Posts filed under 'future'
Christmas Collection # 3
Andrew Curry, London: Future Savvy, by Adam Gordon
Future Savvy was the most stimulating futures book I read this year. I was put off at first; it sets itself up as a book about forecasting, and I am sceptical about this (you learn early in futures work that all forecasts are wrong, except for the ones which are right for the wrong reasons). But businesses and governments live by forecasts, and as you go further in, you discover that Adam Gordon’s intent is to make us appreciate the limits of forecasting.
There are good chapters on the nature of bias (social and personal), on why technology-led forecasts are so often wrong, and a reminder that the ‘blockers’ of change can be as influential as the ‘drivers of change’. Unlike some futures books, it is also clear and well-written.
It ends with a couple of chapters which are designed to improve the quality of our thinking about the future. The first takes some actual forecasts and interrogates their assumptions and gaps. (The forecast for the US housing market to 2013 by the US Homeownership Alliance is self-serving and spectacularly wrong). The second has a useful set of questions the reader can use to test the value of a forecast. As he concludes,
Good forecasting is as much about seeing what won’t change in the future. Even in fast-moving situations, not everything will change.
(The Future Savvy blog is here.)
Liz Walkling, London: The Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson
I have just finished reading this crime trilogy inside a month! The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest are un-putdownable, with a complex, interconnected and riveting plot and a cast of intriguing characters – journalists, security experts, corporate heads and a network of hacking experts. Particularly likeable – even given her multi-faceted role as victim, anti-heroine and the saviour of the day – is the dysfunctional Lisbeth Salander, an extraordinarily gifted computer hacker. These skills enable her to uncover the long-unsolved disappearance of the daughter of a Swedish corporate millionaire, aided by the other central character, Mikael Blomqvist, an investigative reporter. The trilogy starts and finishes in tight courtroom dramas. It’s compelling because Lisbeth’s own story is a true injustice in all the senses of the word, but it’s this that makes her unusual character so likable. I was sad to finish it and desperately tried to slow down to eke out the pleasure, but the final volume was so gripping that I failed. I was so engrossed I almost missed my tube stop several times.
Claudia Rimington, London: Damien Hirst, No Love Lost
Hirst’s latest exhibition consists of 25 oil paintings, all large, dark and brooding, in two rooms in the Wallace collection. Most of the paintings contain an object associated with death (a skull, a skeleton) and they sit in dark blue spaces. All similar in feeling, and dominating the two classical rooms in which they are housed, their exhibition space is cold and atmospheric. Though the exhibition isn’t full of cheery subject matter, I would definitely recommend a visit to this before it closes on January 24th. What’s attractive about this exhibition is the rare beauty of some of the works. There’s something strangely compelling about Hirst’s low lit skulls in the dark – the deepness of the colours, the contrast between a sense of humanity and the nothingness which surrounds.
(You can watch a short video where Damien Hirst talks about the works in this exhibition here.)
2 comments 30 December 2009
More books… and a film
A couple of late arrivals for our review of favourites from 2008.
J. Walker Smith, Chapel Hill:
Let’s say you develop some idea of what the future is likely to hold. Do you then know what to do about it? That’s the question that University of Chicago law professor and prolific public intellectual Cass Sunstein tackles in his thorough discussion of planning for Worst-Case Scenarios. This has obvious relevance for the most frightful worries of our age like climate change, suitcase nukes, anthrax, avian flu and GMOs. But it is relevant as well to every policy action and business decision. Sunstein critiques the Precautionary Principle and Cost-Benefit Analysis to recommend an alternative that he believes better balances risks and benefits. This book is another must-read from Sunstein for anyone doing strategic analysis or scenario planning.
Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, Brian Wasnick (Bantam Books, 2006) Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do, Tom Vanderbilt (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008′)
Behavioral economics is all the rage these days, and the bestsellers Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely and Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein have helped popularize this branch of social psychology. But do we really understand how these classic psychology experiments and even the more recent work in economics apply to real life, particularly to business and marketing? Two recent books make this connection for eating and traffic. Brian Wasnick teaches marketing and nutritional science at Cornell where his lab has done pioneering work deciphering the workings of the
‘mindless margin’ that lies between healthy and unhealthy food choices. Tom Vanderbilt is a science and culture journalist who embedded himself for three years with traffic researchers and engineers to answer questions like ‘why does the other lane always seem faster’ and ‘why are dangerous roads safer’ and ‘why do women cause more congestion than men.’
Larissa Persons, New York:
5×2 is the story of an unhappy marriage told backwards in five parts. It begins with the divorce. And it ends with the couple, Marion and Giles, meeting for the first time. Each of the five ‘chapters’ focuses in on a particular scene from their lives together. We see the couple hosting a dinner party while their young son sleeps. We see the birth of their child. We see their wedding. Each scene peels away another emotional layer and offers another insight into the individuals and their relationship.
Ozon exploits the construct of reverse chronology to the full. So the film is not about what happens – after all we know the end from the beginning – but rather is about why it happened. And by the time you get to the end (of the film) it is clear that the roots of the couple’s demise are there, plain for all to see, right from the start of the romance. You can see the drivers that created the future.
And while the construct turns the viewer into a clinical observer of the dissection of the marriage, the details revealed and the style of the narrative are almost disconcertingly intimate. This serves to ensure that you become intensely involved in the story itself and with the two main characters, rather than simply remaining an innocent bystander. The film therefore manages to be gripping, despite its removal of conventional suspense.
It’s not exactly an enjoyable 90 minutes, but I found 5×2 powerful and memorable. It’s also got an excellent soundtrack, courtesy of Philippe Rombi.
Add comment 24 January 2009
Most recent Henleymail now online
Jo Phillips writes:
The latest edition of HenleyMail (our free regular think piece email) is now available to read online here. There’s a chance to consider responses to the economic downturn in both the lead article by our UK managing director on how brands can adapt to a recession, and a perspective from Yankelovich in the United States on undermining the ‘fear factor’. There’s also an article on some of the work we have been doing on long-term futures – sharing some of the learnings and indeed the challenges that arise when we look to expand our strategic horizons in this way.
After over 60 issues, this is the last edition of HenleyMail – but only because we’re changing the name. As a result of our merger and rebrand, from now on the newsletter will be known as Futureproof. If you’d like to receive it you can sign up here.
The picture at the top of this post is ‘Hard Times’, by the 19th century painter Sir Hubert von Herkomer. From The Victorian Web.
1 comment 19 January 2009
Grant Park’s tipping points
Editor’s note: Walker Smith, who runs The Futures Company’s Yankelovich division in the United States, has sent a long post reflecting on the 40-year context of Barack Obama’s Presidential victory this week. The conventional wisdom is that blog posts should be short and pithy. But we think that from time to time it’s better to give an argument the space and time it needs to unfold. Walker’s short essay is one of those occasions.
Walker Smith writes:
Barack Obama’s victory on Tuesday night was not unexpected. Three weeks out, political pundits knew that Obama had a lead that has never been overcome in modern political history. (Horse race political junkies will enjoy my favorite campaign resource, www.fivethirtyeight.com.) The real drama came an hour later when Obama took the stage with his family to honor this historic moment in his moving victory speech.
Chicago’s Grant Park, the scene of the victory rally, is a beautiful, expansive park bordering Lake Michigan that to this day still stirs up grueling memories for Baby Boomers like me, of the police violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The question that hangs over Barack Obama’s election is whether it really does represents the end of a 40-year cycle of deep political and cultural division, even though his electoral victory was built on effective party-political organisation rather than cutting across party-political lines.
1 comment 7 November 2008
“We are where we are”
Rachel Kelnar writes:
I went to two really interesting futures events last week and was struck by the extent to which some emerging learnings were common to both, despite having expected beforehand that the topics would have little in common.
