{"id":218120,"date":"2009-11-19T06:14:17","date_gmt":"2009-11-19T11:14:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/futuresavvy.net\/?p=1019"},"modified":"2009-11-19T06:14:17","modified_gmt":"2009-11-19T11:14:17","slug":"the-c5-electric-car-and-the-art-of-getting-the-future-less-wrong-than-competitors-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/218120","title":{"rendered":"The C5 electric car and the art of getting the future less wrong than competitors do"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a recent Times article ‘The future was never going to be the C5<\/a>‘ actor-comedian Ben Millar offers a familiar criticism of foresight work. Inter alia he says: “For all our achievements in art, science, and technology, the human race has always been spectacularly bad at predicting the future. Literature is littered with shockingly wide-of-the-mark utopias, dystopias, shiny suits, flying saucers and whole meals contained in a single pill. As a child of the Seventies, I was taught that as an adult in a world run by machines my main challenge would be how to spend my endless hours of leisure time…”<\/p>\n

Yes, Ben. I’m sure you know this has all been said before ad nauseam. But more importantly, 40 years on many lessons have been learned, and it wouldn’t run foul of quality journalism standards to reflect this.<\/p>\n

First, let’s be clear: nobody can predict the future. Anyone who says they can is a charlatan. Also, yes, unconscionably dreadful and irresponsible predictions have been made and are continually being made. But there are three problems with the ‘no-flying-car-so-there-we-can’t-predict-the-future’ argument:<\/p>\n

(1) The kinds of predictions Millar cites are a product of a particular moment in Western thought and therefore foresight. The 1960s and early 70s were a time of Post-War American emergence, unleashing for a while a techno-futurist predictive rapture, most of which has indeed proved to be rubbish. There are still people, very famous talking-head futurists, promoting techno-rapture for the 21st century (caveat emptor) but as a whole the foresight field has moved on to become much more circumspect about what can be predicted.<\/p>\n

Balancing techno-fantasy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Foresight practitioners are these days more likely to balance technology wowee with economic, social, and environmental friction; see systemic (often indirect or counter-intuitive) effects where once only simple cause-and-effect was seen; and create scenarios of key alternative outcomes rather than predict one.<\/p>\n

(2) The second thing that is missed in gleefully deriding foresight work, is how many people and institutions get it right, or right enough.\u00a0 It’s axiomatic that in order to be successful a person or organization must have correctly assessed both key changes and rate of change in their operating environment. To take a famous case, as quoted in Future Savvy<\/em>, while Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1972 erroneously forecast super-sonic passenger air travel, Herb Kelleher, founder of SouthWest Airlines<\/em>, foresaw the low-cost air travel industry. Bingo. Billionaire. Similarly, behind every success one can find future thinking that, while sometimes latent, was present and correct.<\/p>\n

(3) The purpose of foresight work is misunderstood. We cannot predict the future and it’s pointless to try. We can only assess signals of change, trends, and potential for surprises and reversals, including challenging our all-too-easily calcified mental models, and take this into a process of understanding alternative outcomes and pre-considering best strategic actions. In other words, actively stimulating the investigation and analysis of future conditions in order to create the basis of better decision-making today.<\/p>\n

In fact sometimes the ’strategic conversation’ that results from poor<\/em> predictions is instructive to managers. As I say to clients: the goal of foresight work is better decisions not better predictions.<\/p>\n

Back-street abortionists<\/strong><\/p>\n

The reality is that there is good and bad foresight work. Yes, some futurists are the technical and moral equivalent of back street abortionists. But the good work remains, and quality foresight is a critical advantage to decision-makers. The key thing is to be able to tell good foresight work from bad.<\/p>\n

Simplistic trashing of foresight work en bloc<\/em> ignores the weight of case evidence that people and organizations can improve their management of future uncertainty and\/or create a situation where they manage the future better than competitors. Further, it encourages managers to fly blind into changing environments, often resulting in spectacularly poor decisions that deeply and widely punish their dependent stakeholders.<\/p>\n

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In a recent Times article ‘The future was never going to be the C5‘ actor-comedian Ben Millar offers a familiar criticism of foresight work. Inter alia he says: “For all our achievements in art, science, and technology, the human race has always been spectacularly bad at predicting the future. Literature is littered with shockingly wide-of-the-mark […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}