three horizons | Hinesight....for Foresight

by Andy Hines on February 17, 2021 4 Comments

Directory of After Capitalism Blog Posts

I am [finally] get closer to finishing the book. I thought it would to useful to gather and review the blog posts I’ve put together on the After Capitalism topic over the last 7+ years — well, really the last five is when I got serious. I was surprised to see there were 73. I’ve also gone through a scanning library I created in Diigo that has almost 400 scan hits. And I created and filled out a template for analyzing the two dozen-ish Horizon 3 images of After Capitalism. So, the process is kicking into gear!

Title	Date
1. What do we call the Next Economy?	October 15, 2013
2. Five more new economy concepts	April 8, 2015
3. Soft Path Indicator Hits: More on a Guaranteed Basic Income	January 13, 2016
4. Next Economy Additions: Zero marginal cost, metaspace, conscious, and Blockchain	May 11, 2016
5. Indicator Alert The Swiss Say No to Basic Income	June 14, 2016
6. Future of income inequality via Picketty	August 30, 2016
7. Next Economy Additions Commons, Creative Molecular, and Em/Singularity	October 26, 2016
8. MISC Prepping for the Next Economy(s)	November 9, 2016
9. Foundations of plenty challenged	December 28, 2016
10. Next Economy Is It Really Different This Time?	January 17, 2017
11. Don’t be a meatbot	January 25, 2017
12. Postcapitalism It isnt just the economy	March 1, 2017
13. Money money money & capitalism	March 21, 2017
14. Four Futures After Capitalism	April 5, 2017
15. Revisiting the End of Work	April 12, 2017
16. The Next Book What’s After Capitalism?	May 2, 2017
17. Economy or Society: Aftershock	May 10, 2017
18. Aspiring to Betterness	May 16, 2017
19. Preparing for a World that Doesn’t Yet Exist	June 6, 2017
20. Postcapitalism and a world without work	June 21, 2017
21. A classy view on After Capitalism	June 28, 2017
22. Jobs or Tasks?	July 13, 2017
23. Wiring or Choice?	July 25, 2017
24. Balanced View of Emerging AI & Automation	September 13, 2017
25. I Am Not a Consumer: Values and After Capitalism	September 27, 2017
26. From Apartness to Integrated	October 31, 2017
27. The Sharing Economy Transition	November 14, 2017
28. P2P Platforms in Transition to After Capitalism	November 22, 2017
29. Reframing After Capitalism	December 5, 2017
30. Signal Men without Work	December 13, 2017
31. The Neoliberal Capitalist Story	December 27, 2017
32. Reformation or Transformation	January 16, 2018
33. Abundance: Tech to the Rescue	February 20, 2018
34. After Capitalism Visions Taking Shape	February 28, 2018
35. Has Trump Shifted the Baseline?	March 7, 2018
36. Next up A new species!	March 21, 2018
37. Circular economy: From Consumers to Users	March 28, 2018
38. After Capitalism video	April 4, 2018
39. A healthy fear of superintelligence	May 15, 2018
40. Evolutionary Reconstruction as Path to Vision	May 31, 2018
41. Digging Deeper into Inequality: the 9.9%	June 5, 2018
42. Degrowth A Growing Issue in the Future?	June 13, 2018
43 Prosperity without Growth	June 19, 2018
44. Why create visions or images?	June 26, 2018
45. The boiling frog future….to 2052?	July 5, 2018
46. The Gig Dichotomy: Gigging because we want to or have to?	July 11, 2018
47. After Capitalism Concepts	July 18, 2018
48. Algorithms Big Data and the perfect sneaker	July 26, 2018
49. Avoiding Used Futures in After Capitalism	October 31, 2018
50. Pre capitalism and post capitalism	December 5, 2018
51. Visions images and utopias	January 3, 2019
52. The Non Tragedy of the Commons	January 23, 2019
53. Post Work Future May Take Longer Than We Think	February 5, 2019
54. Work is central to our identity	February 20, 2019
55. Jobs provide structure to daily life	March 6, 2019
56. Jobs as income is a distribution problem	March 27, 2019
57. Ten things we could do if we did not have to work	April 17, 2019
58. Walking Away from Capitalism	May 15, 2019
59. Capitalism in Context	August 14, 2019
60. Fully Automated Luxury Communism	January 29, 2020
61. Imagining After Capitalism Graphic	February 12, 2020
62. Utopia for Realists	March 25, 2020
63. The Sufficiency Economy	April 22, 2020
64. Three Horizons of After Capitalism	April 29, 2020
65. The global question for “After Capitalism”	May 6, 2020
66. The New Localism (ain’t so new)	June 17, 2020
67. Wageless Life	August 5, 2020
68. 9 Shifts for After Capitalism	August 18, 2020
69. Utopia is a moving target	September 23, 2020
70. After Capitalism: Evolution or Revolution?	October 21, 2020
71. After Capitalism Drivers	January 19, 2021
72. Doughnut Economics: Light and Tasty	January 27, 2021
73. Economic growth and the future	February 3, 2021

