Futurists: shaping business for tomorrow

How we think about the future will dramatically affect our chances of living in a sustainable world, says James Goodman. Which is why futurists are starting to reshape the ways in which leading companies and organisations think and act today.

From Revelations to Nostrodamus, Malthus to Marx, we humans have always been fascinated by imagining what lies ahead. And, arguably, we’re more aware of the future today than we ever have been. We can’t escape it: with climate change dominating the media, there seem to be more headlines about the world of 2050 than there are about 2010.

But how much effort do we make to consider the future and our relationship with it in a structured way? Typically, not much. We might plan a holiday, a career path or a pension. But we rarely think about the sort of world we might be living in decades down the line – or the sort we might want to live in.

There is a growing band of futurists, armed with a box of tools and an optimistic disposition, that are out to change that. They believe that bringing the future into our lives, giving people the ability to deal with change and uncertainty, is critical – even for the survival of our civilisation.

One of them is Jamais Cascio, recently named as one of Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers. “Futures thinking can become a sort of immune system for civilisation”, he says, “with tiny tastes of the future acting like a harmless dose of pathogen that allows the immune system to develop the appropriate antibodies.”

Considering what might happen in future helps us to prepare for it, to become ‘futures literate’ and habitually act in a way that is more likely to be robust in the long term. Futures work, in other words, helps us achieve that elusive goal of so much of public policy in uncertain times: resilience.

For Cascio, this means its value can’t be underestimated. “Even though it might sometimes look like trainspotting, it has a real social and political purpose. It is important.”

Futures as a discipline has a surprisingly short history.

It can be traced back to author HG Wells of The Time Machine fame, himself an instinctive futurist. In 1932, he called for the establishment of Professors of Foresight “who make a whole-time job of estimating the future consequences of new inventions and new devices… All these new things, these new inventions and new powers, come crowding along; every one is fraught with consequences, and yet it is only after something has hit us hard that we set about dealing with it”. Typically sage of him: there are plenty of Professors of Foresight now.

In the following decade, the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov started publishing his Foundation series, in which the mathematician Hari Seldon comes up with the science of psychohistory. This uses statistical analysis of the behaviour of billions of people to predict the future of the galaxy. Shades of this approach persist in futures work to this day.

It’s part of the toolkit at Forum for the Future too, which has recently used futures work as part of change programmes with PepsiCo, Finlays, the NHS, and the UK tourism industry, to name just a few.

Futures projects are usually both collaborative and creative, and can create huge momentum within and across organisations. Why? Because when confronted with ideas about the future, and asked to think deeply about them, the normal response is to want to do something to prepare: either to mitigate risks, or to move quickly to develop opportunities.

Out of this process can come not only new ideas about business models, products, services and wider strategies, but also changed mindsets: a willingness to think more broadly and more long-term, more consistently. Simon Large, then Commercial Director of tea company Finlays, who worked with Forum’s futures team on scenarios for their business in Kenya said: “There was a fundamental shift in our approach. [As a result], we have built a general acknowledgement that developing sustainably had to be central to the brand, the single thing that would hold the business together, and have acted accordingly”. In our experience at Forum, we’ve discovered time and again that the simple act of engaging with the future leads to much deeper engagement with sustainable development. Jamais Cascio says that in his work with business, he tries “to give people a greater sense of connection with their own future, a sense of intimacy”. This, he says, is essential to counter “a great sense of the future being out of our hands. We feel we are subject to huge unstoppable forces and massive unchangeable organisations. Helping people to engage with their own futures can be enormously empowering”.

Disempowerment is not a surprising reaction to widespread pessimism about the future. There’s been a marked shift from the tech-fuelled optimism of the 1960s to today’s anticipation of climate chaos and ecosystem collapse. According to Wendy Schultz, a futurist who straddles the academic and consultancy worlds, “there’s been a change in the perception of the future. There is a palpable sense of hope for the future in China that does not exist in Europe. This is worrying, because optimistic societies succeed and pessimistic societies fail. The pessimism is in part due to the recession, but also because people only hear the bad news. They don’t hear about the good stuff being developed, the inspiring solutions and new ways of living or working that are popping up all over the world”.

It’s perhaps reassuring, then, that futures thinking seems to be getting more and more common, connecting people with tomorrow’s possible solutions– even if this is in part a response to new economic uncertainties and accelerating environmental change. As Venezuelan futurist Pedro Riveira told us, “there is a wider audience for futures now, with more people doing it casually or as amateurs. Up until last year the field was a bit cold, but now people are thinking far more about planning for uncertainty”. The tools and techniques that futurists use are changing too, increasing the capacity for engagement. In 2008, the California-based consultancy, Institute For The Future, launched Superstruct. It’s one of the most ambitious futures projects ever undertaken, “the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game”. It ran for six weeks and attracted over 8,600 players from across the globe. “Not only was there great engagement,” says Cascio, who helped set it up, “but I was struck by the novelty of what emerged. There was such an incredible diversity of ideas that would not have been possible to obtain with traditional approaches.” He describes Superstruct as a process of “collective storytelling”.

Josephine Green, Director of Trends and Strategy at Phillips Design, says that this is absolutely where futures should be going: “Our role as futurists is to tell the stories that can help us to live better, and to do that in as meaningful and democratic a way as possible. The future must become a co-creative act.” She points out a trend away from the more linear and predictive view of the future that still often predominates. “As the complexity of the world increases, predictions become even more precarious than they were before. Even using scenarios is more difficult. The future is ever more complex, emergent, fluid.”

There are two responses to this increasing complexity. One is to try to monitor and manage it – to seek answers to the questions of the future. And the massive upscaling of information processing capacity allows just that. Mike Jackson works with the online futures portal Shaping Tomorrow, a giant resource of futures intelligence and trends for anyone interested in the future as it emerges. He points to an increase in demand from organisations wanting to know what is happening immediately and in the near future, rather than exploring longer term possibilities. The value of tools like Shaping Tomorrow is in their sheer breadth of scope. Gereon Uerz, who worked at the German futures consultancy Z-Punkt before joining Volkswagen, believes that “the use of ICT tools like data-mining, competitive intelligence, trend extrapolation based on statistical analysis and especially simulations, will increase”. And it will do so, he says, “despite the failure of the highly elaborated tools that have been used by analysts in the financial markets – and despite the mostly disappointing results of simulation and modelling in futurology”.

The other response to an increasingly complex prospect is to try to steer a course through it, navigating with a vision of a desirable future – to tell more stories. Gereon Uerz again: “I think that foresight work has to move away from a purely descriptive approach towards a more normative one. We need images of desired futures rather than mere descriptions of possible ones”. People identify with a positive future: it gives them something concrete to work towards.Developing shared visions of a better – sustainable – future is particularly empowering as it cultivates an optimistic outlook; it tempts us with the possibility that the future is there to be shaped by the present.

These two responses to a more complex, uncertain and in some ways threatening future need not be mutually exclusive. It is possible to know more about what is happening now, and then to use that as a basis for a mass conversation about the sort of future we want. All of which makes applied futures thinking absolutely critical for sustainable development. We need both answers and stories. 

18 January 2010

James Goodman