Full-Spectrum Thinking

How to Escape Boxes in a Post-Categorical Future

Bob Johansen

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781523087532
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Food Industry
• Index: Business

Leading futurist Bob Johansen shows how a new way of thinking, enhanced by new technologies, will help leaders break free of limiting labels and see new gradients of possibility in a chaotic world. The future will get even more perplexing over the next decade, and we are not ready. The dilemma is that we're restricted by rigid categorical thinking that freezes people and organizations in neatly defined boxes that often are inaccurate or obsolete. Categories lead us toward certainty but away from clarity, and categorical thinking moves us away from understanding the bigger picture. Sticking with this old way of thinking and seeing isn't just foolish, it's dangerous. Full-spectrum thinking is the ability to seek patterns and clarity outside, across, beyond, or maybe even without any boxes or categories while resisting false certainty and simplistic binary choices. It reveals our commonalities that are hidden in plain view. Bob Johansen lays out the core concepts of full-spectrum thinking and reveals the role that digital media—including gameful engagement, big-data analytics, visualization, blockchain, and machine learning—will play in facilitating and enhancing it. He offers examples of broader spectrums and new applications in a wide range of areas that will become possible first, then mandatory. This visionary book provides powerful ways to make sense of new opportunities and see the world as it really is.

PART ONE

THE PAST CANNOT CONTINUE

THE FUTURE WILL PUNISH CATEGORICAL THINKING BUT reward full-spectrum thinking.

The future will be a global scramble that will be very difficult to categorize. You will need a full-spectrum mindset to have any hint of what is going on. The next decade will see staggering shifts like the increasingly visible rich-poor and asset gap, cyber warfare and cybercrime, and global climate disruption.

The scramble will be fraught with toxic misinformation (not necessarily intentional), disinformation (intentional), and distrust. In this future, it will be very dangerous to force fit new threats or new opportunities into old categories of thought. Fortunately, new spectrums of thought will become possible in new ways over the next decade. Full-spectrum thinking will be required in order to thrive.

If you have a carton of eggs, as the old folk story goes, you can decide how you want to cook them. Once you’ve scrambled the eggs, you cannot unscramble them. You can, however, make the scrambled eggs into some kind of new egg-based dish.

During the scramble, many things that have been stuck will become unstuck. Some things will unravel. The scramblers of the present world—we see them all around us today—won’t be very good at putting things back together again.

In the scrambled future I am forecasting, you can expect an unusual number of unexpected consequences from the scrambling. You will have a range of creative new options that weren’t on the menu in the past. The future will get even more perplexing over the next decade, and most people—including most leaders—are not ready.

Our old categories will work adequately when new opportunities or threats match prior understanding. Simplistic categorization, however, will be perilous if people stereotype others superficially or boil new experiences down too far or too fast. People categorize to try to understand, but categorization often yields a superficial or false understanding. Sometimes categorizing demeans or devalues others.

A full-spectrum mindset is not new. In fact, full-spectrum thinking was probably more common among our ancestors than it is now. You can argue that children are born with it until we crush it out of them with labels, rigid intelligence and educational testing, autofill tools, and binary computing where everything ultimately must be reduced to a zero or a one.

In the effort to create simple stories to help people understand the scramble, overly simplistic stories will abound—especially those created by extreme politicians and extreme religions. People will struggle to make sense of emerging futures that often won’t make much sense at all. Comforting labels will be both alluring and fraught with danger.

Full-spectrum thinking is, in a way, a step back to analog even as it is a step forward to an ever more digitally enhanced world.

Producer George Martin joined the Beatles just as they tired of live performances because of the inane screaming of fans. He was a practitioner of full-spectrum thinking before it was called that. His mentality was to move beyond the live performance to something different that was a kind of hybrid of analog and digital. He didn’t try to simulate concert performances; he tried to create something profoundly different and, at least in some ways, better. He was thinking beyond either/or. Now, analog has shifted to digital in the music world, but at a price that sometimes comes at a cost of reduced quality to the ears of those who prefer vinyl records.

Now, we can—as George Martin and the later Beatles did for music—create a new spectrum of experiences that has the nuances of the analog world with the power and scale of digital.

Thinking across spectrums (not even just one spectrum) will become much easier. Our brains are very good at putting new things into old boxes. Next-generation tools and networks will help us teach our brains the new tricks of full-spectrum thinking.

Neuroscience (an important influence for this book) teaches us that our brains are very good at putting new experiences in old categories. Simplistic categorization will be perilous, however.

Neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner, a Columbia professor, was the respondent to my keynote speech at the NeuroLeadership Summit on October 4, 2018, in New York. I talked about the value of strategic foresight and futures thinking. Professor Ochsner’s response was that foresight can “lift us up from the eternal present,” where our brains function by default.

Our brains, he went on, have evolved to constantly categorize and predict what’s next—to try to keep us safe and out of trouble. Even though predicting the future is impossible, our brains do it anyway. When faced with a confusing situation, our brains’ default reaction is fear and dread, fight or flight. Our brains were programmed in the past to do continuous prediction of what’s coming next. The brain practices of the past, however, will get us into a lot of trouble in the future.

The emerging future will require us to teach our brains new tricks, to move from unexamined categorical thinking to mindful full-spectrum thinking. Sometimes categories are weaponized to inflict violence. Sometimes people categorize to pretend they understand. Sometimes people categorize to demean or devalue others.

Full-spectrum thinking will help people strategize with a future-back approach (I call it Now, FUTURE, Next), which we have an urgent need to do in order to thrive in the scramble. This book shows you how to do that.

Many people today—including some of the most popular political and religious leaders—think only within their own rigid boxes of thought. Some leaders, however, have developed an ability to think across the boxes, and those are the ones who deserve our attention.

