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.

3D printing vs. digital fabrication

"What Does The Future of 3D Printing Look Like?" is an article from Techpublic this morning and it is a good example of the distinction we need to make between 3D printers and the broader suite of technologies that make up digital fabrication.  For example even a quick glance through your typical makerspace reveals that the 3D printer is but one of a range of tools and expertise brought to bear on the creative challenge of making truly amazing things.

Predicting Google

After writing this morning's post, I was thinking about the supreme difficulty of accurately anticipating the new businesses and new business models that emerge in the world (i.e. that "stick"), and the even greater difficulty of anticipating what those new businesses then evolve to become/create/reshape.  Thinking first about the graphic from this morning (Figure 1), consider the "entrepreneurial experimentation" occurring in the Surface layer.

Part of the great challenge in knowing how the economy will ultimately be affected by the entire landscape of changes lies in this area, what roughly corresponds to the "Emergent Models" section of the original Infinite Economy landscape image (Figure 2).  This is an area of basically evolutionary action: variation and selection.  Out of this competitive space eventually emerges the businesses and business practices that go on to (re)define normal.

And this jumps us to thought leadership/consultant's s-curve from "Working the hype cycle, part 2" (Figure 3).  See the orange line the defines the "Application Gap?"  This is the space in which VCs and other investors are developing ever-greater interest in other people trying to develop new things and to make businesses out of new things.  This, of course, is where people are looking for "the next Google."

But of course you can't really know ahead of time what invention/innovation/new venture will succeed (i.e. stick).  That's why they're all bets.  But even if you could get really, really good at anticipating what new piece of technology or what new venture goes on to become established and mainstream, you still couldn't know what they will go on to do outside of their intended application or their original business plan.  It's essentially an issue of, to use Google as an example: Could the folks who invested in Google at their outset truly have been able to anticipate what they might yet do to shape broad economic change in a variety of areas, far beyond improving internet search?

I am certain that the answer is no.  So consider the difficulty in not just "picking winners" amongst all the emerging technologies and business models out there right now (in terms of what they're trying to do right now), and then anticipating how they will evolve to introduce even more fundamental economic changes beyond their original intents.

Thinking about economic futures...

After yesterday's round-up of articles related to economic futures, I spent the early part of my morning thinking more on what the landscape of economic changes looks like today.

For those of who attended the 2012 Hawai'i Futures Summit, you will be familiar with my framing of the Infinite Economy.  For those of you who aren't, you can check out yesterday's post or the 2012 slide deck on slideshare.  The Infinite Economy looks at the full breadth of changes occurring in the world that, collectively, will shape economic life.  In this way the Infinite Economy looks much farther afield than just one or two developments, say 3D printing or renewable energy.  And in it there's a graphic that conceptually tries to see all the elements of this "landscape" (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: the Infinite Economy

In reflecting on this image this morning, I started to list some of the big trends and emerging issues that are found within the Infinite Economy and which people are discussing today.  The list began with:

• Automation
• Digital fabrication
• DIY movement
• Maker movement
• Social financing
• Alternative currency
• M2M/internet of things/ubicomp

A comprehensive list would of course be huge, but after just getting this far I started thinking in a new direction.  Switching to a layered view, I started to list some of the major trends, but also started to add some of the change dynamics that are relevant to anticipating economic futures (Figure 2).

Figure 2: initial iteration of a layered view

In starting to draft this visual I soon realized (and was reminded of) a number of things:

1. This image will need a lot more time and effort to capture enough of the different dynamics of which I think people need to be aware
2. I need to switch to my preferred 11x17 page size :)
3. Thinking about economic futures today truly requires a global perspective.  An exploration that simply focuses on, say, the American scene, will overlook critical shifts and interdependencies shaping economic life
4. And this requires a much more systemic perspective than I think we've traditionally employed when thinking about the "economy"
5. Partly because there seem to be changes occurring on so many levels and across some many domains/boundaries, employing only an "economics" viewpoint will not provide real insight
6. Considering economic futures today requires a practice of zooming in and out to see the different kinds of change dynamics underway (future iterations of Figure 2 will illustrate this point)

Economic futures round up for Thanksgiving

Because everyone has nothing better to do today than hang around on the web reading articles, I've included below a few good articles that bear on economic futures (not to be confused with the stock market term).

