The Unknown Unknowns and the Previously Unknowns

Getting hooked on future studies in the late 1960s, when the famous Daedalus issue with results from the Commission on the Year 2000 appeared, I shared the optimism that existed then regarding the accuracy of such studies. The first oil crisis put an end to that optimism, but there were other signals of trouble, too.

Let me take a seemingly trivial example. I’ve been a runner, now jogger, since the mid 1950’s, and I used to be alone on my jogging path. From the late 70’s, though, a lone jogger no more: in Hyde Park in London, in New York’s Central Park, even in Paris’ Bois de Boulogne there was this stampede. Trivial, but not so trivial if you’re in the shoe business, when a bit into the 1980’s, three quarters of the American shoe market was for running shoes.

Not so trivial, either, this signal about a change in values and attitudes. That was for me an eye-opener. Not only do we have trouble forecasting economic and political change like the oil crisis, we took values and attitudes as so unchangeable that we did not even pay any attention to them. So one basic quandary would be: what are (with a famous phrase) “the unknown unknowns”? How may these be spotted? By definition, they may not — but then the challenge would be to identify them before they reach center stage. Such an ambition might be generalized to a striving for bringing early attention to weak signals, weak signals that are growing to become strong. (Or like with the positive side of self-defeating future studies: knowing about something potentially disastrous or at least negative may help us avoid it.)

The other theme to explore would be to undertake to map the now known previously unknown, thus trying to establish concepts and descriptors for, in this instance, “values, attitudes, and life-styles” (to refer to one such attempt, that of Arnold Mitchell of SRI International; there are others as well). How are values created or perhaps rather imbued? How may they change and to what extent are they constant, unchangeable? What are their effects on our evolving future? How do they relate to something profoundly affecting values, culture?

Bengt-Arne Vedin, professor emeritus, Sweden