Think Like a Futurist: Know What Changes, What Doesn't, and What's Next

Introduction

Picture this: after a long day's work, you return to your hotel room—an underwater suite with glass walls that transform into computer screens—and fall onto your bed, famished. You don't have to call room service. Instead, you grab your cell phone, touch a few keys, and hop in the shower. By the time you come out, you can smell your dinner—a Kobe beef steak, cooked medium rare, and broccoli rabe sautéed with red wine vinegar and garlic—printing out from the FAB Hub on your bedside table. After dinner, you check your message notifications, and are fascinated by a photograph of an enormous cockroach that a friend has sent from Madagascar. You could use some company, so, using the FAB Hub, you print out a 3-D cockroach robot, complete with six clicking metal legs and two wire antennae. Your new pet isn't an exact replica of the one that freaked out your friend; on a whim, you've given it a green Mohawk made of rug fibers, and the ability to sing on command. All you want now is a slice of hot apple pie fresh out of the printer. Can you smell the cinnamon in the air?

Can you see the future on the horizon?

If not, your resistance probably isn't prompted by an aversion to sweets or cockroaches, or what your kindergarten teacher unkindly referred to as your lack of imagination. The fact is, the future I've described is closer than you think. (The straight-out-of–Star Trek FAB Hubs are already being used to generate human tissue for medical purposes.) But you are hardwired not to believe it, or even imagine it. Here's why: according to the most recent brain-imaging research, the same neural networks we use to envision the future are also used to recall memories. That means that most of us can only imagine what we already know.

Considering that prediction is the primary function of the brain and the foundation of intelligence, this biological efficiency can be seriously limiting. Our neural networks want what they want: certainty. This is a benefit of our wiring: it helps us feel prepared for the future, in control and confident. In short, it nurtures our sense of stability. But the future could not care less about our biological comfort zone.

What happens when an unstoppable force (the future) meets an immovable object (our brains)? The end of the world as we know it. The fallout from a failure to imagine on the part of corporate America can be devastating. Remember the 1990s tech darling AOL? Its merger with Time Warner was supposed to create the future of global media. Instead, the two companies remained stuck in their corporate cultures, resulting in a failure to meet the future that cost shareholders more than two hundred billion dollars. Or GM? The company had a head start on electric and hybrid vehicles, but decided to abandon its march forward in favor of lobbying government to keep energy regulations in line with the past. For both companies, the collision of the unstoppable force of the future with their unmovable corporate vision created crisis.

Were our brains wired differently, we would be more able to imagine the future as something other than a linear continuation of the past. The fact that we are biologically predisposed not to see what is coming is cold comfort. Just ask the thousands of autoworkers still looking for a job in Detroit, because their corporate leaders steered their companies into the future using the rearview mirror on a gas-guzzling SUV. Understanding our biology is not an excuse to accept it as destiny; it is an opportunity to push past our natural neural limits—in other words, to get unstuck.

This is what futurists do: we get people and organizations unstuck from what I call the Permanent Present, the natural bias for projecting current conditions out into the future. Over the years, I have worked to reverse that bias with such companies as American Express, Best Buy, General Mills, Kraft, Motorola, Nestlé Purina, Target, Yahoo!, and other billion-dollar conglomerates seeking strategic foresight for success into the next millennium, as well as with mom-and-pop shops passionate about moving a long-standing family business into the next generation. No matter the size, product, challenge, or character of the corporation seeking help, I have encountered one constant: the push required to get clients past thinking in the Permanent Present is so strong that it feels literal. That is why I named the Minneapolis-based nonprofit think tank that I have spearheaded for several years the Push Institute.

The most public project of the Push Institute has always been its annual conference, PUSH, in Minneapolis. It brings together innovative minds from business, governmental, academic, environmental, artistic, religious, musical, and other disciplines across the globe in order to teach corporate clients how to think innovatively.

I am continually amazed—and, frankly, frustrated—that more than a century after Thomas Edison said that the innovative process is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration, so many people still believe that creativity is a gift: either you have it or you don't.

I knew better by the time I was ten—working up my own perspiration at a ballet barre.

A dancer for more than twenty years, I lived most of my life in a studio. Each day followed the same routine: ballet class in the morning, followed by afternoons spent making and rehearsing new works of choreography, culminating in a production, then back again to the barre. Even when I was faced with a bad performance, review, or injury, the drill continued: learn, create, produce; learn, create, produce. Our creativity was a structured process of perspiration.

I applied the same disciplined approach to innovative thinking in phase two of my professional life. Fascinated by the systems of the human body I studied in dissected cadavers in anatomy class, I hung up my ballet shoes in my late twenties for a career as a chiropractor. Over the years, working with Western, Chinese, and homeopathic traditions, I realized that no system was in itself right and that I had to borrow from each to come up with a useful diagnosis. In the decade I spent teaching anatomy at the University of Illinois and Indiana University, I tried to instill the core lesson to my students: back away from ideology and look to see how the facts fit together; that is where the insight lies.

