The Infinite Economy

Today we released the highlight booklet for the updated Infinite Economy material.  First presented to audiences in 2012, the Infinite Economy is a look at how the material basis of our modern lives is poised to undergo fundamental transformations over the next several years.

"A review of current global trends such as population growth, continuing industrialization, rising energy demand, massive urbanization, and long term climate change shows that humanity is entering uncharted territory with respect to the material and organizational challenges it will face in the coming decades.

Yet, despite these considerable challenges, a review of humanity’s history and an exploration of the presently dim outlines of the future both strongly suggest that humanity can and is developing the insights and tools to dramatically raise the material security and affluence for all if it chooses to do so.

Thus, the future is very much a matter of vision and of choice."

Please check it out today.

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.

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.

How to Forecast the Futures of 3D Printing

3D printing (additive manufacturing) is pretty hype right now, anointed so not just by Gartner (see the top of the hype cycle below), but also by the proliferation of exuberant articles in mainstream publications over the last 18 months or so.  How are all these journalists and evangelists arriving at their images of the 3D printed future?  Truthfully, in most cases I’m not exactly sure, but I suspect that in a fair number of them folks have given over to expanding on intuitive extrapolations of what they’re seeing in front of them.

Gartner Hype Cycle Special Report 2013

Digital fabrication certainly looks poised to become a major component in our future economic systems, and additive manufacturing will clearly play a major role in any digital fabrication scheme.  Given the inherent appeal of 3D printing systems, how they decentralize (not democratize, as so many writers like to mistakenly say) the tools for fabrication and how they enable such freedom of creation, it is both easy and fairly logical to assume that 3D printing has some role in our future.

But how can one usefully think about the future evolution of 3D printing?  How can we generate useful images of 3D printing’s future? (by “useful” I mean both logical and insightful though not necessarily probable).

Well, let’s do a little exercise in forecasting.  In fact, let’s consider two different approaches to qualitatively forecasting the futures of 3D printing.  We will call the first method displacement analysis and the second coevolutionary forecasting.  The former method is based partly on assumptions about the expected uses of a new technology and focuses our thinking on the changes that have to happen for those uses to come about, and how our expectations themselves might have to change.  The latter method leaves the future more open-ended and focuses our attention on how a given technology will evolve in connection with related and/or necessary enabling technologies and systems.

The Displacement Analysis

In displacement analysis, we would first think about additive manufacturing in terms of the capabilities it presents and the applications for which people currently do and hope to use it.  Then we map these capabilities and applications against a picture of the systems and processes in place in society today.  What’s displaced?  What has to be reworked?  Where are the systemic connections that have to be made to make the technology work as hoped?  And socially and institutionally, what stakeholders are threatened, and which are empowered?  Where’s the push-back (and what forms would it take) and where’s the natural incentive for investment?

As a result, we redraw the picture of the industry or societal systems of which our new technology will be a part and we identify the types of changes that have to occur for that new picture to become a reality.  And in the process we are forced to think about how our expectations might be altered when confronted with the many forces and relationships in systems that influence both stability and change.  Having been forced to think so systemically, we can end up with a picture of the future different than the one with which we started out.

The Coevolutionary Forecast

Our second approach also asks us to see our new technology as part of an ecosystem, but rather than working backward from the systemic impacts of a new technology it progresses forward from today by asking how a new technology would coevolve with other developments.  In contrast with displacement analysis that is anchored by our assumptions or expectations for a technology’s future use, this method asks us to start by identifying related parts of the ecosystem and then to think about how these different but related technologies, institutions, and values would logically coevolve as developments and changes in each part feed back to the other parts.

Coevolutionary forecasting is therefore predisposed to producing timelines of change (what I have always thought of as coevolutionary change tracks).  In the process of doing this kind of forecasting we are often “following our nose” as it were, following sequences of interactions that can take us to fairly unexpected places.  And that really is the key value of this kind of forecasting: it provides a structure for finding unexpected or counter-intuitive pathways into the future.

And so, what then would be our two different forecasts for the future of 3D printing?  Well, that will just have to wait for second part of this piece…

The Futures of Constitutional Governance

Today I am releasing the Highlight Booklet from a new work, The Third Era: Reframing the Futures of Constitutional Governance.  It looks at the the various forces that collectively are shaping the futures of governance and it suggests ways of conceptualizing both governance and the processes we use to design our systems of governance.

From an examination of the many forces that drive political change, we can anticipate that the futures of governance will not be determined solely by the experiences and preferences of the West.  While many of our modern patterns of governance emerge out of the West, the new era we have entered is a global one in which the challenges faced by peoples in regions such as Asia and Africa will have as much, if not more, relevance for political innovation as those faced by communities in the West.

Nor will the futures of governance be shaped primarily by a single approach to addressing political and social challenges.  The design of governance systems was once the purview of constitutional lawyers and scholars.  Today, individuals from professions as wide ranging as political science, urban design, and data analytics are attempting to apply their perspectives to understanding and improving governance.  Part of The Third Era’s message is the value and importance of integrating these various perspectives in order to reconceptualize the art of designing constitutional governance systems.

