FAN Club Newsletter
8 December 2009
What’s New in Futures?
Is the future what it used to be? That knotty question was addressed by 70 FAN Club members who met at the Institute for Engineering and Technology in London on December 8. The meeting explored ideas about the future, and tools for helping us manage our approaches to it. We had an emphasis on our ecological future to help concentrate the mind.
Brian Brader from the Foresight Horizon Scanning Centre began the day by telling us about new strands of Foresight activity. These emphasise science and technology trends, migration driven by climate change and other environmental changes, and new futures work with the Communities and Local Government department. There is also to be a major revision and refreshment of the Sigma Scan in 2010. In addition, a project called Horizons in Public Policy is being developed to encourage futures thinking in policy analysis. One product may be more futures training for policy makers, and the aim is to make this available within six months.
Brian added that this meeting would take forward Foresight’s interest in collaborative thinking about the future. Much as the FAN Club’s November meeting in Belfast had heard about Futurescape, a Fujitsu tool for collaborative futures thinking, this meeting would learn about Southbeach from CSC.
Future FAN Club meetings will focus on Africa (January 25 at South Africa House, with science attachés of London embassies), the nature of evidence (February 24, with the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology), engineering (April 19 with the Royal Academy of Engineering), and perhaps food (on 24 March). On May 19 we meet in Wales, and after that there may be meetings on topics to do with energy and with innovation, held with the R&D Society and the Royal Society.
Gary Kass
The Ethnographic Futures Framework
The first main speaker of the day was Gary Kass of Natural England, well known to many at the FAN Club, and indeed a speaker at our September meeting at the London Wetlands Centre. His theme of the day was Natural England’s use of a method called the Ethnographic Futures Framework.
He explained that Natural England was set up in 2006 by legislation which specifically mentions the benefit of present and future generations. So it has a futures programme which is intended to anticipate and respond to challenges, lead debate and discussion of important issues, and help Natural England focus on how it manages itself to face the future. Scenario work has been vital to each of these aims. As Gary explained, this work is data-driven and is “engaged.” This means that it is tested by workshops and other methods both within Natural England and more widely. One important link has been to the FAN Club and the Foresight project Land Use Futures.
Gary told the meeting that this work is required to be relevant. A Natural England board member told him that it needed to have an effect as well as being fun for Gary and his colleagues. They approached this problem by looking for the major issues that might affect the environment of England in 2050. The five that have emerged are resources; climate change; innovation and technology; governance, wealth and the economy; and finally, people and values. Shunning the usual 2x2 matrix, these were used to produce a cubic space of uncertainty. But to simplify matters, it is easier to think of the issues on a graph with just three lines. First comes today’s dominant way of doing things, both social and technical, and this approach fades on a decade timescale.Next is the emerging logic, which itself weakens over coming decades. It is replaced by the third wave, which is at present only visible as a series of weak signals.
The biggest problem posed by this approach is to get past a period in about 2030-2040, the zone of greatest uncertainty. Having been forbidden by his mother to become an archaeologist, Gary chooses to see this problem as being about “the archaeology of the future.”
This Ethnographic Futures approach to these issues involves less thinking about the future of, say, ICT or energy supplies, and more focus on how we see ourselves, how we relate to each other, how we communicate, how we create wealth, and how we use resources. For example, thinking about communication might encompass language, communications networks and even art.
Natural England has just published the scenarios which it developed under this methodology. It has also produced a compendium of 34 other projects from all over the world that relate to these issues.
At the meeting, Gary used one scenario, called “Connect for Life,” to illustrate the ethnographic approach. In this future, economies have gone local, but people are connected globally and understand interdependence. National government has been squeezed in the middle and become less important. If people spend most of their time in cyberspace, the scenario asks, what happens to their belief systems? Will people develop loyalties to others whom they have never met physically? They might think of the environment as part of a “grid of life” which also encompasses them. This might enhance their sense of connection and responsibility to the landscape.
