futurism and fitting into the future

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“When you look at past futurists, the big mistakes they make are not predicting the game-changers. Anyone can predict incremental advances, but the things that really trip futurists up are when they think something is going to be a breakthrough and it isn’t, or they just entirely miss the real breakthroughs. The big one is the analog-to-digital transition. Nobody picked up on that. Asimov completely missed it. Nobody saw how digital technology was going to transform our society and our world. Of course now, once it has, it seems obvious. But that was a game-changer that nobody saw coming. So now we’re trying to predict, “What are the future game-changers like that going to be?”

Steven Novella

(author note: both McLuhan & Toffler did not miss this)

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koan

a paradoxical anecdote or riddle, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment.

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It used to be I fixed businesses. They had an issue, maybe even one they struggled to put a finger on, and I got called. Nowadays I get called to talk more about, well, the future: how that business could fit into a vague future and maybe discuss some vague outlines of what the future could be. But, please, do not call me a futurist. Futurists, for the most part, are bullshit artists weaving wonderful narratives of worlds that could be. Fun to listen to, certainly opens the imagination, but mostly fantasy buttressed up by some pretty charts showing trends leading to that future or selective anecdotes about the present which get extrapolated out into stories of possibilities. And this is where they typically truly lose the plot; they discuss possibilities as declaratives. They state something “will be” as in “the metaverse is the” or “the metaverse will be the future of” as if it is cast in stone. Fantasy stuff in my words. The best “futurists’ simply suggest these are things to make you think; not things of what will be. The best ‘futurists’ don’t give answers or ‘destinations’, but rather frameworks to think about fitting into the future and force you to think about probabilities of possibilities not fantasy.

Which leads me to the real business of futurism is harder than it looks.

“Behind each door of what-if lies an unanswerable question that unhinges an infinite Rube Goldberg machine of probabilities.”
Maria Popova

I have always embraced the concept of scenario planning, but I have just thought it was relatively cumbersome in practicality – in the doing of and in the usefulness in a dynamic market. But, inevitably, any discussion of futurism will crash into the discussion of inevitableness. The only futurists who discussed inevitableness that I admire are McLuhan and Toffler. In fact, contrary to the opening quote I used, they did exactly what Steven Novella said no one did. That said. Both McLuhan and Toffler’s thinking is strewn with what now looks like fantastical inevitable musings. Yet, the prize in studying them, particularly Toffler, is in viewing what he deems as inevitable underlying sociotechnological currents, not specific changes (although he does get many of those right). I cannot remember who said this, but many of the technological changes we view today as inevitable truly hinged on one person and one decision. For example, if Henry Ford had decided to build electric cars rather than gas-powered ones, it would have changed the course of oil dependency, how cities were built and designed and even how homes would be built. Yeah. Many of the world underpinnings are grounded in a single bet. And that is why much of futurism is hard. Much of the ‘good stuff’ futurism suggests that single bet needs to be unraveled which is, well, hard. This means the ‘bad stuff’ futurism is usually simply an extrapolation of what exists. This can certainly be interesting and lots of businesses like this because it is always easier to edit the world than create a world. But let me circle back to the former. Creating a new world does not have to be fantasyland. There is a massive difference between suggesting automation will make all human work irrelevant and suggesting automation will shift 50% of jobs in some way (new jobs or change jobs). Similar discussion revolves around robots, currency, medicine and, well, everything. And that’s the hard part – discerning fantasy with possibility and, well, koan (sifting through the inadequacy of logical reasoning).

Which lead me to the role people play in futurism’s mojo.

Humans are inherently ‘belonging beings.’ What I mean by that is we gain a sense of meaning and mattering when we sense we belong. Some people may call this ‘community’ and I imagine they aren’t wrong. I simply suggest it is about connection. And from there I would suggest it is a complex connection in that it is a connection to the earth – water, climate, resources, etc – leading to a greater sense of belonging if we feel connected to the earth as well as the more normally discussed connection with other humans. This isn’t some hippy-dippy thought, but more of a growing realization that survival is pragmatic as well as psychological and if we connect with all, we are closer to maximizing (optimizing) our potential life – in the present and for the future (where the next generation will be residing). True futurism isn’t specific to a ‘thing’, but rather specifically about the whole interconnected messy mix of things of which humans are at the center.

Which leads me to thinking.
Futurism is just thinking beyond the present. I bring up thinking because I believe people like to think. Maybe not every day and every minute (like I do), but I believe people like to feel smart and to feel smart you have to think. I suggest that because circling back to Toffler, he suggested every business should have futurists. I agree and disagree. I think if everyone just thought a little bit better, was able to contribute what you are thinking, and that thinking could be applied as part of collective action to create some impact that benefited the business, well, you have a business that is future-fitting on a daily/weekly basis. I am sure a business would benefit from specific people who were fairly good at scenario thinking (that’s a pragmatic futurist), but having an entire business thinking morphs to fit the future. I imagine my point here is that the link between futurism and future-fitting is thinking. I say that because neither futurism nor future-fitting is a ‘how-to-manual,’ they are simply frames within which you could envision the business existing. And, as Toffler has noted, people know more about the future then we tend to formulate in any way so I believe people just need to be encouraged to do so.

Which leads me to how we should think about the future.

I am not sure if it was the pandemic or real business change, but almost every techno-futurist is claiming that ‘the future’ is just around the corner, or even the future is now, always offering a sense of inevitableness, and always suggesting it’s going to be something fantastical (using some vague future to make that point). All of this “future is now” bullshit is attempting to suggest you are missing something (note: which you most likely are, but not the things they are going to suggest) and you need to get onboard.

Here is the problem. The people that eat this shit up don’t really want wisdom. These people just want shortcuts to getting “more” of what they view as self-interest prosperity/progress therefore if the message doesn’t match the ‘more’ desires ultimately it doesn’t engage the listeners because it doesn’t contain the inevitability of something positive for them. To be clear. The message itself need not be positive, there can even be a general sense of doom in a futurist message, but nowadays a message needs a sense of some guarantee that prosperity will never end. Therein lies my biggest issue about futurism in the fact that trend watchers are seeking future prosperity versus discussing releasing present prosperity. In other words, there really isn’t an emphasis on future fitting, but rather establishing some ‘maybe’ future state. In addition, this futurism stuff can edge very quickly into ‘the elitism zone’ where things get discussed in ways that enable people to envision some fantastical future states and, yet, be incredibly off-putting in its lack of understandability.

In the end. I believe the “seek future vs. release the present” topic is at the core of how we should think about the future. Yeah. I know the balance in that discussion will vary by the business vision itself, but, if you don’t navigate pragmatism of the present and possibilities of a future, you kind of are wasting people’s time and minds. In addition, if you don’t navigate pragmatic understanding of reality, any possibilities crafted will appear hollow. Maybe we all need to embrace Koan. Ponder.