1. "A Skeptic's Guide to 3D Printing": as I was saying on Twitter a couple of days ago when this article got posted, this is the best starting point for exploring the futures of 3D printing I have seen yet. And as I've said in previous posts, in its full suite digital fabrication clearly will play in interesting role in rewiring some of our economic life, but the current hype around 3D printing is animated a bit more by people's excitement and imagination than by critical examinations of the development and diffusion of a new technology, which is something this article does well.
2. "Google Enters 3D Printing Arena": Follow the digital fab vein, this short article as an announcement about a development agreement between Google (dba Motorola Mobility LLC :) ) and 3D Systems to build a high speed digital fabrication and fulfillment system to support Motorola's mobile device customization project, Project Ara.  As a colleague has often said, take a quick peek at anything Google gets into.
3. "The Reluctant Visionary": This is a review-of-sorts of Eric Drexler's new book, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization, which returns us to an examination of what Drexler now calls "atomically precise manufacturing."  Nanotechnology has had its own massive hype in decades past, but in various forms the science and engineering continue to advance and, as always, the promise of what manipulation at the atomic level could mean for human economy is nothing short of revolutionary.
4. "How Google's "Deep Learning" Is Outsmarting Its Human Employees": The last article is from Fast Company and takes us back to Google and into the realms of neural networks and machine learning to look at how Google's system for deep learning is evolving capacities to distinguish objects in the world around it that it's programmers never provided.  Augmentation of human capabilities with machines and the replacement of human effort with machine effort, both fundamental aspects of technological change since the beginning, will of course portend even greater changes in economic life.

And for our early work from last year on framing many of these larger economic shifts:

The Infinite Economy from Richard Lum

5 things you can do to think like a futurist

Intent on beating the retailers at their own game, and seeing as New Year’s is the natural holiday for futurists, today we’re going to leapfrog both Thanksgiving and Christmas to start dispensing advice for the New Year!

And so here are five things you can do to think more like a trained futurist*.

Scan.  Scan, scan, and scan some more.  Trained futurists engage in a continual exercise classically known as environmental scanning.  For us it’s like breathing.  Find and flip through a lot of news and developments.  This isn’t classic research; it’s more like dipping your face into the fire hose.  Over time you’ll get a sense of patterns and shifts emerging out there in the world.  This is the raw info feed about the world from which trained futurists continually refine their notions of the nature of the possible.  It is from here that we typically pull the weak signals that we weave together into emerging issues.

Diversify Your Sources.  Whether you’re engaged in scanning or conducting more in-depth research, diversify your information sources and go farther afield to sniff out developments that might be important.  When scanning, this helps us identify emerging issues arising outside of classic industry/sector boundaries that might drive change that is in fact relevant to our concerns.  When doing research or even strategy development, the experiences, perspectives, and frameworks from outside of our concerns can often provide a breakthrough, through reframing or simple inspiration.

See the World Systemically.  Always ask yourself about connections, about the relationships that bind what you’re looking at with many other things in the world.  Think about upstream drivers and downstream effects.  Think about first, second, and third order impacts.  See the world around you as a web, see the strings of that web vibrate as feedback ripples around you.  Try thinking and note-taking in pictures, in diagrams that connect actors with each other and that link causes with effects with further effects, with even further effects.  And think about complexity: about how inputs don’t always relate to outputs; about sudden, unexpected shifts in the system; and how unexpected patterns can emerge from the undirected interactions of lots of individual actors…

Swing Both Ways.  Regularly alternate between deep dives into the work of great scholars and intellectually rigorous conceptual frameworks and the surface-skimming, social network-sampling activities of scanning.  Theory and mental models matter, so do not ignore them.  Always forecasting the futures of complex issues based solely on intuition and gut feeling is a poor practice.  At the same time, you need to draw upon your intuition and the capacity of your mind to see something entirely new.  Moving back and forth between these two approaches will keep your mind fresh while challenging it to always be rigorous and self-critical.

Be Humble.  Remind yourself that you don’t actually know how the universe works…

*recall: trained futurists are fundamentally dealing with the issue of change in society...

A better forecast for 3D printing

Today I was pleasantly surprised to come across what is by far the best example of proper forecasting regarding the future of 3D printing that I have seen yet.  It's an article titled, "A Skeptic's Guide to 3D Printing," from of all places, Booz & Company.

