framework foresight | Hinesight....for Foresight

by Andy Hines on April 18, 2018 Leave a Comment

The Purpose of Purpose?

Surely, purpose would fit with our set of Horizon 3 Visions, right? In fact we originally referred to the “Sustainable Commons” visions as “Sustainability and Moral Purpose.” So I was surprised to find after digging into The Purpose Economy book, that it squarely fit as in H2 Transitions as a “New Source of Value” branch.

The simple distinction: H3 Visions propose a new economic system to follow capitalism, while H2 Transitions are still within the capitalist framework. There is a sub-category within these transitions: “source of new value” that in effect work within capitalism but suggest there will be a shift in emphasis on what brings value within that system. Indeed, the author of the Purpose Economy does our work for us here: “we are in the early days of the emergence of a Purpose Economy—the fourth American economy in our history….it is likely that in fewer than 20 years, the pursuit of purpose will eclipse the third American economy—the Information Economy.” So, the source of value has shifted from agriculture to manufacturing to information and now to purpose. To put this in context, thirteen other “new sources of value” concepts have been identified:

Algorithm/Data	Experience	Metaspace
Artisan	Intangible	Network
Attention	Knowledge	Philanthrocapitalism
Creative Molecular	Leisure	Relationship
		Zero Marginal Cost

To put it unfavorably, purpose becomes a new focal point for making money. We sell purpose instead of information. We co-opt the noble pursuit of making a difference and find out how to make money from it. However, that is not the intention of the author. I believe it is a quite genuine and useful attempt to improve the capitalist approach – to make the current system work better. I believe the author is committed to purpose in a noble sense, and proposing to work within the existing framework to make it happen. Some might find commercializing purpose to be a bit paradoxical, but the book is full of examples of how this is already happening. — Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on March 21, 2018 Leave a Comment

Next up: A new species!

Homo Deus makes the provocative argument that technological progress has Homo Sapiens on the path to becoming a new species. My recommendation: read this book, now!

Already, technology-led progress is helping us to “reign in” grand challenges of famine, plague and war. And we are moving on to tackle longevity and even happiness. Our growing capabilities in the biology and robotics are essentially enabling the “the upgrading of humans into gods may follow any of three paths: biological engineering, cyborg engineering and the engineering of non-organic beings. At the point when technology enables us to re-engineer our minds, we effectively become a new species, and “Homo sapiens will disappear, human history will come to an end.”

This transformative vision fits with Tech-Driven Abundance in our After Capitalism framework. It fits alongside the ideas Transhumanists, who suggest humans and technology should integrate. This merger of man and machine is also part of Kurzweil’s Singularity vision.

We are somewhat blindly moving in this direction. We use “healing” as the initial justification for every tech upgrade, sliding down a slippery slope, where we invite in technology-driven upgrades and in effective replace our Sapien-ness (my word). As time goes by it becomes easier and easier to replace humans with computer algorithms. Indeed, we will often be happy to transfer much of our decision-making processes into the hands of such a system, or at least consult with it whenever we face important choices. We will gladly hand over our files, data, etc. so that our virtual assistants can assist us better. Rely on the almighty Google!

The author suggests that humanism has been a dominant “religion” for the last 300 years. We’ve worshiped human ingenuity, particularly as embodied in science and technology. But emerging technologies are replacing this humanist religion, “stripping humans of their authority, and empowering non-human algorithms instead.” An emerging “data religion” suggests that humans have completed their cosmic task and should now pass the torch on to entirely new kinds of entities – Homo Deus. The rub, there are likely to be lots of Homo Sapiens still hanging around.

Dataism, and Homo Deus, thereby threatens to do to Homo sapiens what Homo Sapiens has done to all other animals. If “relationships between humans and animals the best model we have for future relations between superhumans and humans,” then…. Yikes, humanity has not been very kind wielding its power at the top of the food chain. Let’s hopes that Homo Deus uses that power more benevolently than Homo Sapiens have. – Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on December 5, 2017 2 Comments

Reframing After Capitalism

I introduced a new framing of the “After Capitalism” project a few weeks ago in a post on “transition.” Let’s look more closely at this reframing, which often happens several times in a book project, and is key to whether it comes together – or not! The revised simple version of the domain map indicates how we’re re-organizing the scanning.

