The Search for Global Solutions: Moving from Vision to Action

By Cynthia G. Wagner

Photos by Aaron M. Cohen

What does it take to get an idea launched or a problem solved? At the World Future Society’s 2011 conference, the answer was inspiration, collaboration, and the energy of forward-thinking people.

Health Maintenance for Extended Life Spans

Metabolism causes damage on an ongoing basis, and this damage eventually causes pathology, Aubrey de Grey told attendees. It is “a side effect of being alive in the first place.”

But gerontologists aim to intervene in this complex process, focusing on lifelong maintenance. De Grey argued that repairing damage early enough to prevent the pathology that causes aging could help humans achieve a big extension of healthy life spans.

How does an idea transform into a goal, and how does a plan inspire people to implement it? What does it take to give a movement its momentum? These were the underlying questions of the 750 futurists who met in Vancouver this past July to consider how to take that great leap of faith required for “Moving from Vision to Action.”

The future absolutely requires courage, said leadership expert Lance Secretan, author of The Spark, the Flame, and the Torch (The Secretan Center, 2010). Just as skiing down a steep slope for the first time requires faith in one’s abilities, effecting change and inspiring others to do so requires courage, whose rewards are fulfillment and accomplishment.

“It’s a myth that we can’t make change quickly,” said Secretan, “but it takes courage to let go of what’s holding us back.”

Is there danger in rushing down the unfamiliar slope of change? Of course there is. Studying the future helps us see where we’re heading. As business consultant Owen Greaves pointed out, many of our cool new technologies, like smartphones, brought risks we didn’t necessarily anticipate, such as geolocation tracking chips that could potentially reveal our whereabouts to others.

Because their impacts may be enormous, the assessment of emerging technologies is one of the key tasks of futurists—and a new mission of the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). Picking up where the former Office of Technology Assessment left off, GAO has now created a permanent Center for Science, Technology, and Engineering (CSTE), reported chief scientist Timothy M. Persons.

The center has just completed a technology assessment of climate engineering, which includes such proposed projects as brightening clouds at sea, pumping liquid CO2 into rocks or aerosols into the stratosphere, and afforestation of deserts. Persons pointed out that the center’s assessments include conversations with the public to get the potential responses of those affected by such technologies. “You don’t want to leave this to the experts alone, because you would lose public trust,” he said.

Communicating the Future

An important aspect of CSTE’s work is to improve communication with the public, including the congressional leaders who, though not scientists themselves, must make decisions about these scientific and technological developments. Thus, the design of interactive animations became an important aspect of the technology assessment and communication process, Persons reported.

Why interactive animations instead of, for example, a printed report? Literacy expert Lawrence Baines of the University of Oklahoma–Norman explained that there is “evolutionary pressure to condense information and communication.” Images, he noted, are briefer than text, which is too complex for the small devices that people are increasingly using as their principal mode of communication.

Baines also observed that television viewing is increasing, along with consumption of media on cell phones. Thanks to multitasking, young people can pack 10 hours of media consumption into just seven and a half hours a day. This consumption is also interactive and social, whereas reading a book requires solitude—an activity that may seem antisocial to today’s youth.

Another approach to communicating technological developments to a new audience is exemplified in the work of Booz│Allen│Hamilton. “My job is to find stuff, and tell everyone about it,” said senior associate William P. Barnett Jr. But, he admitted, not everybody wants to know about it.

The challenge is to help innovators, who may only speak in the language of physics, to describe to potential investors the problems that their work may help solve. Barnett said one way to do this is to create “future environments,” or simulations of the environments that the clients will be working in, showing how the innovations will be able to fill future gaps. Such a simulation is a “great place to dream,” and these future environments are intended to “make complicated information and ideas more visual and easier to understand,” he said.

Changes and Impacts

As Baines pointed out in his session on the future of language, demographic and technological shifts are impacting each other in sometimes unsettling ways, as when a 7-year-old can’t seem to put down her multifunctional cell phone. Baines warned that the move away from the complexity of communication found in books could impair critical thought among younger generations.

On the other hand, young people are growing up in an ever-changing social and technological environment, and they are using new technologies and tools to rebuild the world as they go. The panel on Cultural Shifts among Global Youths gave a mind-boggling overview of these changes:

The “aging” and “younging” of global populations are altering the workplace, careers, and even the traditional life path from school to work to retirement, said Erica Orange, vice president of Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc.

For young people, multitasking with multimedia has fundamentally changed their brains and the way they process information. They bore easily, and this boredom will increasingly make shorter-term jobs, contract work, and temping more entrenched, Orange said.

For older workers, the need to acquire new skills to remain competitive may inspire them to try new careers from scratch; internships will no longer be just for the young, according to Orange.

Globally, rapid economic development means that the concept of the “Third World” is becoming obsolete, according to Jared Weiner, a vice president of Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc., and a member of the World Future Society’s board of directors.

