Posts filed under 'future'
Grant Park’s tipping points
Editor’s note: Walker Smith, who runs The Futures Company’s Yankelovich division in the United States, has sent a long post reflecting on the 40-year context of Barack Obama’s Presidential victory this week. The conventional wisdom is that blog posts should be short and pithy. But we think that from time to time it’s better to give an argument the space and time it needs to unfold. Walker’s short essay is one of those occasions.
Walker Smith writes:
Barack Obama’s victory on Tuesday night was not unexpected. Three weeks out, political pundits knew that Obama had a lead that has never been overcome in modern political history. (Horse race political junkies will enjoy my favorite campaign resource, www.fivethirtyeight.com.) The real drama came an hour later when Obama took the stage with his family to honor this historic moment in his moving victory speech.
Chicago’s Grant Park, the scene of the victory rally, is a beautiful, expansive park bordering Lake Michigan that to this day still stirs up grueling memories for Baby Boomers like me, of the police violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The question that hangs over Barack Obama’s election is whether it really does represents the end of a 40-year cycle of deep political and cultural division, even though his electoral victory was built on effective party-political organisation rather than cutting across party-political lines.
1 comment 7 November 2008
“We are where we are”
Rachel Kelnar writes:
I went to two really interesting futures events last week and was struck by the extent to which some emerging learnings were common to both, despite having expected beforehand that the topics would have little in common.
First, I attended a debate at the London Transport Museum (LTM) on the future of transport – ‘Survive or Thrive: What will urban life be like in 2055?’ The LTM used the intelligent infrastructure scenarios which my colleague Andrew Curry and I wrote for the UK Government’s Foresight Programme as the starting point for this discussion. I also participated in ‘Museums in the Long Now’ – a roundtable exploring the future of the museum, organised by the Cultural Leadership Programme at City University and Compton Verney, with funding from the London Centre for Arts and Cultural Enterprise (LCACE).
An emerging theme of both sessions was ‘we are where we are’ – that if we were to design a transport system for the UK, we would not set out to design what we currently have, and neither would we fund or develop our museums in the way we do now. However, ‘we are where we are’ – and we therefore have to temper our views of the future with the reality of this starting point. We don’t have the luxury of a blank slate.
However, it’s important that this doesn’t limit us in terms of what we strive for, and both sessions used scenarios to help participants resist the temptation to think too short term, or too negatively.
Another interesting reflection for me was the potentially changing role of museums. They are generally considered windows to the past and this is pretty uncontroversial. But, if museums are to remain relevant in the future, they perhaps need to do more than reflect on what has already happened. They need to start providing a window on the future as well. The LTM has certainly embraced this idea, with the Future Generator, which allows every virtual or real museum visitor to explore how their choices can impact the future of London and the type of city we will all live in. It’s about putting the Museum at the heart of the debate about our transport system, sustainability and the London we might have in 2055, and pleasingly, it’s also based on the scenarios we were involved in writing.
Discussing the Museum of the Long Now, it became increasingly clear that many museums may well be a natural home for such futures exploration. They are naturally places where people go to learn – to be challenged, provoked, and to understand a culture, a society or a particular event in our history. This mindset is a good one for thinking about the future of our culture and our society – because thinking about the past is the first step to thinking more effectively about the future.
This shift is not without its challenges - it requires, for example, that museums get a bit more comfortable with conflict than many are at the moment. If museums can successfully place themselves at the heart of our future – regardless of the issue – than they are helping to cement their role in our lives going forward. We are where we are - but we don’t have to be stuck here.
1 comment 25 June 2008
Blind spots on globalisation
Joe Ballantyne writes:
Back in the late 90s, and even more recently, globalisation was all the rage. Some people thought this was a jolly good thing and it would make us all rich and free, while others thought it was a really bad thing. which would lead to greater poverty and environmental damage. Either way, almost everyone agreed that we were careering towards a brave new globalised world, ruled by the free flow of capital between nations, and characterised by global institutions and global flows of people and goods.
Fast forward a decade, however, and things start to look quite a bit different. Countries like India, Russia and China are much wealthier and more powerful than ten years ago, the expansion of international groupings such as the EU seems to have all but halted, and the ongoing drama of the credit crunch suggests that financial deregulation has reached its limits. Protectionism is a recurring theme in the Democrat candidates’ contest in the US, and the chief executive of Deutsche Bank was recently quoted as saying that he “no longer believes in the market’s self-healing power” – and when the head of a major bank starts saying that financial markets need some sort of state intervention, you know something’s up. The public seem to think so: most of us admit a growing suspicion around the role free markets in the economy.
So how did the global theorists – from both the left and the right – so misjudge globalisation? There’s a whole thesis to be written on this, but some pointers could be:
- Many of them were working in internationally-focussed institutions such as universities or global banks – which probably blinded them to the attitudes of the majority who weren’t globetrotting, post-national types.
- Many of them had come to believe the widely canvassed idea that financial power will always trump state power – where as in fact, nationalism is a tremendously strong driver of domestic politics and therefore of political change.
- The Brits in particular lived in a country which had probably gone further than almost any other towards developing a ‘post-national’ identity, embracing the market and minimising the role of national symbols such as the monarchy, religion and so on. But what happened in Britain wasn’t replicated elsewhere.
