Mapping technological revolutions onto three horizons

The three horizons framework developed by Bill Sharpe and Tony Hodgson is a favorite of mine, as it is both versatile and provides an good framework to explore interactions and dynamics.  And so, as I was working on new Infinite Economy content, I began mapping recent technological revolutions, a la Carlota Perez, onto the three horizons framework.

Recent technological revolutions mapped onto the Three Horizons

As detailed in her excellent book, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages, Perez develops the notion of long waves of economic eras ever-so-briefly introduced by Schumpeter into a full-blown and well-researched framework of technology-driven economic change.  In the book, Perez talks about the "great surges of development" that have occurred five times since the advent of the Industrial Revolution.  I'll post another graphic later to gets at these "surges," but it's enough for now to say that these waves of change, and the complex dynamics behind them, map perfectly onto the Sharpe and Hodgson 3H framework.

Back to thinking about the future

One of our folks recently shared around an HBR.org article entitled,"Four Keys to Thinking About the Future."  Needless to say, we were all a bit underwhelmed by the advice in the article.

1. Enhance your power of observation
2. Appreciate the value of being (a little) asocial
3. Study history
4. Learn to deal with ambiguity

I think we were just a tad disappointed to find this (digitally) printed under the HBR banner, since it felt vague and light enough to feel futures-self-helpy.  We also pulled up the recent post I wrote on "5 things you can do to think like a futurist" (admittedly with just a little trepidation, wanting to make sure that what I had wrote initially as a very light and quick post didn't turn out to be exactly what the HBR.org post was). Fortunately, it wasn't.

To recap, 5 things you can do:

• Scan
• Diversify your sources
• See the world systemically
• Swing both ways
• Be humble

But, since we are in the midst of prepping all of the updated foresight training modules for 2014, it's probably as good a time as ever to put a little thought into how we would replace the "4 keys" from the HBR.org article with a more sophisticated and rigorous set of guidelines for thinking about the futures.

Measuring the effectiveness of foresight

Lately I've been thinking about how to measure whether or not foresight work has been effective for an organizational client.  Not that this is a new topic by any stretch of the imagination, but it struck me the other day that, well, of course you can try to measure the impact of your foresight work.

A starter list of metrics might include:

• Did you (the organization) develop a new product or service or enter a market (that is profitable), which you otherwise would not have, based on some finding or outcome from the foresight work?
• Did you create a new market as a result of the foresight work?
• Did you end a product or service or leave/avoid a market that you otherwise would not have, as a result of the work?
• Did you avoid, or were you unusually prepared for, an event or development as a result of the work?
• Did you establish something aspirational (vision or goals) as a result of the work, which continues to inspire and orient the organization?
• Did you establish an ongoing foresight activity (like scanning) as a result of the work that continues to inform organizational decision-making?

We'll keep working on this list, but it's a reasonable place to start.

Towards thinking about expertise

Part of the team was out of town last week and getting intellectually overstimulated, so the normal rate of posting slowed a bit.  I'll try to make up the loss from here on in.

Over the past few months I've come across a few blog posts and articles that all somehow relate to the issue of subject matter experts or to expertise in general.  In one form or another, they have either to do with declaring an end to the need for expertise or with refuting that claim.  Most recently this was prompted by Robert Murray's short piece in e-International Relations titled, "In Defence of Expertise," but I think most of the writing about the end or not-end of theory (related to big data) also provokes this line of thinking.

At the moment I am not sure what to make of the issue of the value/validity of expertise in today's world.  Having just come out of some workshops dealing with complexity and systems thinking, I am tempted to simply repeat an oft-repeated phrase from the event: everything within bounds.  Yet clearly that doesn't actually address the issue, it simply sidelines it.

The issue also comes up within the education and learning futures space.  Here a number of people across the country are both excited by and insistent on the erasure of the line between student and instructor, people that often assert that the "model" of education in which a teacher (expert) pushes knowledge to a student (novice) is dead or terminally ill.  While debates on the lecture itself as a valid form of teaching/learning continue, the overall issue in the future of education space seems to be with the validity of teachers are experts.

Interestingly, the ideas of a Google/Wikipedia/adaptive learning-driven information environment as well as the almost New-Agey passion with the "wisdom of crowds" and the emergence of "big data" all seem to support the development of a counter-expertise worldview in the US today.

And at some point we can probably rope in the anti-intellectualism in America that others have identified...

Again, I don't know where to go with these thoughts at the moment, but I feel like there's something here to explore and work on.