The governance systems that we will come to live in will not emerge in a vacuum. They will emerge as integral parts of a global political landscape and indeed will co-evolve with that landscape. They will be the result of a turbulent confluence of forces: individual  innovation, competitions for power, and the reactions that preserve the status quo. To usefully anticipate the variety of forms that future governance systems might take requires an examination of the many forces driving political change.

The Third Era sits at the intersection of both political science, concerned with issues like government and the state, and futures studies, using different frameworks to understand and anticipate change.  It will be an ever-evolving work, periodically updated with new material and new forecasts as things (and my thinking) continue to evolve.

(cross posted on The Third Era)

Spotting the Future

I caught the following article this morning as it flitted by on Twitter (via +Fabienne GOUX-BAUDIMENT), "How to Spot the Future," by Wired of last year.  I of course could not resist checking it out.

Their list of rules of thumb for spotting the future include:

1. Look for cross pollinators
2. Surf the exponentials
3. Favor the liberators
4. Give points for audacity
5. Bank on openness
6. Demand deep design
7. Spend time with time wasters

Fundamentally, I was kind of "ehh," about the whole article.  Perhaps Wired really does use those, um, heuristics, to anticipate change, but the academic in me is not that impressed (of course, the academic in me wants to see one of their intrepid editors write up a proper historical study of their experiences in this regard, so that we can see exactly the historical precedents that inform their rules of thumb).

At the same time, what I often see around me when others are "forecasting" the future is not dramatically dissimilar: a broad rule of thumb/model of change combined with some form of informal frequency analysis + novelty hunting (scanning the Web and identifying things that seem to be popping up more but are not yet fully mainstream + picking out things that provoke and are probably less well known).

Quick Stakeholder Forecasting

Of the many conversations I had yesterday, all of which were quite useful, one was particularly productive with regard to the Infinite Economy.  One of the things to emerge from this particular conversation was a conceptual tool for some quick forecasting.

What you see often in the media, and what most of us are guilty of on a regular basis, is extrapolating the development of a technology or issue with all other things remaining equal.  This is, as I've mentioned previously, a natural but uncritical method of forecasting.  Nothing, in fact, exists in isolation, and most phenomena in which we are interested in fact co-evolve with a great many other phenomena.

But as we were discussing this truth yesterday in the context of forecasting elements of the Infinite Economy (and props to Mr. +Dominic Muren for helping shape said conversation and all of our resulting conclusions), we began applying some structure to our conversation and came up with method/heuristic for quickly challenging our forecast.  In fact, this method looks promising as a simple tool for groups to produce forecasts within larger processes (e.g. scenario planning).

Essentially, this is a heuristic that runs through a set of common stakeholders to either produce a forecast or modify (test) a forecast that someone is suggesting.  The stakeholders we identified include:

1. Physicist
2. Engineer
3. Lawyer
4. Business person/investor
5. Cultural anthropologist/ethnographer

So, given a forecast that someone has suggested (and let's think about a technological forecast for this, just for ease of imagining), we would:

First, consider whether or not a physicist would say that the suggested forecast is prohibited according to our current understanding of the laws of physics/the universe.

Second, given a physicist saying that it's possible, we consider whether or not an engineer could identify current or experimental tools/process to make the forecast real.

Third, given an engineer saying that they could imagine how the developments would be produced, we would consider what a lawyer would see in terms of enabling/constraining laws and how laws might be used in support of or reaction to the developments being forecast.

Fourth, given the lawyer's comments on the broader societal reactions and how that might affect a development pathway, consider what a business person or investor would say about pursuing the developments in the forecast.

And finally, given what results so far, what would a cultural anthropologist say about how the suggested developments would or would not fit within people's lives.

As I said, a quick tool, but one that I think could be very useful for wind tunneling or stress testing (or at least assumption-testing) many of the extrapolative forecasts that people produce everyday.

Conflicts in Hawai'i: Looking Forward

This is basically a re-post from a year ago, but it's that time of year for prognostication and we feel that the tensions outlined here are still relevant and under-discussed in polite company.  Happy New Year!

"The arrival of a new year inevitably brings the usual raft of predictions and Top 10 lists from media outlets attempting to frame the challenges of the coming year.  As professional futurists, our training is less in making point forecasts for a 12-month period and more about developing a broader and deeper context for change.  Having said that, we can still offer a forecast concerning the social, economic, and political contexts that will be evident in 2012 but which will gain in importance in the coming years.
The following are five key “tensions” that are already evident in Hawai‘i, and which are likely to become more apparent as the current decade unfolds.  Each of these represents differences in values and worldviews that, while often unspoken or unexamined, point to the deeper tensions at work beneath the surface of many community and policy issues we face today.  As always, understanding the deeper motives and differences that exist among us is key to developing truly effective and beneficial strategies.

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

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

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

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

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