How to Future

Leading and Sense-making in an Age of Hyperchange

Scott Smith, Madeline Ashby

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781789664706
• eBook ISBN: 9781789664713
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

Approach the future as a conversation, not a declaration. How can you be prepared for what's next when emerging trends constantly threaten to turn your strategic plan on its head? The world of business is experiencing a state of hyperchange influenced by global movements, disruptive technologies, political uprisings and new consumer expectations. If your world is turned upside down, will you know how to pivot and thrive, or will you be roadkill in the 'adapt or die' business race? Futuring is the art of anticipating and testing the trade-offs of different futures by making sense of key trends, signals and emerging patterns. How to Future is the only book that will teach you how to become a strategy wayfinder, allowing you to evaluate, plan and prepare for better futures for you and your business. How to Future is a guidebook to futuring and arms you with tools, strategies and practices that illuminate new strategic pathways. Renowned futurists Scott Smith and Madeline Ashby teach you how to manage the daily flood of information and signals, and discern emergent patterns that have a direct impact on the direction of your business. How to Future isn't about the "one future" you expect. Instead, this book equips you with valuable tools and concepts, builds a future-focused mindset and enables you to envision, stress-test and prototype adaptable, informed and agile strategic visioning. These tools will empower you, your team and your organization to anticipate whatever futures emerge.

CHAPTER ONE

Different futuring for different needs

People need a motivating vision of what comes next and the awareness that more will happen after that, that the future is a process not a destination. The future is a verb, not a noun. Our minds may reach the ends of their tethers, but we’ll never stop futuring.

BRUCE STERLING¹

Where do you start a discussion about the future? Many contemporary books or texts that discuss thinking about the future as a practice will start with history. They’ll take you back to the Oracle of Delphi or Nostradamus or some other distant historical figure that isn’t you. If you’re lucky, you might get a run-through of recent figures in the field of prognostication – early science writers imagining future inventions, or Cold War warriors from the 1950s mathematically modelling nuclear first strikes. These are not uninteresting or impractical framings or figures if you want to talk about the pedigree of the practice of foresight, but this book hopes to do something different. The goal of this book is not to make you a card-carrying futures consultant or to repeat the detailed pedagogy of strategic foresight training, which has been well-described elsewhere by others. If you’re seeking information on in-depth training, specialist tools and academic thinking, you can find some further readings on these topics in Chapter 10.

This book is designed to address a different challenge: equipping people of different backgrounds, needs and contexts with mindsets, tools and practices for better understanding of possible futures and their impacts. The intent of How to Future is to provide a way of looking at prospective problems, questions or challenges that, over time, becomes ingrained as a useful method for considering what could be. Futuring isn’t a once a year or a few times per quarter event; it’s an always-on way of thinking about what’s next, with a dimension of nimbleness and fluidity that can become more a behaviour than a system.

If we’re to enable ‘futuring’ as a useful embodied behaviour, this requires stepping out of the clouds and bringing ideas down to human scale. So, in that spirit, let’s start somewhere that might be somewhat unfamiliar: the insides of other people’s heads. If you’re in a public or group setting right now, take a moment and put your paperback book or e-reader down and politely and carefully note the people around you. Next, imagine for a moment what they’re thinking about. (The publisher would like me to remind you kindly to come back to the text in just a moment.) If you’re alone, think of a group situation you may have encountered recently. Whether you’re in a crowded public space, an office, a classroom or a coffee shop, everyone in your view, in their own way and within their own cultural construct, has probably considered the future in some way today.

Some of the people in your view are thinking, justifiably, of their schedule for the next few hours – whether they will meet friends for a drink, or if that favourite bakery will be open after work – and some are worried about the effect of climate change on future generations of their families. Some are thinking about risks, others opportunities. Depending on where you are at the moment, they may be thinking about how to make their big idea a world changer, or whether they’ll be safe for the next 24 hours. It’s doubtful that many have explicitly framed it this way in their minds, but the thoughts are there, churning away.

