Post on 15-Apr-2017
transcript
What’s Next for the Future?Making Sense of the Signals and Making Decisions
The Forum 2016Washington Hilton, 3/15/16
Richard Kaipo Lum, PhD
Vision Foresight Strategy LLC“Reframing the future.”
Foresight and Strategic Analysis
www.visionforesightstrategy.com
richard@visionforesightstrategy.com
@kikiloAvailable now on Amazon
Understand and anticipate change in society…
and then help others reframe their expectations and preferences for the future.
Two Complementary Aspects
Analytic: understanding
and anticipating change
Synthetic: reframing
expectations and preferences
Elements of Our Work
Historical analysis
Images of the future
Theories of change and stability Trends & emerging issues
Forecasting
Preferred futures
Innovation & creativity
Futures Thinking is…
…critical thinking about the future, both in terms of what could happen and
what we want to see happen.
• Identify critical blind spots
• Reduce uncertainty about the future
• Map new opportunities for growth and innovation
• Create shared understanding about possibilities and changes
What Does Futures Thinking Get Us?
• Exponential development of technologies
• Coming disruption to many old industries
• New rules for work and for success
• Anyone can be an innovator today
Vivek Wadhwa: “Crash Course on the Future”
1. New Behaviors: we are much more comfortable living a public life
2. Technologies: cloud, collaborative tech, big data, IoT
3. The Millennial Workforce: new attitudes, expectations, and ways of working
4. Mobility: work anytime, anywhere, and on any device
5. Globalization: no boundaries
Jacob Morgan: “Employee Experience”
• Human talent and labor as the “economic engine” vs. the rapidly rising capabilities and productivity of machines
• Millennials are basically all adults now; “youth” is now about the Homeland Generation
Tensions and Uncertainties
Local/state politics
Federal workforce regulations
Future nature of the economy and the American workforce
“Standing” Uncertainties
• The system is greater than the sum of it parts
• You cannot understand the whole by focusing on individual parts
• Relationships are more important than parts: it’s about connections, flow, and feedback
• Archetypes can be useful starting points
Thinking in Systems
Systems
Facilities
People
Practices
Products
Regulations
Urban designChemicals
Equipment
Shifts in societal values
Training technologies
Broader labor market
Smart materials Synthetic biology
Automation
Robotics
Adaptive learning
Nanotech
Some Emerging Issues
Employer/industry-based credentialing $
Smart Contracts
Distributed Autonomous Organizations
Universal Basic Income
Rewriting Employment-Based Social Contracts
Adaptive Learning
• What are your goals for 2016? 2021? 2030?
• How will the trends, emerging issues, and uncertainties alter those goals?
• How might those same things pose new opportunities and specific threats?
Goals, Opportunities, and Risks
• Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards).
• The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows.
• The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks, population age structures).
• The lengths of delays, relative to the rate of system change.
• The strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against.
• The gain around driving positive feedback loops.
• The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to information).
• The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints).
• The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure.
• The goals of the system.
• The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises.
• The power to transcend paradigms.
Intervening in a System (Donella Meadows)
http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/