This analysis points up important and neglected uncertainties, such as the future of environment protection, the future of innovation, economic growth and potential advantage, and how networking will alter society. For Natural England, it adds emphasis to an existing focus on ecosystem services.
An example is the need to mitigate flood hazards. This can be done by more thoughtful management of uplands, or alternatively by pouring massive amounts of concrete in valleys which are at risk of flooding. In a growth economy, the uplands can be neglected or misused, but in Connect for Life they are likely to be highly valued.
As Gary sees it, these scenarios are mind-expanding rather than being about evidence. They regard the future as a living thing, not some fixed object waiting to be discovered. This may seem to limit their value to managers who are responsible for delivery. But the ethnographic approach helps remind people that the drivers of the future are not static, by putting society at the centre in a way that does not normally happen in futures work. It draws attention to complexity, and away from the false extremes which can be emphasised by conventional futures approaches.
Gary was asked in questions how we can tell that this approach is stretching our imagination and analysis. He replied that when the work began in 2008, he and colleagues had looked back at the world in 1908. Things had changed colossally in the intervening century, especially in the first 50 years, during which there had been two world wars, the UK had shed most of its empire, and democracy had reduced the influence of the aristocracy. Technology had also changed dramatically. So we are right to think that the world can be a different place on a timescale of a few decades.
See Gary’s presentation here.
Professor Bill Sutherland
Scanning Global Conservation Futures
The theme of how best to make use of expert opinion on global futures was taken up by our second speaker, Professor Bill Sutherland, of the Conservation Science Group at the University of Cambridge. He told us of using this approach on a massive scale to generate a gargantuan horizon scan of the ecological issues we face.
Bill’s title was “Scanning Global Conservation Futures” and his presentation began with the phrase “Frog-dried slippers.” It had nothing to do with the talk, but Bill had promised his daughter that he would get the words in somehow.
He began with a criticism of his own profession, conservation biology, which has, he says, “not been doing its job well.” For example, he and his colleagues had failed to point to the probable effects of the 2006 push towards biofuels in the US and Europe. This change in land use has had severe effects for greenhouse gas emissions and the environment. His community was not a significant part of the biofuels debate. Its conference presentations tend to look in the rear-view mirror, not to the future. Policy makers say that ecologists don’t produce anything useful, and ecologists say policy makers are not interested in evidence.
Bill presented some ideas on improving this state of affairs, adding that he wants feedback on how useful his approach might be for other interest groups, perhaps the police or the Ministry of Defence.
His effort began by asking horizon scanners, biologists, conservationists and others for neglected conservation issues of interest to their organisation. Then they were asked to vote on the full list in two ways: they were asked whether it was important, and whether they had heard of it. This produced a list of 15 important but neglected issues, ranging from ocean dead zones to invasive species.
The next stage was to ask conservation bodies to rank these issues in terms of their importance and urgency. Seven organisations have done this and six more are working on it. For example, a butterfly charity tends to regard UK terrestrial ecology issues as being of most concern. By contrast, high-latitude volcanism (?) could have severe global climate effects. The issue is potentially serious, but most organisations do not regard it as worthy of attention right now.
Bill and his colleagues have also done an exercise designed to identify the top ecological questions for politicians. It was the subject of a full-page Guardian article. Then the group repeated the exercise on a global scale, and produced 2278 issues from 21 organisations.
Bill told the meeting that while there are many issues and challenges, there are also plenty of solutions out there. For example, his group has produced a list of about 300 possible solutions to the many severe problems we have in the global marine environment. There are dozens just for the single problem of birds getting tangled in fishing nets. The list is being put online. Might this also work for attempts to reduce drug use or crime?
Finally, Bill’s group has looked for evidence, much as might happen for medical innovation, that these proposed interventions work. For instance, there are over 60 possible solutions to the decline of pollinators, a familiar ecological problem. What is the evidence for the effectiveness of each of them?
