Hinesight....for Foresight

For Foresight, Use Hinesight

You are here: Home / Search for "visions"

Search Results for: visions

by on Leave a Comment

Visions of the future over time

Back in 1995, influential economist Robert Heilbroner was given the opportunity to look at the role of visions in history and the future. [It is very revealing to note only a passing acknowledgement of the foresight field, in which he cites the work of political analyst Max Singer who was a colleague of the futurist Herman Kahn – a six degrees thing]. Anyhow, that niggle aside, it is a delightful book and I enjoyed it!

Heilbroner divides history/human existence into four time periods:

  • The distant past, from the beginning of homo sapiens 150,000 years ago to “yesterday,”
  • Yesterday, roughly 250 years ago (Note: roughly arrival of the industrial revolution and capitalism).
  • Today, it was 1995
  • The future

The visions of the distant past, while varied in form, had the common element of saying little about changes in humans material condition, and focused primarily on the rewards or punishments of the next life. The view of the future is one of resignation to one’s fate. As I’ve noted in my research on values, my shorthand for the traditional values prevalent here is “follow the rules.”

The visions of yesterday are characterized by “the rise and flourishing of capitalism.” In this period “the future now enters into human consciousness as a great beckoning prospect…re: improving the human condition…and we begin to look to the human future with confidence.” The vision of the future shifts from the next life to this one. He does make the caveat that this shift is primarily in the affluent Western nations. In values terms here, we have the rise of modern values here – “achieve.”

The transition to today leads to another shift in visions to “a new degree of pessimism. He notes that science begins to supplant religion, which was the central visionary element of the past. We also begin to see “the seismic pressure exerted by the accumulation of capital.” He refers to how Marx acknowledges the tremendous dynamism and growth resulting from capitalism, cautions that it is like “a sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.” Put bluntly, he observers that “since its postwar reconstruction boom, capitalism has evidenced serious malfunctions in every nation.” He characterizes the visions as apprehensive, which aligns with the postmodern values “search for meaning.”

Heilbroner’s assumption when he talks about tomorrow — he is writing this in 1995 — is that “it is likely that capitalism will be the principal form of socioeconomic organization during the twenty-first century….because no blueprint exists for a viable successor.” At the same time, he acknowledges that “capitalism will not last forever…its internal dynamics are too powerful.” The tomorrow vision is kinda blah:

  • A secure terrestrial base for life (don’t wreck the environment)
  • Preserving the human community as a whole against its war-like proclivities (don’t blow it up, you maniacs)
  • Respect for human nature if given the cultural and education centrality it demands (be nice to each other).

He admits it’s not much, but asks his critics “if they have anything better.” Hopefully the After Capitalism work will produce something better. – Andy Hines

by on 3 Comments

Visions, images, and utopias

I’m working on the explanation of what’s to come for After Capitalism. As regular readers are aware by now, three clusters or themes have emerged from the review of the 50-ish new/next economy ideas. But what to call them? It seems that visions, images, or utopias could each fit.

So far I have been referring to them primarily as visions, in part because I’ve been using IFF’s Three Horizons Model, which refers to the concepts in Horizon 3 as visions.

At the same time, a key inspiration for doing this work building upon my longstanding interest in images of the future. One of my earliest papers on the future when I was an undergrad in the 1980s was an analysis of Polak’s Image of the Future. So to pay proper homage to this work, the three themes could rightfully be called images.

It would also be fair to say that my intention to uncover positive stories about the future could be utopias. Indeed, Polak talked about eschatological and utopic images of the future, the former brought about by God and the latter from man.

Given that they are the key focus of the after capitalism book, one ought to be precise in the terminology, right? It has turned out to be quite a challenging journey to determine if there is any useful difference between the three.

The dictionary doesn’t provide much help:

  • Image: a mental representation; idea; conception.
  • Vision: a vivid, imaginative conception or anticipation.
  • Utopia: any visionary system of political or social perfection.

Where I have netted out, in terms of operational definitions for the project:

  • Vision is a project crafted by a group for its particular future [intent is to achieve].
  • Image is an aspirational view of the universal human future based on ideal values within a culture, [intent is to inspire to achieve].
  • Utopia is probably the least “accurate” of the three as it crafts a specific story of a specific place.

My sense at this point is that images is perhaps the most accurate of the three. But this use of the term image is probably more well-known among futurists. Visions may have a bit more popular appeal? What do you think? Does anyone possess a nice clear distinction between vision and image that might help? I would be grateful for your help, and will acknowledge it in the book if I use it! – Andy Hines

by on 4 Comments

Why create visions or images?

