Dialogues About the Role of Foresight and Problems it Faces Today: Part 3

This article is the last of three dialogues between a few members of our foresight team, Mat Lincez, Karl Schroeder, Dr. Ashley Metz, and Dr. Paul Hartley. In this series of discussions, we talk about the place of foresight strategy, some problems that we see in the way foresight strategy is implemented, and what needs to happen for governments, companies, and NGOs to get more value out of the exercise. In it we also discuss a few topics, like the current situation concerning the global pandemic, failures of foresight strategy in the communications process, and problems that arise when doing foresight well.

In this final part, the panel considers the problems foresight faces in the face of current concepts of “reality,” the failures that have become apparent with the Covid-19 outbreak, and the issues arising from a failure of understanding in how to apply foresight to the present.

We hope you find something of value in the discussion and join us in trying to expand the way foresight is communicated as a whole so it can help prepare us all and prevent, or at least mitigate, future disasters. This discussion has been edited for length.

We Conclude with Part 3

Paul The Covid-19 event example provides an interesting point for me because I maintain that it is actually the role of foresight, foresight strategists, and foresight strategy as a whole to not just predict events like this and make it so that we can prepare against them in order to maintain the status quo, but that we build concepts about preparedness, which allow us to understand how we can make the most of these changes when they occur. And for me, being a cultural anthropologist, what I would like this to happen is that we can now clearly understand what we can to leave behind. Which of those pillars of reality or supposed “reality” are unnecessary. Because if they are no longer necessary, we need a new model of preparedness for cultural change and social change following an event of this kind.

Karl Yeah. It's a contingency is what we're talking about, the possibility that things could be different. And as you say, it's the possibility that the specific things within our blind spot that we assume cannot be changed could be different. That is that the important idea that foresighters have been trying to communicate her for a very, very long time. If you see the future as the dimension of surprise, and if you see foresight as being the science of surprise, then you can imagine that what we're doing is attempting to minimise surprise for ourselves and our clients while maximizing surprise for their competitors, within a capitalist point of view. It's not so much about prediction because prediction of complex adaptive systems such as societies is essentially impossible. But it's about minimising surprise. And there are a lot of different strategies you can use to do that. Thinking about foresight in terms of the future is one of them. But it's also possible thinking about foresight without regard to the future as such, by thinking in terms of blind spots, in terms of surprises and conceptual shocks that may come from things that were already there that may in fact have great deep historical roots.

This is, again, a reason why the old vision of the professional futurist as a modern-day prophet whose job is to predict is pernicious, and we've been trying to sort of steer clear from for quite a while.

Paul Yeah, exactly. And one of the pieces of this that I see is completely essential. Just as you say, is an assessment of things like the inertia of human activity and our tendency to prefer homeostasis in the face of any kind of change. So, what we're what we're actually starting to see is how responses to events or moments such as this, are really rooted in our almost desperate need to keep things the way they were. Because the way they were is safe. It's not dangerous for us.

Karl This is true. There's also an interesting thing that happens in disasters, and that is that. A lot of people, sometimes even the majority of people caught up in a great disaster will experience euphoria.

It's odd that a disaster can turn out to be the best time in some people's lives, even though they've lost everything. But it's really because they've lost everything that they have lost all of the restrictions that they had built their previous lives. So, a catastrophe can be a moment of reinvention.

I'd say this is probably less true for a pandemic than at any other kind. But from a systems, and from a civilizational point of view, I wouldn't be surprised to see the same kind of moments of euphoria when people realize that different social arrangements are possible.

The current discussion about universal basic income is a good example of that. If we cover the other side of this with the UBI in place in Canada, people's heads will spin about how fast it happened. But again, it could result in this kind of euphoria of being freed from a constraint that we didn't even know we could be free of.

Paul Well, it's interesting because even in business or even in policy work, we should talk a lot about ritual process, which is the old Victor Turner concept. This is about the nature of the way we enact social change within individuals and within a group of people. And we the traditional story is that a ritual process is used in order to foster a moment of liminality which is then harnessed to do social work. Liminality is a sort of in-between space where the rules are different and all of the social norms don't apply anymore. We use that as a mechanism for transforming people within the society.