Enjoy! Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on July 15, 2020 Leave a Comment

Internationalization and the pandemic

It was a pleasure to revisit my colleagues in Thailand virtually and explore how the pandemic might influence the work we’d done the previous year. Key Issues Influencing the Future of Internationalization of Higher Education has recently been published by the Office of the Higher Education Commission of Thailand (OHEC) through its Bureau of International Cooperation Strategy (BICS). Internationalization is the process of integrating an international, intercultural, or global dimension into the purpose, functions or delivery of postsecondary education. BICS recognized that context for internationalization was changing and wanted the help of a futurist to help understand it. So, I spent a month with BICS last summer in Bangkok on a Fulbright Fellowship doing the research.

The slide shows the issues we identified last year and suggests how their emergence has been influenced by the pandemic. The issues were organized using the Three Horizons model. I particularly liked how they lent themselves to key organizing principles:

Horizon 1 issues were about “how are we doing?” (assessing current strategy)
Horizon 2 issues were about “what should we do next?” (sorting priorities)
Horizon 3 issues were about “what do we want to go?” (toward a vision)

For the talk, I focused on the degree to which the pandemic influenced the issues. I think there is a general sense that a major disruption “changes everything forever.” But in looking at several major disruptions over the last few decades (9/11, the Great Recession), it is clearly not the case that everything changes. Rather the effects are mixed. In the case of our work, noted above, some issues accelerated, some stayed the same and some slowed down. I believe this is a much more helpful way to explore the influence of the pandemic, or any major disruption than the general sense of panic prevailing today. The effects are mixed, and may or may not be “permanent.”

A video of the session is also available. – Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on January 3, 2019 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 Andy Hines on November 28, 2018 2 Comments

Reasonable futures timeframes

What’s an appropriate timeframe for foresight work? It’s a question we futurists often get. It’s usually coming from a concern that a particular project’s timeframe may be too close to the present, or put differently, not sufficiently far enough into the future.

It’s become a lot easier to answer this since the field has been using the updated Three Horizons framework that I first came across in a piece by Andrew Curry and Tony Hodgson, ”Seeing in Multiple Horizons,” which later won an APF MSFW award.

The first horizon covers the existing way of doing things. My view is that futurists ought to be careful about playing in this space. My favorite story here is on “pizza trends.” I was a new internal futurist and asked to gather trend data on pizza consumption. I reasoned that if I answered this request, I’d become the data gathering guy for the exiting business, and I felt it would pigeonhole the foresight activity into the wrong timeframe. So I took the risk of saying “not my job.”

Rather, I reasoned then and advise now, the job of the futurist is to focus on Horizons 2 and 3, the zones of transition and new visions of the future. The vast majority of my work has been in Horizon 2, which probably reflects my focus on the corporate world earlier in my career. Here we focus on the potential disruptions to the existing system that ultimately may portend a new system, but provide the client with insight into what’s next, which is usually their key concern. Of course, I/we try to extend that view into Horizon 3 as practical.

In terms of how many years into the future, it depends on the topic or system. Some topics that are moving very vast or just on the cusp of a transition from H1 to H2, may appropriately suggest a very close-in timeframe, say 3-5 years. Other topics, which are very slow moving, may have a very long H1, where 3-5 years is still firmly in H1 and thus not appropriate.

In thinking back across my project work – mostly H2 work — I would say that H2 is most often 5-10 years (again, keeping in mind the differences according to topic). Clients usually want five, and I’ll do my best to persuade them to extend that to at least 10. But we do some H3 work. We did a project for NASA extending to Horizon 3 with a 2050 timeframe.

So the rule is to first work out the timing of the Three Horizons, and as long as you’re in Horizon Two, that seems like a good starting point for foresight work.

