framework foresight | Hinesight....for Foresight

by Andy Hines on March 7, 2018 2 Comments

Has Trump Shifted the Baseline?

This question emerged in a working session on the future of US and Mexico relations. In good Framework Foresight fashion, we first attempted to set the baseline in order to explore alternative futures. The simple definition of the baseline is the current system or the current way of doing things within a domain (or topic). So, what is the current system or way of doing things vis-à-vis US-Mexico relations? Hmmm. If we were doing this work a couple of years ago, per-Trump, it would have been easy to characterize the baseline as dominated by NAFTA. But we’re doing it today, and certainly President Trump has strongly suggested that the NAFTA approach and almost anything associated with that system is in question. So, Trump Populism, for lack of a better term, is the new baseline, right? But not so fast. Trump Populism is not actually in place yet. Should we assume it will be? Or is Trump Populism still an alternative future? Of course, it is acknowledged that the issue is more complex than this.

While we occasionally enjoy these kinds of geeky challenging questions, we recognize the need for practicality. Which means, pick one as the baseline, and set the other as an alternative. So, if we shift to Trump Populism as the Baseline, Return to NAFTA could be an alternative future. Another suggestion emerged of having two baselines. I would position this as one baseline with two branches, Baseline A and Baseline B.

As we often say, it’s useful to think about this stuff, but not too long. As long as we have both potential futures being considered, we’re covered. I suppose if I had to answer the question in the post title — Has Trump Shifted the Baseline — for US-Mexico, I would be conservative about the baseline and choose NAFTA and set Trump Populism as an alternative. For me, the baseline should be grounded and documented, thus we should only declare it over when it’s really over. That said, each topic or domain has its own baseline. I would say that Trump Populism certainly has not shifted the baseline of Neoliberal Capitalism as we’ve been discussing in our After Capitalism work.

We still have lots of work to do in sharpening up our concept of the baseline and other frequently used archetypes. They are very handy and useful concepts, but our understanding of them is still very superficial – it’s enough for practice, but from an academic or research perspective, we’re on shaky ground. — Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on October 25, 2017 Leave a Comment

Changing sense of place: the Virtual Replicator

Interesting how many times I’ve rewritten this! I keep seeing different angles, but not convinced that’s it, trying another. So, the initial idea was to play with a future in which delivery was super-advanced, and think about what that might mean for “place.”

Imagine a “virtual replicator” scenario where we don’t actually beam atoms Star Trek style, but with 3D/4D/nano printing and super-fast delivery such that it’s almost like we have a replicator. It’s a just-in-time world of nearly anything to nearly anywhere at nearly anytime. Okay, let’s exhale now.

What has to happen? To keep it simple, we can look at the relationship between storage, delivery, and compatibility with decentralized production, the state of sharing, and an enabling technological infrastructure of IoT and predictive analytics. We can probably get a sense of timing of affected industries by looking at industries where these five factors come together favorably.

Storage costs are judged high (at least relative to delivery – have you ever thrown something out and said you’ll buy another, rather than store it)
Delivery costs are falling as capabilities rise (a fairly big assumption that costs will come down in the short run. Early drones will probably be more expensive)
Print-on-demand technologies are suited to key product lines
Move to “sharing” means people are less inclined to need to own/possess
IoT and predictive analytics as key enablers behind the scenes

I was writing this at a construction industry event — candidate #1?

Peter Bishop developed a technique called baseline analysis in which we identify the key assumptions of the baseline scenario, challenge those assumptions, and identify the support or evidence for that alternative (I would not call the “virtual replicator” a baseline, but the principle holds). Without slogging through each here, I think we can see how there are viable alternatives to each of the five drivers above, thus we shouldn’t assume the path to a virtual replicator scenario is going to be a cakewalk. A lot of things have to go well, as they say.

And we also look at history in our Framework Foresight process. The “delivery” topic in my view has consistently moved slower. Take online ordering and delivery of groceries, which I first looked at in the 1990s (one version of which we called “the return of the milkman”) Almost nobody likes going food shopping, so this should have been easy….right? History suggests this will be tougher than we think.