Bill’s approach uses horizon scanning to identify issues, and “intervention scanning” to look at possible solutions and their effectiveness.
Given the FAN Club’s interest in collaborative working, Bill was probably not surprised to be asked how network organisations can change their behaviour. This is a tricky problem. Work like Bill’s might act as a “strange attractor” to focus attention on possible solutions. As he said: “Getting collective interest is simple. Getting collective action is more tricky.”
Alun Rhydderch
Futurescope: Future Dimensions
The last speaker of the morning was Alun Rhydderch of HSC, who presented a Futurescope discussion of uncertainty.
His presentation was based on an imminent publication, which itself grew out of the HSC’s International Futures Project. It identified 10 initial dimensions of uncertainty, such as education, climate change and demographics, to which an eleventh, values and beliefs, has been added because they keep arising during HSC projects.
Alun explained that the project International Futures has completed its analysis phase and produced a toolkit as well as the UK futures Wiki. The Wiki has been used instead of a conventional research effort, in the hope of finding out more about the 11 issues and the questions they raise. The toolkit has already been used in work with other UK government departments. For example, it raises governance as an issue and can be used to look at where power lies on a scale from autocracy to democracy.
Alun added that this work has now been encapsulated into causal maps. People differ in their response to these. Some people find them a valuable help to their understanding. For example the maps produced by the Foresight project Tackling Obesities allow users to see which aspects are economic and which are psychological. But other people need some help to realise how these maps can show up patterns and priorities.
Steve Wells, Chriss Yapp, Howard Smith
Collaboration the Southbeach way
The afternoon session had two main themes. The first was the FAN Club motif of collaboration. To begin with, we heard from Steve Wells of Informing Choices about his work on getting members to work together. He is carrying out research on collaboration amongst members. More immediately, a new collaboration between FAN Club members in the UK’s devolved Celtic nations is using Fujitsu’s Futurescape tool to help thinking about the effects of the ageing population for policies in their region.
We heard next from Chris Yapp, an IT industry veteran now with CapGemini. He had two simple questions. Why do futures analysts use all those flip charts and post-it notes? And why do more futures presentations tell you more about the speaker’s PowerPoint skills than about their subject knowledge?
He has looked for a way round this problem, ideally one that would allow for uncertainty in analysis and avoid on-off answers. It should also allow any client of a multi-client study to process and play with information as they wish, and to add their own proprietary material.
One possible solution was presented by Howard Smith of IT firm CSC, producers of the Southbeach collaboration tool. Southbeach uses a standard repertoire to display – for example – things that are harmful, things that are useful, and the links between them. As Howard says, Southbeach does not even need a computer. You can do it with felt-tip pens. The result, said Howard, may look like a Mindmap. The difference is that a Mindmap only means something to its creator. Southbeach uses standardised notation, so that a representation in Southbeach always means the same thing to everyone who sees it. Businesses use it, but so do children.
Howard says that the Southbeach notation is a rich one, so that almost anything can be represented. As an example, he showed a diagram of the water supply crisis in the Murray-Darling river system in Australia. It mapped the influences on this problem as useful or harmful, as having potential, as being insufficient, as being actions or interventions, and in other ways. This produces a flat map, but it is also possible to split out the components, perhaps by time or by likelihood. Another case he showed was that of extending the life of UK power stations, where longer life might mean more risk of power cuts.
In an even more controversial case, for example, Southbeach has been used to pinpoint the problems arising from the low propensity of people in the NHS to accept business innovation: only medical innovation is respected in the NHS, while service innovation is not regarded as being interesting or important. This leads in turn to tension between local and national leadership in the NHS. Southbeach, said Howard, allows the roles of different participants to be made clear. It also allows the views of a wide range of stakeholders to be represented, for example in a diagram of the US subprime crisis.
Howard explained that Southbeach is free but that it pays for itself by the sale of add-ons for specific users. He is keen to involve the futures community in its development.
Howard and Chris’s presentations are here.
