How history can help to develop good judgement

European Planning Conference Prague, November 2015Katharina Michalskibrandforesight.co

“Job of agencies today is to be somewhat of a future/growth hacker.”

– Rem Reynolds, AKQA

Disruption: Creating new markets

TechnologyMobile internet enabled devices (e.g. iPhone)

Consumer How people access and share content

Market Subscription based streaming (e.g. Spotify, Amazon)

1. Recognise converging trends

2. Come up with a new idea 3. Anticipate a mass habit

change

Creativity Foresight+

Seeing relationships and connecting the dots Anticipating future behaviour or change

What is foresight?

Latent need:A need or desire waiting for a new cultural trend to developAbility:

The ability to predict what will happen or be needed in the future

Mindset:The product of particular ways of thinking and updating beliefs

Some events are predictable. But: Probabilistic expression of the likelihood of events is not enough.

Foresight starts with a bold hypotheses or question, which involves a flash of insight or an imaginative leap.

Expressing and quantifying uncertainty in predictions.Epistemic: Contents of unread booksAleatory: Contents of books that haven’t been written yet

Foresight should be a collaborative process based on feedback-loops between hard and soft science.

“Epistemology, the philosophy of history, and statistics aim at understanding the truth, investigating the mechanism that generate them, and separating regularity from the coincidental in historical matters. They all address the question of what one knows, except that they are all to be found in different buildings, so to speak.”

– Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan

“Historians make good futurists because they understand how change happens.”

– David Armitage

What is history for?Conservative: “History for its own sake”Mainstream: Explanatory function of historyProgressive: Relevance of history

History is a critical human science. It is the broadest of studies, embracing every aspect of life. It aims at understanding and explaining human experience over time.

What is history?

Theoretical aspect of history - philosophy of history

The process of writing history - historiography

The product of that process - history

The process of writing history: Zooming in and zooming out

Facts

Relationships

Patterns

Micro history

Why did killing cats amuse apprentice printers in Paris during the 1730s?

Longue-durée history

Asks about the rise of long-term complexes, over many decades, centuries, or millennia

Only by scaling their inquiries over such durations can historians explain and understand the genesis of phenomena and trends

Every history is an approximation of the truth

Evidence is always somewhat ambiguous

No clarity on relative importance of varied factors and how they interacted with each other

Intuition, imagination and empathy to fill in the gaps

History doesn’t repeat itself: No one historical situation has been or ever can be repeated in every particular. This limits the confidence with which we can predict.

The need to generalise: Events lose much of their meaning if they are not seen as having some degree of regularity and consistency, as belonging to a certain type of event.

Looking for rough regularities

Fergusson found that the combination of economic volatility, ethnic conflict, and failing empire always led to spirals of lethal violence.

The three causes are still in play: "Our job is to keep them from coinciding again"

Trajectories

Long-term structural factors that render certain developments inevitable in the long run

These are the defining limits within which the actions of individuals or groups have their scope

“Breakdown” of the family: decline of productive household rather than the decline in individual morality

Fluctuation of cultural codes

No aspect of human culture lies outside history or is predetermined

Fatherhood in Victorian age: reaction against the past rather than a climax of a long tradition. Codes of fatherhood have been in continuous flux throughout the past 200 years

Learning from mistakes

History as inventory of experiences

Based on insufficient data about collapsed societies

But: Puts forward an interesting perspective about failures of judgement

Familiar patterns of thinking or behaviour that are immediately accessible to us

“History can show us what to avoid, even if it does not teach us what to do, by showing the most common mistakes that mankind is apt to make and repeat.”

– B.H. Liddell Hart, Why don’t we learn from history?

Road map of factors contributing to failures of group decision-making:

1. Failure to anticipate the problem before it actually arrives 2. When the problem does arrive, failure to perceive it 3. After the perceive it, failure to even try to solve it 4. Attempt to solve the problem, but with no success

Source: Jared Diamond, Collapse - How societies choose to fail or succeed

“The fact that disruption can take time helps to explain why incumbents frequently overlook disrupters (…) Failing to respond effectively to the trajectory that Netflix was on led Blockbuster to collapse.” - Clayton Christensen et al., What is disruptive innovation?

Developing good judgement

Zoom in to zoom out: Generalisation not based on profound understanding of the details is pure speculation

History as inventory: We can learn a lot from mediated experiences and mistakes; the more abstract the lesson the more valid

Reasoning by historical analogy: History doesn’t repeat itself, but certain events have same characteristics, which we can anticipate (e.g. revolutions, financial crises, market disruption)

Culture fluctuates: Human culture consists of reactions and counteractions and is not a progressive development

Self-knowledge: Understanding own biases, values and assumptions helps to enter the mental worlds of others

Good innovators typically think very big and they think very small. New ideas are sometimes found in the most granular details of a problem where few other bother to look. And they are sometimes found when you are doing your most abstract and philosophical thinking, considering why the world is the way that it is and whether there might be an alternative to the dominant paradigm. – Nate Silver, The signal and the noise

Thank you!