It is this quest for insight that has defined my career, from dancer to chiropractor to futurist. And as much as the experience and theoretical knowledge I have accumulated along the way has influenced how I think about strategy, it has also convinced me of four simple truths: the creative process can be taught to anyone; it can be scaled for groups of all sizes; it follows a clear, replicable structure; and, in the end, a lot of hard work, not magic or even the right DNA, is what wins the day.

The question is, how? It was just this challenge that the cellist Yo-Yo Ma touched on in a tribute to one of the greatest innovators of the twentieth century, Apple visionary Steve Jobs. In the 2011 Entertainment Weekly year-end special, Ma wrote that the two friends often spoke of The importance of stimulating disciplined imagination in our students to ensure an innovative workforce.¹

The fact is, in the wake of the tech boom of the 1990s—and inspired by the success of Apple as well as renegade start-ups like eBay, Napster, and Google—corporations of all sizes are already sold on the need to inject the soft stuff of creativity, innovation, and collaboration into their businesses. But putting everyone in open work spaces, urging employees to play Ping-Pong and be courageous, and exhorting executives to find their inner maverick in an effort to Innovate or die! or Fail forward fast! (to quote just two catch phrases of the day) are meaningless moves unless they come with specific instructions and fit within a specific strategy.

There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

When clients come to me, they can feel that they are spinning in place. Often they say something like this: Okay, we get it: creativity in the workplace is important. Collaboration is a good thing. Innovation leads the way to growth and differentiation. Now, tell us how we go about doing those things in specific steps. Show us how we can do this and still meet earnings expectations for next quarter. Give us a way to nurture the free flow of ideas that doesn't waste time, talent, and money. Bottom line—show us exactly what we need to know and how to implement it in our organization.

The purpose of Think Like a Futurist is to close the gap between talking about the role of creativity and innovation in business and integrating them into standard business practices—in concrete terms that hold up no matter what New Economy the gurus say we are experiencing: the Creative Economy, the Knowledge Economy, the Experience Economy, the Post-Industrial Economy, the Social-Capital Economy, the Information Economy, the Bottom-Up Economy, and on and on. Yes, thinking like a futurist is partly about seeing coming trends, but it also means transcending trends. To think like a futurist is to adopt a wide-angle perspective on any issue you face. You must develop your ability to step outside the particulars of your situation and ask, How does this work? Which is to say, before you can get practical, you have to get philosophical. That means you have to step back from the situation to frame your challenge in terms of who you are and where you're going; to understand the context of your challenge from a systems point of view, in regard to change in the environment, the human system, and the organizational system; to formulate what I call Best Questions that focus you on the real need; to expose yourself to new thinking and experiences; to formulate a vision; and, finally, to create a plan for action.

In Think Like a Futurist, I will show you how to integrate the hard-to-prove, hard-to-manage capacities of foresight and innovative thinking in three steps: Know, New, and Do.

Know

The first step in thinking like a futurist is to examine the world in which you operate. In Part One, you'll learn that the social, economic, and environmental crises of our time spring from just four constant and predictable forces that always have, and always will, structure our world. The four forces of change are resources, technology, demographics, and governance. I will show you how to familiarize yourself with them in order to get a big-picture perspective on any challenge you may face. Understand how they work together to drive change, and you will be able not only to avert crises but also to uncover ideas and opportunities for your future along the way.

New

The hardwired functions of the brain are what govern the subjective human experience. If we want to learn to think like a futurist, we have to first understand how our brains are designed to do what we refer to as thinking, a conscious process by which we make sense of our world so that we can make good decisions. The left-right-left exchange between the left and right hemispheres of the brain describes how we form predictions, a capacity known as foresight.

This is where a futurist begins.

I call the problem-solving methodology I use to kick-start your futurist thinking the Zone of Discovery (ZoD). It is based on the newest brain science related to learning and creativity, easily adapted for use in strategy and innovation, questions big and small, opportunities far and near.

In Part Two, I'll introduce you to some ZoD exercises and activities that follow the neurological pattern of left brain–right brain–left brain activity that is associated with innovative epiphanies. A progression of steps stimulates new ways of thinking and seeing that, when mixed with inputs from outside sources and experts, reveal opportunities to connect your present to the fast-approaching future. By selecting those opportunities that help you become more of who you are and get closer to where you're going, you can craft solutions and turn them into action-ready projects.

Do

Most organizations don't know how to integrate short-term and future thinking without sacrificing productivity. Further, most assume they don't have the time. I assure you, they do. In Part Three, you'll learn the 5 Percent Rule: a way to incorporate future thinking into a standard organizational system that requires no more than 5 percent of your time and resources. The 5 Percent Rule is an approximate measure of investment of time, talent, and money required to ensure that futurist thinking thrives in a business environment. You will learn to manage the alignment of short- and long-term projects, making your life easier and your work smarter and more efficient.

