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)

Looking Towards the Broader Interests in Google Glass

Yesterday Paul Krugman had a post on "The Economics of Evil Google," in which he is exploring the issue of Google's services (Google Reader) being so important to the public, yet not in the interests of the service provider to continue providing them.  He references an article by Ryan Avent on The Economist of "Google's Google Problem."  Both writers are basically pushing the issue of when a private service becomes important enough to be treated (and provided) as a public service.  I've asked it before and I will keep asking it: "when does Google become critical enough infrastructure to warrant an eminent domain conversation?
 
On a related note, as Google Glass comes nearer to market, techno-optimists and techno-cautionaries have been spending a lot of digital ink on what to look forward to or what we should deeply concerned about with this new consumer product.  GigaOM had their post on "The real breakthrough of Google Glass: controlling the internet of things."  I don't think I disagree on the potential for shifting the primary interface with an ecosystem of wirelessly connected things, but across the broader societal landscape, I would hew more closely to the techno-cautionaries in anticipating the important applications of Glass.

For instance, I think the real fun stuff will start to come into play as more people in mainstream society realize that devices like Google Glass are mobile CCTV cameras, recording everything that individuals are looking at.  Beyond the individual privacy issues, about which people are justifiably concerned, lie the very real interests that other economic and societal actors will have. Wait until Glass telemetry is key evidence in court cases, in auto insurance claims disputes, in sexual harassment cases...  It is so very easy to imagine the situation: "No, I swear, he came out of nowhere..." says the car driver.  "And yet your Google Glass feed clearly shows that at the exact moment of the collision, you were looking down at you iPhone," says the insurance company rep.

In this regard, Google Glass simply becomes another sensor platform in what I think is likely to be a very pervasive ecology of sensoring and ubiquitous computing, of which high flying Hellfire-armed drones are merely the most talked about early iteration.  Such a "system" really comes online with a multitude of new stationary or other-mobile sensor platforms, like Glass.

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).

Verge: a general practice framework for futures work

Back in 2004, my friend Michele Bowman and I started working on an environmental scanning service to offer corporate clients.  Out of those discussions emerged what we thought of at the time as a new taxonomy for conducting scanning.  As most folks involved in futures (foresight) work know, the most common frame for scanning or discussing trends and emerging issues (TEI) is STEEP: Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, and Political.

The basic idea in using STEEP or any related or similar arrangements is to ensure a complete sweep of the environment, overcoming a group's natural biases or blindspots.  It's simple and useful.

Being academically trained futurists out of UH Manoa, we, of course, weren't satisfied with this and were looking for something fresh.  My original idea was to try and "anthropomorphize" the taxonomy and look at how people experience or view things in daily life.  While I'm not entirely sure I achieved that original objective, what resulted was a new set of categories, collectively named Verge:

• Define: the concepts, ideas, and paradigms we use to define ourselves and the world around us
• Relate: the social structures and relationships which define people and organizations
• Connect: the technologies that connect people, places, and things
• Create: the processes and technologies through which we produce goods and services
• Consume: the ways in which we acquire and use the goods and services that we create
• Destroy: the ways in which value is destroyed and the reasons for doing so

 Originally intended to frame scanning, this set got shared and communicated over the years to a number of professional futurists and client groups and has become a general practice framework, a framework that is easily applied in virtually all aspects of futures research and foresight work.  Like the general practice tool of Implication Wheel, which is used by many professional futurists, Verge is used for scanning and research, for forecasting and scenario construction, and for exploring implications.

And like any generally useful tool, it constantly gets interpreted and adapted for local use.  And I would expect it to continue to evolve.

Now to work on the next tool...

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.

Hawai'i: Choose your own scenario

Do you believe, like good ‘ole Thomas Hobbes, that people are inherently nasty and evil?  Or do you get all warm and fuzzy thinking about the good deeds that spring unbidden from the minds and hands of humans everywhere?

Beliefs like these are critical to how you perceive the future, and they color every judgment about goals, policy, and strategy that you make.  The four scenarios below, all dealing with the future of Hawai‘i, show how different beliefs about how the world works, from theories about the economy to beliefs about human nature, interact to suggest very different futures for our lovely state.

What do you believe?

Two Axes: Two Spectrums of Theories

Using the well-known “2x2 matrix” process of building scenarios popularized by the Global Business Network, the following four scenarios emerge from a 2x2 matrix formed by crossing two spectrums of beliefs about how certain things in life work.

Economic Change: Do you believe that our current economic and employment malaise will end naturally (it’s just a cycle, silly), or do you think something deeper is going on that’s permanently changing the nature of work and productivity?

Human Nature: will physical tribalism (ethnic and cultural associations) always win out in a contest of identities, or can ideational tribalism (identities based on other common values and interests) take root and trump facial features and living next to each other?

By Gradual Turns (Cyclical Economy + Ideational Tribalism)

The clear and unambiguous signs of energy insecurity and natural resource constraints drive residents of Hawai‘i to gradually form a common set of concerns and a clear sense of “being in it together.”  A rise in fairly traditional, but refreshingly cooperative, politics leads to a surprisingly coherent consensus on Hawai‘i’s best pathways to more energy and food security, a consensus that leads to a common vision for the first time in recent memory.  Rallying around this clear and common vision, community leaders and policy makers pressure business leaders into gradually overhauling Hawai‘i’s industries toward both more sustainability and more community-sensitivity.  The coincident upward turn of the economy, following its cyclical path out of the downswing, provides more resources and “breathing room” for business to buy into these changes, while providing law makers with a broader budget to create state-wide incentives.  In this emerging period of plenty, and building on the common vision that people hold, frank but positive discussions between all sectors of Hawai‘i lead to far-reaching changes in how people are educated and in how businesses are allowed to operate.