I need to get back to work, so let me share three somewhat random thoughts/insights that emerged during the numerous re-writes:

Peak trade? Is global trade (as a percentage of all trade) at its peak? In the virtual replicator scenario, what things really need to be shipped around the world?
Is “storage” a candidate for our dictionary of obsolescent concepts? The popular example is today is the urban parking garage, but when you start playing with these drivers. Things like “if you don’t own it, you don’t need to store it.”
It’s not always worth the effort. Existing systems, even if less than ideal, they are often good enough/not so bad that they are not worth the effort of changing. — andy Hines

by Andy Hines on May 31, 2017 Leave a Comment

Masters of Transition?

I’ve been involved in Summer chats with students about their progress in the program and about the future in general. Now that we can all exhale after a semester of work (and a research draft out the door), it’s fun to talk futures. Invariably, things come up that me make me go hmmm. Thus the title of the post about transition in foresight work.

We were discussing the value-add of foresight. I was pontificating about the modularity of the Framework Foresight process – how it was designed to accommodate other methods and techniques within it. Which led to a discussion about the various ways that each of the six activities can be carried out. I believe I said that was the easy part, and that the challenging part was the transition between the activities. Put another way, a key value is knowing what to take forward from each activity to the next. Crafting the transition.

I came to this is a discussion about how futurists are being asked to go “further” down the value chain toward action. I’d say that we futurists are less differentiated from others in the “influencing the future” activities of visioning, planning, and acting. That is, others can do this just as well as us (or at least it’s close). But, I would also say that few can take the output of the first three activities — framing, scanning, forecasting – and transition them into the “influencing the future” activities. Thus, it’s the transition between these that provides the great value-add. And taking that a step further, the “smaller” transitions between the activities are also perhaps an under-appreciated value-add. Masters of transition….hmmmm. — Andy Hines

PS: The Foresight Competency Model is soon to be published in World Future Review. Great news, though it means some work for us in adjusting our terminology to synch up with it. But more on that later.

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by Andy Hines on May 2, 2017 4 Comments

The Next Book: What’s After Capitalism?

After five or so years of keeping one eye on concepts for what might follow capitalism, it’s time! The topic is so super interesting to me. I preach to follow your interests and what you love, so…..The last time a “content” topic about the future caught my interest like this was the values stuff, captured in ConsumerShift.I let the cat out of the bag at our Spring Gathering last weekend — nothing like a public commitment to keep one honest!

I plan to use or Framework Foresight process as the research approach. That will also give us another example of how the FF process works. I would be super grateful if you could pass along any tips/articles/book suggestions etc. The good news/bad news is that there is a lot out there right now on the topic. More to come! — Andy Hines

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by Andy Hines on March 21, 2017 3 Comments

Money money money & capitalism

Framework Foresight and other foresight methods suggest that any exploration into the future be accompanied by a look backward into the recent history. So, as part of our ongoing exploring into what’s next, it seemed like some financial history would be relevant. I selected Niall Ferguson’s, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, 2008. Ferguson is a renowned historian writing for someone not an expert in the topic, e.g., me. I’m not particularly interested in money (don’t tell my clients), seeing it as a necessary evil. The book is an interesting, enjoyable, and useful read, but I want to focus on ties or implications to our “what’s next” topic.

Make no mistake. You are getting the mainstream view here. Money is “the root of most progress.” The financial crisis of 2007 is in some measure explained by public ignorance not just among the ordinary public but also the “masters of the universe.” There is a bit of hero worship of the great financial minds, who do go a little too far now and then. And that does causes suffering for the masses, but it’s kind of implied that it’s their own fault. Basically, the real problem was the dummies who bought subprime loans, not those who sold them to them. In case it’s not clear: “poverty is not the result of rapacious financiers exploiting the poor.” Perhaps a more balanced view from my perspective: the financial system….reflects what we human beings are like….finance can enrich the lucky and the smart, and impoverish the unlucky and not-so-smart. That’s a pretty baseline view right there, and one that any alternative future is going to be confronted with.

