Quick tools for thinking about future impacts of change: 'for there is nothing either good or bad,...

“…for there is nothing either good or bad,

but thinking makes it so.”Wendy SchultzInfinite Futures

ICT2013Vilnius Lithuania

7 November 2013

“…for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Wendy SchultzInfinite Futures

Vilnius Lithuania7 November 2013

• Today, I’ll leave the facts and forecasts to others• I’m here to suggest how to think about the facts

and forecasts they’ve offered

BEWARE OF STRAIGHT LINES

BEWARE OF STRAIGHT LINES

xkcd

• Change in living systems – particularly in human systems – is neither simple nor ballistic

• Because we are curious, creative, inventive, playful – and contrary, addictive, and perverse

CHANGE EVOLVES IN OVERLAPPING WAVES & TURBULENCE

THREE HORIZONS FRAMEWORK

MANAGER VISIONARYENTREPRENEUR

Eg, MUSIC, MOVIES, CDs, DVDs

Eg., MUSIC, MOVIES – transformational disruptor -

iTunes

Eg, MUSIC, MOVIES – paradigm buster -

Napster

CHANGE EVOLVES IN OVERLAPPING WAVES & TURBULENCE

THREE HORIZONS FRAMEWORK

• The operating assumptions of today are built on successful responses to past waves of change: Those assumptions create stability, but also resist change

• The visionaries and inventors of today challenge those assumptions – but often in ways that are ultimately unworkable: they disrupt paradigms and perspectives

• Entrepreneurs build on visions to create the marketable goods and services – they transform capacity – and create new operating assumptions

The Crapularity

3D printing + spam + micropayments = tribblesthat you get billed for, as it replicates wildly out of control. 90% of everything is rubbish, and it's all in your spare room – or someone else's spare room, which you're forced to rent through AirBnB.

Source: Alternatives to the Singularity, online; also at Journal of Futures Studies: “The Singularity is Boring: An Open, Collaborative ‘Mock-up’”http://www.jfs.tku.edu.tw/17-1/S06.pdf

A pile of worthless "crapjects" (neologism coined by @iftf)

The Crapularity

3D printing + spam + micropayments = tribblesthat you get billed for, as it replicates wildly out of control. 90% of everything is rubbish, and it's all in your spare room – or someone else's spare room, which you're forced to rent through AirBnB.


A pile of worthless "crapjects" (neologism coined by @iftf)

• You may have invented something ‘insanely great’

• But when you set it free, it will immediately and unpredictably interact with everything else in its context

MANOA SCENARIO BUILDING

• Try brainstorming the impacts – and the impacts of the impacts – of three different new ideas you’ve heard discussed today

• Now ask yourself, ‘what next new thing will the colliding impacts of those three changes generate?’

MANOA SCENARIO BUILDING

The GrouponularityIn which aggregate consumer purchasing power + pricing algorithms + applied captology, allows your mother (working in concert with everyone else's mother) to reduce the price of 99% of mainstream consumer goods to ~0.

The global economy is replaced by something almost equally improbable. Unfortunately, it's comprised entirely of jet-ski adventure days, bread makers, and underwhelming restaurant meals.


The GrouponularityIn which aggregate consumer purchasing power + pricing algorithms + applied captology, allows your mother (working in concert with everyone else's mother) to reduce the price of 99% of mainstream consumer goods to ~0.

The global economy is replaced by something almost equally improbable. Unfortunately, it's comprised entirely of jet-ski adventure days, bread makers, and underwhelming restaurant meals.Source: Alternatives to the Singularity, online;

also at Journal of Futures Studies: “The Singularity is Boring: An Open, Collaborative ‘Mock-up’”http://www.jfs.tku.edu.tw/17-1/S06.pdf

• How will those colliding impacts affect society?

• What counter-intuitive results emerge when a change that’s good on a small scale goes global?

BEWARE the LONE WOLF FUTURE

http://bethwalshphotography.wordpress.com/2013/04/13/lone-wolf/

BEWARE the LONE WOLF FUTURE

http://bethwalshphotography.wordpress.com/2013/04/13/lone-wolf/

• Change is not binary, and the future is not monocular

• We don’t face a single future – no matter how compelling new technologies are, or how much momentum they seem to have

CHANGES GENERATEMYRIAD POSSIBLEFUTURES

CHANGES GENERATEMYRIAD POSSIBLEFUTURES

• Multiple emergent futures are possible given different initial conditions; complex interactions of multiple onrushing changes; and a complex context that includes cultural diversity and all of your individual points of view

BEWARE OF INTENTIONS


• So you’ve invented a new technology, or a new service, or a new form of organization

• What you designed it to do is not necessarily what your fellow humans will actually do with it.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES ABOUND


A diagnostic toolbecomes

an artist’s medium

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES ABOUND

BEWARE OF INTENTIONS…or, as with so many

media, a new avenue for porn

WHERE WILL UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES ARISE?

Verge General Practice Framework for Futures Studies

and Foresight

Verge General Practice Framework for

Futures Studies and Foresight

Dr Richard Lum

• Artists will use the invention as a new medium

• Children will turn it into a game• … and of course, someone

somewhere will use it to create porn

• Use guides like Verge to explore how your invention will reverberate through all the arenas of human endeavour

WHERE WILL UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES ARISE?

BE AWARE OF YOUR LENSES

BE AWARE OF YOUR LENSES

• How do you see the world? • Who else sees the world that

way – what are the embedded values, myths, metaphors of your assumptions?

• How do different values, myths, and metaphors drive responses to your inventions / ideas / policy initiatives?

OTHERS MAY USE DIFFERENT FILTERS


Causal Layered Analysis

Sohail Inayatullah


• You can’t just change the buzz• You can’t just invent a new system• You need to engage with, and develop,

different worldviews• Re-perceive the world with a different

metaphor, a new myth• Ask the next five people you meet for their

myths and metaphors for the worlds and fuures we are inventing.

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”

Albert Einstein

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as great and sudden change.”

Mary Shelley

Thank you.Wendy Schultz

@wendyinfutures

Quick tools for thinking about future impacts of change: 'for there is nothing either good or bad,...

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