Turner's example is coming of age ceremonies in amongst a few groups in Africa where the boys are removed from the village. They are dressed in a different form. They are taken out to the forest. And then they are taught the secrets of what it is to be a man and a ritually circumcised during that process and then taken back to the village in their new clothes with their new social role. And the point is that the ritual and the liminal space that it conjures up is the way in which a boy becomes a man.

And that the liminal nature that in betweenness where the rules have all changed, and where you even allow things to happen to yourself that you would never allow in in real life i.e. being circumcised, is possible. Whereas that's not possible in the real life. And one of the things about that whole process is that we are able to bring that about through a ritual process, that liminal phase. But that is not the only way in which a liminal phase can kind of be can be generated for a society, and that if moments of this kind also produce a kind of liminality.

Karl Ah, one of our failures in the modern period is that we have. It's not that we don't have these rituals. A lot of people think we don't have them. That the we we've lost moments, formalized moments in our lives. We still have them, but we're not marking them and we're not recognising them anymore.

Paul I actually couldn't agree with you more because I've always maintained that going to the doctor is itself a ritual process because. You are transformed from a person into a patient in that moment who then has a new set of social expectations. And we've got a kind of governing behaviour in that moment. And so, yeah, it is still with us. We just we don't make so much of a big deal about the process. But the process is still functioning every day.

Karl Well, we don't track it. And as a result, these are both the rituals and the liminal moments that they represent have become blind spots for us. Again, the we don't recognise the moments of change that we undergo as people, partly because we don't celebrate them. But this suggests a possible future in which there is a lot more understanding of these modes, more codification and celebration of minimal change. And what would that look like in a society that was less buttoned down and had more options and more ways of expressing identity? It's kind of an exciting idea. And one that really hasn't been explored, for instance, in science fiction, which tends to deal with catastrophes.

Paul Yeah, well, what I would what I would also say is that the greater awareness of the nature of liminality and its presence in our daily lives and its presence now that the fact that we are in a liminal state globally right now, this is perhaps this is one of the first true global liminal moments where everyone is participating in this. This is the thing that I really hope that we can learn from this and frankly, put into the foresight modelling that we're using in order to understand what the world will be like or could be like post this this moment is that right now we are in an uncontrolled liminal state because we have not ritualized ourselves into it. This is caused by the moment itself, caused by Covid-19 and the necessities of preventing this kind of thing. However, what it is providing us is an opportunity because it is still in a liminal state. Transformation is part of what a liminal state does.

So for me, it's part of the role as a culturally aware foresight practitioner would be allow being a little bit of a midwife to help us transition through so that we can actually make some positive changes and harness the power of this liminal phase that has essentially been forced upon us to our best advantage.

Karl I think that's a great sort of model. And what it brings to mind is the idea that we find the. The places in the in the current crisis that are serving as creative constraints for people and making it possible to imagine new things such as universal basic income. And we codify those in such a way that we can then impress them on the future of global warming. In other words, we can say we have passed through this particular passage and done these things and have come out changed. Now we have to do this again on a greater scale, on a greater timescale, with regards to the climate and the ecosystems of the planet. But we know how, because we have this model, this thing that we've done. And it's a moment in which we could essentially design, design the ritual, equivalent to marriage, or a funeral, or whatever is appropriate, for global change that we can then apply on the scale that we need to for the grand one that we have to do, which is addressing climate change.

Paul Yeah. Exactly. And. I get that so much, Ink will be digital ink will be spilled talking about how foresight is going to work to put the world back together. Or to help companies, policymakers, or NGOs understand the world that they are now presented with. And one of the things that I really hope that we do as a foresight community is that we resist the temptation to use it, to put ourselves back to the way things were in terms of allowing those pillars of reality. The idea that competitiveness is the best way forward. The idea that there will be a "new normal.” I’m thinking of examples like that properly working businesses need to collect their employees under one roof and stuff like that are good examples.