Jon Turney
The Rough Guide to the Future
The final speaker of the day took us far away from the world of policy drivers and scanned horizons. Dr Jon Turney is the author of the forthcoming Rough Guide to the Future.
Jon’s theme was “What’s old in Futures?” He believes that our ideas of the future are at a historic point. We realise we have to think about the future. But the more we do so, the less comfortable the contemplation becomes. As all FAN Club members know, a lot is written about the future, but there is far less about the ideas that this thinking involves.
One key clash, thinks Jon, is between the bad future (peak oil, climate disaster) and the optimistic one (ease and leisure while machines do the cleaning). At the moment, the second of these is less prominent than in the past. But polls shows that a surprisingly high percentage of the population expect that something near to one or other of these extremes will occur during their lifetime.
The Rough Guide will look at futures methods and our ideas about the future as well as at “futures past,” our previous ideas on the subject. It will also examine our key 21st century challenges, from today’s headline issues out to possibilities such as The Convergence and cosmic evolution.
Jon believes that many future-oriented projects are “self-undermining,” for example the inherently impossible claims made to support the Human Genome Project. In the past it might not have mattered too much that all forecasts are wrong. But in the information age, nothing gets forgotten, so anyone making a prediction is volunteering for ridicule in a few years’ time.
Jon doubts whether anyone still thinks seriously that prediction is a valuable activity. He agrees with the economist and historian Robert Heilbroner, who wrote that for most of history, people had very little idea that the future would be different from the present. The scientific revolution and the enlightenment introduced the idea of a better future. But since 1945 there has been more of an awareness that things might get worse rather than better. Nowadays even optimists such as Ray Kurzweilalso discuss fears of the future.
There is now less optimism about the future, and less faith in forecasting it. But there is renewed interest in past visions of a better world, exemplified by the exhibits at World’s Fairs from the 1930s onwards. Millions saw their optimistic visions of a clean, leisured future of high technology. Disney, another purveyor of this idea of the future, now shows off “A Classic Future Environment” from its own past. The iconography of the TV series Futurama is a homage to this cultural trope, as is the web site RetroFuture, “Where Yesterday’s Tomorrow is still in the Future.”
It may be, Jon thinks, that this cultural baggage prevents us from thinking clearly about the future, and leads us to think about possible futures in a jaded way. This disillusion is amplified by the tendency for the media to write about implausible extremes. But he added that futures and scenario thinking is here to stay. There is even psychology research suggesting that “mental time travel” is a fundamental aspect of the human mind.
Jon’s presentation is here in full – an IT glitch prevented him from showing it properly at the meeting. You can find out more by visiting Jon’s web site and blog.
Discussion of Jon’s ideas was animated. One speaker pointed out that the average length of a marriage in the UK has been 15 years for many decades. Divorce is only more common because people are living longer. Is our current thinking influenced by memories of a past that never was? Jon agreed that this was probably true, especially in areas such as marriage where “the cultural police” are at their most vigilant. But it is possible to make grounded predictions: for example, H G Wells thought that cities would always grow so that they took an hour to cross, whatever transport technology was available.
One very clear question was asked. “What sort of thinking do you think we need in the future to think about the future?” Jon replied by quoting author Bruce Sterling. What will happen in the future is more history. It will be messy and ambiguous, but we may avoid some of the worst problems.
One part of the Rough Guide will look at key issues for the 21st century. While the usual suspects such as climate change, water supplies and population growth are all there, Jon – a biologist by background – says that biodiversity is perhaps the hardest issue to be optimistic about. “There will just be less of it.”
But he ended by adding that some of the biggest claims of the life extension movement may turn out to be close to reality. This is a “possible game-changer,” in Jon’s words, because people probably do get better at planning as they age. So although a society with many very old people would be unlike anything we know today, it might be able to take better decisions about big issues.
And on that comparatively cheerful note, we applauded Jon and the rest of the day’s speakers, and left.
If you were at the meeting, you will have received a feedback form by email. Please fill it in!