Ferguson briefly entertains the idea of a world without money. “The Communists and Anarchists dreamt of that.” Yet no communist state has been able to dispense with it. And the others who have done without it, hunter-gathering societies, are not exactly happy places. He notes that money is a belief. In our parlance, it is a social construction. And we know that social constructions can be deconstructed, beliefs can be unbelieved. As we futurists know, paradigms can be amazingly powerful, as if they are the way things have been and always should be. Yet this book shows how our financial system is, historically speaking, a relatively new (and perhaps fleeting?) phenomenon.

I think it is very important for us, as we explore alternative futures, to keep in mind how strong the paradigm around money and capitalism is. Alternative thinking can easily be swept away by many folks in a few paragraphs. “That can’t happen,” or “The Commies” tried that and it failed. End of discussion.

One thing we clearly need to do is have a good response to “it’s communism and communism failed” argument. The basic income may be a useful frame. It’s a bit granular. Post-capitalism is close, but the “post-” is a sorta lazy way of admitting we don’t know what’s next. The three dozen or so concepts have their flaws. Something for us to ponder – suggestions welcome! — Andy Hines

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by Andy Hines on March 16, 2017 Leave a Comment

Geeking out on Three Horizons

Just finished Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope, 2013. I often refer to a slide below as my “desert island” slide. That is, if I had one slide to explain the future, this would be it. It comes from Andrew Curry and Tony Hodgson, who wrote”Seeing in Multiple Horizons,” an article for the Journal of Futures Studies that I nominated for an APF MSFW award (which it won).

We have also incorporated three horizons language into our “domain description” template in the “Framing” step of Framework Foresight, in which we set the timeframe of our domain (the topic we are exploring). We also use the Three Horizons model to situate our scanning, as we label scanning hits according to which time horizon they indicate.

My initial introduction to the concept was to the McKinsey version in the Alchemy of Growth. When I took the job as Ideation Leader in New Business Development at Dow Chemical, I was handed that book and told to read it. One of my rules of thumb, “when in Rome….” so I adopted the Three Horizons language and model. It actually appeared in my 2003 article “Organizational Futurist Audit” as “Know Your Time Horizon.”

At this point you may be thinking, he likes this Three Horizons! Indeed!

So, that takes me to Bill Sharpe’s book. The background was useful, I hope, to illustrate how it has changed my thinking on the three horizons. My experience with the Mckinsey version led me to think of H2 as space of line extensions. H1 as the current product line, H2 as extension, and H3 as really new stuff. I don’t believe it is totally at odds with the Sharpe (and Curry and Hodgson) conception, but it is different. What the book brought home for me (and maybe I should have seen this earlier) is that the key transition is not from H1 to H2, but rather from H1 to H3, with H2 as a zone of transition. We move from H1 to H3, and H2 is “where tensions and transitions are played out between the continuous improvement of H1 and the transformative possibilities of H3.”

It can help us with clients to reframe H2 innovations as going somewhere else, so to speak. A neat concept in the book notes that some innovations are “absorbed” by the existing H2 system – what he calls H1 capture — while others take us forward to the third horizon — the h2+ innovations.

I found that distinction made the book worthwhile. It’s a short book, and as the title implies, there is a fair bit of it on the “hope” aspect. As a methods geek, I didn’t find that as helpful. And there are some case studies that some may find useful as well. I’m very happy to have read it and it’s making me think about how it fits with our interpretation of the archetype methods. Hmmmm. Andy Hines

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by Andy Hines on March 22, 2016 Leave a Comment

Exploring the Future…with MISC

The bonds are strengthening between foresight and design. I’ve just received the first physical shipment of beautiful new magazines as part of the Houston Foresight Program’s collaboration with MISC. MISC is published by Idea Couture…. “where design meets business, insight meets foresight, and empathy meets economics.” One of our alums, Emily Empel, the co-head of futures, joined the firm a few years ago after spending time with Disney, and raves about the combined power of foresight and design (and she instigated the program’s collaboration with the magazine). We are listed as a co-publisher along with KAOSPILOT (a “hybrid business and design school for entrepreneurship, creativity, and innovation), CEDIM (takes a design, innovation and business approach to education), and OCAD (Strategic Foresight and Innovation). What an amazing set of collaborators!