More fun with search terms

Following from the previous post that looked at some Google search trends, we've continued our in-house conversations about big picture issues (like the end of capitalism).  This time we decided to look at Google search terms in the US, beginning an exploration into how big issues compare for attention among Americans.  Certainly nothing scientific here, yet, but the results of some quick questing.

To start, we compared search in the US for "China" and "flu."


Next, we added "sustainability" (no real impact):


Finally, we added the term "jobs"



Again, this doesn't show much at the moment, but I think we'll slowly get a handle on how different big picture issues or concerns, the kinds of issues that futurists and other big picture thinkers get paid to forecast, actually compare to one another in the search habits of Americans.

The end of all things

One of our discussions today dealt with big picture issues: global economic order, global political landscape, collapse, etc... The discussion was the first of a series of planned conversations exploring some very big systemic issues, and coming out of this first one we idly wondered about certain trends over time.

So, to get the ball rolling, we ran a quick Google Trends search for certain terms over time.

Not that this necessarily tells us much at the moment, and some of it is entirely predictable, but we were surprised that there weren't higher numbers for "antiglobalization."

Focusing on change

As I have asserted for some years now, at the heart of futures studies is the focus on change.  No serious forecast of any alternative future can be achieved without some sense of how change happens and no aspiring vision of the future can be seriously attempted without some sense of how change can be made.  The understanding and anticipation of change lies at the heart of all good futures work.

That being said, there are few resources out there that, at least from an intellectual standpoint, consistently meet the need of trained futurists for thinking and research on change in society than the "experiment in thinking" blog, Understanding Society.

For ongoing intellectual (and theoretically grounded) provocation about how and why society changes, I highly recommend following this excellent resource.

15 books for your Christmas list this year

Since it's that time of the year again, we've put together a list of recommended reading that might be helpful if you happen to be shopping around for Christmas gifts for any readers and deep thinkers on your list this year.  The selections below span a range from deep, almost academic treatments to long views of history to works on subjects that are a little more "top of mind."

Thinking About the Future

• The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: While somewhat contentious among trained futurist circles, Taleb's justly popular book on black swan events, randomness, and the limits of knowledge is an important set of intellectual reminders.
• Connections: James Burke's multiple television series on "Connections" is a perennial futures favorite as it wonderfully highlights the contingency of the histories we all take for granted.
• Foundations of Futures Studies: Human Science for a New Era: History, Purposes, Knowledge: For anyone interested in learning about the academic field of futures studies, this is a great place to start.
• Macrohistory and Macrohistorians: Perspectives on Individual, Social, and Civilizational Change: Produced by two great thinkers, this book reviewing big picture theories of social change is a must-read for serious thinkers about the future.
• Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation: A classic work concerned with scenario planning (popularized by the Global Business Network), this book is still recommended by professional futurists to professional futurists.

Economic Futures

• Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation: This most recent work by Cowen paints a vivid though not necessarily encouraging vision of our economic future that will definitely exciting to some, and depressing to others.
• The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time: Certainly receiving renewed interest since 2008, this famous work by Polanyi introduces both an important critique of modern economic flows and new definitions for understanding economic life.
• Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy: The futures of automation and the dislocation of human labor are hot topics at the moment, and this work by Brynjolfsson and McAfee is a wonderfully short and clear dive into the subject.
• Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization: Drexler almost single-handedly kicked off the nanotech craze with his book, Engines of Creation.  In his most recent work he returns to an exploration of the technology that remains poised to revolutionize material life.
• Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages: For those interested in either "creative destruction" or solid theories of economic change, Perez's book on long cycles of technology-driven change is sure to delight.

Political Futures

• The Future of Power: Critical to any exploration of political futures is some consideration of power, and Nye's book does an excellent job of exploring the changing nature of power on the global stage.
• No One's World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn: Amid the recent deluge on books about the future of the world order, the rise of China, and/or the decline of the US, Kupchan's book was an interesting, thought-provoking suggestion that the future will not be a new hegemony, but something with greater political diversity.
• The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History: For those interested in how the modern nation-state came to be, and what historical patterns suggest for it's future, Bobbitt's incredibly detailed account and theorizing will be thoroughly engrossing.
• Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future: Any long-view and deep history buffs will be sure to enjoy Morris' thoroughly engaging exploration about the patterns that made, and perhaps continue to make, the world order.
• Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety: Another in a long list of works on global political futures, Rachman's book is useful for the reminder that the world doesn't fall neatly into two ideological camps on all issues; rather it splits up messily according to specific issues.