One of the things we say in futures work is that if the filters you see the world through are too strong, they act like the blinkers on a horse - and create blind spots which make it harder to see signs of change. It’s interesting to think of other blindspots our assumptions about the world might create for us.
The picture was taken by David Eppstein.
1 comment 24 April 2008
The next age of the train
Andrew Curry writes:
This is one of those unexpected pieces of data. According to figures just released by the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC), more miles were travelled by train in the UK last year than in any other year, at least in peacetime. The total mileage - just over 30 billion passenger miles - topped the previous record figure set in 1946. In fact, rail has been growing much faster than car mileage since 1995; the reasons include greater road congestion and rising car costs, investment in new trains, and more accessible information and booking (through online, for example).
ATOC marked the occasion with a booklet, The Billion Passenger Railway (opens in pdf). As it happens, ATOC has been involved in a recent scenarios project we’ve run for the rail sector on the future of a sustainable industry, and through this I was invited to contribute a picture of rail in 75 years time - a story I thoght might well be about European connections. That future scenario, ‘A Europe of City States’, is below the fold.
Image by Atlan at his Cityscapes and Skyline Photos blog.
2 comments 16 April 2008
The future is already here…
Andrew Curry writes:
One of the best-known quotes about futures work - “the future’s already here, it’s just unevenly distributed” - is by the novelist William Gibson, and it’s one of several quotes we sometimes use to introduce futures concepts at workshops. But it’s become dulled by familiarity; a couple of months ago, at a workshop with our sometime collaborator Wendy Schultz, she wondered out loud if there was another way of making the point that there were almost always clues around us as to how the future would evolve, as long as we listened for them (”weak signals”, in futures jargon).
So Russell Davies’ recent post suggesting that the Gibson line “needed flipping around” raised a wry smile. I think the problem is that the line has become so familiar to practitioners that it has floated free from its meaning - it signifies that the speaker does some futures and and knows that very familiar William Gibson line. But it still has meaning for audiences who are new to, or unfamiliar with, futures’ work, who haven’t heard it before; they get it straightaway. It’s about the listeners, not the speaker.
As for the quote: Gibson himself has suggested an alternative:
“Glancing sideways is becoming more generally recognized as about the best way of doing what we used to call futurism.”
[Thanks to the end of cyberspace for the link to this].
Image of William Gibson by Fred Armitage with thanks to Wikipedia
Add comment 20 February 2008
Influential Boomers
Siân Davies writes:
Henley Centre HeadlightVision is just embarking on a merger with the US research company Yankelovich - the market leaders in understanding the changing values and behaviours of US consumers.
While we’ve been negotiating I’ve had the good fortune to immerse myself in much of their research. One publication which stood out for me was ‘Generation Ageless‘, by J Walker Smith and Ann Clurman, Yankelovich’s leading commentators on generational marketing. Yankelovich coined the term ‘baby boomers’ in the 1960s when they first started collecting data on this influential generation. As Walker and Ann say: “Without notice or warning, in defiance of all trends and expectations, Baby Boomers exploded onto the American scene, and in the process changed everything”.
Add comment 1 February 2008
In with the old?
Jo Philips writes:
I was struck by the following quote when reading the historian Theodore Zeldin today:
“What to do with too much information is the great riddle of our time. My solution is to look at the facts through two lenses simultaneously, both through a microscope, choosing details that illuminate life in those aspects that touch people most closely, and through a telescope, surveying large problems from a great distance.”
Zeldin’s argument reinforces Michelle Singer’s previous post on understanding both macro- and micro-narratives to build a robust picture of change. History also helps. Recently in an office workshop we looked back to images from 50 years ago to see what had changed and what had stayed the same. Some of the findings were quite surprising, and it made me think about the importance of a grounding in history to imagine the future. Perhaps the New Year newspapers’ reviews of 2007 are as important for understanding future change as their predictions for the year ahead…
Add comment 7 January 2008
Green influencers
Clare Archer writes:
To mark Energy Savings Week, which finished yesterday, the Energy Saving Trust commissioned us to research the role of word of mouth and community in promoting ideas about saving energy. Our research showed a strong correlation between people who were informed about ‘green ideas’ and their level of connectedness to other people in their communities - creating a kind of virtuous circle. From this we developed a index - working in conjunction with another consultancy, Wildfire - which allows any individual to calculate the power they have to influence others to save energy, on a scale of 1 to 100, by answering a few simple questions. The EST has shifted its strategy to focus on the power of communities to influence change.
There’s coverage in a number of publications - for example in Metro and Marketing Week.
Add comment 29 October 2007
The future of civil society
Andrew Curry writes:
We’ve just finished an extensive project with Carnegie UK’s Commission of Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society in Britain and Ireland, looking out to 2025. We ran eleven workshops across the five jurisdictions, involving several hundred people, and we used the innovative causal layered analysis method to build the scenarios, to help us get to shifts in values. The reports are out soon, and we’ll blog more then.
For the moment the Commission’s chair Geoff Mulgan has written a piece on the findings in today’s Society Guardian. Too bad that our credit for running the process - and for the futures quotes - got lost on the sub-editors’ table.
Add comment 24 October 2007
