I was invited to talk about futures recently at the Royal College of Defence Studies In London. Most of the event was unattributable, but our initial remarks were recorded, so I can share a version of them here.
Futures, in its modern version, is a child of the Second World War. It has two foundational strands, one in the United States, funded by the Department of Defense, and associated with RAND and SRI; the other in Europe, which is less cohesive but associated with Fred Polak‘s The Image of the Future in the Netherlands and Gaston Berger and prospective school in France. The first was about better forecasting, the second about rebuilding nations; the first positivist, the second more normative.
Since then, futures has gone through three phases, each lasting about 25 years. It took the first quarter of a century to reach some conceptual agreement about what futures work did. In 1970, in Future Shock, Alvin Toffler wrote that “Every society faces not merely a succession of probable futures, but an array of possible futures, and a conflict over preferable futures”[1]. In a paper four years later, Roy Amara, who was running the Institute for the Future in California, used the same trio but substituted “preferred futures”[2]. The first is about forecasting and trends analysis, the second about scenarios, the third about visioning. Conceptually, this trio has stuck.
Over the second quarter of a century, scenarios, and in particular a variant called “scenario planning”, became dominant. You can trace a thread here from the RAND alumnus Hermann Kahn, through his Hudson Institute to Royal Dutch Shell, to the consultancy Global Business Network set up by Shell alumnus Peter Schwarz. This strand runs out of intellectual energy in the late 1990s.
The ‘complexity turn’
The third strand, which was more engaged with issues about complexity and agency, emerges at this time. This is futures’ “complexity turn”, and early markers of it are Richard Slaughter’s Integral Futures model and Sohail Inayatullah’s Causal Layered Analysis. This drew on futures ideas that had been incubated since the 1960s by academic futurists associated with the World Futures Studies Federation, notable James Dator and Eleonora Masini. This work is more interested in values, meaning and power, and in preferred futures. But it is also an important philosophical moment, because it represents a different understanding of our relationship to the future, in which elements of the future exist as latent elements in our present, and respond to what we do or don’t do. This third phase is second-order futures, not first-order futures.
Toffler added a gloss to that Future Shock quote:
Determining the probable calls for a science of futurism. Delineating the possible calls for an art of futurism. Defining the preferable calls for a politics of futurism.
In this he was prescient. There certainly was more art in the construction of scenarios in the second phase, and more politics in the third.
Dancing around systems
Throughout this history, futures has danced around systems. The two are more like cousins that don’t know each other that well, but one coreidea in futures work is that change comes from the outside, which aligns it immediately with open systems theory(pdf), going back to the influential work of Emery and Trist in the 1960s. This suggests that change emerges from the “contextual environment”, then influences the “transactional environment” (also thought of as the “operating environment”, and then finally, the “organisational environment”. I usually describe this metaphorically as like frying an egg in a pan: the pan heats first, then the white cooks, and then, finally, the yolk.
Another systems idea that has direct relevance to futures and foresight work is Ross Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety (‘variety’ in this context meaning ‘complexity’, which hadn’t really become a commonplace term when Ashby formulated his law in the 1950s.) This is a cybernetic principle—provable mathematically, but not by me—that states that the internal variety of an organisation needs to match the external variety of its external environment. It can do this by amplifying its ability to understand external variety (which is where futures comes in), or by ”attenuating”—reducing—the amount of variety it chooses to absorb from the external environment [3].
One of the features of futures methods is that many of them enable people to have systems conversations without having first to learn systems. Systems thinking is encoded into the methods. I’m thinking here of scenarios, when done well, of Three Horizons, or Futures Wheels, or Causal Layered Analysis, but there are many others.
