby diminishing the effectiveness and even efficacy of such agreements (US at Kyoto). An 80% decrease in CO2 emissions against a 1990 baseline means very little when weighed against bringing a billion people out of poverty.

With little outside of tax incentives or anemic offset markets to promote action in line with climate change policy, companies – and the global economic system in which they are embedded – see little to benefit them. The situation is compounded, exponentially, with the competitive disequilibrium that is created when oversight varies dramatically country to country, region to region. Again, this is less a legalistic problem than one of nature. Companies based in countries committed to growth over much else will be more able to ignore international agreements with near impunity.

Individuals may have self-interested reasons to act aggressively to combat climate change. Or not. Citizens of the Maldives are very motivated; those of the American Midwest less so. Rising sea levels threaten the continued existence of a country in the first instance but may provide longer and more productive growing cycles coming from shifting weather patterns in the second. The real power, in any case, of individuals is limited in affecting climate change. Yet, the basics of food, shelter, energy, and protection remain central to individuals’ conception of self-interest, and there is little wiggle room available to companies, markets, and nations in ignoring them.

Nations can thrive, companies can prosper, and humanity can grow – all sustainably. Yet the paths that the two sides of the current debate would have us take to reach this goal are dead ends. As the world prepares to engage with discussions around Kyoto 2, as the US contemplates serious climate change legislation and the monetization of carbon, and as markets seek to find a way out of their current doldrums, a middle road is available. Finding a way down it will require leadership, nuanced and serious policy, and realism.