“We argue that BRIC [Brazil, Russia, India, China] is outdated. Think about Turkey and Singapore,” he advised. The challenge for all economies—and companies—is finding where the talented youth of tomorrow are and where they will want to go.

Global youth’s changing relationship with the virtual world is also driving trends toward using real names online, putting attention on reputations, and regulating more online activities, said Lisa Donchak, an enterprise sales associate for Google Enterprise. “We’re toward the end of the Wild West age of anonymity,” she observed. “Maybe the opportunity to be anonymous was a growth stage. More sites [such as Google+] are asking for your real name.”

Along with this authenticity comes “the right to be forgotten,” to erase your data footprint, Donchak noted. The European Union has been leading the way, with a “do not track” policy on cookies (data files placed on your computer by the Web sites you visit).

How Action Builds on Resilience

Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Donald Byrne, president and CEO of Metrix411, drew on Eisenhower’s wisdom to help illustrate a fundamental principle of futuring: the need to take action.

This point is crucially important in emergency situations, such as when deadly tornadoes struck many parts of the United States earlier this year. Byrne credited the resiliency of the community of Greensburg, Kansas, for its reaction to the 2007 tornado that destroyed the city. “In most communities, there is no organization for what really needs to be done; everybody wants to send water or ready-to-eat food,” he said. But the Lions Club did one thing that was immediately needed: It paid for funerals.

The community’s resiliency, its ability to respond, is one reason people stayed in Greensburg to rebuild rather than move on, Byrne argued. This power of community resiliency was seen again in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011.

Thanks to a cadre of young volunteers flocking to Peace Boat, a relief organization, help quickly came to the communities ravaged by the tsunami. “Kids were distributing food before even the army or Red Cross could get there,” reported Patrick Tucker, deputy editor of THE FUTURIST.

Tucker spent five months in Japan and was in Kyoto when the earthquake hit; as did most other foreigners, he left the country in the following week, but returned when he learned of Peace Boat’s relief work. “If you can keep the community together, you can rebuild faster,” he said, noting that neighbors are essential for keeping track of each other’s whereabouts. [See Tucker’s full report, “Lost and Found in Japan,” in this issue.]

“Actions” in Action

One of the best aspects of World Future Society conferences is the opportunity for futurists to share their work, providing case studies of effective actions as well as models for applying futuring principles.

Two of the world’s leading futurist training grounds again sent teams of students to the conference to present their work. Describing the Singularity University experience were teaching fellow José Luis Cordeiro and alumni Sasha Grujicic, Matthew Kern, Vjai Anma, and Alison Lewis, who described such projects ranging from sustainable clean water to automobile sharing.

Representing work done at the University of Houston, and introduced by Studies of the Future graduate program chair Peter Bishop, were Sara Robinson, who analyzed the Future of the Progressive Movement in the United States; Heather Schlegel, on the Future of Transactions and Alternate Currencies; and Emily Empel, on the Future of the Sex Industry.

One especially inspiring approach to stimulating action is “the power of the prize,” said Thomas Frey, executive director of the DaVinci Institute. Most prizes award past accomplishments, but increasingly prizes are offered as a way to stimulate innovative solutions.

“What if we could solve the world’s biggest problems through prize challenges?” Frey announced the DaVinci Institute’s Eight Grand Challenges program, in which countries would enter teams to compete for medals, as in the Olympics. The pursuit of these grand challenges would result in enormous benefits to humanity, Frey said. [Editor’s note: More on the DaVinci Institute’s grand challenges will appear in the January-February 2012 issue of THE FUTURIST.]

DIY advocate Dale Dougherty, editor of Make magazine and organizer of the Maker Faire events, led a lively session showcasing the spirit of hands-on innovation. Maker Faires and the “Maker” movement began a dozen years ago as a way to inspire those who feel compelled to manipulate things with their own hands, who want to understand how things work—and make things work themselves.

But unlike the image of the lone “tinkerer” working in the solitude of his or her own basement, the Maker movement is about “social tinkering. … It’s physical, connecting to the digital,” Dougherty explained. “It’s about personal expression, creating, and interacting.”

Because makers tap their childlike curiosity to play with technologies, recombining them to create new innovations, the Maker movement could provide a model for education. “Give children the gift of time and space to play,” Dougherty advised. “Immersion in an activity is valuable. Why isn’t school like this? … My goal is that students would become producers of a personalized education that they invent for themselves rather than a standardized education that they consume—to consider themselves as producers, not consumers.”

When people are having fun, they are engaged, Dougherty concluded. And this engagement may be the very key to moving from vision to action.

About the Author

Cynthia G. Wagner is editor of THE FUTURIST and of the 2011 conference volume, Moving from Vision to Action, which is available from www.wfs.org/wfsbooks. Email cwagner@wfs.org.

For links to download the WorldFuture 2011 conference program (PDF) or to order audio recordings or the conference volume, please visit www.wfs.org/content/worldfuture-2011.