Related Publications - Tuning into our times

A Presentation to the Future Practitioners Forum - SSC 3rd May 2007

Introduction

You’re here because you’re interested in what the future could be, and learning about how we might become better prepared for what does happen.

Because we know, as William Gibson http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/index.asp put it: The future’s here; it’s just not evenly distributed. As the guy who coined the phrase, cyberspace, it’s fitting that he also said, “The Internet could one day be seen as something terrifically significant, something akin to the building of cites …It’s immune to legislation because it’s postnational and postgeographical. Not an insight many people could have claimed in1996.

But just to add a contrary note, be mindful of black swans. Stuff that appears to appear out of nowhere. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s thesis is that the future is unpredictable despite our almost hard wired predisposition for seeking to explain significant events as though they could/should have been predictable: in other words we need to more openly acknowledge the unknowable unknowns. http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/

Mind you, when I woke up to the radio this morning and heard Kathryn Ryan say she was going to talk about zombies and the internet on Nine to Noon, and then Patrick O’Mara on Business talking about routing and WiFi, I thought, the future’s downloading itself pretty damn fast.

So I’d like to start by stating perhaps the obvious: that we’re living in times of unprecedented change. I say that despite having a degree in history, which might suggest that I’d be cautious about according the adjective ‘unprecedented’ to these times, given the massive changes that have occurred in recorded history.

Some of you will be thinking, what’s new? What’s so special about these times? The world has had times of massive change before. What’s different about these times is:

The pace: accelerated. The scale: huge. The direction: multiple

Since I began work on this, in August 2005, when I was in London, and finished it in June 2006, back here, many of things I first noted have accelerated in the most extraordinary way, such as

• The move to social networking, or web 2.0 ¹
• The outsourcing of innovation
• China’s multi-dimensional global impact.

So it’s even more important that we understand the way the future is happening right now: that we tune into our times; the zeitgeist.

Like some of you, I take a multi-directional approach to the future. First I look sideways; peripheral vision helps us see the early movers. Then I look backwards. History, contrary to the Finn brothers refrain, does repeat. We can see that in such diverse things as;

• The return to coffee house commerce
• The re-emergence of China and India as economic powerhouses
• The attraction of pastoral idylls, aka the Slow movement http://www.slowmovement.com/
• The strengthening of the city state: New York, London, but think Venice, Amsterdam in the 16th and 17th centuries
• The re-emergence of home-based business.

Then I look within. Self-reflection is a really important element of developing future insight because we have to be alert to our own biases. Only then do I look forward because, having looked in these other directions, I’m now better placed to understand what might be around the corner. Because, as we know, the future’s never reached via the straight road. To-day is about looking sideways – seeing how the future’s here on the periphery.

So what’s different about to-day’s changes? In the first half of the 20th century, technology drove changes in commerce, enabling a move to mass production: Fordism and Taylorism. But there was no equivalent social or cultural revolution.

In the second half of 20th century: Carnaby St and California Dreaming created social and cultural revolutions but the means of production, distribution and consumption – commerce - didn’t essentially change.

This time round it’s climate change on a global scale.

The 4 C’sons in one day: Culture, Commerce, Connectivity and China.

Culture – attitudes, values, life patterns, demographics are changing significantly.

Commerce – how business is done, what a business is, where it takes place, who runs them, how profits are made and distributed, are changing.

Connectivity – not just the Internet and broadband. But the development of social and economic networks, and networks of networks is strengthening.² The rise of the masses, or ‘everyday people’ as Glenn Reynolds puts it in his book, An Army of Davids. ³ And James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds. ⁴

China. Where to start. Clever, Huge, Innovative, Nationalistic and Ambitious. Not Cheap, Humble, Introverted, Naive and Amateur. That view, as my niece would say, was soooo last century.

The 4 C’sons in one day. Climate change, but not as we know it. Perhaps we could call it global warning, with a heavy emphasis on the N.