Thanks to Micheal Cooke fo inspiring this piece with a recent comment in Linked in. — Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on July 18, 2018 2 Comments

After Capitalism Concepts

The After Capitalism research started by collecting interesting “new or next economy” concepts. They’ve been analyzed, clustered, and re-grouped a few times. To the right is the pretty close to done version, as it’s time to move on the next phase of the project: creating the futures using the archetype approach (more on that later). The main buckets of concepts:

Horizon 3 “Transformation” Visions. The transformation archetype involves changing the rules of the game and a new system emerging. The visions attempt to characterize a new economic system or era at the highest level — they seek to explain a new socio-economic order.
Horizon 2 “New Equilibrium” Transitions. The new equilibrium archetype involves a challenge to the existing system in which the response is to compromise but keep the essential structure intact. The transitions explain emerging variations of capitalism that are still part of existing capitalism with some new elements, and are bridges to the visions.

Some of the key updates since the last version:

Introduced three horizons framework and sorting of concepts into:
- H3 visions
- H2 transitions
- H1 signals (not shown here)
Added, pruned or combined concepts to attempt to keep each distinctive — at one point the list hit 57!
Added a subset of sustainability transition concepts – several concepts that appeared to be transformational visions were actually suggestions on how to make capitalism more sustainable, which fits better as a transition concept.

— Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on May 2, 2018 Leave a Comment

Where can we find the fringe? Scanning the fringe part 2

After our scan hit sharing session, which I shared about last week, we jumped into the formal program. Let’s focus on where each session suggested we might find the fringe.

Graduate Assistant Kimberly Daniels and I started the day with an overview of our basic scanning process to set the context. One fringe-worthy note there is that in our projects of Houston Foresight, we’ve been adopting a tagging convention locating our scanning hits on the three horizons framework.

So we can find the fringe in Horizon 3

Anne Boysen discussed the role of analytics in finding the fringe, where she identified steps for “Predictive Weak Signals Scanning.”

So we can find the fringe using buried in the data using algorithms

Eric Kingsbury explored finding the fringe in the counterculture, with his aptly titled presentation “Burners, Discordians, Rainbows: SIGNALS from the Counterculture.”

So we can find the fringe in people/groups/communities living outside the mainstream.

Natalie Pacheco and Maria Romero talked about finding the fringe on social media. They explored the “rabbit holes” of the Reddit discussion forums as well as Tumblr as part of the need to listen to new voices.

So we can find the fringe “deep” in social media discussion forums

We ended the day with APF Chair Jay Gary highlighting the immense contribution the futurist Graham Molitor made in developed emerging issues analysis. One could argue that the entire day was really about trying to bring more specificity to the work that Molitor started decades ago.

So we can find the fringe at the edge of the emerging issues curve, in art, fiction (esp. science, fiction, underground media, blogs, etc.

The presentations mentioned above, and others from the Scanning the Fringe meeting can be found on the Houston Foresight blog. – Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on March 14, 2018 Leave a Comment

Introducing the Future

I’m sure there a mixed feelings at a conference when it’s time for the futurist session.

What is a futurist anyway?
This might be fun!
Is this going to be some gee-whiz technology celebration? Or an environmental gloom-and-doom story?
Is this going to be relevant at all to my job?
What time is lunch?

I’ve done my share of conference talks, workshops, and all sorts of venues where I’ve been responsible for introducing people to the future. For this post, I’ll share where I’ve landed on a generic approach the keynote/short workshop. The basic components in roughly equal modules

A few concepts/tools for thinking about the future (e.g., Framework Foresight, Three Horizons)
Two to four content modules of drivers and/or potential disruptors/discontinuities. Each module consists of a brief review of 5 or 6 items, followed by “table talk” in which participants rank them for impact and identify implications; then on to the next module and table talk, etc. The implication can be very simple or with more time we might do a futures wheel
“What’s it mean/what might we do” wrap; time permitting, might have them do elevator speech responses; or show of hand votes, or just me distilling what I heard.

This seems to work well for the audience, a mix of tool, content, and process. And it’s more fun for me, too.

What sparked this post [and maybe at some point a deeper look into the “Introducing the Future” topic…] was that my friends at the Society for Marketing Professional Services recently published a write-up of a session along the lines that I described above: Don’t Be Surprised by the Future: ©Marketer, The Journal of the Society for Marketing Professional Services, February 2018, www.smps.org.

I’m curious to hear how you’ve been introducing the future to people!!! – Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on January 24, 2018 2 Comments

Setting up a horizon scanning system

One of the great challenges of foresight work has been to establish a consistent ongoing horizon scanning system within organizations. Alongside that has been the equally difficult challenge of teaching beginners how to do horizon scanning in the first place. I am pleased to share a new article that takes on both challenges that was recently published in the excellent foresight journal World Futures Review. I encourage readers to subscribe to this journal with its practical focus on how to improve the practice of foresight.