In particular, I like the authors' employment of well-documented patterns of change to develop their sense of the future potential and time horizon for 3D printing: experience curves, economies of scale, and total landed cost.  Would that more folks would employ some of these models when contemplating the future of emergent issues and technology.

Having said this, I also offer that this is an excellent example of how good forecasting, particularly that which aims beyond a three year horizon, should begin.  Beyond what these authors have presented there are a number of additional models that could and should be brought to bear in considering the multiple possible trajectories that 3D printing could follow.

Working the hype cycle, part 2

In my previous post today, "Working the hype cycle, part 1," I mentioned how I was wondering where on the Gartner hype cycle one would plot the entrance of the big consulting firms into a thought-leadership space.  After discussing it further in-house, I found myself thinking not of the hype cycle so much as the classic s-curve of issues development.

Trained, professional futurists, in addition to a great many other professionals, often use s-curves as our own thumbnail sketches as that sigmoid function is found so often in the maturation of public policy issues, development of technology, diffusion of tech, etc...  And so I began to think in terms of the s-curve, and more specifically, I began thinking about where you would expect to find different consultants entering a thought leadership/idea space.

Figure 1 is the result of my most recent thinking.

Figure 1: applying the s-curve to mapping thought leadership

Something like 2/3 the way through the curve you can see (what we're surmising as) the typical entry point for major consulting firms.  The reasons are neither terribly mysterious nor necessarily nefarious.  It generally isn't until about that point in the development of an issue that there is sufficient "trend" data or enough cases to study to begin to propose any sort of "best practice" action in response to an issue confronting a large organization.

Firms run by trained futurists, such as ours, are oriented below that point, spanning the entire first 2/3 of the curve, but often most useful in the Foresight Zone just before the "Application Gap."  And the application gap refers to the period of time in the development of an issue in which there is very little in the way of sound new wisdom to apply; no best practices to implement, no well-studied improvement projects to launch.  Just people more comfortable with risk and ambiguity deciding to wade in/strike early.

Put simply, our job is to help frame the full set of issues that will be cascading over you in the years ahead.  How can you make a truly informed decision regarding the "big" issues of the next 2-3 years without understanding the the waves of issues following right behind them?

Working the hype cycle, part 1

Yesterday, as I was reviewing some reports from the last couple of years from some of the big consulting firms like McKinsey, I idly wondered about how to interpret the entry of the big C consulting firms into any particular topical area.

Most of the big firms today like to claim thought leadership in their various practice areas, so their reports tend to be written as deeply insightful probes into an issue of critical future importance to (potential) clients.  But I have found over the years that for any particular area, a true subject matter expert would often not find anything they had not already read about or discussed with other experts for years, and sometimes decades.

And I'm not digging on anyone here, just thinking about what it means, in terms of the maturity and "lifecycle" of a big issue, that the big C firms have decided to start addressing it for (potential) clients.

Almost as a joke, I posted the following question yesterday on Twitter: "Where do we plot an issue on the @Gartner_inc hype cycle if the major consulting firms are piling into the space?"

Gartner Hype Cycle Special Report 2013

I got a couple of quick and clever answers from colleagues @nextwavefutures and @changeist, and their responses made me realize that I will now have to actually play with plotting this on the hype cycle.

More to follow shortly.

Is Tech THE Agent for Change in Healthcare

As much fun as Twitter is, 140 characters just cannot do justice to the complexity of real life, and so this longer post in response to @SusannahFox's discussion in response to @jayparkinson's post on "can tech be an agent for change/generational divide."

As with all complex social institutions, the answer to the question of whether or not technology can be an agent for change is, Yes, with caveats.  It can of course be an agent for change, and is an agent for change, but I think the real question that's being debated here is whether or not technology is the primary agent for change in healthcare.  And because this discussion is framed as a generational divide issue, it becomes a question of whether or not we think a younger generation will let technology do its change-agent thing on healthcare.

Having worked with health insurers, community health centers, specialized health services organizations, and small business physicians, my take is that in healthcare in the US (being made up of lots of sometimes-interoperable systems), change and/or stability is impacted by more drivers than in other countries.  The larger financing mechanisms, the reimbursement systems, privacy regulations, and even the straight-up ease-of-use of new technical infrastructures are all hugely important for shaping change or stability within a given area of American healthcare.  Layer under that competing value sets and worldviews (and here's where generational differences become even more important) and you've got a wonderfully complex turbulence.