First, I attended a debate at the London Transport Museum (LTM) on the future of transport – ‘Survive or Thrive: What will urban life be like in 2055?’ The LTM used the intelligent infrastructure scenarios which my colleague Andrew Curry and I wrote for the UK Government’s Foresight Programme as the starting point for this discussion. I also participated in ‘Museums in the Long Now’ – a roundtable exploring the future of the museum, organised by the Cultural Leadership Programme at City University and Compton Verney, with funding from the London Centre for Arts and Cultural Enterprise (LCACE).
An emerging theme of both sessions was ‘we are where we are’ – that if we were to design a transport system for the UK, we would not set out to design what we currently have, and neither would we fund or develop our museums in the way we do now. However, ‘we are where we are’ – and we therefore have to temper our views of the future with the reality of this starting point. We don’t have the luxury of a blank slate.
However, it’s important that this doesn’t limit us in terms of what we strive for, and both sessions used scenarios to help participants resist the temptation to think too short term, or too negatively.
Another interesting reflection for me was the potentially changing role of museums. They are generally considered windows to the past and this is pretty uncontroversial. But, if museums are to remain relevant in the future, they perhaps need to do more than reflect on what has already happened. They need to start providing a window on the future as well. The LTM has certainly embraced this idea, with the Future Generator, which allows every virtual or real museum visitor to explore how their choices can impact the future of London and the type of city we will all live in. It’s about putting the Museum at the heart of the debate about our transport system, sustainability and the London we might have in 2055, and pleasingly, it’s also based on the scenarios we were involved in writing.
Discussing the Museum of the Long Now, it became increasingly clear that many museums may well be a natural home for such futures exploration. They are naturally places where people go to learn – to be challenged, provoked, and to understand a culture, a society or a particular event in our history. This mindset is a good one for thinking about the future of our culture and our society – because thinking about the past is the first step to thinking more effectively about the future.
This shift is not without its challenges – it requires, for example, that museums get a bit more comfortable with conflict than many are at the moment. If museums can successfully place themselves at the heart of our future – regardless of the issue – than they are helping to cement their role in our lives going forward. We are where we are – but we don’t have to be stuck here.
1 comment 25 June 2008
Blind spots on globalisation
Joe Ballantyne writes:
Back in the late 90s, and even more recently, globalisation was all the rage. Some people thought this was a jolly good thing and it would make us all rich and free, while others thought it was a really bad thing. which would lead to greater poverty and environmental damage. Either way, almost everyone agreed that we were careering towards a brave new globalised world, ruled by the free flow of capital between nations, and characterised by global institutions and global flows of people and goods.
Fast forward a decade, however, and things start to look quite a bit different. Countries like India, Russia and China are much wealthier and more powerful than ten years ago, the expansion of international groupings such as the EU seems to have all but halted, and the ongoing drama of the credit crunch suggests that financial deregulation has reached its limits. Protectionism is a recurring theme in the Democrat candidates’ contest in the US, and the chief executive of Deutsche Bank was recently quoted as saying that he “no longer believes in the market’s self-healing power” – and when the head of a major bank starts saying that financial markets need some sort of state intervention, you know something’s up. The public seem to think so: most of us admit a growing suspicion around the role free markets in the economy.
So how did the global theorists – from both the left and the right – so misjudge globalisation? There’s a whole thesis to be written on this, but some pointers could be:
- Many of them were working in internationally-focussed institutions such as universities or global banks – which probably blinded them to the attitudes of the majority who weren’t globetrotting, post-national types.
- Many of them had come to believe the widely canvassed idea that financial power will always trump state power – where as in fact, nationalism is a tremendously strong driver of domestic politics and therefore of political change.
- The Brits in particular lived in a country which had probably gone further than almost any other towards developing a ‘post-national’ identity, embracing the market and minimising the role of national symbols such as the monarchy, religion and so on. But what happened in Britain wasn’t replicated elsewhere.