Let’s briefly recall that the initial idea of tracking After Capitalism began five years ago when I started collecting concepts that seemed to address the next socioeconomic system. When those concepts reached what seemed to me to be a critical mass of 40 – without looking too hard – I put together an initial framework that sorted the concepts into umbrella concepts, sources of new values, sustainability, and drivers/enablers/mechanisms. That framework proved a useful starting point in introducing the ideas to audiences.

But, as happens, further scanning and research (mostly books and reports), and ideas from colleagues, drives a search for next framework based on what’s been learned. A key insight, I believe, is that the Three Horizons framework from Curry, Hodgson, and Sharpe provides a more useful organizing approach moving forward:

Horizon 1. Today’s version neoliberal capitalism has served its purpose as an effective system for economic development and growth that fit the modern context, but is an inadequate fit for the emerging postmodern [and to a lesser degree integral] context. We identified three primary challenges to the existing order:

Inequality
Ecosystem overload
Reliance on jobs as wealth distribution

There are many other drivers of change to the system, which we are now organizing by STEEP categories in our scanning. [A tricky issue that we’re wrestling with is sorting the drivers into the various horizons – for now we’re putting them all into H1.]

Horizon 3. We lack clear and compelling positive images of transformation, that is, what is after capitalism, but we have some “seeds”

Sustainability and moral purpose
Tech-driven Abundance and the Singularity
A world without work, which we’re calling, the non-workers paradise

Horizon 2. Transition concepts center on sharing, platforms, and collaboration, which have one foot in the old and one in the new; two issues seem particularly thorny for the move to transformation

Those supporting transformation have so far been ineffective in mobilizing, compared to the forces supporting the existing system
Can pockets of transformation catalyze change, that is can ideas like basic income and sustainable development take root in a global context of extreme differences in levels of development; put bluntly, one might imagine these being pioneered in affluent postmodern regions; one can also image the modern areas eventually making the transition, but can the destitute areas leapfrog to transformation without passing the modern phase of development

— Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on September 20, 2017 2 Comments

Let’s talk about success

I was happy to see my paper “Let’s Talk about Success: A Proposed Foresight Outcomes Framework for Organizational Futurists” win an APF Most Significant Futures Work Award back in July. And to be honest, a little surprised. Success in our work does not come up a lot when we talk among ourselves. We talk about the project, but not so much on whether they were judged successful. – not only bout the client but even how we viewed them. Granted, because of the timeframes we work with, it is challenging to specify or measure. So, it’s good that this topic is being recognized. Indeed, a few years back my colleague Terry Grim won an MSFW Award for the Foresight Maturity Model that measures levels of maturity in key foresight practices. The APF Professionalization Task Force identified developing professional standards as part of its second phase of work. Finally, the Houston Foresight program had “Good Futures Work” as the theme of its most recent Spring Gathering.

My old boss Joe Coates had suggested that the marketplace will tell you if you are doing good work. If you’re not, clients and repeat business will eventually go away. Typically, the practitioners in an emerging field are too busy doing the work to spend much time reflecting on it compared to established fields. They have a network of well-established university programs to do this kind of research for them. Foresight has maybe a half-dozen or so graduate programs in the entire world! And our Houston Program is a Master’s program that is aimed at producing professional futurists, not doing the deep academic research typical of PhD programs.

It makes that we are where we are. Great, now what? In a wide-open field like ours, we can practically choose the area we want to lead in. I have particularly intrigued with the integration of foresight into organizations and the role of organizational futurists. I came at the question from my own experience as an organizational futurist for The Kellogg Company and the Dow Chemical Company, and from the perspective of a consulting and academic futurist helping futurists and organizations to start an organizational foresight function – whether companies, government agencies, NGOs, non-profits, etc. Thus, my contribution to the success question started there.

I think we have to start with being clear on what we think we can deliver. And then having conversations with our clients about it. To put it bluntly, we need to start having better conversations about outcomes and success. Indeed the Foresight Outcomes Framework that I propose is quite simple and is primarily designed as a discussion starter with stakeholders and the boss. It can help to set expectations more appropriately.

This framework is based upon a key assumption that the goal of the organizational futurist is to influence the decision-making process. What it’s really trying to do is help our organizations make more informed decisions about the future. It draws on the view of Pierre Wack that scenario work is ultimately aimed at influencing the mental model of decision-makers. He suggested that effective scenarios “change the decision-makers’ assumptions about how the world works and compel them to reorganize their mental framework of reality.” In simple terms, we deliver “better decisions about the future.”