We had a nice discussion on the APF list last week that started out on the gig economy and ended up exploring ideas for visions or images of the post-capitalist future. It was suggested that those looking at after capitalism were perhaps hypnotized and failing to recognize that capitalism was simply reinventing itself again. Fair point! A big question from the works I’ve reviewed so far is that many indeed suggest a next phase of capitalism, which I’m capturing as the Horizon Two transition concepts. It was also suggested that the smart money is on these reinvention ideas compared to post-capitalism. Again, fair point. But that raises a question of what futurists ought to be doing.

Is our job to suggest where to put the smart money on the future? In some cases  the answer is yes. For many clients, we are indeed helping them to develop a more informed view of the emerging future by crafting plausible alternative futures — so that they can make the necessary course corrections. But we have another job: crafting images of preferred futures! Long-term preferred futures at that. Horizon Three. If we don’t, who will? [Well, science fiction does some of that — and some of it is very, very good]. But I think most futurists would agree that at least part of our job is to open up the possibility space for our clients, the public, and everyone to imagine where we might go (and what we want to avoid).

My answer: I spend more of my time on Horizon 2 and I’d like to shift to more time on Horizon 3.

Indeed, more Horizon 3 work is part of the motivation for the After Capitalism work. We know Polak’s charge – the lack of a positive guiding image is the downfall of a civilization. So we’ve been sifting through concepts via the capitalism/post-capitalism lens for the last few years. Clearly, the question is bigger than just economics, but the “centrality” of capitalism to much of the world’s way of life makes it a fruitful starting point.

The argument about “is capitalism dying” or “when will it die” is an interesting and useful one that needs to be discussed. But that doesn’t mean we should neglect to consider what might come after. Shame on us if it is dying, and we don’t have positive and compelling alternatives to suggest. Andy Hines

by on Leave a Comment

After Capitalism Visions Taking Shape

Small steps forward. It’s helpful in research to step back everyone once in and while and assess or re-assess where you are. I’m happy with this structure (see “reframing”)

  • “signals” emanating from Horizon 1
  • “transitions emerging in Horizon 2
  • “visions” calling from Horizon 3

So far, three visions are taking shape. I’ve been going sources/readings relating to them in hopes of getting a better fix on what the essence of each vision is. In particular, they needed better titles! The hyphenated mixing of two concepts….yuck. So, after much contemplation and caffeine.

  • Abundance/Singularity renamed Tech-led Abundance. A struggle here, as the Singularity is often thought of as a vision, but almost by definition it really isn’t – we can’t know what’s on the other side of the Singularity. Not very helpful in terms of vision-building. What’s associated with the Singularity is the high-tech future. Abundance is as well. And Abundance is more of an economic concept. The core idea is that this is the tech-fix scenario (whatever it’s ultimately called).
  • Non-workers’ Paradise stays the same. The best title of course is not mine. I started with Workers Paradise as a placeholder for what I was calling the “Reformed Left” concept. A colleague, Christopher Farrow, pointed out that the vision was about “not working,” thus the clever addition of non-
  • Sustainability renamed Sustainable Commons. Sustainability is a bit of a mixed bag – on the one hand, it describes current activities and on the other it is very well-known. The works comprising this concept sort into environmentally inclined or morality-based or purpose driven – often combining the two. I have been really influenced by arguments about moving to a more commons-based approach – particularly by Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics. The “commons” idea may be key here.

Let’s also keep in mind that there are visions of collapse that needed to be accounted for. But the emphasis, really the purpose of this work is to identify positive visions.

As I think about refining the visions, I see the rabbit hole of “what are the key components of a transformational vision? – Andy Hines

by on 1 Comment

Visions looks forward, not backward

This Sunday’s NY Times, alongside a piece chortling about the problems that Roy Moore is causing Republicans, featured five Democratic leaders providing a message for their party. Surely the stunning and devastating defeat put on the party by Trump and the Republicans has prompted Democratic political leaders to do some soul-searching, re-thinking and strategizing? So, what have we got?