What I hope that we do is that instead of spilling the ink about how to get back to normal or understand a new normal. That what we do is we try to facilitate the transition into a stage where we are now harnessing the nature of change a little bit better. I mean, I almost see this as a potentially a productive inflection point for the way that we understand the future.

Mat And yes, we suffered through things and eventually we come out of them. And, yeah. Humans are survivors. the species survived. We're going to continue to exploit and consume the world, until ultimately the next bug wipes us out completely. But at the same time, it's like using things like Thompson Vocation of Pearl Harbour and these things like they have no it has it is completely irrelevant is not the same thing. These are those are things that we're like. Yeah. I also sensed and warned about and potentially foreseen. But there were surprise events.  here's another event that was like no one really knew exactly when it was going to happen, but everyone knew is going to happen and no one prepared. Using the war metaphor, it’s like we're in control of the logistics of the kinetics of war. We're not we're in control of the logistics of this, which is like, and now invoke Paul Verilio. Here we are in the context of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. That's stupid thing that everyone likes to talk about. Now, the military have been talking about that for decades. Consultants have been talking about for decades. Verilio really talked about it since the moon landing, being a post-war being a child of France during the war in post-war era, watching the nuclear proliferation. Witnessing and considering all those things he eventually said that success in these areas is all about speed and logistics, and that people that can occupy space and move things around cleverly will win. Here we find ourselves in exactly this kind of situation. We are all struggling with the logistics of combating this virus. We’re struggling with human logistics, material, logistics, etc.

Paul Well, and these are like there's something that you said earlier, which was, now we can start to see the kind of the mistakes of the past or the problems that were inherent in the system. And logistics is the perfect example, because what's very clear is that an ultra optimized logistics network, which has been six-simga-ed to the nth degree is now as nick of time as you can get. It has absolutely zero resilience in the face of behaviour change or occurrences of this kind.

Mat It’s got me questioning my own theories about that because like I've said before, all this and during it, I'm still of the mind of precision. Like I still think that in the face of climate change, in the face of resource scarcity, we need to think about precision too. We need to think about the precise use of energy and resources. And we don't want to be wasting anything. Is that in direct conflict or does it contrast with this idea of stockpiling things?

When we favour just-in-time manufacturing, the manufacturing, this bring the need for a more accurate demand forecasting so that we're not sort of wasting materials and energy, moving things around that don't need to be made. I think there's a there is a critique there, but I think it's a timing issue. And if you think about timing, context and geography. If we think about the timing and context of logistics today, the whole system hasn't transformed itself or hasn't been fully optimised for that world yet. And you can responses to this happening in the hacker spaces. You can see it happening with certain parts of the logistics chains. They're actually designed for that. The idea of like people using 3D printers to print of specific part for a ventilator that can then be shipped and added to something else to make it on demand is legit. You don't need necessarily maybe all those parts really sitting in a place somewhere forever. You just need to make them when you need them. However many you need them. Right. But not everybody's got a 3D printer. Not every not every big business is set up to procure the right inputs they need to make that on demand.

The present should be seen as an inflection point, that from a civilizational point of view, I think, is the moment when we have to decide how to be optimistic about the future while understanding that we can't control everything. This is pushing an entirely different idea of how we move into the future onto us. And from our previous point of view, if we can't control everything, then we are victims being dragged into the future. What I want to do is present some images and some metaphors for thinking about this in a different way, chiefly being the idea of creative constraint.

Karl Right. Yes. In one of my novels, Lady of Mazes, I described an anti-fragile contrast to that late in the book. I talk about firewalls and what they are in that civilization are points where the cascading changes are stopped and they take the form of interruptions in things like supply chains in the present world. You could imagine it this way that rather than having one factory in China that produces in N-95 masks for most of the world, you have many factories in many different places doing the same thing on a regional basis. So that when disruptive change cascades through one place, it doesn't go everywhere.

