THE FUTURIST, November- December 2006

Though our challenges are growing more complex, our tools for meeting those challenges are growing more sophisticated, according to speakers at WorldFuture 2006.

It has been said that it takes a village to raise a child, and it is becoming increasingly clear that it will take a global village to "raise" humanity--that is, to create a working future for all of the world's people. Whether you are seeking the best education for your own child, brokering a deal for your company, or resolving a tense conflict between warring factions, one thing is certain: Relationships matter.

This truism was suggested frequently in the observations of many speakers and participants at the World Future Society's annual meeting, "WorldFuture 2006: Creating Global Strategies for Humanity's Future," held in Toronto this past July.

According to Society President Tim Mack, the conference welcomed more than 1,000 attendees from 34 countries, with the largest non-North American contingent arriving from South Korea. The goal of the meeting, Mack said, was to answer the question, "So what?"that is, to determine what it is we want to do next in creating our collective future.

The Society last met in Toronto in 1980, and its return to Canada afforded the opportunity to explore the importance of the Canadian–U.S. relationship. Accomplished journalist Pamela Wallin, who recently completed duties as Canada's consul general to New York, emphasized the importance of face-to-face encounters in the "dance of diplomacy," because "diplomacy is about seeing through other people's eyes." She quipped, "The Canadian and U.S. views of each other are like a one-way mirror," where the United States is "benevolently ignorant" of Canada, while Canadians are wiserand not always benevolently soabout the United States.

Even neighbors as close as Canada and the United States need to work diligently on their relationship, Wallin said, citing John F. Kennedy's famous observation about the United States and Canada: "Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies." This relationship won't fundamentally change, but Wallin cautioned that "getting along doesn't always mean going along with the decisions of your partner."

Challenges for the Future

More than 100 sessions at WorldFuture 2006 addressed these and other major forces of change:

• A "demographic tsunami" is looming on the "coast" of the United States as baby boomers approach retirement age, according to David Walker, comptroller general of the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
• Computer capacity is increasing in accordance with Moore's lawit was predicted in 1965 to double every 18 months for the next 10 years, but Moore's law has held and will hold "as far as the eye can see," according to science writer Joel Garreau. The only limitations come from quantum mechanics, human ingenuity, the market, and human values.
• Technologies are increasingly being turned inward in such areas as human enhancement, Garreau added. For example, four U.S. companies are already racing to bring "memory pills" to the market, which will find eager customers among the "needy well"i.e., aging baby boomers.
• Global warming will have civilization-altering impacts on the planet. "We may be within 10 years of irreversible climate change," said scholar Thomas Homer-Dixon of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto.

Creative Collaboration

Solving these problems will require new solutions that demand not just our technological ingenuity, but also our collaboration and creative resourcefulness.

Individuals are becoming more technologically empoweredwith both positive and negative consequences. Among the most dangerous, according to Homer-Dixon, is the capability of smaller groups or even individuals to kill more people.

And yet, that same empowerment is letting communities do things like create online "crime maps" of their neighborhoods and do better real-time surveillance and reporting than police departments can do, said Deborah Osborne, a crime analyst with the Buffalo Police Department.

Joel Garreau, too, noted the power of technology-enabled individuals, such as those on Flight 93 who, on September 11, 2001, came up with a "bottom-up" solution and took collective action to thwart terrorists' intent to use the airliner as a weapon of mass destruction.

Leadership could do a much better job of nurturing our connected "oneness," said Lance Secretan, former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations Environment Program and the author of One: The Art and Practice of Conscious Leadership (The Secretan Center, 2006). Many of our problems, he said, are due to leaders who are cowardly, self-serving, dishonest, unfeeling, and ineffective. He described the "CASTLE" principles for leadership that will enhance our oneness: Courage, Authenticity, Service, Truthfulness, Love, and Effectiveness.

Connecting to Deal with Complexity

One of the today's freatest, challenges is the complexity of the problems we face. In health care, for instance, it is difficult for a family doctor to treat complicated diseases or conditions such as diabetes, noted William Rowley, COO and senior futurist at the Institute for Alternative Futures. Patients may be referred to specialists rather than treated immediately by one doctor. One solution may be found in community health centers in inner cities, which could serve as a model of team doctoring.

As the Futures Lab's Wayne Pethrick put it, "It's not what you know that matters. You don't need to know everything. What matters is who you know that knows." Connectivity, he suggested, is critical.

This connectivity is taking new forms, as virtual relationships become more commonplace, said Derek Woodgate, president of the Futures Lab and co-author, with Pethrick, of Future Frequencies. "You might have more friends on MySpace [a social networking Web site] than in real life," he pointed out. "We're reconceptualizing intimacy."

Another distinction of MySpace as opposed to other media is that its entire contents are created by users, who upload not only information about themselves, but also their own videos, photos, and music, according to Stephanie MacKendrick, president of Canadian Women in Communications.

But technology is not a panacea for connectivity, MacKendrick warned, and "connectivity" is not the same as effectiveness. We may be incorrect in thinking that we are better off the more "connected" we are through technologies such as the increasingly ubiquitous cell phone. "We fear being out of touch," she pointed out. "We lose confidence in our ability to operate on our own." Cell phone use in public may also be creating more reserve among strangers in public.

Institutions such as governments and corporations may have a harder time dealing with change than individuals do. As GAO's David Walker pointed out, the U.S. government simply does not have a strategic plan for the future or for dealing with the megatrends shaping the future, though the work of the GAO comes close, since it uses foresight tools such as modeling and scenario planning. "Government structures need to be rearranged to capitalize on opportunities" and to deal with challenges such as a potential bird flu pandemic and population aging, Walker said.

