By Christopher Mims
In 2004, Ford Motor Co.'s resident futurist, Sheryl Connelly,
led a team that imagined what would happen if an economic shock and
a rapid increase in the price of gasoline led to a crash in
automotive sales. With the 2008 economic crash and subsequent
bailout of the U.S. auto industry, it seemed as if their scenario
had come true.
But did Ms. Connelly and her team really predict the future?
"I always feel compelled to tell people that the same group also
spent time, albeit a short one, talking about what would happen if
aliens were to land and religions reacted in a way that led
societies to crumble because they have no more moral
infrastructure," says Ms. Connelly.
Predicting the future, it turns out, isn't what futurists do.
And in a funny way, that's what makes their work so vital. Many
futurists are convinced that, now more than ever, everyone needs to
start thinking the way they do.
What futurists actually do is facilitate as groups of people
work through a highly structured, sometimes months-long process of
coming up with as many hypothetical futures as they can, in order
to prepare for more or less anything.
Until now, futurism has been practiced mostly by large
organizations making decisions that might not become policy or
products for many years to come. Big companies like Ford and
International Business Machines Corp., as well as government
agencies and especially the Department of Defense, all employ
futurists. Futurism is an academic discipline taught at dozens of
universities around the world.
In the current moment, with political and economic uncertainty
combining with rapid technological change, "it's clear we're not
going to make it through this as passengers," says Scott Smith, a
futurist for 20 years and creator of the educational resource How
To Future.
I recently spent a day futuring with Amy Webb, whose recent book
"The Signals Are Talking" is a good introduction to the topic. We
decided to examine the future of self-driving vehicles.
The first thing about futurism that surprised me is that
practitioners don't think much about technological change. At least
not at first. They start with all the other factors that drive
change, from wealth distribution and education to demography,
politics, the environment and media. This makes sense: No one would
have predicted the rise of Airbnb Inc. by focusing simply on the
capabilities of smartphones and the wireless internet.
Another surprise: Futurists are relentlessly critical of their
own assumptions. Once you're done coming up with wild-eyed notions
about what changes might arise as a result of various forces, you
tear apart your own work.
When Ms. Webb and I settled on the future of self-driving bus
transit, we at first imagined that the group transport services
proposed today by Lyft Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc. might be the
death of bus stops and pre-planned bus routes. But as we picked
apart our assumptions, it became clear that the predictable nature
of most commutes would mean not dynamic bus routes, but routes that
were simply better informed by data about where and how often
people actually need mass transit.
Good futurists, even though their work is as much art as
science, attempt to make it rigorously quantifiable.
"We use aggressive computation to try to ask what difference do
things in the longer term make to our choices today," says Robert
Lempert, a principal researcher at Rand Corp., a policy think-tank.
That could mean anything from modeling all the economic and
environmental factors affecting construction of a new reservoir or
aqueduct, to whether Congress should agree to re-insure companies
selling terrorism insurance.
One thing all the futurists I talked to had in common was
disdain for anyone willing to attempt to predict the future. In
futuring circles, paradoxically, this is the mark of an
amateur.
Actually practicing futurism, even if only for a day, showed me
the reason the future is so confounding: Aside from the fact that
anything can happen, those unexpected events rapidly compound on
one another. This leads to second, third and nth-order effects that
can seem completely beyond the realm of plausibility until they
happen. Hence the impossibility of predicting financial crises,
wars and technological revolutions.
But at least futurists can lend us a sort of mental flexibility,
as well as the ability to think through trends that are otherwise
easily dismissed. For example, my time with Ms. Webb and Ms.
Connelly convinced me that the rise of drones might some day lead
to height regulations on buildings, and that the graying of America
and the fraying of our support networks could lead to social
acceptance of euthanasia. And also, of course, that this could
affect car sales.
Futuring is no longer just for futurists, says Ms. Webb. Like
the ability to make a budget or think critically, it's a skill that
anyone who has to make long-range decisions should, and can,
acquire. Doing it at the scale required by a corporation might
require weeks of effort by a team of people, but for individuals it
can be much simpler.
"It doesn't require a Ph.D. and a complicated nine-month
process," says Mr. Smith, who adds, "We can do this in 15 minutes
at a table in Starbucks and come to some kind of interesting
realization."
Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 01, 2017 07:14 ET (12:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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