One of the things we say in futures work is that if the filters you see the world through are too strong, they act like the blinkers on a horse – and create blind spots which make it harder to see signs of change. It’s interesting to think of other blindspots our assumptions about the world might create for us.
The picture was taken by David Eppstein.
1 comment 24 April 2008
The next age of the train
Andrew Curry writes:
This is one of those unexpected pieces of data. According to figures just released by the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC), more miles were travelled by train in the UK last year than in any other year, at least in peacetime. The total mileage – just over 30 billion passenger miles – topped the previous record figure set in 1946. In fact, rail has been growing much faster than car mileage since 1995; the reasons include greater road congestion and rising car costs, investment in new trains, and more accessible information and booking (through online, for example).
ATOC marked the occasion with a booklet, The Billion Passenger Railway (opens in pdf). As it happens, it has been involved in a recent scenarios project we’ve run for the rail sector on the future of a sustainable industry, and through this I was invited to contribute a picture of rail in 75 years time – a story I thought might well be about European connections. That future scenario, ‘A Europe of City States’, is below the fold.
Image by Atlan at his Cityscapes and Skyline Photos blog.
2 comments 16 April 2008
The future is already here…
Andrew Curry writes:
One of the best-known quotes about futures work – “the future’s already here, it’s just unevenly distributed” – is by the novelist William Gibson, and it’s one of several quotes we sometimes use to introduce futures concepts at workshops. But it’s become dulled by familiarity; a couple of months ago, at a workshop with our sometime collaborator Wendy Schultz, she wondered out loud if there was another way of making the point that there were almost always clues around us as to how the future would evolve, as long as we listened for them (“weak signals”, in futures jargon).
So Russell Davies’ recent post suggesting that the Gibson line “needed flipping around” raised a wry smile. I think the problem is that the line has become so familiar to practitioners that it has floated free from its meaning – it signifies that the speaker does some futures and and knows that very familiar William Gibson line. But it still has meaning for audiences who are new to, or unfamiliar with, futures’ work, who haven’t heard it before; they get it straightaway. It’s about the listeners, not the speaker.
As for the quote: Gibson himself has suggested an alternative:
“Glancing sideways is becoming more generally recognized as about the best way of doing what we used to call futurism.”
[Thanks to the end of cyberspace for the link to this].
Image of William Gibson by Fred Armitage with thanks to Wikipedia
Add comment 20 February 2008
Influential Boomers
Siân Davies writes:
Henley Centre HeadlightVision is just embarking on a merger with the US research company Yankelovich – the market leaders in understanding the changing values and behaviours of US consumers.
While we’ve been negotiating I’ve had the good fortune to immerse myself in much of their research. One publication which stood out for me was ‘Generation Ageless‘, by J Walker Smith and Ann Clurman, Yankelovich’s leading commentators on generational marketing. Yankelovich coined the term ‘baby boomers’ in the 1960s when they first started collecting data on this influential generation. As Walker and Ann say: “Without notice or warning, in defiance of all trends and expectations, Baby Boomers exploded onto the American scene, and in the process changed everything”.
Add comment 1 February 2008
In with the old?
Jo Philips writes:
I was struck by the following quote when reading the historian Theodore Zeldin today:
“What to do with too much information is the great riddle of our time. My solution is to look at the facts through two lenses simultaneously, both through a microscope, choosing details that illuminate life in those aspects that touch people most closely, and through a telescope, surveying large problems from a great distance.”
Zeldin’s argument reinforces Michelle Singer’s previous post on understanding both macro- and micro-narratives to build a robust picture of change. History also helps. Recently in an office workshop we looked back to images from 50 years ago to see what had changed and what had stayed the same. Some of the findings were quite surprising, and it made me think about the importance of a grounding in history to imagine the future. Perhaps the New Year newspapers’ reviews of 2007 are as important for understanding future change as their predictions for the year ahead…
Add comment 7 January 2008
