Think Like a Futurist

Know What Changes, What Doesn't, and What's Next

Cecily Sommers

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781118147825
• eBook ISBN: 9781118239179
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

Push past resistance to discover and own new business territories

Think Like a Futurist shows how to track changes, explore questions, and engage in new thinking that connects today's pressures with tomorrow's realities. Cecily Sommers shows how to apply long-term focus and strategies to needs as diverse as industry forecasts, innovation challenges, leadership development, or future-proofing a brand. By understanding intersecting potentials that one day may impact your organization, you can readily spot emerging trends and market shifts, uncovering opportunities on the horizon.

Think Like a Futurist explores such questions as: Where will new markets emerge over the next 5-10-25 years? What will be the big issues of the day? How will lifestyle, social mores, and policy adapt? And what role do we play in that future?

• Offers a clear framework for thinking like a futurist, and direction for how to integrate it in high-pressure corporate environments
• Explains how the social, economic, and environmental crises of our time spring from just four constant and predictable forces
• Reveals the three dramatic disruptions on the horizon that should be a part of every strategic conversation
• Written by Cecily Sommers the Founder and President of The Push Institute, a non-profit think tank that tracks significant global trends and their implications for business, government, and non-profit.

Filled with tools and models for a new world, this book should be required reading for strategists and innovators across disciplines.

"Refreshing. A book that does not follow today's push to be 'innovative' just to snag attention because of the current hot trending keyword. Matter of fact, Cecily Sommers' book works to get us away from simply identifying and going for a ride on the latest trend(s) in our respective industries.

Quite the contrary, rather than avoid a scientific or tactical discussion of trend identification, she works to give us the ability to go beyond trends and into the future.

Cecily has drafted a book providing a nice blend of practical reality, philosophy, and practical execution. It speaks well to current discussions about how to drive 'innovation' or, better, creativity within your businesses—however large or small.

All in, this is a book 254 pages long, including index, that is written at a practical level that, after closer study following an initial read-through, provides a methodology for anticipating the future and taking action to meet it.

Provides a methodology for anticipating the future and taking action to meet it.

Think Like a Futurist is a good read for anyone struggling with how to move their organization forward. Business leaders, product and program managers, service providers will all find the concepts Cecily introduces to be well laid-out with a reasonable amount of supporting content."—The source is a blog: http://jtpedersen.net/2012/11/15/what-ive-read-lately-think-like-a-futurist/

Part One

Know—The Four Forces of Change

The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed.

—William Gibson, science fiction writer

Chapter One

The Four Forces of Change

It is important to remember that the focus of this book is on thinking, not on trends. Certainly, we'll uncover a number of trends here in Part One, but as the Four Forces Model will show, the thinking and process hold up no matter what the trend may be.

Current trends are not the purview of a futurist anyhow. Our concern is with the deep, structural forces that are constant and that cast a longer shadow on the future. In my work as a futurist, I have sought to reduce change to its most elemental components and have come up with the Four Forces Model. Just as hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and sulfur are the four building blocks of all life forms, resources, technology, demographics, and governance are the four building blocks of all change. These forces generally move more slowly than trends and have a permanent effect. Because we understand the relationship among the four forces—a relationship we will examine in the following pages—we also understand that the changes they bring about occur in a fairly predictable manner. What we can't predict are their outcomes.

To appreciate how the four forces shape society, it's useful to look at human society as it was taking shape, during the time of Neanderthals, fifty thousand years ago. An archetypal depiction of this group usually shows them huddled around a fire, holding spears, either getting ready for or feeding on the results of the day's hunt. The four forces are easily identified in a scene such as this, as everything about their life is in a more elemental form: resources comprise the food and materials that nature offers; technology is represented by the spears; demographic data could be measured on the fingers of just a few members; and governance is inferred from the evidence that they've managed to create a home base that supports a group.

Over time, humans have been able to harness the power of the four forces for their own benefit. In the process, they have moved from a position of hand-to-hand combat with the forces in a battle for survival, to one of greater comfort and ease. We'll explore how the four forces have been the constants in every stage of development and how, with the exception of catastrophic events, progress has unfolded in an evolutionary manner. Our journey begins, here, with our Neanderthal predecessors.

