We look at the present
through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
Marshall McLuhan
The most difficult challenge of foresight is that everything
is interdependent –everything influences the way everything else changes. The important
point is that change occurs simultaneously through many different processes, in
many different ways and on many different time scales. This makes it difficult
find a natural place to begin writing and thinking about the future. The
reality of complexity means that long term control and prediction are impossible
and uncertainty looms. If we don’t want to be marching into the future with our
focus primarily in the rear view mirror must exercise more than traditional
scientific rigor – we must embrace a creative imagination.
For this reason I’ve defined foresight in the following way:
Foresight is not about predicting what will happen.
Foresight is about understanding evolving conditions in
order to imagine what they can enable.
Foresight
needs Rigor and Imagination.
Essentially we have to imagine what affordances we can
discover within the ongoing currents of change as well as imagine how people can
creatively act and respond. We must engage our imagination in order to wayfind through
a changing landscape where each step changes the environmental conditions of
the next step – and the next step may not just be ‘one more’ – it may initiate
a ‘difference in type’.
The key points to this definition are:
- Understanding trajectories of change;
- Imagining what can be enabled within these conditions
The title to this initial series of postings is meant to
evoke the challenge to our imagination – when more become different. The title
is a play on words alluding to Moore’s Law of exponential change. The now very
common phrase “more is different” was the title of a paper written in 1972 by Philip
Anderson (Nobel Laureate in Physics) refers to a point where an increase in
quantity creates a qualitative, discontinuous change – sort of like a phase
transition.
One more challenge to our imagination is posed by a famous
quote from Einstein that states: “We
can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created
them.” In this series, we want to imagine that accelerating
change won’t just be Moore, but different, and we imagine that this difference
will involve not just developing new forms of thinking – but new types of
thinkers arising in new types of societies. This requires more than just better
creative thinking but a disposition that believes that problems can be solved
and this means a fundamentally positive disposition.
A
great place to begin is with a recent blog post by Kevin Kelly, where he asks a
great question. It’s a question about the need for more positive visions of the
future. Not utopias, but positive visions – “On the chance that desirable
futures ARE possible, we need to imagine them.” The challenge of any foresight
effort is to not be seduced into prediction. I’ve previously said that
foresight is an effort to understand evolving conditions to imagine what they
can enable. However, most foresight efforts are aimed at specific questions and
horizons that are less than 40 years away.
It seems intuitively natural that entrepreneurs inherently
have a positive vision of the future – but perhaps we should explore this
assumption a little. Certainly an entrepreneur must have a naturally optimistic
temperament. They must be able to not only see possibilities that are the basis
of their endeavour, but also have the creative confidence to believe they can
make their venture real.
However, the focus that is the entrepreneur’s strength may
also be their weakness. The entrepreneur has to become very focused on the direct
work necessary to implement their vision. This can force their creative
imagination become bounded to the narrower domain and near-term timeline of
their venture. The search for opportunities easily becomes constrained to the
affordances in the more immediate environment – low hanging fruit that are ripe
for consumption.
Entrepreneurs will often see the future of a world changed
by their ventures. However, it is much harder imagine what the new innovations
will be enabled by their ventures. It is even more difficult to imagine the new
social institutions that disruptive innovations will enable.
The generation of innovators, scientists, engineers, and
hackers that have been influenced by the positive depiction of a future
portrayed by Star Trek has been well discussed – not just by William Shatner.
But in the decades since Star Trek the popular future seems to be filled with
looming catastrophe and science fiction has mostly focused on depictions of
inevitable dystopias. In response to this, Neal Stephenson began the “Hieroglyph
Project to convince sci-fi writers to stop worrying and learn to love the
future,” in 2012. What science fiction can do is create a larger and more
coherent vision of the future – one that imagines a whole integrated society,
economy, political system and more.
This is why Kelly’s blog points at something so important. The
call to imagine a future worth living in is more than a place we want to live –
but is also a call to create visions of how individual innovations can
contribute in the shaping of this sort of positive future.
What entrepreneurs need to be both individually successful
and meaningfully successful in making the world a place worth living in, is not
a single vision but rather the means, and support for a larger and more
coherent visioning of their innovations and the ecologies their innovations
will enable.
Before I begin to explore how the digital environment will
provide a fundamentally new ‘ground’ (as in figure-ground) for life in the 21st
Century. I want to begin by laying out a foundation for understanding how
things change, and how change creates change in conditions of change (is this a
Rumfeldism?). I will begin with some important types of causality, then look at
some fundamental types of distribution and then discuss a few basic processes
of change – but always with an eye on visioning what can be enabled by the
emerging digital environment. Later I will explore the implications for how we
construct individuality.