GAO's work is based on environmental scanning, conducted both by employees and by outside futurist consultants. Walker pointed out that 188 countries have GAO-like offices--auditors--that are helping sort out the challenges and opportunities of change; for instance, Australia and New Zealand have faced the demographic facts and are now doing something to address the fiscal challenges of aging populations.

Walker said that knowledge sharing among governments would encourage greater cooperation on issues such as sustainability. To do this will require the transformation of government structures. The United States needs to recognize "that challenges need multilateral, global efforts. No country can or should go it alone," he said. Scenario planning and strategic planning are not enough. The United States, he said, needs to change how it thinks and acts: It needs to "partner for progress"--to reach across institutional lines to share knowledge, including with business and with other countries.

"America faces decades of red ink due to aging population," because of the health-care crunch, entitlement programs, and other issues, Walker warned. "There is no way we will grow our way out of this fiscal hole, . . . and time is working against us."

Reducing the Risks of Change

Many futurist consultants are devoted to helping organizations, leaders, and individuals to deal with change, and several participating at the conference offered insights. Kenneth Hunter of the University of Maryland's Institute for Global Chinese Affairs said never tell people you're going to change something instantly; rather, "relentless prototyping" is the more effective approach in introducing change, as it allows for testing improvements and reduces people's anxiety in making wholesale change.

"Change implementers must be capable of working on the connections among groups," Hunter said. "Help them deal with their fear of loss. People resist leaving their comfort zone."

Dealing with risk and rapid change could drive the "next big thing" in technological development--the convergence of systems to enable problem solving at lower risks. The "killer app" here is simulation, said Jeff Wacker, vice president and CIO of Global Industry Solutions for EDS. With advanced pattern recognition and powerful new models that provide the relevant contextual information about the overwhelming mass of data we can now gather, "the future will become more predictable."

World Future Society board chairman Arnold Brown said that change in organizations meets resistance because ways of doing things become entrenched; assumptions and procedures are seldom challenged. Thus, "If you're the one suggesting change, you need to have more than good information. Keep it positive: Somebody always profits from change. Look for ways you can impart that information and show how people can benefit from it."

Brown was one of the participants in a session entitled "The Search for Intelligence Life: Why Foresight Systems Fail and How to Make Them Work," which was moderated by Jay McIntosh, Americas director of retail and consumer products for Ernst & Young, the session's sponsor.

Often resistance to change has to do with an inability to analyze risk appropriately. "Risk aversion hinders progress," said Randall Yim, formerly head of the U.S. Homeland Security Institute.

"We focus on blame and judge effectiveness with results, when luck has a lot to do with it," Yim said. "'Smart luck' is opportunity that you're prepared for. . . . [We need to] create a culture of preparedness, not a culture of fear."

Yim observed that the Department of Homeland Security was created in order to improve information sharing, but it didn't happen because there was still a strong culture of secrecy. A better model of information sharing, he said, would be an infrastructure similar to the highway system, with multiple information destinations.

Business futurist Edie Weiner, president of Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc., agreed, arguing that we need to look at multiple, "parallel information streams of intelligence," as information critical to an organization is increasingly nonlinear and contradictory.

Much of this critical intelligence is open and freely shared; Weiner noted, for example, that Eli Lilly collects intelligence shared by scientists all over the world and that many organizations now use blogs to gather intelligence. One challenge to this open-source knowledge sharing is determining what information is true and useful. Once again, the message is that relationships matter: As Weiner noted, you are more likely to value the opinion of a drugstore clerk in your neighborhood who understands your problem and shares your values than the advice of a remote, distracted doctor who does not.

"It's all about relationships," she said. "If you want to make intelligence systems work, take a lot of people to lunch."

Maps for the Future

Since it's hard to go anywhere without a road map, many speakers focused on ways of conceptualizing and contextualizing the future. For instance, George Washington University management professor William E. Halal described the work of the TechCast project he directs. TechCast creates an "online learning system" to enable experts in a variety of fields to collectively forecast when emerging technologies may reach mainstream status. (For more information, see Halal's article in this issue.)

Similarly, consultant Jim Mathews of The Futures Network LLC offered a detailed analysis of technology life cycles, which can help companies understand the risks of bringing a new product to market.

Another "map" to understanding change on a large scale is the Spiral Dynamics theory, originally developed by psychologist, Clare W. Graves and advanced by the Center for Human Emergence founder Don E. Beck. By improving our understanding of the transmission of values and the bases of our core intelligence, we can better see how these forces shape our futures. It is more important to understand how people think than what they think, as well as why they make the decisions they do and what motivates them.

"This powerful conceptual system has been field-tested in some of the most complex environments on the planet, from inner-city Chicago to racially plagued South Africa," according to Beck.

For understanding society's relationship with technology, the "TechnEcologies" paradigm described by Joel Barker and Scott Erickson, co-authors of Five Regions of the Future: Preparing Your Business for Tomorrow's Technology Revolution, offered lucid guidance. Technologies exist within cultural contexts that determine their function and value to society. For instance, wind power is an example of "Local Tech" that scale science and technology to meet needs at a very local level.

By contextualizing technologies, we can better see the relationships that help hold systems together when there are shocks. "The Five Regions paradigm tries to look at technology in a different way, in terms of applications," Barker explained.

"We're living in a time when we're generating more solutions than problems," he concluded.

About the Reviewer
Cynthia G. Wagner is managing editor of THE FUTURIST.

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