Peering into the Future Is a Fascinating
Business
By Jeffrey M. Bowen
Peering into the future is a
fascinating business. Humans seem
uniquely suited for the task because, among all species, we are the only ones
who actually contemplate the future. Those
who attempt to do this reside on a continuum.
At one end are planners who build pyramids of data-based assumptions. At the other end are soothsayers and fortune
tellers whose talents involve intuitive guesswork. Somewhere in between live weather forecasters,
poll takers, marketers, scientists, religious gurus, astrologers, science
fiction writers, and most definitely politicians.
Taken
together all these types extrapolate our minds and hearts into the unknown by building
from what is known about the past and present.
A lot depends on what we want to do with the results. My curious question is this: When the past and future talk to each other, what
do they really say?
Science
fiction provides one entertaining answer.
The best writers of this genre have insisted that their work provides
essential training for anyone who wants to peer at least a decade ahead. I believe their creative freedom is the
mother of invention. For instance, more
than 150 years ago, the French novelist Jules Verne built stories around electric
submarines, helicopters, lunar modules, spoken newscasts, solar sails, tasers,
and videoconferencing. The basic
technology for all of these existed back then, but Verne turned them into
shocking possibilities long before inventors took out patents.
Another way to change the future is to rescript
the past. Historians and politicians,
among others, share this strategy. Historians
revise their interpretations when they find new artifacts. Politicians change past practices
legislatively to gain power and control. Thus heroes turn into villains. Most recently, old statues become catalysts
for protest as generational awareness and political agendas shift.
My favorite strategy for
tapping into the future is called futuring.
Unlike predictions which are usually calculated from statistical odds,
and forecasts which are tied to specific time frames, futuring develops a
bigger picture of broad possibilities.
It paints likelihoods that may change depending on the angle of view and
the evolution of trends or changing events.
Originally conceived in the late 1940s as a Cold War gaming strategy, futuring
has since become a popular planning strategy in the business world. Portraits
of what may happen are enriched by technology. Different scenarios produce a
composite of probabilities.
I was introduced to futuring 50 years ago in a
graduate course. Our group project was to describe what elementary and
secondary education would be like today – that is, in 2020.
We treaded through some familiar
territory based on our awareness of developing issues such as nontraditional
schooling beyond the classroom walls, better support for the disabled, and more
responsive counseling services Our
foray into the future was more like short-term predictions extended from the
status quo, and limited by the statutory mandates of the day.
In contrast, today’s fearless futurists think
their way out of the box, and into worlds of internet-enhanced information and
data, looking for curious trends, alternative scenarios, and trigger events. They act more like generalists who scan
different disciplines seeking connections among ideas that are novel and
unusual. Futuristic thinkers ask “what
if” while remembering that the most specific predictions are probably the ones
most likely to be wrong.
The biggest challenge is to escape the past. When
we plan into the future, psychologists tell us that much of our thinking stems
from memories of our past. Yet we gloss
over the details in that past, so we may deceive ourselves and fail to learn
what not to do in the future. We also
make that past much more predictable than it really was. Finally, survey
research also confirms that, regardless of age, we believe that we have changed
a great deal over the past 10 years, but that we will probably change very
little over the next 10 years. So we
often rationalize the past and have real difficulty seeing ourselves in the
long-range future.
Does this mean our attempts
to fathom the future are wasted? Not
entirely, because, we benefit from certain advantages. First, we are overwhelmingly social
animals. When we lack information about
a future event, we become what psychologist Daniel Gilbert calls “surragators”. We become much more willing to listen to and
endorse the personal experience of others. Indeed, futuring calls for collaborative
thinking.
A second advantage is that we
are emotional beings. The prospects of
our future provoke strong reactions. Psychologist
Martin Seligman labels humans as homo prospectus because his research has
confirmed that we spend enormous amounts of time recombining and retouching our
past to imagine the future. This helps
us cope with novel situations, and deal with the unexpected. The instant answers we get are much closer to
gut feelings than to thoughtful analysis.
On balance, we spend much
more time thinking about the future than about the past. This makes us uniquely
human, and probably much happier. From
science fiction to strategic visioning, we never really leave the past behind,
nor are we very good at “prospection”.
Still, the effort is worthwhile because the future lies not in what we
learn about our surroundings, but in what we learn about ourselves.