This part of the book will show why we cannot continue to be locked in categorical thinking. Chapter 1 introduces full-spectrum thinking at the individual, organizational, and societal levels. Chapter 2 explores the dilemma of categories that were intended to help us understand what is around us but which we often take too seriously. Then, Chapter 3 introduces futures thinking to help us move beyond the past and make a better future.

Chapter 1
Ramping Up to Full-Spectrum Thinking
More Clarity, Less Certainty

Chapter 2
The Coercion of Categories
Please Don’t Stamp Me with Your Label

Chapter 3
Escape the Boxes of the Past
How to Use Futures Thinking

Categorical thinking allows little room for subtle differences. Full-spectrum thinking is both nuanced and scalable. Tension will remain, since cultures are very good at detecting and reinforcing categories, but the spectrum of possibilities will continue to broaden.

For example, people talk about being online or offline—but that will be increasingly difficult as our connectivity grows. Ten years from now, there will be a spectrum of online/offline realities. Today, most of us are offline unless we are on. In the future, most of us will be online unless we are off. It will seem quaintly out of touch to distinguish between being online and offline. “Logging onto the internet” will be a foreign concept with no meaning except to very old or out-of-touch people.

Categories won’t go away, and simple categories will work fine when they accurately match a new situation to an old one. But simplistic categories, labels, generalizations, and stereotypes will be exposed for what they are: sloppy and dangerous. Racism, sexism, and other prejudices will be much harder to justify in a world of everyday full-spectrum thinking skills and capabilities.

Priority Questions for Part One

As an individual, how can you constructively question your unexamined assumptions about categorizing yourself and others?

As an organization, how can you categorize mindfully and in ways that draw out the best in people rather than boxing them in? How can you consider a broader range of business and social value that you might deliver?

How can societies avoid the dangers of stereotyping? How can societies and cultures seed and employ full-spectrum thinking in order to make the future a better place and space?

CHAPTER 1

Ramping Up to Full-Spectrum Thinking

More Clarity, Less Certainty

SOFT DRINK CANS, HALF OF THEM STILL BOUND TOGETHER with plastic collars, were scattered across a coffee table in the small family room when we arrived in the early afternoon to visit Peter Drucker in his 95th year, about a year before he died in 2005. We were there to talk with the famous management guru1 about the future of work and the human resources function.

I walked into that room with AG Lafley, then the CEO of Procter & Gamble; Dick Antoine, P&G’s head of human resources; and Craig Wynett, a visionary P&G thinker. I felt fortunate to have been invited and was impressed by the fact that the CEO of one of the world’s best companies had flown across the country in his corporate jet to spend the afternoon with this remarkable 94-year-old.

We were told in advance that we would be meeting in a simple setting with no staff support, but Peter Drucker welcomed us warmly to his modest ranch-style house in Claremont, California—just a short walk from the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University. Peter Drucker was slow in body by that time in his life, but still very active in mind. My brief time with him was mindset altering and has become the anchor story for this book.

He told us that for the first half of your life, you should try many different kinds of work and make it a point to work with many different kinds of people—since you won’t yet know who you are or what you want to become. Try out a spectrum of possibilities, he taught us.

For the second half of life, Drucker said, you should only work on things you are passionate about and only work with people with whom you love to work. Focus is good, he said, but don’t focus too early. Categories of work aren’t necessarily bad, unless they lock you into a categorical cage.

By “first half of life,” since he was approaching 100 years of age at the time and still thinking strong, I took him to mean about 50 years. Now, more than 20 years later, I realize that Peter Drucker was encouraging us to have a full-spectrum mindset about work and life—especially at key milestones. I realize now that he was thinking across all levels of aggregation: individual, organizational, and societal.

Look beyond Binary Choices

Peter Drucker was encouraging us to see beyond the caging and coercion of categories. Try many kinds of work while you are less than 50 years old. Don’t allow people (like your parents or your friends or your professors or your first boss or your company) to categorize you too soon or label you as this or that. Don’t box yourself into a job or a career trajectory that is not a calling for you. Search for a vocation, not just a job.

Many parents I know just assume that their kids will go to college. Many of their kids, however, aren’t so sure. Many young people are not sure what they want to do, they are not sure about the value of a college degree, and they don’t want student loan debt. Stalemated by the binary choice of college or not, a growing number of families are choosing a gap year when a young person can explore. The gap year is a simple example of broader-spectrum thinking.

Parents often have more specific expectations than their kids. My young colleague Gabe Cervantes became my research assistant after graduating from Williams College as a first-generation college student and first-generation American-born (his parents immigrated from Mexico). When he joined me, he had already done a few different things since graduating and was on his way to law school when he decided instead to join Institute for the Future (IFTF) and work on this book with me. His family was shocked: they wanted a lawyer for a son—not a futurist. In fact, they had never heard of a career category called futurist. Gabe had a goal that he had shared with his parents: go to law school and work his way up to the point where he could advise senior executives at corporations. He chose working with me so that he could have the experience of working with top executives sooner, but this was not a path that his parents understood or could even imagine. Gabe may still go to law school, but he wanted a wider experience before making that choice.

Peter Drucker urged those P&G executives to offer their workers many options and assist them in navigating obstacles and choices. Don’t assume that people will follow those career tracks routinely. Encourage people to go off the rails now and again.

Most people do not find a calling early in life. Many people never do find a calling. Many people work for long hours and many years in jobs they don’t even like, let alone love. Drucker himself began as a journalist and had at least six distinct careers in his life. He had definitely found his calling long before we met him that sunny afternoon, but it wasn’t until his mid-60s that he settled down and focused on his true calling.

Just after AG Lafley first became CEO of Procter & Gamble, his first official speech was in Chicago for ...