If you want more, I explored this question as part of my dissertation research a few years back from the perspective of the organizational futurist, that is, a futurist working internally for a single organization. There are gory details in my dissertation. – Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on August 30, 2017 Leave a Comment

APF Most Significant Futures Works Winners 2017

One of my favorite things to do each year is to coordinate the APF’s Most Significant Futures Works program. This year we announced winners at the APF Gathering in Seattle on Saturday, July 29th. We are building quite a library of significant futures works….stretching back to 2007. So, when someone asks “what does good futures work look like?” Point them here:

We had three winners this year out of the dozen nominees. Each winner is recommended by a two-judge team and confirmed by the full panel of judges.

Category 1 Advance the methodology and practice of foresight and futures studies “

Designing an Experiential Scenario: The People Who Vanished, Stuart Candy & Jake Dunagan, Futures, 86, Feb 2017, pp. 136-153. [link]
Let’s Talk about Success: A Proposed Foresight Outcomes Framework for Organizational Futurists, Andy Hines Journal of Futures Studies, June 2016, 20(4):1-20. [link]

Category 2 Analyze a significant future issue

Disruptive Futures: Nuclear Weapons Summit, (principals: Creative Santa Fe (Cyndi Conn, Executive Director), N Square Collaborative (Erika Gregory, Managing Director), Nuclear Threat Initiative (Deborah G. Rosenblum, Executive Vice President), PopTech (President, Leetha Filderman), Santa Fe, New Mexico, December 4-7, 2016, Conference (link)

Category 3: Illuminate the future through literary or artistic works

no winner this year

The list of nominated works that were judged included:

Category 1: What the Foresight: Your Personal Futures Explored. Defy the Expected and Define the Preferred, by Alida Draudt & Julia Rose West; The Critical Role of History in Scenario Thinking: Augmenting Causal Analysis within the Intuitive Logics Scenario Development Methodology by Ronald Bradfield, James Derbyshire, and George Wright, Let’s Talk about Success: A Proposed Foresight Outcomes Framework for Organizational Futurists by Andy Hines; Corporate Foresight, by Guest editors: Rene Rohrbeck, Eelko Huizingh and Cinzia Battistella; Designing an Experiential Scenario: The People Who Vanished by Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan; What is the Future? by John Urry; Epiphany Z: Eight Radical Visions for Transforming your Future, by Thomas Frey,

Category 2: NaturePod, by Situation Lab; Disruptive Futures: Nuclear Weapons Summit, (principals: Creative Santa Fe, N Square Collaborative, Nuclear Threat Initiative, and Poptech

Category 3: Hyper-reality, by Keiichi Matsuda, Everything Change: An Anthology of Climate Fiction, by Arizona State University’s Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative; Science Fiction Futures; Marine Corps Security Environment Forecast: Futures 2030-2045, by Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory,

I would like to acknowledge my fellow core committee members Cindy Frewen and Rowena Morrow and this year’s judges, without whom this program does not happen, were: Nur Anisah Abdullah, Liz Alexander, Josh Calder, Bob Frame, David Hamon, Robin Jourdan, Jim Lee, Michael Lee, Tricia Lustig, Oliver Markley, Sam Miller, Guillermina Baena Paz, Gabriele Rizzo, John A. Sweeney. Thank you all so much for another successful program. – Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on August 23, 2017 3 Comments

Future readiness for students

The Future of Student Needs 2025+ work sponsored by Lumina Foundation brought up potential shifting purpose of higher education from a sharp focus on jobs to a more general preparation for life. Of course, in the short term, job preparation is the sensible course, and I have advised my children accordingly. But as we look over the second and into the third horizon, we see a very plausible future of a significantly reduced supply and need for jobs, primarily due to AI/automation. Or even in the present or first horizon, we will indeed see more AI and automation. The full-time lifetime jobs are moving toward extinction, as we move to more project-based work and “taskification.” In a this future with a high degree of job uncertainty, what kind of advice we can give to educators?

Let me introduce you to a wonderful framework developed by Knowledge Works as part of their “Redefining Readiness” project. It provides advice on what’s needed to prepare students for this future. While our Student needs work identified the challenge of rethinking how we prepare students, Knowledge works has now given us a concrete and tangible framework to start building this preparation on.