  • Leaders #1 called for “jobs and economic growth.”  I think we’ve heard that one before.
  • Leader #2 suggests going back to JFK and FDR…and “folks in the middle.” Okay, let’s look 50-and 80+ years back….
  • Leader #3 recognizes that a high school diploma is no longer a ticket to a good job, but at least acknowledges we can’t turn back the clock.
  • Leader #4 talks about the need for a vision of the future, refers to back to Kennedy, and does some cheer-leading.  cheer.
  • Leader #5 wants to keep it simple and “return to the center of gravity of lived experience.” I’m not 100% sure what that means, but it seems to have something to do with “sticking up for ordinary people.

Oh my! I apologize for my snarkiness, but this is dreadful. Readers of the After Capitalism series will likely recognize that my tendencies are far to the left of the Democrats. I am much more sympathetic to them than Trump and Republicans. I was [stupidly] hopeful that this zinging defeat might give the Democrats pause, and rethink what the party is about.

Let’s take off our political hats and put our futurist hats back on. A key message becoming increasingly clear in our After Capitalism series is that we lack a compelling vision of the future – despite the plethora of “new economy” concepts we identified and analyzed. We lack a “pull of the future” that a positive and compelling vision provides. That vision must come from looking forward, not backward. We are not going to find the answers to super-intelligent AI, gene splicing, nanobots, climate change, and global terrorism in a context of several generations ago. Sure, there are lessons from the past (I have a history degree – I’m not anti-history), but in effect the Democrats above are playing the same nostalgic tune about going back that simply is not possible.

These backward-looking visions are a response to fear of the future. Since we fear the future, we look back for the “simpler” days. As we futurists know, a trip back is likely to be driven by collapse. So, our work must go on to develop images and visions of the future that are positive and compelling, and offer a better choice than that drivel above.  – Andy Hines

by on Leave a Comment

The Election and After Capitalism

Thinking about what the election results mean for After Capitalism (plz, no current politics … important, but not here). A few years back I set the timeframe for After Capitalism at 20-30 years. Part of me thought, don’t be so timid. The other part of me recalled my own frequent warning that transformation scenarios avoid “bunnies and rainbows” and keep plausibility in mind. What sealed the 20-30 year timeframe is the deeper I got into the research, the more questions it raised. Lots of questions. Big questions. So many things need to happen for such a monumental shift. My greatest fear was, and still is, that capitalism collapses too soon – before we are ready. It may sound counterintuitive but I think 20-30 years is actually a pretty optimal timing. There is A LOT of work to do!

The election. After Capitalism is all about creating forward-looking guiding images of positive or preferred futures that we might aspire to. The key ere are “forward-looking.” The problem with both US political party visions is they are backward-looking. The Republic MAGA vision is very clearly  bring back the good old days — although the timeframe is not clear. The Democratic vision of “middle-capitalism” is also about bringing back the past. To be blunt, the middle-class is gone. This vision does not go as far back into the past, but it’s still backward-looking. They both fit with futurist Sohail Inayatullah’s concept of used futures.

My hope that the After Capitalism work can stimulate some discussion of forward-looking visions. Some good news there is I will soon be sharing some tangible info about the book … release is coming soon. Andy Hines

by on 4 Comments

What Is a Preferred Future?

Oh wow, a definitions discussion … how exciting. Bear with me. I think there is some juicy stuff here! We futurists all know the struggle with different interpretations of key terms. Variety is the spice of  life, but it can be a pain when trying to explain our work.

Let’s start with good news. I’m seeing much more interest in “preferred futures.” We’ve been asked to include it in our training at Houston Foresight and in our project work as well. For example, we created a preferred future in our Future of Libraries project for the Seattle Public Library system. It also came up on the After Capitalism research where I focused on the difference between visions, images, and utopias.

I grant you that this definition is not exactly how we thought of it previously. It’s been one of those nagging “doesn’t feel quite right” problems. One thing we started doing several years back is creating a preferred future archetype, which was inspired by the work of Clem Bezold (among others) on aspirational futures. Our Houston Archetype Technique (the HAT), which is derived from the pioneering work of Jim Dator), synthesizes scanning and research into a set of key drivers that in turn are projected into the future using four archetypes or patterns of change. We added the “preferred future” as the fifth archetype.

This approach indeed produces a preferred future scenario. But it is kinda different, right? So, what is different? In our Advanced Strategies class, we have been working on integrating foresight more closely into strategy work. We absolutely believe in the power of foresight, and the power of vision, to guide strategy development. But how to connect? Voila. The preferred future can be thought of as the expression of the vision. What might the vision look like? That’s what scenarios do … they tell us stories about what the future might look like.