Our first contribution is coming out in the Spring “gamechanger” issue: “Exploring the future of Anything and Everything.” It’s a two-pager that introduces readers to our program and our core approach of Framework Foresight, and highlights four recent student framework projects. The layout is quite elegant. I’d say more but I can’t give away the story before the issue is out!

I recently used the image of my tv hero Agent Dale Cooper of Twin Peaks to note synchronicity, or when multiple signals from different places are telling you something. I just got back from hearing a dissertation on the role of scenarios in foresight and design from newly minted Dr. Danila Zindato who visited with us last Fall….at a design school in Italy (more on that later) and a few months ago I wrote about future-friendly design in the new PDMA product handbook. And, well, for years many professional futurist colleagues have been exploring design and foresight together. I suppose sometimes the signals get louder! Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on February 9, 2016 Leave a Comment

Second edition of Thinking about the Future

An updated second edition of Thinking about the Future is now available on Amazon. The foreseeable depletion of the original print run of the book prompted this new edition. The changes include:

Most important, our additional work on the process of using the six framework activities opened up an opportunity to provide specific “how-to” process advice to supplement the guidelines. Thus, I added a new step-by-step how-to chapter to conclude the book.
Some of the guideline examples were getting a bit dated. All the examples of the 115 guidelines were reviewed and 55 were updated. This also add some new references.
My friend and colleague John Smart, who inspired several folks to review the book and thus helped deplete the first edition, was adamant that I change the shape of the new edition paperback, so it is now a 6×9 instead of the original square. The cover is redesigned as well.

A bit more on the new chapter. It is designed to provide more tangible, practical, how-to advice. The first edition was not written to provide step-by-step instruction on how to do a foresight project, but rather to share key tips and wisdom from practitioners on how they went about the doing the work. The guidelines provide advice on forecasting, for example, without going into the specific methods or techniques for doing so. One could certainly infer some process tips, and I have heard from readers that were doing do. Thus, I had hoped the opportunity might present itself to address that issue by providing that piece in a new edition (and I have).

Peter Bishop and I have been working on our approach to doing and teaching how to do foresight projects for the University of Houston Foresight Program since the book was published in 2007. Peter originally developed “framework forecasting,” which went through the first three activities of the framework: framing, scanning, and forecasting. I explored and eventually identified how to extend that process through the second set of three activities: visioning, planning, and acting.

The new chapter draws up an original article Framework Foresight: Explore futures the Houston way that was published in the journal Futures. We owe thanks to the many Master’s and Certificate students who worked with us as we tried out various approaches over the years. I would also like to thank futures friends Gary Hamel, David Learned, and Will Lidwell for inspiring the original idea of the book, and Tom Conger, then of Social Technologies, for stepping in and getting the first edition published when the original publisher went out of business.

I’d also like to plug Rafal and his team at Formatting Experts – they produced both the print and e-version of the book and are amazingly attentive to detail, responsive, and diligent. They routinely did more than I asked – check out the revised index for instance – because they could not help it but to make improvements where they were needed. A really, really outstanding team and very fairly priced.

And, of course, special thanks to the original three-dozen significant contributors–and the hundreds of others who have in some way helped us to produce this work–to live on as a useful reference guide to futurists and those interested in thinking about the future.

Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on September 30, 2015 Leave a Comment

The push and pull of the future

We reviewed Sohail Inayatullah’s Six Pillars in Alternative Perspectives class last night. The first pillar, mapping, includes the notion of the push and pull of the future. He defines them as:

• Push: Our present often pushes us to the future
• Pull: A shared image of the future pulls an organization forward

We discussed how it related to our framework foresight process. We suggest that the baseline future, in which present trends continue, plans are fulfilled, and projections are on target, represents the push. The momentum of the baseline carries us into the future, unless a discontinuity changes the trajectory or if we decide to move the future in a different direction. We suggest that the preferred future represents the pull of the future It is not always present, of course. Many organizations (or individuals or communities) do not have a preferred future and are not trying to pull it in any direction.
Earlier in the class, we had read a piece suggesting that academic schools had a tendency to graduate students who would advocate for their school’s version of how to do foresight work. I hope that we are not doing this. We routinely talk about how there is not one right way and look to other ways all the time, such as Sohail’s Six Pillars. I’m not sure I’ve seen this clubbiness (whatever you want to call it) in practice in foresight. I know many of the folks from other schools and I have not got the sense that anyone suggests they have it right. And I know of an effort led by Peter Bishop a few years ago that got many of the academic programs together to compare notes and exchange ideas. So, let’s keep learning from one another — that’s the preferred future I’m pulling towards. Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on January 26, 2015 1 Comment

Real options, scenarios, & sensemaking

Read an interesting piece on combining scenario planning and real options: “Making sense of future uncertainties using real options and scenario planning” (sorry, not available for free), outlines a three-stage process to explore the following question: “Do real options thinking and scenario planning enhance collaborative sensemaking in dealing with future changes and strategic options?”

I’ve been especially interesting in finding ways to linking scenarios more tightly to action, whether it’s strategy, policy, consumer insight, or new business development. In our Framework Foresight process, we developed an Implications Analysis module as a bridge from scenarios to the identity of strategic issues or opportunities, because students and clients often struggled with this transition. We’ve also been spending more time on working with indicators – including developing an “Indicator Bingo” game. This has helped a lot, but I’m always on the lookout for different techniques. I recall playing with real options maybe ten years ago, thinking it had great potential for linking to foresight, but never figured out a way to make it work (probably because I did not try hard enough).

I was intrigued to see this article title and dove in. concept. To cut to the chase, the authors concluded that: “Overall, the real options concept appeared to be too complex to be immediately adopted, although it was recognized as a useful tool in negotiating with contractors over flexibility.” In essence, they found a neat way to bring scenario planning and real options together, but it was a bit too complex for the groups. I’m not surprised about that, but I am intrigued by the process that the authors described.

In the first stage, the scenarios provided the exploratory context; in the second, the organization envisions their desired future state or preferred future, and the third develops strategy or strategic response via the real options — to work toward the preferred future based on the exploratory context described by the scenarios.

They also called out “sensemaking” throughout the process. I think in my own practice, we do this, but more implicit than explicit, i.e., I have not called out “time for sensemaking.” Here is how the authors define sensemaking: “individuals give meaning to the events and actions taking place in an organization. Sensemaking is undertaken by individuals in interaction with others, each having their own socially constructed reality based upon their experiences. Collective sensemaking takes place when individuals discuss their insights and knowledge obtained by individual sensemaking. In this way, tacit knowledge of individuals becomes more explicit and usable.” One might say that “strategic conversation” fits this approach. They go on to add that ….”sensemaking starts by people noticing cues. Cues are seen as those observable events that are inconsistent with people’s expectations and require further attention….people can only absorb a certain number of cues without reacting, after which they experience a ‘shock’ that initiates the sensemaking process. The two most common sensemaking events that generate shocks are ambiguity and uncertainty.” The goal of scenario planning is to change the “frames” or mental models of participant which is done by introducing the cues. The real options serve as future cues — similar to the indicators concept that is typical of scenario planning.

Before going to deep in the weeds, let’s resurface and see if we can do a lot sensemaking about what we have so far. I think the authors have done a terrific job in making a connections that makes a whole lot of sense (pun intended), and that this is an area that is ripe for further investigation. Maybe it’s a bit complex for audiences right now, but isn’t that a juicy challenge for us! Andy Hines

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