I was particularly struck by the core social-emotional skills at the center of the model. In the Houston Foresight program, we have been emphasizing “practitioner development” as a key aspect of preparing for work as a futurist. So, it was pretty cool to see the Knowledge Works research come to a similar conclusion, and suggesting that we start this earlier (not waiting until graduate school). The hexagons in the diagram should also resonate with futurists — Thrive in ambiguity and uncertainty — yep, check! It was also striking to me, in spending a day exploring the implications of this work, how participants focused relatively little on “content knowledge.” Yet, filling our student’s heads with knowledge is still the modus operandi of many schools. In this future, it’s not that content goes away, but it’s how we deal with content that is the real challenge and value-add – how do we interpret it, communicate it, apply it, etc., and all within a context of human relationships (and don’t we need to get better at those!). Check this important “Redefining Readiness” work out! – Andy Hines

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by Andy Hines on July 5, 2017 3 Comments

Scanning the Fringe: The Signals Are Talking

At Houston Foresight, we’ve announced that our Gathering next spring will be on “Scanning the Fringe .” So I’m looking for interesting work that touches on the topic, which drew me to Amy Webb’s The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream.

The book is focused on her approach to trend identification and analysis. Her scanning is aimed at identifying an emerging trend – really a big trend, or we might say macrotrend, driver, discontinuity. The idea is to pass on the identified trend to [mostly] tech clients so that they can develop a product/service/offering around it. There are many very interesting and well-told stories of how blockbusters were based around understanding a new trend [she doesn’t take credit for enabling this, but simply points out how the trend ID & analysis can work].

A quick side note: Readers of this blog might find interesting is that the scenario step in her methodology is done in order to validate trends[s] she is identifying. So, the fundamental unit of analysis in her work is trends. In our Framework Foresight method at Houston, we primarily use trends are inputs to the baseline/alternative futures).

We are in strong agreement that scanning is both a challenging and fundamentally important part of the process, as it is the foundation of the work that follows. There is no pat formula for tapping into the fringe, at least neither of us have found it yet! What I took from the book and a chat with Amy, is that we can:

vary the sources that we consult. Not just articles and blogs, but also discussion boards, social media, interviews, patents, and so on.
broaden the context of scanning beyond the specific topic, and scan the periphery of the topic.
and of course recognize the today’s fringe is tomorrow’s mainstream (as the book title suggests)

Yep, yep and yep So, we’ll continue to probe and question how the best scanners do it, with Amy’s book a nice stop on the journey. — Andy Hines

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by Andy Hines on December 28, 2016 1 Comment

Foundations of plenty challenged

Continuing on the next economy theme this week with The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created. This is a historical look at how we got to where we are. Good futuring says we look backward as well as forward. The premise is that economic growth takes off around 1820, more or less in synch with the industrial revolution. I think we’d all agree with that and appreciate the date and some nice storytelling around that. There are four factors that ignited this takeoff:

property rights, including intellectual property
scientific rationalism
funding: capital markets
communications: improvements in transportation and communication

The author suggests that these four factors first coalesced, albeit briefly, in sixteenth century Holland but were not securely in place in the English-speaking world until about 1820, not coincidentally the date of the boom. Property rights and the rule of law are foundational. Scientific rationalism drives the technological progress –“economic growth is almost entirely the result of technological advance.” Capital markets provide the financial support, and transport and communications facilitate everything. The author also makes a strong point that institutions are also extremely important – “national prosperity is not about physical objects or natural resources, rather it is about institutions – the framework within which human beings thin interact and carry on business.”

There is very little about the future in the book. It even trots out the old saw: “it’s very hard to make predictions, particularly about the future.” Ah! We can look at the factors and speculate. I would say that the fourth factor – transport and communications – looks the most solid going forward. Hard to argue with that. But there are potential challenges for the others. Intellectual property is being challenged on several front, in particular by open source movements. Scientific rationalism is being questioned. For our purposes this is a quintessential “modern” concept that is being questioned by those with postmodern and integral approaches. Capital markets are also being challenged on multiple fronts. They are a target for those protesting unequal distribution of wealth. New approaches to markets are also being considered with crowdsourcing, P2P, sharing, Blockchain, etc. So, three of the four foundations of the “birth of plenty” are being challenged, although one could argue that challenges are still fairly weak.