Are you seeing this growing interest in preferred futures ? Love to hear your stories on that. – Andy Hines

by on 1 Comment

Imagining After Capitalism article

A new Imagining After Capitalism article is out in the Journal of Futures Studies (JOFS). It is the [plant-based] meatiest piece I’ve put out so far, clocking in at over 6,000 words. It talks about how I tailored our Framework Foresight approach to fit the particular task of searching for and analyzing ideas images about images of After Capitalism. It describes the seven key drivers of change. It includes a table that briefly highlights the major (not all) works I used  in putting together the three guiding images of the Future. And it explains the images in more detail than previous work.

Kudos to JOFS for this wonderful image – love it!

I put the written piece together for the Finland Futures Research Center annual conference a few summers ago – the video version is below:

I’m getting closer to sending back the book manuscript revisions to the publisher! — Andy Hines

Filed Under: After Capitalism Tagged With: , , , ,

Sign up for updates

by on Leave a Comment

Houston Archetype Technique Updated

Not new, but updated … as promised in a previous post. To recap, for several years we and our audiences at the  Houston Foresight program thought we saw likely patterns in how domains evolve over time using archetypes and the Three Horizons. We use a customized version of Jim Dator’s Archetype technique (see Evolution of Framework Foresight).

We (finally) did the research by gathering and analyzing historical scenario sets. We identified those using or aligning with the archetypes and observing, with the benefit of hindsight, whether the domains did in fact follow a pattern along the three horizons. The paper has been through revisions and is still in the pipeline. (It is taking such a long time – peer review is broken, but that’s for another post.)   

The most significant change to the original graphic is that the super-talented Denise Worrell re-designed it (Denise is part of the research team along with myself, Heather Benoit, Lavonne Leong, Laura Schlehuber, and Adam Cowart.) On the graphic, we explicitly added the three horizons label. We already had put forth the idea of two versions of transformation in the early version. Now that we have used it in practice a few times, we like it and it’s here to stay. We should be able to share an example publicly soon (another piece stuck in a review process). We also added some design polish, i.e., shading and a redesigned logo.

Now, for a little sneak preview of the research findings. The key purpose of the research is to see if there is a pattern in the flow of a domain through the archetypes and across the three horizons. There are two obvious candidates.

  • Baseline > New Equilibrium > Transformation
  • Baseline > Collapse> Transformation

Of these two, we thought the answer was obvious. We appear to be wrong. Care to guess? – Andy Hines

by on Leave a Comment

Utopia … No Thanks

I am a futurist, but I love history. They are cousins after all. As we explore the possibilities for After Capitalism, it’s good to have a solid grounding what’s happened before, so we might learn some lessons the easier instead of the harder way.

Economist Brad DeLong provides a history of what he calls  the “long twentieth century ” beginning circa 1870 in Slouching Toward Utopia. He cites three critical developments: globalization, the industrial research lab, and the modern corporation. This triple combo provides the spark to “pull the world out of the dire poverty that had been humanity’s lot for the previous ten thousand years.” The key was not just inspiring invention and innovation, but developing the process and structures for reproducing it. It triggered the growth spurt that is now causing up problems today and into the future. The long twentieth century ended in 2010 in the throes of the Great Recession.

One way to look at this – this was an unprecedented and incredible growth spurt. It is not the norm, but I think we have come to expect this growth as the norm. Ideas suggesting slowing growth, steady state, or even degrowth are not as crazy at they might seem given this context.

He also makes the point that this long twentieth century was the first century in which the most important historical thread was the economic one. Again, those alive today have grown up in a context of homo economicus that is taken for granted. But it is not the “normal” state of affairs. It is not unthinkable that we might rethink that idea.

I enjoyed the book. It’s easy to read, entertaining, and covers a lot of territory in a useful way. I do find myself curious why he chose a title with utopia. He doesn’t seem to be much of a fan of utopia – I guess “slouching” was the clue there. For instance, he says “utopian imaginings during the long twentieth century were responsible for its most shocking grotesqueries.” Or “utopian faith is a helluva drug.”

While he is sympathetic to markets, he is not a slavish advocate either: “One reason why human progress toward utopia has been but a slouch is that so much of it has been and still is mediated by the market economy.” He advocates a mixed approach.  

It is food for thought as we consider images of the future. Earlier I explained why I chose images over utopia and visions. DeLong’s work makes glad I chose that way! – Andy Hines

Filed Under: After Capitalism Tagged With: , , , , ,

Sign up for updates