 If
you have ever watched The Jetsons on television you know the hazards of
projecting current trends into the future. Like most of the futuristic
predictions of a half century ago, the program assumed that what was
true in the recent past would be true in the future, only more so. So
the portrayal of life in 2000 was staggeringly wrong because it failed
to identify and incorporate two great discontinuities of the past half
century: Energy constraints, and the Two Income Trap.
I know the Jetsons was intended as a comedy, perhaps even a parody, but even more 'scholarly' predictions failed to anticipate and consider the impact of these two great discontinuities.
As a result, we do not have personal flying cars and other
gravity-defying devices -- they are technologically possible but
unaffordable. And the 'little woman' is no longer staying at home
having 'her' household chores done by robots, not because of a lack of
robot technology, but because she is too busy working in the (usually
futile) attempt to afford a better education for her children.
Read
what futurists are saying today about the world of tomorrow and you
will see they continue to make these same mistakes -- projecting the
future as a continuation of the trends of the past. We are told that:
- The
future will be full of intelligent devices and sensors talking with
each other, machine to machine, to make our lives easier.
- We
won't need to prevent pollution, because we'll be able to track and
recall for recycling every inanimate object on the planet from its
unique tag.
- The world will be full of all kinds of new entertainments, not because they are needed, but because they are possible. The 'market' will sort out which of these are valuable.
- Crimes
(other than crimes of passion) will disappear because the ubiquity of
tags and cameras will make them impossible to get away with.
- We will live forever, with increasingly mechanical parts, as we decode what illness is and render it obsolete.
- Machines will become more biological, and hence more adaptable, compact, and 'intelligent'.
- We
will find natural, non-polluting alternative sources of unlimited
energy, which will end global warming and allow us to colonize space,
because we have to, and because our ingenuity knows no bounds (not even
those of the laws of thermodynamics and gravity).
- We will have
a single world government, which we will hate, but which will use
ubiquitous information and communication to find less bloody
alternatives to international wars.
These extrapolations not only ignore foreseeable discontinuities, they fail to appreciate the evolutionary notion that increased diversity creates increased accident, and increased accident produces more discontinuities.
It is almost as if most futurists wistfully believe that the law of
entropy trumps everything -- that eventually differences in cultures,
in social and economic classes, in belief systems, in political and
economic and educational systems, will disappear and we'll have a world
characterized by homogeneity and hence predictability. But the evidence
is to the contrary. Cultures are diverging (and clashing more often),
belief systems are splintering within once-homogeneous groups, wealth
and power and education are becoming less evenly distributed, and
political units are becoming balkanized. As this divergence fosters
even more discontinuities, linear, and even cyclical, predictions of
the future will become even less likely. Our world today is (in all
ways except ecologically) increasingly diverse and complex, bordering
on chaotic.
The normal and predictable response of established
large organizations (business, political and other organizations) to
perceived chaos and unpredictability is to try to buffer themselves from
discontinuities, through risk management programs that are called, with
no irony, continuity plans
(can you picture the dinosaurs looking at the cold dark sky after the
meteor filled the atmosphere with megatons of dust, saying "I think we
need a continuity plan"?) Businesses also focus on shorter and shorter
time horizons in which the effect of discontinuities is less likely to
make management look foolish and un-prescient. What leading innovation strategists like Christensen have been advocating is the antithesis -- what could be called discontinuity plans. The essence of such plans is resilience, to become both an adapter to, and a catalyst for, discontinuity, taking advantage of change instead of resisting it.
How does one do this? In a previous article called Seeing What's Next, I outlined
the approaches suggested by Porter, Drucker and Christensen to do this.
Porter talks about seeing what is happening to your suppliers,
customers and competitors, and anticipating new entrants and new
products before they disrupt your markets. Drucker proposes looking for
unexpected occurrences, incongruities between perception and reality,
exploitable weaknesses in processes, untapped needs, recent changes in
your industry, market and demographics, and in buyers' attitudes and
priorities, and new scientific and business knowledge. Christensen
advocates focusing on unserved, underserved and overserved customers,
new government regulations and policies, competitors SWOTs and
asymmetries of capability, strategy, and tactics, and potential new
entrants and alliances.