This passage is being written 32,000 feet over France en route from Amsterdam to Barcelona, with your author tucked snugly in the back of a plane full of excited holidaymakers, students, parents and businesspeople – some are elderly, some are very young, they are high- or low-skilled, happy or fretful. Like any crowded flight, someone is probably working on a spreadsheet forecast or PowerPoint pitch, a laptop wedged between seatbelt and seat back. Each of these formats represents modes of thinking about the future – a way of externalizing this thinking. The former is probably quantitative, modelling assumptions about sales, production or headcounts, and might contain a few variations based on changes in these assumptions about how the future might play out. The PowerPoint deck may include a mixture of qualitatively expressed vision, or promise, or a means of realizing a future in a legible way, with shiny images of people enjoying a new product, or the plethora of partners who will be attracted to the opportunity it portrays.

The purpose of this trip to Barcelona isn’t to bask in the July sun or stroll through museums but to deliver two guest lectures at an intensive summer course at the Istituto Europeo di Design (IED) Barcelona. As this is my fifth summer of working with this particular institution, I have a reasonably good idea of what awaits me, within an expected range of variables – weather, crowdedness, number and background of students, variability of air conditioning and so on. I’m considering the very near-term future, such as how I’ll get from the airport bus to my rental flat, to the mid-term future – which path I’ll take through the obligatory slides I’ve prepared and which stories will spring to mind as illustrations of concepts I’ll introduce. I also have in mind a future with a slightly longer horizon, modelling in my head how these days away from the office will impact the next project in the queue, as well as a more vague, big picture future, considering how near-term choices fit into a notional professional trajectory.

The few examples above are just a thin slice of the infinite range of futures we constantly contemplate, and only the most cursory examples of how we consider or express them. Diversity of understanding and thinking about ‘the future’ as a time, place, question or abstract hope goes well beyond the variety represented by the 200-odd people on board my flight, or the handful or maybe even hundreds of people within your sight at the moment. Given that the futures we’re headed towards are almost never exclusively those of one person, or even one culture, having a set of rules or expectations as a starting point is important for considering the possible differences in how we understand or measure the future in our minds.

As a jumping-off point, let’s consider some variants in personal framings of the future.

Different modes of thinking and mental modelling

There are as many modes of thinking as there are people. In recent decades, psychologists and researchers have mapped and labelled some of the most well-known. For example, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and professor Dan Lovallo identified the concepts of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ views, describing how individuals process information about the future.² According to Kahneman, people taking the inside view follow information and experiences that seem directly relevant to a prospective question: in effect, taking a straight-line, narrow perspective of what matters – that is to say, extrapolating from what’s known. This view, Kahneman found, overvalues the information directly at hand and neglects the value of information from outside the specific domain or knowledge of the forecaster, by discounting or ignoring current or future factors that may later influence an outcome. By contrast, an outside view takes into account a broader range of factors, experiences and references: in effect, opening the view of the forecaster to a wider range of downstream issues that may shape a particular outcome. In his research, Kahneman found an outside view helps produce better forecasts over time.

Along with Stanford cognitive psychologist Amos Tversky, Kahneman mapped a catalogue of cognitive biases that factor into our prospective thinking, as they place limitations on how we model, measure and analyse different futures. These biases include hindsight bias, in which we view the process by which we reached a decision based on the outcome (think about the last time you shouted ‘I knew it!’), and confirmation bias, in which we interpret outcomes based only on confirmatory information, by discarding insights or data that don’t fit the model.

However, not all of these modes of thinking or mental models are faulty. Economists, neurologists and other researchers are increasingly learning that humans are just remarkably ill-equipped to think prospectively about the future. If you’ve ever watched a child work out a maths problem, or followed two partners shopping at the supermarket, it’s clear that individual humans can develop and deepen particular ways of problem solving that are highly personal or shared within problem-solving collectives.

You might be surprised to know that we include forecasters and futurists in this category of humans too. Watch any particular futurist in action – or, for that matter, mathematicians or software developers – and you’ll see individual mental models being expressed on top of the formally learned, broadly accepted mental models of others. This doesn’t mean that our ways of thinking are broken, but it is important to understand where they come from and how they differ. As British statistician George F P Box wrote on multiple occasions, ‘all models are wrong, but some are useful’.³ Understanding what models may be in play in any particular forecast is helpful for deciding how they can be usefully evaluated in discussions of futures between two or more people.