Resources. Neanderthals spent much of their days hunting and gathering food and collecting materials, such as wood and stone, from their environment to make fire, tools, and rudimentary shelters. Their lives depended on what was readily available (or not) in close proximity. If what was at hand wasn't enough, or if the grass looked as though it would be greener someplace else, then they'd go in search of new hunting and gathering grounds.

Technology. Tools helped Neanderthals get the most out of what the environment had to offer, and transform it into secondary resources. For example, fire could transform a fresh animal into cooked, digestible food; melt hard minerals into new, moldable forms; and convert clay into pots. Each of these secondary materials introduces new capacities—improving food storage and shelter, for example—which build on one another. In this way, technology begets new technologies.

Demographics. Though often no larger than a clan of forty, early societies were also concerned with having the right demographic mix of age, gender, and genetic diversity. This is an important third category of assets, after resources and technology, for who you have on your team is the primary factor in how successful you'll be as a group. Productivity is the key. Whether it's the ability to produce more children or provide more labor, the capacity to enhance the health and wealth of the group relies on who's in the mix.

Governance. Distribution and management of the group's assets—resources, technology, and people—are administered through the rule of law and the rule of markets. Whether it is a clan of forty deciding who does the hunting, who tends the children, or how the meat is distributed, or the communist state of China mandating the distribution of resources, information, and even offspring for its 1.3 billion citizens, every society uses the rule of law and the rule of markets to adapt to a shifting landscape. And what drives those shifts? Why, resources, technology, and demographics, of course.

We may have graduated from loincloths to spacesuits and from cave dwellings to smart homes, but there's a whole lot that hasn't changed since prehistoric times. We've gained comfort, convenience, and complexity, but the four forces are still the foundation for life.

There's a hierarchy among the four forces that has also remained constant over time. Because the availability of resources is most closely related to survival, it is the foundation of the system of forces. It is also the slowest moving of the four, sometimes moving at the pace of a glacier, literally. Change in resources is affected by gradual processes—such as evolution, mineral formation, climate change, tectonic shifts—and by human activity. The exception is when, due to these gradual changes, pressure builds, then releases in a sudden eruption or weather system such as a tsunami, earthquake, or hurricane. The utter destruction waged by such events reminds us why resources rank first among the four forces. Resources can pull rank anytime; all it takes is a tsunami or earthquake to remind us which force has the upper hand.

In the hierarchy of forces, technology comes second. The tools and knowledge we use to extract and transform resources into new products and new capacities are what expand our world. Technology also expands human capabilities, giving us power beyond our physical bodies to make things, go places, and discover new realities. Something as simple as magnification in a microscope or telescope opened up an entirely new way of understanding life that shifted beliefs and morality, affected medicine and science, and allowed us to dream about worlds beyond our own.

Knowledge among humans is progressive. Technological innovation builds on what came before it, which explains why the rate of change in technology accelerates over time, limited only by our capacity to make sense of it. For instance, when stem-cell research and tissue engineering first came on the scene, the consensus reaction was, “Whoa! Wait a minute! What do you mean we can grow organs in the lab? Is this moral? Should it be legal?” So progress has slowed while we try to understand what this new capacity for genetic engineering and regenerative medicine means for our society.

Demographics are next in the four forces lineup. People are producers. We produce through our physical and intellectual labor, and we produce more people. Composition matters, too: you need to have enough working-age people to support the young and the old, and there has to be a balanced ratio of men to women to produce the next generation. Equally important is that a population be bonded to one another, value and reward cooperation, and bear some accountability for the good of the group.

That people can produce more working together than they can working individually is the foundation of social groups, but for social groups to work together successfully, there have to be explicit rules to guide and manage what groups do, how they produce, and how the assets are shared and distributed. This is the role of governance, the last of the four forces.

The first tool of governance is the rule of law, which differentiates between permissible and impermissible actions, determines who has the authority to make the rules, and sets penalties for rule breakers. The second tool of governance is the rule of markets, which rewards a group or individual according to the quantity and quality of items produced.