So, structure matters.  Just replacing all of the America's current crop of congressional representation with under 40 individuals, but leaving all else in government and civic life constant, would not by any means necessarily produce significantly different outcomes.  So suddenly replacing all physicians (and we're not yet talking about all of the other people who actually make healthcare happen) with under 40 individuals, but keeping all the current systems and relationships in place, would not necessarily and magically produce new health outcomes.

Technology is a major driver of social change (which is why trained American futurists are normally so focused on it), but its impacts, and its trajectory, can be altered by the very social institutions in which we expect changes.  We can resist, delay, and deflect change.

So, our question is really, "will a younger generation (of physicians) unleash technology to truly transform healthcare?"

And my answer to that question right at this moment is, No.

Part of my answer comes from my belief that structures matter and that we need much more institutional and systemic change than, say, ACA is able to command into existence.  And part of my answer comes from my belief that the very centrality of the allopathic physician in our modern conception of health and healthcare is one of the elements that needs to change in order for real transformation to occur.

Put another way, if younger Gen X physicians and Millennial physicians age up into leadership positions, but the rest of the systems underpinning healthcare in the US don't significantly change, then I don't expect real impressive transformation emerging under their watch.

On a minor note, it's interesting (and perhaps refreshing) to note that Jay marks a 40 year-old dividing line, which places Baby Boomers squarely on one end, Millennials on the other, but rather nicely splits Generation X across that line. Interesting...

Can a 2x2 Matrix Help You Facilitate Better?

Now that I've spent so much time with a 2x2 matrix in my last post, my mind keeps circling back to 2x2s.  In fact, several months ago I had a conversation with a colleague (I honestly cannot recollect who) about facilitation...

I've done my fair share of process design and workshop facilitation over the years, and have had the benefit of a number of formal facilitation trainings.  Then last year I read Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking and, being a introvert myself, found myself thinking much more explicitly about common facilitation issues that often concern me.

Most pertinent to this post is what I've always called the "fallacy of the facilitated workshop."  This fallacy deals with the often unreasonable expectations we set for facilitated meetings to generate, validate, and secure consensus on important strategic decisions.  All within a one-day session!

Now related to this is the issue of extreme time constraints for participant exercises.  It is not uncommon to find groups tasked with answering deep questions within the space of 40 minutes, or rushing through important critical thinking exercises in 20 minutes.  In most cases this simply is not enough time for an individual, to say nothing of a team of people, to adequately wrestle with truly strategic issues.

What can often happen in these situations, and indeed, in American workshops in general, is that extroverts gain an advantage in shaping the conversations, especially in workshops that are extremely time-constrained.  In order to counter this a workshop designer has to think very carefully about the kinds of exercises and timing they program.

One book that I haven't yet read is Thinking, Fast and Slow though it is on my list.  I was having a chat with a colleague about "fast" and "slow" thinking and I remembered my thoughts about facilitation and about extroverts in workshops.  I immediately thought of a 2x2 matrix (bringing us back to the present), which would look like the following:

And my thought was: what if you used this matrix to help you make sure that no one type of thinking or one type of personality had an overwhelming advantage in a workshop?  Put another way, could you use this to help design the right workshop?

My experience tells me that, at least in the US, most facilitated privilege the upper right quadrant, the realm of the extroverted and the fast thinking response.  And often the issues we are assembling people to deliberate on are strategic and complex.

It seems to me that using a framework like this should make it easier to design a session that draws on the strengths of the full spectrum of personalities and that plays with the interplay between Kahneman's system 1 and system 2 thinking.

We'll definitely be using this in 2014 for our client sessions and we'll post later on how it seems to work.

Working on the Future

The older I get the less I feel the need to define for everyone else and the more I become comfortable with just defining for myself.  For some time I have been thinking about the things that distinguish professionals who call themselves “futurists.”

Futures studies is one of those unknown academic fields.  Indeed, even within the field there are those who argue that it is not, perhaps, a true field yet.  In any case, the label given to students emerging from futures studies is unfortunate: futurist.  Like “democracy,” “democratization,” and “strategy” this is a term that is terribly overused and misused, adopted by a very wide cast of consulting/speaking/thinking characters out there in the wild world.

