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

FUTURES STUDIES

Understanding and anticipating change in society

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

Foresight:

Insight into how and why the future could be different from the present.

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?

KEYNOTE TAKEAWAYS

The compelling forecasts and comments about the future

• 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

KEY FUTURE UNCERTAINTIES

Some critical pivot points for the futures of workforce development

Local/state politics

Federal workforce regulations

Future nature of the economy and the American workforce

“Standing” Uncertainties

SEEING THE WHOLE PICTURE

Beginning to use systems thinking to draw the map

• 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

The Local Workforce Ecosystem

The Broader Environment

SEEING AHEAD

Beginning to use futures thinking to map farther horizons

Trends Emerging Issues

Trends and Emerging Issues

Mapping the Road Ahead

Some Emerging Issues

Employer/industry-based credentialing $

Smart Contracts

Distributed Autonomous Organizations

Universal Basic Income

Rewriting Employment-Based Social Contracts

Adaptive Learning

MAKING PLANS AND DECISIONS

Prioritizing and Sorting Action Amidst Uncertainty

• 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

Dealing with Uncertainty: A Strategic Portfolio

Now let’s play with some of these ideas…

Cynefin

https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making/

• 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/

Mahalo.