Strategic Foresight

Learning from the Future

Patricia Lustig

• Publisher: Triarchy Press
• ISBN:
  9781909470675
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This is a practical guide for leaders, to aid their practice in strategy, decision making and change. Strategic Foresight is a set of skills and tools used to explore potential futures so organisations can plan for and take advantage of these possible futures. The book first explores how we think about the future, looking at ambiguity and uncertainty and how these play a role in our ability to think into the future. The next section covers models, tools and maps that people will find useful for developing their own Foresight. Then the book considers how to identify emerging trends; what impact they may have on the organisation; the strategic importance of early recognition; and how to apply the knowledge in the organisation.

Chapter Eight

Exploring Different Paradigms

“Alice laughed. ‘There is no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’ ‘I dare say you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!’”

Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson

~~

In Chapter Five I explored what happens when you put three different time horizons on the same map and looked at how you might bridge between today and the future. You learned about Environmental Scanning – I hope you manage to do a bit of scanning every day – and you looked at Wild Cards. To get the best out of Strategic Foresight, you try to create futures that combine the strange and thought-provoking with the manageable. If it’s too far out and challenging, people will be frightened and won’t engage with it, therefore it is important to find the balance so that you can get people to engage with the ideas in your potential futures and to want to do something about them. Remember that Strategic Foresight is about action.

Exploring different paradigms is one of the ways of stretching and strengthening your Foresight muscles. In this chapter I will look at how to recognise, uncover and explore different paradigms, or hidden patterns underlying what you see around you. Larger than trends, deeper than assumptions, paradigms encompass a group’s worldviews and colour the way a group sees what is happening around itself. I will look at a method to identify paradigms and shift them that can be used in a diverse team. Then I will provide a brief introduction to some of the paradigms that you can see changing around you today. The idea behind the section on New Paradigms is to give you some ideas which will provoke you and challenge your assumptions; that will help you to exercise your Foresight muscles (which should be getting quite strong by now).

The method we use to uncover existing paradigms is called Causal Layered Analysis. It is an interpretive method that helps you to unpack and unpick the current paradigm in which you operate. You can then see what happens when you turn it on its head. Paradigms, mindsets, assumptions and worldviews are hard things to see, and CLA helps to remove your blinkers. It does this by giving you a framework which integrates different perspectives and time into one method. This helps you to gain some distance from today and the present, which makes it easier to recognise paradigms and worldviews.

Why do this? What is the relevance? Think back to Chapters Three and Four when you looked at how people think. Daniel Gilbert’s research indicates that people always estimate that the amount of change that will happen in the future is far less than what they know has happened in the same amount of time in the past. This means they underestimate the amount of change that they think will happen. It indicates that people find it hard (in varying degrees) to think very far into the future. Recognising and unpacking your current paradigms helps open you to new possibilities and helps you to see a new potential future (or two). You will need to make sense of it and work on how you plausibly arrive there, but it expands your ability to imagine vastly different futures to today’s world and that is the relevance. The more you stretch your thinking and work through what different – perhaps even very strange – potential futures could look like, the better prepared you will be for any of them when they arrive and become your today. You’ll likely recognise the early warning signals for a future in enough time to do something about it. The surprises may be unexpected but your Foresight muscles are strong enough to enable you to adapt and flourish.

So when you are making sense of what you discover, make sure you are clear on the path each particular future will follow so that when you monitor your position, you will recognise that you might have considered or seen this before.

Causal Layered Analysis

Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) was developed by Sohail Inayatullah²³. He felt that the growing complexity people face means that we need to examine futures from many different perspectives and levels. CLA was therefore developed to do exactly that, opening out people’s thinking. CLA can unearth deep cultural structures as you work your way through the layers; it is easy to see and immediately apparent.

Fig. 8.1 Causal Layered Analysis

Litany

It starts with the Litany – the stories people tell about the way things work around here, the headlines you see in the press, the things people gossip about or see on social media. It is the level of your busy world where you look at the natural and social events that occur from day to day. Inayatullah used as an example a case study of the US health system where he focused on the many deaths related to medical mistakes (I suspect that the same holds true elsewhere as well) in an article he wrote for The Futurist (WFS) in early 2014. At the level of Litany you get the official public description of the issue, the headlines you would read in the papers, what it says about malpractice and so on. This means you are talking about your current operating assumptions and it means in Inayatullah’s case study, that the focus is on the individual doctor – and therefore, the answer will be ‘more training for doctors’. Often the first port of call at this level is to throw more money at the perceived problem.

Systems and Institutions

Going a level deeper, you focus on the Systems and Institutions around you. You look at – and analyse – them in order to understand the causes of the Litany. You look at how we collectively fix and maintain things as well as how we build things. Inayatullah says (in his case study) that “the safety issues lie not just with particular doctors making mistakes, but rather with the medical and hospital system as a whole. Long working hours, hospitals poorly designed for a maturing society and lack of communication among different parts of the health system are among other key issues.” So, there are wider (and deeper) systemic causes for the initial presenting problem. A possible solution might be to have better, smarter systems, better designed hospitals and better working conditions for staff (in particular with fewer working hours and a more normal schedule). At this level you can begin to see that money isn’t the only key to fixing things; actually it goes deeper – systems and relationships will need to change too.