The structure for maintaining governance is a group's government, be it a monarchy, dictatorship, democracy, theocracy, or some other form. Similarly, there are different types of economic systems for managing productivity and rewards, including capitalism, socialism, and communism. No matter what you call it or how it works, every form of government and economic system sets the rules for its group to follow.

Of all the forces, governance is the most reactive. The rule of law and the rule of markets for a group change in response to resources, technology, and demographics.

To better acquaint you with the four forces, the following four chapters will introduce you to a number of visionary thinkers—some contemporary and some historical—who exemplify the best of future thinking in their “force field.”

• Resources: Doug Cameron, leading researcher, inventor, and venture capitalist in biofuels technologies
• Technology: Iqbal Quadir, founder of Grameenphone and of Emergence Bioenergy, and founder and director of MIT's Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, which promotes bottom-up entrepreneurship and innovation as a means of achieving economic progress in low-income countries
• Demographics: Thomas Malthus, an eighteenth-century political economist who issued a surprising warning—that the planet could reach and exceed population capacity; Auguste Comte, a nineteenth-century French philosopher who coined the phrase “Demography is destiny”; and David E. Bloom, a Harvard economist whose “demographic dividend” concept was featured in Time magazine's “Ten Ideas That Will Change the World” in 2011
• Governance: Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute, formerly a U.S. trade negotiator and currently an adviser to the White House, global corporations, labor unions, and governments around the world on globalization and competitiveness

Together, their stories will illustrate how the social, economic, and environmental issues of our time spring from these four constant and predictable forces that structure our world. Understand how they work together to drive change, and you'll be able not only to avert crises but also to uncover ideas and opportunities for your future along the way. Signs of emerging ideas, technologies, and markets that you note and collect then become invaluable fodder for the right-brain innovation process you will learn in Part Two.

Chapter Two

Resources

It's dinnertime, and you have the option of jumping into your air-conditioned Escalade and rolling down to the local pizzeria for a ten-inch arugula and artichoke pie, or seeing whether the hunting party comes back with any fresh kill to eat. Which would you choose?

Unless you're a contestant on Survivor and there's a million dollars on the line, I'm guessing that tonight's meal will probably include the Escalade and the pizzeria. How do I know? Humans have always preferred the cushier path. History shows that we've done an excellent job of inventing tools and materials to make life more comfortable and convenient. Our pursuit of a “better” life is what drives innovation.

Long ago, the desire for a better life motivated people to invent their way out of the Stone Age and on to increasingly more elaborate and luxurious lives. Each of the agrarian, industrial, and now digital eras has been associated with an increase in the standard of living so dramatic that they are referred to as revolutions (as in the Industrial Revolution). The hallmark of these revolutions is that they represent a leap in our capacity to harness nature's energy for our own purposes, in ever more concentrated forms.

Every time there's a jump in energy concentration, as the moves from wood to coal to oil and gas reflect, new possibilities become available. You couldn't get to that pizzeria down the road in a wood-fired vehicle, for example, but with petroleum, you can get to the moon. To move up the energy ladder, we have to invent technologies, and that requires scientific discoveries. The tools and knowledge are then used in other applications—such as agriculture and building materials—jump-starting waves of innovation that bring the modern conveniences that define each era. Human progress has been propelled by one simple formula: advances in science and technology + new energy sources + imagination, paving the path from stone tablets to iPad tablets; from rarely surviving to age thirty to starting families after forty; and from figuring out how to cross oceans to figuring out how to cross the universe.

Our appetite for the even better life is an energy-intensive pursuit. The demand for energy grows as we progress, meaning that we have to continuously develop new methods of finding and exploiting rich energy sources. We've been quite successful, too: we figured out how to build dams and windmills, create drills that can penetrate the ocean floor to tap oil deposits, split atoms to release huge amounts of energy, and make petroleum-like products from genetically altered algae. Each of these innovations has enabled significant gains in human progress, and all resulted from tinkering our way t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part One: Know—The Four Forces of Change
• Part Two: New—The Zone of Discovery
• Part Three: Do—The 5 Percent Rule
• Part Four: What's Next Toolkit
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index