Different understandings of time

Naturally, time plays a central role in futures, and will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3. It should be noted that there isn’t a universal understanding of time as it relates to the future. As individuals, we have different operating ‘horizons’ or natural time frames in which we tend to think. As children, these are pretty simple and short-term (setting aside those abstract ‘When I grow up…’ thoughts), but as we grow older, more and more framings of time are loaded onto us. School calendars, work weeks, financial quarters, gestation periods, lifespans and so on.

Time isn’t only an economic or technical construct. Thankfully, it’s also a deeply cultural one. Different cultures understand time in broadly disparate ways, and, as a result, they frame the notion of ‘The Future’ accordingly. For example, some cultures understand and behave based on a linear progression from the past to the future, and process questions of possible futures accordingly. Other cultures see time as cyclical, which presents possible futures in a wholly different perspective – for example, the future and the past may seem to be connected and repeating, rather than a straight line. Communication and cultural researchers talk about a monochronic or polychronic culture. The former is often considered to be the most prevalent in North American or Northern European cultures, and is expressed as being linear – that is to say, things happen sequentially. In the latter, seen as being most prevalent in Middle Eastern, Latin American or African cultures, time has multiple threads and events are often simultaneous.

Similarly, some faith traditions consider time and the concept of the future in a different manner. These influences may be subtle, or they may go unmentioned in cross-cultural settings, but they are always important to understand and acknowledge, as they can influence one’s framing of possibility, probability and causality. In our ongoing experience of working in regions with very strong faith traditions, cultural framing of the future can hold both an everyday, pragmatic framing of what’s to come as well as a faith-informed understanding that offers a more spiritual context of what will happen next – and, crucially, what may drive or determine what the future may bring.

Different languages of expression

For every situation there can be a range of definitions. If four people sit down at a table together and are asked about the future, they are sure to have four different time frames in mind. One might express the future as everything that isn’t now or in the past, while another may describe it with aesthetic or technological tropes such as dystopian blue-and-purple lighting, flying cars or glitchy holograms. Politicians can frame ‘The Future’ as being everything they promise to do in their next term, or the destiny of a people or a society.

For most of us, the idea of ‘The Future’ is increasingly co-opted by technology marketing, which delights in summoning futuristic concepts into the current moment, through promises of the future happening now: ‘Tomorrow, today!’ The academic Sam Kinsley writes about this phenomenon as ‘the future present’ and describes how forecasts of future developments effectively activate those ideas, to make them seem real, in the present.⁴ Describing things as ‘futuristic’ plays a similar semantic game, as if products or experiences we have access to now have travelled back to us from a time in the future.

For high-innovation sectors such as technology, mobility, healthcare or the media, this compression of the future into the present has such an influence on common advertising language that it has a significant impact on the way the average person on the street speaks about the future. As modern consumers have become surrounded by cultural iconography related to the future, references have become maddeningly circular: this unexpected situation or that surprising new gadget is compared to ‘something out of Blade Runner’ or ‘like a scene from Black Mirror’. Leaning on pop culture references alone short-circuits any nuanced discussion of a possible future beyond the imaginations of the writers and producers of these works.

Influencers do this by talking about the future more as a thing than a time. When asked i...

Table of contents

• List of figures and tables
• About the authors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Different futuring for different needs
• 2 Getting started: scoping
• 3 Sensing and scanning: finding signals of the future now
• 4 Sense-making and mapping: turning data and insights into patterns and themes
• 5 Scenario development: combining patterns and themes to tell strategic stories
• 6 Storytelling and prototyping: creating ways for others to engage with your future stories
• 7 Assessing effectiveness: tools for monitoring and measuring fitness of approach
• 8 What to do next? Building a futuring culture
• 9 Conclusion
• 10 Further reading
• Notes
• Index