What’s different this time are the ways in which the social, economic, technological and geographic are converging as the Internet, broadband and mobile multi-media devices provide new ways of operating; personally and commercially; with less distinction between the two spheres. And we feel the force of the East Winds: China and India. I use China as shorthand for the emerging economic power of what McKinseys called the BRICs. Within a decade China and India will become the largest English speaking countries in the world. With 1.3 and 1.1 billion people respectively, it doesn’t take a large percentage to speak English for this to happen.

And as I said, China is about re-emergence rather than emergence because, unlike the nations documented in Jarrod Diamond’s book, Collapse, China just retreated for several centuries; it didn’t collapse so it doesn’t need to reconstruct itself; it just needs to reconnect with its sophisticated legacy of invention and culture, and crank up its pace to take the global leadership role that ICT positions it for.

As we know, it’s never just an economy that transforms, it’s the whole of society: politics, social relations, how and where we live, how we organise our education system, and the way that culture shapes our beliefs and attitudes.

The 4 C’sons have created a mass market of individual consumers and a mass movement of everyday people, who are increasingly putting themselves first, as consumers, citizens and workers.

In more than an electronic sense, we’re experiencing a revolution from e-commerce to ME-Commerce. And I just read last night in a report on advertising and social media, about We-economics, where consumer participation changes the way content and advertising is monitised. ⁵

We’re entering a realm of e-lancers. People who are increasingly social and economic free agents: voluntarily and involuntarily. But it’s a time of paradox. While, it’s all about me, people also increasingly want to be connected: to become an “us”. And cyberspace and mobile telephony enable this. Always on and always available. But more about that shortly.

The individualistic society and economy, empowered by the Internet, might be strongest with Generation Y, the born to iT generation - digital natives - but it’s infusing other generations as well.

Because I did this work for the Department of Labour, my focus is on how this is affecting the labour market - the supply of and the demand for talent. You will obviously be looking at it through the lens of your agency. Whatever, your focus, the answer is that we simply don’t know enough to judge what’s happening within society and the economy, to be able to adjust our advice and services accordingly. To be future prepared to the extent that we should and could be.

We’re in danger of making assumptions about the future that might have use-by-dates. That we should be testing. So let’s improve our future preparedness by exploring five assumptions: things we shouldn’t take for granted.

What if …

• Life patterns don’t go on so much as usual …
• Business isn’t business as we think of it …
• Innovation isn’t all about the big discovery, the high-tech stuff …
• We don’t just need more tertiary qualified, technically skilled people …
• Money doesn’t matter most …

But before we start, let’s be real:

We do live in increasingly complex times– while we need to know more, actually we’re over-informed and over-choiced – and - some groups in society have little or no choice about how they live.

Governments and officials can’t pull the ‘big levers’ anymore to improve wealth and well-being: we have to harness the mood of the times. Is this because, as Nicholas Negroponte puts it, “Nations today are the wrong size. They’re not small enough to be local and they’re not large enough to be global.”⁶

Are academics like Jane Jacobs and Ed Glaeser right, it is the city that is the key social and economic unit of the 21st century? ^{7 8}

While there’s a larger divide between the very rich and the very poor, most people are more affluent, but not happier. Is the Economics of Happiness going to become the new economic orthodoxy? ⁹

There are lots of paradoxes: we want simplicity and sophistication; privacy but self-exposure; novelty but constancy; to take risks but for the government to fix things.

We’re increasingly a ‘Me, Me, Me society, but we want to “belong”, to have a sense of connection and community: But often we care more about the wider world than we do about our immediate community. We’d rather do a volunteer stint with tsunami victims than volunteer locally.^{10 11}

If, as Voltaire said, the present is pregnant with the future, we’d better find out what’s about to give birth.