Those coming out of futures studies are concerned with understanding change, with anticipating change, and with helping people to shape change.  But because the field is currently so… unregulated, and in fact may never become strictly regulated, the variety of methods, preferences, and degree of training among those claiming the title of futurist give rise to an extremely wide array of practices and objectives.

As a trusted colleague frequently points out, there is a considerable body of literature now built up around futures studies, so often grad students or newcomers end up reinventing things that they simply hadn’t been aware of beforehand.  While I risk doing the same thing, I have been occasionally returning to the exercise of trying to sort and distinguish between the various professionals who tend to work specifically and explicitly on the “the future.”  This is a schema based on my current thinking.

Let’s sort individuals according to two spectra: the purpose of their work and the underlying approach of their work.  Purpose can be thought of as the intent or objective of the practitioner.  Approach refers roughly to the sources of information and the ways of knowing upon which they build their work.  Using both spectra as axes we create a typical 2x2 matrix.

Figure 1: the basic 2x2 matrix

Purpose runs from anticipating change on one end to shaping change on the other.  The extreme left of anticipating change would be sincere attempts at prediction; more tentative or careful forecasts would fall to the right of that.  Crossing over the Y axis, efforts at shaping change would run from light efforts to shake people out of their assumptions all the way to grand attempts at social change.

The Y axis of approach runs from methods that rely entirely on participant knowledge and responses on the bottom end to the upper end with work that is entirely dependent on quantitative data (and likely disdains most intuition not based on “facts”).

Using these two axes we can play with plotting a variety of methods that are commonly used by “futurists”.  This is just a sample, to be sure; if we were to plot methods common to, say, urban planners, the quadrants would probably fill differently.  And this is just a quick generalization.

Figure 2: common methods plotted

Now, to follow classic business management practice, let’s give the quadrants labels and identities.  We’ll call the Data-Driven/Anticipate Change quadrant the Analyst quadrant.  The Analyst’s domain is about explicit models and information, and it’s about needing to understand.  Below that is the Intuitive/Anticipate Change quadrant, which is the domain of the Sage.  Merriam-Webster.com defines sage as “wise through reflection and experience,” and that aptly describes the methods and motivation within this domain.  To the right we have the Intuitive/Shape Change quadrant which we label as the domain of the Provocateur.  The Provocateur’s work is to shake people out of their assumptions and their complacency.  Finally, we have the Data-Driven/Shape Change quadrant, which is the domain of the Planner.  By definition, Planners want things to happen, and they lean towards information and structure to accomplish that.

For added fun, we can perhaps start to overlay archetypes, and specifically the brand-related use of archetypes developed by Mark and Pearson in The Hero and the Outlaw.  The Analyst domain is probably where the Ruler archetype feels most comfortable.  The Sage archetype would fit the Sage domain.  We might place the Magician in the Planner domain and the Outlaw and the Jester might both fit into the Provocateur domain.

Figure 3: the four quadrants

Knowing many actual trained futurists as I do, and having met a great many people who otherwise call themselves “futurist” or whose work focuses on the future, I think individual professionals have preferences or biases that tend to draw them into one quadrant more than others.  I myself was trained very much from the Provocateur’s domain, yet naturally gravitate towards the Sage quadrant (but higher in the quadrant and closer to the Analyst domain), while consciously wanting to explore the Analyst domain more.

Of course, what becomes obvious once you start staring at this matrix is that a really good futures or foresight process will glide across more than one quadrant.  While some engagements are wholly within a single domain (say, a futures-driven creativity/ideation workshop resting comfortably in the Provocateur domain), many probably do, and all probably should, move across multiple domains.

A process could begin in the Analyst domain say with some Emerging Issues Analysis, dip over into the Provocateur space for some Manoa scenario process, and then conclude in the Planner quadrant some Participatory Action Research (example 1).  Alternatively, it could start in the Sage mode with some Forecasting by Analogy, move to the Analyst mode for validation and additional perspectives from Learning Curves (and maybe some technology adoption curves), then end in the Provocateur mode with participants oriented for creating new products/services through morphological analysis (example 2).

Figure 4: processes across the matrix

In fact, you could probably develop this further to make it an easy-to-use process develop framework.  Aligning your project with client needs (archetypes) and making sure to include strengths from each of the quadrants would seem to always be beneficial.  This would just be a framework to help someone do that.

Well, this is not exactly where I had planned to end up when I started this post, but this is an interesting place to pause for now.