Worldviews

Delving yet deeper, you uncover the Worldview – the values and knowledge that underpin the institutions and systems of our world – which in this case is the structure of modern medicine. This boils down to the way in which (in Western medicine at least) a problem is dissected in the search for a single cause and little or no attention is paid to the whole person (or system), either in identifying the cause(s) of illness, treating the illness or communicating with the patient.

At this level of CLA you are looking at uncovering paradigms and exploring how language interacts with and frames a particular issue, perhaps even contributing to or causing it. A solution could be to design different systems for solving the problem of illness, perhaps looking at Chinese or Ayurvedic medicine and their paradigm of viewing the patient as a whole system. Or redesigning what should be included (and excluded) in a medical education.

Myths/Metaphors

Finally you look at the deep stories we tell each other, what is called the Myths/Metaphors level. This is found in personal and collective stories about the world that underpin current worldviews. In Inayatullah’s case study, you will see ‘the doctor is always right’ as the current metaphor in operation for this issue. This is a deeply held belief that is commonly held. It is at a visceral and emotional level where visual images often help you to see what is happening. A solution at this level would be to put the patient first and flip the metaphor on its head – in place of the doctor always being right, explore what would happen if the patient was always right. Some further metaphors of this system are:

• ‘medicine as war’ (the battle against disease)
• ‘medic as mechanic’ (fixing the human body like a machine)
• ‘medicine as a sport’ (winning or losing the game of a healthy lifestyle).

Fig. 8.2 CLA Overview²⁴

CLA can be used to create a variety of alternative visions for the future, going up and down the model as you work. As you go down the levels, the timescale you are examining gets longer. At the level of Myths/Metaphors, you are looking at very long timescales indeed. Identify alternatives for each of the levels and choose which you’d like to work with. When you identify alternative Myths/Metaphors, you can generate new assumptions and creative, out-of-the-box solutions and you stand a much better chance of achieving a description of a plausible/very different (from today) tomorrow++.

A colleague, Marcus Bussey, suggested a simple example to help make it really clear. He calls it ‘The CLA of Shit’. The table below is quite self-explanatory.

Once you understand how it works, you can turn a myth/metaphor on its head and work its way back up the CLA to see how things would be if a particular underlying myth were to change. For instance, what if you took ‘Shit is dirty, shit is bad’ and turned it on its head? It would become ‘Shit is clean, shit is good.’ What kind of worldview would flow from that? For it to be considered ‘clean’ and ‘good’, it will have to be good for something. What if we looked at shit as fertiliser? As a foundation for growing things? Certainly my garden grows much better with the addition of manure from my horse… And if we had a worldview that said it was something good, something to build upon, what systems might arise from that? Our sewage processing plants could have a different focus. There would be a demand for the output. It could be marketable. And that would change the Litany and stories.

That was a very simple, easy and quick example. Below you will find a more thorough example based on working through one ‘round’ of CLA on our case study, FastTrack Publishing Group, including turning a myth on its head to see what that would mean.

What I find energising about this method is that while it is difficult (and can be quite messy as you go deeper), it brings great insight. Starting at the top with Litany, you are likely to easily come up with dozens of quotes. The next level down – Systems & Institutions – is a bit more difficult and has fewer items.

We used CLA on FastTrack Publishing (see below). We began to gain real insight when we moved down a level into Worldviews and values and also began to uncover some fascinating questions. By the time we got to the ‘bottom’ with Myths/Metaphors, there were very few points, but each gave us the chance to see what would happen if we reversed the Myth, looked at its opposite and then worked our way back up the ‘iceberg’… so if we had a new Metaphor, what Worldviews would it support? What Systems & Institutions would those Worldviews support? What would the word-on-the-street be in that world? Look at how we worked out one round of CLA for FastTrack Publishing; it will give you an idea of how you can use it for your own situation either in your organisation OR for you personally.

We did a ‘round’ of CLA over a Skype call with a group that knew one another and was familiar with Future Studies tools. Each person had a different area of expertise; the diversity in the group clearly contributed to the richness we uncovered. The session took 90 minutes.

CLA Exercise

1. Pick an issue to work on: the shift towards digital publishing
2. Brainstorm each level separately and discuss
   • Brainstorm on your own, on sticky notes
   • Share with group and add notes as you come up with more ideas, clustering the notes into themes
   • Identify gaps
3. Create a future vision by
   • Choosing an alternative Myths/Metaphors or Worldviews
   • Working back through the layers to see how each would support the one you chose…
   • …until you reach a new set of events and a new story for your litany.

With thanks to Dr Wendy Schultz

CLA practised on FastTrack Publishing case study

Litany

Looking at FastTrack and the transition from print to digital publishing we focused on ‘What is the buzz on the street’ for digital publishing. We looked for opportunities and potential crises. Here are some of the items we brainstormed:

• People are using libraries less
• Audiobooks!
• ‘My e-book reads to me’
• E-books might be convenient, but I love the feel of ‘real’ books
• I can give someone a ‘real’ book, not an e-book. It’s something someone can pick up and enjoy.
• I love our holiday home with its bookshelves full of ‘beach-reading’ books. How do you do that with e-books? You’d lose the feel, the smell (and the sand). There is something visceral about holding a physical book
• Amazon is screwing over authors and publishers
• It is easier to self-publish than to find a publisher
• I’m a writer and I can’t get an advance any more!
• I can’t get publishers to even read a manuscript any more
• I’m so entrenched in paper books; I’m having a hard time figuring out how to move into the digital space
• The format isn’t fixed with an e-book; this changes my expe...