Harmonious Dislocation (Structural Economic Shifts + Ideational Tribalism)

Government work, long characterized by an ever-growing administrative bureaucracy, is squeezed between the slow advance of automation on the one hand and shrinking public budgets on the other.  This hollowing out of government employment sparks a crisis of economic confidence as labor unions attempt to rally public support for government workers by raising the specter of mass unemployment.  Instead of mass panic, the PR campaign instead triggers a widespread questioning of the future of employment in Hawai‘i.  Starting with a series of new organized labor agreements, an emergent “New Work” movement leads to an unprecedented renegotiation of social contracts between lawmakers, business, and citizens, redistributing technology-driven productivity gains to offset the fewer hours and lower earnings of many workers, redefining employment standards, taxation, and citizen benefits in the process.  Increasingly freed from “wage-work”, people explore other productive activities, giving rise to non-money forms of economics, a proliferation of arts, community, and culture, and ultimately leading to very different economic lifestyles among different types of workers within the state.  For a decreasing percentage of the population, those employed full-time, life continues to revolve around the ever-increasing competitive demands of office and shop.  For the rest, life is becoming more social.  Hawai‘i’s schools begin to evolve away from each other, specializing in very different types of preparation and providing increasingly distinct pathways to these different economic lifestyles.

Waiting it Out (Cyclical Economy + Physical Tribalism)

Given enough time, the economy pulls itself out of the doldrums and growth returns.  As tourism dollars flow in and government budgets slowly fill out, organizations once again begin to hire, creating an irresistible pull for a workforce long starved for opportunity.  The faith of lawmakers and business leaders in Hawai‘i’s mainstay industries is rewarded and a return to policy-as-usual is welcomed with quiet, relieved sighs in koa-paneled boardrooms across the state.  Without significant change in the state’s economy or industry makeup, patterns of socio-economic distribution continue to be shaped by educational experience and broad cultural affiliations, each reinforced now by the steady drivers of immigration from the Pacific and in-migration from the mainland.  The socio-economic-ethnic lines, long perceived but rarely discussed, harden as economic trends and roles become more firmly entrenched.  As the economy slowly cycles through its ups and downs the best predictors of employment and professional status remain cultural and ethnic identity.

Chasing Growth (Structural Economic Shifts + Physical Tribalism)

After years of ineffectual employment growth strategies for the local economy, policy makers finally accept that “the jobs just aren’t coming back.”  Even as state GDP rises, job demand continues to fall behind productivity and growth, presenting a growing state population with fewer viable employment options.  As competition for jobs intensifies, the unemployment rolls expand, and the population continues to grow, a variety of reactions emerge, in particular a rising anti-immigrant/in-migrant sentiment.  Underground “hire kama‘āina” campaigns proliferate across social networks and many organizations adopt requirements that job applicants demonstrate local “cultural competence.”  But as the economic data gets analyzed, experts find that certain sectors have remained largely untouched by either automation (job loss) or significant productivity gains.  In a flash, law makers start dropping sound bites about Hawai‘i’s future being in “difficult-to-automate” (DTA) jobs, leading local pundits to talk about the “Hands-On Economy,” referring to jobs that require the combination of human problem solving with high dexterity and mobility.  Politicians introduce bills to redefine the service economy into a Hands-On Economy, while labor unions quickly begin calling for recognition and protections for the “vital” DTA jobs their members perform.  Many (but not all) health care workers, mechanics, home repair professionals, construction workers, and small scale farmers all see a boost in their prospects and morale, while those seeking work scramble into the DTA sectors and the educational establishment begins its slow, painful turn to supporting these career paths.

 

Anticipating Economic Change

The Free exchange blog on The Economist recently had the post "The illusion of stasis." commenting on techno-pessimism in other recent writing.  Largely about anticipating the extent or pace of economic transformation, the piece responds to skeptics who, for instance, do not believe that technologies like 3D printing or self-driving cars will be economic game changers.

I'm a big fan of co-evolutionary theories of change, which is why the issue of the co-evolutionary development of a broad landscape of issues lies at the heart of my Infinite Economy concept.  And for that reason I both appreciate and basically agree with the Free exchange author's critique of the current spate of techno-pessimism.  As they say in the post,

In general, a very good way to underestimate the potential impact of a new innovation is to consider its possible contributions all other things equal, that is, assuming that nothing in the economy changes to accommodate or complement the new discovery.

And this is where I have considerable empathy for all those currently looking at digital fabrication (most specifically, 3D printing of plastic) and concluding that most of the excited visions of the future built on extrapolating a future of MakerBot-type appliances are unrealistic hype. The history of economic and technological evolution and revolution shows that concepts and things are involved in oft times intricate interactions with infrastructure, other technologies, social biases, regulatory regimes, and structures like financing regimes. And the essence of co-evolution is that they continually impact each other.

Especially in a globalized, highly interconnected and interdependent world, single-issue or single-technology extrapolation is as bad as single point forecasting.

The Infinite Economy from Richard Lum