But all of these approaches are based on
researching what has already happened and what is happening now,
largely in response to discontinuities (like offshoring) that have
already occurred. It's easy enough to 'predict' that thanks to new
technology anyone's job that does not absolutely have to be done
face-to-face may be offshored to whatever country offers the highest
[skill+education]/wage cost ratio. But how can we get better at
predicting the discontinuities that are not yet obvious?
The most compelling approach is what is called amplifying weak signals -- continuously scanning for developments and ideas that have not yet received mainstream attention, and thinking seriously about their potential implications
for your organization and the spaces (industry, labour market, customer
market, economies, communities) in which it operates and which affect
it. For example, I've been trying to amplify a lot of weak signals
about the Gift Economy and Peer Production,
but most of the business people I speak to are uninterested -- their
radar just doesn't extend that far. Umair Haque (thanks to Jon Husband,
the definitive weak-signal detector, for pointing me to his site)
writes incessantly about weak signals -- in this post
Umair explains the movement to use Wikipedia as a repository to provide
complete geographical and historical (and other?) information about any
place on Earth on your mobile devices. Jon has been broadcasting another weak signal -- before and since he recently visited the noisy Istanbul marketplace -- the best marketplaces are two-way conversations, which I suspect would get most business executives saying "Huh?".
Any
of these weak signals could produce massive discontinuities into
business markets if they are turned to opportunity by a perceptive
listener -- and the more entrepreneurs listening, the more likely at
least one of them will do so. If you're a business advisor and you want
to do something really valuable for your clients, put into place a
mechanism to scan for, and to think seriously about the potential
implications of, weak signals.
I could make some predictions
about the future, based on some weak signals that seem to be thundering
under the Earth trying to break for the surface, but when I do so I'm
always called an idealist or a dreamer -- most people find predictions
that are discontinuous from the way things are headed now to be
illogical, improbable, unrealistic.
That, of course, is precisely the point. The people who first predicted
the sudden extermination of smallpox, humanity's most lethal scourge, would
undoubtedly have got the same reaction. But since I'm so often called a
pessimist, here are three predictions that are, I think, for those who
believe in true free enterprise (not the fraudulent facsimile we live
under today) and the power of people, rays of hope:
- By 2050,
most of the political and economic constructs of our world will have
been atomized, because they will have failed so badly that people will
be willing to embrace alternative models. We will have achieved a world of ends,
and most political and economic decision-making will be made at the
community level. Big organizations (states, multinational corporations)
will create the vacuum that enables this in a very old-fashioned way --
by going bankrupt). Weak signals that suggest that are the End of Oil
and the Internet-powered shift of power from producer to consumer and
from political 'representative' to individual citizen.
- By 2050,
money will have become largely unimportant, and individuals and
communities will use social rather than financial means to motivate
people to do what they do. This will be precipitated by a global
depression, around the 2030s (I predict the term 'dirty thirties' will
take on a new meaning), that will undermine public confidence in money
as a commodity (a rigid medium of exchange) and cause us to look for a
more agile, malleable and people- and Earth-friendly vehicle to drive
economic decision-making. We won't have to reform corporations to put
people before profit because the term 'profit' will simply lose its
meaning. Weak signals: Open Source, file-sharing, Peer Production.
- By
2050, people will get much more of their satisfaction and meaning in
life from social interaction than from buying and owning things.
It takes a very powerful PR machine to get people to equate their
financial worth with their worth as a person. The two changes above
will make the operation of that machine simply unaffordable. And these
two changes will also free up a lot of people's time, and they will, I
predict, rediscover that the value and enjoyment of time they spend in
purely social activities (those without any business or economic
purpose) exceeds that they spend buying, maintaining and using
"consumer goods". Weak signals: The utter failure of Bush's Cato
Institute meme "Ownership Society" to enter common parlance; the NoLogo
movement; the growth in 'membership' in almost everything.
None
of these forecast changes is truly radical, and none is a linear
projection of today's reality, forwards or backwards. For that reason,
to most people they are literally unimaginable.
As Bucky Fuller said, "You never change things by fighting the existing
reality. To
change something, build a new model that makes the existing model
obsolete." By amplifying and building on weak signals we will create
many new models, and some of them, like the model that created the
industrial revolution and the agricultural revolution before that, will
simply render some old, dysfunctional, and largely discredited and
unpopular models, obsolete. It may not be enough to save the world, but
it will make it, for those who, unlike me, will be around in 2050, an
interesting ride. |
5:23:46 PM 
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MADE IN CANADA
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