Foundational tools
Because change comes from the outside, this means that horizon scanning is a foundational tool in futures work. When you’re doing the analysis to build up a scanning picture, you tend to be looking for four things. There are drivers of change — big substantive changes, often with long tails stretching back into the contextual environment (population changes, the rise of feminism, and so on.) These are the province of both quantitative and qualitative analysis. There are trends, which are shaped by drivers, which tend to be quantitative (the proportion of a population over 65, say) and therefore—without going into a long aside about the social nature of the production of data—essentially backward looking.
Then there are weak signals, which are individual data points that signify new possible points of change. These are almost always qualitative. And then there are emerging issues, which can best be described as small clusters of weak signals that might point in due course to a new trend.
The scanning questions
Scanning, I was taught by the futurist Wendy Schultz, involves three questions:
- Does this confirm something we already know?
- Does this change something we already know?
- Is this something new?
Wendy also suggested that the third question had a second part: is this new to most people, so genuinely new, or new to us (and therefore suggestive of a blind spot.)
Because the idea of the “black swan” has spread like a virus, people tend to be too interested in the third question, and not interested enough in the second question [4]. Most things that are genuinely new take a long time to arrive, so if you do notice them you have time to prepare. Things that change something we know, on the other hand, are likely to be disrupting the mental models we draw on to understand what’s going on around us.
Pierre Wack, who led much of the work at Royal Dutch Shellthat shaped the way we think about scenarios, said that they were most useful when the external or contextual environment was changing in unexpected ways. He hoped to change the way that managers read the news.
In times of turbulence
This links to the work of Peter Drucker, whom Wack quoted (or possibly misquoted) as saying that
The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.
This connects futures also to management, and to Drucker’s idea of ‘the theory of the business’—which is true of non-commercial organisations as well as businesses. He argued that when organisations were working well, it was because they had a coherent “theory of the business” that connected and aligned three different elements:
- A view of the external environment—mostly meaning the “transactional environment”, as I understand him— that was correct in its essentials;
- A mission statement (this might be the “organisational purpose” these days); and
- The set of competences and capabilities needed to deliver the mission in this environment.
There’s a bit more: as well as maintaining alignment, the organisation needs to ensure that the theory is understood and that it is tested constantly. “Mission” or “purpose” doesn’t necessarily need to be “purposeful” in the modern sense. In the (1990s) paper, Drucker uses the example of Sears, whose purpose was to deliver the things an American household needed at competitive prices.
Signs that you might need to change your theory of the business might be that you attain your objectives (Toyota had this problem when it became the world’s #1 car maker, because, as Hardin Tibbs noted, it had confused goals and mission); if you have an unexpected failure; or an unexpected success.
Obviously the futures and foresight element comes in to help ensure that your view of your external environment is broadly correct. These three elements—environment, mission, competences and capabilities—also connect in interesting ways to Stafford Beer’s viable system model, but that’s probably a discussion for another post.
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A version of this article is also published on my Just Two Things Newsletter.
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Footnotes
[1] I am grateful to my colleague Johann Schutte for reminding me of this quote, even though I am on the record as regarding Future Shock as being over-rated.
[2] There’s a curiosity in the literature here. Conventionally Roy Amara’s 1974 paper always gets referenced in the futures literature in connection with probable, possible and preferred futures (sometimes as the 1981 book in which the paper was gathered). But Future Shock sold by the truckload, and Amara was the President of one of America’s leading futures researchers, the Institute for the Future. Theres no way he wouldn’t have read it. And when you look at the 1974 paper, the idea is thrown away, buried in a diagram. So my interpretation here is that Amara didn’t make a big deal of the notion of probable, possible, and preferred futures because it was already current in the discourse.
[3] I was teaching this idea recently, and one of the people in the room asked if attenuating the information from the external environment might be a bit of a risk—because you might then be surprised by changes. Well, yes; you might be.
[4] Leaving aside that people who tell you that something was a “black swan” event often turn out to be fundamentally blinkered about what is going on around them. As the futurist Alex Pang once said, “black swan” is not an excuse for bad scanning.
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Previously Published on thenextwavefutures.wordpress.com with Creative Commons License
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