Social change note:

Last week we looked at development and progress; this week it’s markets, our friend progress, and a bit of technology:

The markets argument is thus: “the destinies of nations are far more determined by their economic dynamism than by the vagaries of war, culture, and politics.”
Progress comes in as what’s really important. And the ultimate measure of progress is statistical, e.g. literacy, longevity, wealth, with per capita growth advocated as the single best measure. That is the typical approach of progress advocates – show the aggregate improvement of the numbers.
There is also a hint of technology: “the steady flow of scientific and technological advance, which is the ultimate source of economic growth.”

Quibbles

There are a few “hallowed be thy markets” points in there that made me cringe, but it’s not a full-on ideological screed about the wonders of markets, but a little too close for my comfort. For instance, the point is made that for vigorous regulatory oversight of the securities industries by government

It’s one of my pet peeves when folks attack the Limits to Growth and Club of Rome without studying the argument. Here, we get “an entire generation of pessimists led by the Club of Rome embarrassed themselves by suggesting limits …..” (a review on that topic) – Andy Hines

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by Andy Hines on January 27, 2016 1 Comment

Shifts in teaching the future

Teaching should not stand still of course, but it is part of an academic mission is to stay true to what is the core of a discipline. It’s a balancing act and part of my job is to keep abreast of what’s changing. In light of that, APF is having one of its epic discussions about the future of the field and professions that seems to emerge every couple of years. A key theme of this recent incarnation is a perceived shift toward futurists needing to be more “doing” vis-à-vis “thinking.” In short, don’t talk about making or doing stuff, do it!

Indeed we have noted the shift in the field toward “doing” among other shifts:

It first became apparent to me when I “went inside” as a organization futurist back in the 1990s because our clients were having trouble figuring out what to do with our consulting products (see “Viral futures at Dow”).
For me, the organizational futurist role is key to our future. We need more people inside organizations who understand foresight work and can help get it acted upon. (see “An organizational futurist role…”)
We’ve been using the idea of a framework of six activities of foresight for the last decade: framing, scanning, forecasting, visioning, planning, and acting. Interestingly, it’s the bookends – framing and acting – that are getting more attention from my perspective as a practitioner and thus as a teacher as well. In short, we spend more time getting to know our clients (and ourselves) and more time helping them to implement (see Why foresight: I can think of 316 reasons)
The Professionalization Task Force has a draft Competency Model that is being presented to the APF Board next month. It does include some updating of the framework above, reflecting shifts in the field, but is more tweaking than an overhaul. And the proposed competency model is rooted in the present. It was decided to start there, and then explore how that model is or may be changing.
The formation of our Alternative Perspectives class recognized the emerging of critical and integral perspectives and basically has become the “home” for emerging approaches, while Futures Research focuses on the basics.

One of the shifts I’m focusing on now is the greater use of online tools. We’ve been online for years, but many of our tools are still paper- and f2f-based and being translated rather clunkily into the virtual and hybrid spaces. What else should we be thinking about??? Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on December 1, 2015 2 Comments

Values and Design Thinking

The increasing partnership between foresight and design over the last several years has nudged more and more futurists towards the design space. For some this has been quite natural. My fellow student in 1990 in the Houston Foresight Program (then “Futures Studies) Lloyd Walker came to the program pdma design thinking with a background in industrial design and has long been a proponent of this partnership. He curated an APF Gathering at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena several years ago. Design has been a regular topic in APF meetings and discussions. The Houston Foresight Program held a joint course with OCAD a few years back called Futures by Design. And this Fall, I supervised a PhD student from Italy for her dissertation comparing the use of scenarios by futurists and designers.

So I was happy to have the opportunity to jump deeper into the fray with a contribution to the latest PDMA Handbook on the role of design thinking in new product development, aptly titled Design Thinking. It’s quite an impressive volume, and being a part of it allowed me to read up on what my fellow contributors were thinking.

I chose to focus on the role of changing consumer values in the future of design, drawing on the research I did for ConsumerShift. The premise of my contribution is that while new product ideation and design is aimed at future markets, the ideas and designs are typically developed using current consumer needs. I outline the framework for understanding long-term values shifts, which provides insight into how consumer preferences are changing into the future. I focus on the two emerging values types (postmodern and integral) that are driving these changes are describe their trajectory over time. I note how these shifting values are at the core of five
emerging consumer needs, which are illustrated and brought to life with representative future personas. Finally, I conclude with implications for designers and developers both in terms of adding to their tool kit as well as identifying cross-cutting themes of change across the consumer landscape. Andy Hines

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