The idea bears repeating: the work of the futurist is to make your work smarter and more efficient, to offer a discipline and a structure to help you see into the future and align your company's goals with what is coming. By understanding change, you're able to lead change—again, no matter what economy the pundits say we're experiencing. Within each economy lie practices that we name in order to make sense of the change. Recent paradigms are systems thinking and design thinking. I call these mental models and will explore the ideas behind them and others in the chapters that follow. But the bottom line is this: there are laws and mechanics of change that remain constant, no matter what you call the latest thinking. It is the goal of this book to make seeing into your corporate future plain and practical—and a whole lot more effective than looking into a crystal ball. By the end of this book, you will know how to think like a futurist to achieve long-term resiliency and profit.

Think Like a Futurist

Part One

Know—The Four Forces of Change

The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed.

—William Gibson, science fiction writer

Chapter One

The Four Forces of Change

It is important to remember that the focus of this book is on thinking, not on trends. Certainly, we'll uncover a number of trends here in Part One, but as the Four Forces Model will show, the thinking and process hold up no matter what the trend may be.

Current trends are not the purview of a futurist anyhow. Our concern is with the deep, structural forces that are constant and that cast a longer shadow on the future. In my work as a futurist, I have sought to reduce change to its most elemental components and have come up with the Four Forces Model. Just as hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and sulfur are the four building blocks of all life forms, resources, technology, demographics, and governance are the four building blocks of all change. These forces generally move more slowly than trends and have a permanent effect. Because we understand the relationship among the four forces—a relationship we will examine in the following pages—we also understand that the changes they bring about occur in a fairly predictable manner. What we can't predict are their outcomes.

To appreciate how the four forces shape society, it's useful to look at human society as it was taking shape, during the time of Neanderthals, fifty thousand years ago. An archetypal depiction of this group usually shows them huddled around a fire, holding spears, either getting ready for or feeding on the results of the day's hunt. The four forces are easily identified in a scene such as this, as everything about their life is in a more elemental form: resources comprise the food and materials that nature offers; technology is represented by the spears; demographic data could be measured on the fingers of just a few members; and governance is inferred from the evidence that they've managed to create a home base that supports a group.

Over time, humans have been able to harness the power of the four forces for their own benefit. In the process, they have moved from a position of hand-to-hand combat with the forces in a battle for survival, to one of greater comfort and ease. We'll explore how the four forces have been the constants in every stage of development and how, with the exception of catastrophic events, progress has unfolded in an evolutionary manner. Our journey begins, here, with our Neanderthal predecessors.

Resources. Neanderthals spent much of their days hunting and gathering food and collecting materials, such as wood and stone, from their environment to make fire, tools, and rudimentary shelters. Their lives depended on what was readily available (or not) in close proximity. If what was at hand wasn't enough, or if the grass looked as though it would be greener someplace else, then they'd go in search of new hunting and gathering grounds.

Technology. Tools helped Neanderthals get the most out of what the environment had to offer, and transform it into secondary resources. For example, fire could transform a fresh animal into cooked, digestible food; melt hard minerals into new, moldable forms; and convert clay into pots. Each of these secondary materials introduces new capacities—improving food storage and shelter, for example—which build on one another. In this way, technology begets new technologies.

Demographics. Though often no larger than a clan of forty, early societies were also concerned with having the right demographic mix of age, gender, and genetic diversity. This is an important third category of assets, after resources and technology, for who you have on your team is the primary factor in how successful you'll be as a group. Productivity is the key. Whether it's the ability to produce more children or provide more labor, the capacity to enhance the health and wealth of the group relies on who's in the mix.

Governance. Distribution and management of the group's assets—resources, technology, and people—are administered through the rule of law and the rule of markets. Whether it is a clan of forty deciding who does the hunting, who tends the children, or how the meat is distributed, or the communist state of China mandating the distribution of resources, information, and even offspring for its 1.3 billion citizens, every society uses the rule of law and the rule of markets to adapt to a shifting landscape. And what drives those shifts? Why, resources, technology, and demographics, of course.

We may have graduated from loincloths to spacesuits and from cave dwellings to smart homes, but there's a whole lot that hasn't changed since prehistoric times. We've gained comfort, convenience, and complexity, but the four forces are still the foundation for life.

There's a hierarchy among the four forces that has also remained constant over time. Because the availability of resources is most closely related to survival, it is the foundation of the system of forces. It is also the slowest moving of the four, sometimes moving at the pace of a glacier, literally. Change in resources is affected by gradual processes—such as evolution, mineral formation, climate change, tectonic shifts—and by human activity. The exception is when, due to these gradual changes, pressure builds, then releases in a sudden eruption or weather system such as a tsunami, earthquake, or hurricane. The utter destruction waged by such events reminds us why resources rank first among the four forces. Resources can pull rank anytime; all it takes is a tsunami or earthquake to remind us which force has the upper hand.

In the hierarchy of forces, technology comes second. The tools and knowledge we use to extract and transform resources into new products and new capacities are what expand our world. Technology also expands human capabilities, giving us power beyond our physical bodies to make things, go places, and discover new realities. Something as simple as magnification in a microscope or telescope opened up an entirely new way of understanding life that shifted beliefs and morality, affected medicine and science, and allowed us to dream about worlds beyond our own.

Knowledge among humans is progressive. Technological innovation builds on what came before it, which explains why the rate of change in technology accelerates over time, limited