And the obvious place to start is with relationships, families, and households – life patterns. ¹²

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Footnotes

1 Web 2.0 is a set of economic, social, and technology trends that collectively form the basis for the next generation of the Internet—a more mature, distinctive medium characterized by user participation, openness, and

network effects. http://www.oreilly.com/radar/web2report.csp http://www.web2expo.com/

2

3 From Wikipedia: An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths, which covers the various ways in which modern technology is changing society by allowing amateur individuals to do things that previously only large, well-funded organizations were equipped to do.

Reynolds was a finalist for the World Technology Network's 2004 Media and Journalism award. In his remarks, he said:

Changes in technology are producing major changes in media and journalism. Journalism is becoming an activity, not simply a profession. In my InstaPundit.com weblog I have tried to foster the growth of amateurism in that field, by encouraging people to get involved and to make use of the new tools—from Web publishing to inexpensive digital still and video cameras—to bring news and perspectives to the world stage that were previously lacking. [5]

4 http://www.randomhouse.com/features
/wisdomofcrowds/index.html

Q &A Could you define "the crowd?"

A "crowd," in the sense that I use the word in the book, is really any group of people who can act collectively to make decisions and solve problems. So, on the one hand, big organizations—like a company or a government agency—count as crowds. And so do small groups, like a team of scientists working on a problem.

Under what circumstances is the crowd smarter?

There are four key qualities that make a crowd smart. It needs to be diverse, so that people are bringing different pieces of information to the table. It needs to be decentralized, so that no one at the top is dictating the crowd's answer. It needs a way of summarizing people's opinions into one collective verdict. And the people in the crowd need to be independent, so that they pay attention mostly to their own information, and not worrying about what everyone around them thinks.

This web site has articles by the company that wrote the report. http://retailindustry.about.com/gi/dynamic/
offsite.htm?site=http://www.avenuea.com/
showcase/expert%5Finsights.asp

6 I got this quote from Diana Coyle’s 1997 book, The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy. She was economics editor of the UK’s The Independent. Now she’s a partner in Enlightenment Economics http://www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/

For links to Negroponte, the author of Being Digital a http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/nn/bdintro.htm and founder of the One Laptop Per Child project see http://web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/

See his talk and blog on TED http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/41

7 http://www.economics.harvard.edu/
faculty/glaeser/papers.html Have a look at Urban Colossus: Why is New York America's Largest City? (May 2005) and

Book Review of Richard Florida's "The Rise of the Creative Class" (May 2004)

http://ksgfaculty.harvard.edu/edward_glaeser Edward Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Director of the A. Alfred Taubman Center for State and Local Government and of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston. He teaches in urban and social economics and microeconomic theory. His work has also examined the causes of hatred and why the United States doesn't have a European-style welfare state. He has published dozens of papers on cities, economic growth, law, and economics. In particular, his work has focused on the determinants of city growth and the role of cities as centers of idea transmission. He also edits the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Glaeser received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1992.

8 Author of the classic “The Death and Life of Great American Cities

http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Jacobs.html

9 Andrew Oswald http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/
economics/staff/faculty/oswald/#2007 Have a look at some of his 2006 papers, like a review of Affluenza, a ppt on happiness (84 slides) so you might want to download his article from The Independent!

http://www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu/bio.htm You might also want to read some of the work by Martin Seligman on Learned Optimism, and Authentic Happiness.

10 Having said this, there’s also increasing evidence of young people putting values first in terms of the companies they’re willing to work for, with a desire to work for those which have values that resonant with young people’s feelings about the environment or social justice.

11 http://www.consolationchamps.
com/category/virtual-book-tour/ A blog by Ethan Watters who wrote Urban Tribes

12 I went through census and other data to make these ‘judgement’s but decided not to send you to sleep with statistics!! I used 2001 data; the trends have got even stronger with the 2006 data. I have tables in an earlier version if people want them. Or go to the Stats NZ website and look up their reports. The marriage/relationship/fertility reports don’t seem to be out yet. http://www.stats.govt.nz
/census/2006-census-data/default.htm