The article I refer to is Setting Up a Horizon Scanning System: A Federal Agency Example that I co-authored with two colleagues from the US Forest Service, Dave Bengston and Mike Dockry, and a Houston Foresight grad student (now alum) Adam Cowart.

While we certainly do not claim to have solved the twin challenges setting up a scanning system and teaching scanning to beginners, we hope that we have made a useful contribution towards those ends.

The article reports on the design and early stage development and implementation of a horizon scanning system established for the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), Strategic Foresight Group, and developed cooperatively with the University of Houston Foresight Program. The goal of the project is to develop an ongoing horizon scanning system as an input to developing environmental foresight: insight into future environmental challenges and opportunities, and the ability to apply that insight to prepare for a sustainable future.

In addition, the horizon scanning system is supported by volunteers from within the Forest Service. To that end, we also focused on how to make the teaching of scanning more accessible – a mission important to all aspects of teaching provided by Houston Foresight.

The scanning process is summarized in the graphic below. We’ve found it useful to break scanning into three steps

Finding the hits (including creating a domain map, and search terms/tools/sources
Collecting the hits (use of cloud-based library and tagging system along three horizons)
Analyzing the hits (from simple triage, to criteria, to weighted indices)

An interesting addition to the “set up” and teaching of the horizon scanning system was the development of a brief Scanner Guide. The figure to the right captures the highlights. We’ve been tweaking it as we go and hear back from the volunteers and refine the scanning system.

Many thanks to our great friends Dave and Mike at the US Forest Service, and the many students who’ve worked on the project: Adam Cowart, Maria Romero, Johann Schutte, Will Williamson, Liah Johnson, Bo Roe, Kimberly Daniels, Kurt Callaway, ! – Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on December 20, 2017 1 Comment

Research Projects at Houston Foresight

My project work these days is with the research capability we’re building at the University of Houston Foresight Program. We are drawing on our network of faculty, alums, and, primarily, the students. It’s a great win-win-win. Students get real project experience, clients get reasonably priced foresight work (and the satisfaction of helping students), and the program gets some money (which is really important these days).

I’m just back in town from doing a three-day Houston Foresight Certificate training with an awesome team at XPRIZE. It is so energizing to work with groups who want to change the world — bravo!

We recently completed a project on “The Future of Work for NASA’s Langley Research Center.” The project used scenario planning to create long-term views of the future of work. The scenarios will be used to “wind tunnel” the current plans and activities of NASA, and enable them to make the appropriate adjustments to their current strategy. The goal was to stretch thinking out to the world of work in 2050 and then “bring it back” to a strategic approach and initiatives that could be started in the present. The Houston Foresight team consisted of Andy Hines (PI), alum Maria Romero (Project Manager), and students Tim Morgan, George Paap, and Mathew Palubicki.

We also completed a project with Kimberly Clark Corporation on “Technology in Baby and Childcare Products To 2030” that we are briefing at their headquarters this month. It is currently confidential, so we are not yet able to share it. The five-month study focused on consumer attitudes, highlighting parents and the growing subcategory known as “baby tech.” The findings offer specifically long-term strategic insights with respect to the use of technology in products for babies and young children. The foresight methodologies used included Horizon Scanning, Three Horizons, and Causal Layered Analysis as well as pieces of Houston Foresight’s Framework Foresight approach. The Houston Foresight team consisted of Andy Hines (PI), faculty Alex Whittington (Project Manager), and students Tim Morgan, Justin Ochs, Cindi Stuebner, and Mathew Palubicki.

We have also continued our collaboration with the Northern Research Station of the US Forest Service. The purpose of the project has been to help them set up a Horizon Scanning system. Indeed, it is up and running, as our joint team has tagged 855 scanning hits to our online library at this point! You can check out blog posts highlight key scan hits on our blog, and we also developed a Forest Futures newsletter. We are now writing some articles and a technical report based on what we’ve learned. The Houston Foresight team for 2017 consisted of Andy Hines (PI), alums Johann Schutte and Maria Romero, and students Kurt Callaway, and Kimberly Daniels.

These research projects provide great experience for our students. I would like to thank our sponsors Dave Bengston and Mike Dockry at the Forest Service, Clay Bunyard at Kimberly Clark, and Rich Antcliff and Sara McRae at NASA. We are always on the lookout for new Sponsored Research Projects, so please let us know if we could help! – 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

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