This is based on the idea of criticality in critical states. What you're describing is a mathematically critical state where if you increase the interconnections between the parts of something past a certain point, any small change can potentially cascade through the entire system and change everything. To prevent that from happening. You have to have barriers that ensure that the change stops and that's how you maintain homeostasis. Of course, that by itself could end in a bad result if we were to use such techniques to engineer a world in which no change could happen. So there's the delicate balance. And biology is the best model for understanding how that balance works. But yes, if we optimise like crazy as you're talking about, then we enter a critical state. And this happened in 2008 in exactly the same way. And I was talking at that point about the necessity of building and firewalls in the financial system.

Going a bit futher, there is a classic in this example—a classic case of systems thinking—Stafford Beer used to talk about the 80/20 problem and how an organization would discover that 20 percent of its workers are doing 80 percent of the work and fire a bunch of low performing people. But then when you come back a year later, you find out that 20 percent of the people are doing 80 percent of the work. So you go through the thing again, you fire a bunch of people. Come back a year later, strangely, 20 percent of the people that treat 80 percent of the work. But as you shave down your employees trying to optimize towards that perfect number, somehow the system works less and less well. And you eventually realize that that that inefficient 80 percent tail actually is serving some kind of important function. They have to be there, even though they're inefficient and conventional thinking just can't wrap itself its head around that, which is why companies will destroy themselves via this kind of optimization practise.

Paul Well, and it's interesting because if we take in the some of the points about the world of technique, that Jacques Ellul has articulated. And I'll explain that so that everyone can understand it. Ellul described a kind of substitute for culture and for the way that human beings work that we have developed over time that he called technique. And this is a kind of fake culture that spreads over the whole system until we believe that it's real. And in his conception technique has a few pillars: efficiency, speed, an eternal push optimization, and scale being the major ones. So to a very real degree, what you are doing when you are applying optimization and divestiture practices to a business is creating a bubble of technique around the way that business works, so that it is living in what is essentially a subset of culture and not actually living in the real world. It's living in this created world that we we've developed over time. That's based on technology, that's based on the pillars of proficiency and speed.

But the world of technique is actually alienating human beings from the way we normally behave. And in this partial, incomplete position, at this point where we haven't applied a technique completely to all of human society, what we're actually experiencing are the breakages, because there are two systems at play.

There is the way human beings tend to naturally behave. And then there is the way that we are trying to force ourselves to behave. And because of that, we're not only alienated from our own world, but we're also developing a system where there is competition between the mechanisms of the way we work as human beings in a society. And the world that we live in right now, especially the business world, is really all about applying the world of technique to everything.

Even design thinking consultancies are essentially mechanisms to put technique into place in a business. The alienation that we are experiencing is now behind a lot of the rejection of the mechanisms of global globalization, the imposition of governments in some cases over people’s rights, and the imposition of technology on our privacy and our rights. That people are rejecting the way that we're living is due to the fact that there are two systems that the way we normally work and the way that we're trying to force ourselves to work and fighting for dominance.

Karl Yeah. That's a good model for considering all of this. A way to sort of express it that I've been working on is the idea that for a good century now, we have been trying to re-jig our society so that everyone takes the view from nowhere. This is the scientific notion of sort of rising above all events and seeing the universals and ignoring the particulars. And it plays really well to an industrial society where you want workers who are mobile and can be moved anywhere and Taylorism, where workers are interchangeable. And you shave away the particulars of individuality of both people and to places. And you get the view from nowhere.

So this means that a parts factory in Hunan or in Thailand is exactly the same as a parts factory in Scotland or in New York. And if you can do this successfully, then you just have this bubble of human technology and culture floating above the world. And we're all living in the nowhere. We live everywhere. We live nowhere at once. But we have been realizing for a while. Bruno Latour latest book, for instance, Down to Earth is I believe it's called is about the sudden realization that we're having that the climate is a political actor that is forcing us to recognize place and our role in that place. And from my point of view, one of the things is being exposed at the moment is the sham nature of the view from nowhere. That in fact we are all living in particular places as particular people. And at a factory in Shanghai is not the same as a factory in Berlin. And the lives of the people and what they expect to get out of labour and their social relations and monetary relations is different in each of these places. And when you really accept that, then the whole idea of globalism sort of crumbles away. But the problem is, of course, that global warming is a global problem. So, we simultaneously need to come back down to our localities and deal as a global civilization with a situation that we're in. This is a completely different sort of paradigm. And I'm very excited to imagine the future in which we are successfully local, and local people governing globally.

Paul Yeah, well, that this that this has been a thread that's cut through this sort of more advanced and it's anthropological thinking as well in terms of the simultaneity of experience and then the fact that the skills that we need in order to survive as a species most likely is exactly that to be able to inhabit both the macro and micro level simultaneously. Yeah. And that that presents us with an interesting problem. Is being “glocal” even possible for an individual, or is it merely a social requirement for entities like businesses.

Mat Well, that requires a greater flexibility in the system. So we’re still needing greater planning and preparedness. The flexibility I think you have to talk about is flexibility in the system. If we point out that 3D printing example, the flexibility is infinite in that system pretty much, Right? You've got the material tolerances or the material characteristics of the input, whatever is being used to print with. But then you have like the infinite possibilities of engineering that material into a solution. And a lot of what we've been good at as a species, or as an economy(s), is taking raw materials and inputs and combining them into things that create value or have the appearance of creating value and marketing them. Maybe we've been sort of over marketing the things that actually have no value to the detriment of, adapting and modifying our systems to really create things of value.

Paul Yeah. Yeah, that's also a good point.

Mat This is why it's fascinating to me watching the artists right now, like a lot of my friends on Facebook that are artists. One of them commented the other day, like, are you giving thanks to the to the artists right now for saving you and your sanity? People are listening to music, thinking about art, reading books, consuming movies on Netflix. What might come out of this that isn't fundamentally changing our society, but will just be a bit of a value add, will be the recognition of the arts and their contribution to human experience, and the coping mechanisms that come along with that.

I think we need to go back to the beginning of the conversation. I think there needs to be more effort put in by the foresight community to over-index on the applicability of foresight. We didn't we didn't just say applied foresight for innovation for no reason. Like when we started doing this at HFS. Even though I wanted to indulge in bigger picture scenario planning and fantastical visions of the future and all these things, which could be inspiring. We very deliberately called it applied foresight for innovation, because we want that futures thinking to have an applied function and we want it to effect change. I've never been shy about saying, “yeah, we use foresight techniques to give you an idea of a future that is buildable, that is something that you could make, and you should make.”

The fact that foresight is such a heterogeneous discipline. It's people from all different backgrounds and, find their way into foresight as a practice. I'm an industrial designer by trade, and I always say that because I'm always thinking in product and experience in manufacturing. I'm thinking through like how something could and should be made, while I'm thinking about the future.

I think a lot of the sort of work that's been done and misused, frankly, in the foresight world has been too academic, or too ridiculous. It's been too theoretical at a level that isn't digestible by an organization to apply, or it’s been too stupid to implement. I think that the examples that have been out there that have been touted like the Shell scenarios and all these things were true examples of foresight and it’s applicability. And were they well-thought out and run by very smart people? Of course they were. When you start to sort of look around you today and you see all these fly-by-night futurists, or superficial training workshops, and events popping up locally or internationally talking about the technology of the future. It just becomes a big show and tell experience, and then an exercise in frivolity. I always felt uneasy about this, but I prefer to look for an opportunity to shape of real work.  Designers especially, and entrepreneurs even, have identified issues in society and built something for it. I want to see designers that have actually designed a solution against something that could be implemented.

 Paul I think that is such a fantastic point. Ultimately, foresight is about preparing now for what may come. The focus isn’t on the future really. It is part of the reflexivity needed to build better things. And, I guess to sum that up, in the time of Covid-19, that is really hard to do because right now we’re terrible at the kind of introspection needed to think about the present, let alone the future.

 The only example I have for this is that I really hope that people will stop looking to the kind of futurism that sets out “a new normal” and start realizing that there has never been a normal in the first place. Only then can we start planning for what comes next. Covid-19 is bigger in scale than most recent events, but it is just an event like any other that shapes history.