The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.–L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953

That’s a thoughtful and useful quote. And we can also truly say, “The future is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

In considering a future time, you have to reckon with a whole thing: a complete culture, marketplace, society, community, industry, and all the things that shape them. Too often we don’t, we take up one change that we think is powerful and important, and leave most everything else like it is.

So we end up with of view of the future that is too much today. But daily life in 2030 isn’t just daily life in 2012 with genetic engineering added, or implantable eye cameras, for example.

Your best thinking on the future is naturally going to be shaped by what future possibilities might mean to you, as if you used a time machine to visit a future year, and reported back on what you found. But in that future, you would be changed, too. Your interests, habits, experience, and expectations would be different. There is much that changes slowly in human society, and our cultural underpinnings are some of the slowest things of all to change, but even culture changes. And the further out you go, the more that future will be a truly foreign country.

There’s an element of presentism in a lot of work on the future that is rooted in our tendency to hold most things constant while exploring one change. So it helps if you let that future be a little more like a country foreign to you, that you imagine walking around in it, noticing how people live, what they do for fun, how they socialize, how they work, what they talk about and how they do so, and so on. Take notice of differences, prepare to see new things. Be puzzled.

Futurists, by definition, are supposed to talk about the future. So this is a little embarrassing. I’ve recognized, for some time now, that a lot of my work is about showing people what’s already going on. That’s about today! Yet, it’s enough to blow their minds, sometimes, though I’ve not even begun to tell the about the future.

The lesson in this is to make your efforts in exploring change about any change that matters to the people and situations in front of you, whether people are behind the times, and catching up, or pretty much up to date, and needing to understand what they can about what’s next. So don’t worry about the differences, or force distinctions between what’s true now versus what might be in the future.

In fact, you can use the “unrecognized present,” pointed out and explained, to get people to more fully understand what lies ahead. Doing that could be as simple as showing them the leading edge of change, the early adoption of a technology, the first examples and experiments on things, a leading place that is a bellwether for change, and so on. Your advantage: you may be able to bring forth a witness, a video, or pictures of that poorly-understood present, and make it real to them. It’s like showing people the future–almost!

Tip of the pen here to my colleague Katherine Green, an expert in workforce futures. She made me capture and write down the phrase I’ve taken here as my title, and promise to write about it.

Image: sumidiot, via Flickr, creative commons attribution license

Insights come more reliably to an undistracted mind. Have you noticed a little magic in the otherwise purgatorial time you spend with the cabin doors closed, approved electronic devices off, between pull back and take-off? Have you noticed that you had a few moments to think?  That few minutes is a blessing–it’s time you are given to spend un-distracted by the interruption of your digital daily life. Embrace it!

Yet most of us work intently to optimize our distractions: fine-tuning i-devices with apps and connections, so that we might encounter information all the time. Mobile digital life guarantees that you can have something to distract yourself whereever you go, whatever you are doing. Your thoughts are under siege.

You can even listen to music or the radio while swimming or showering. You can take in NPR or a book on tape while walking your dog or doing yard work. But don’t!

• Turn the radio off when you drive, sometimes
• Leave the iPod home when you walk the dog, sometimes
• Don’t use a shower radio, each time
• Clear some time with your thoughts, all the time

You get the picture.

How does this apply to foresight? Thinking about the future is a tough mental game. To effectively explore and understand it, you need to do think about a lot of things at once. You have to think altogether new thoughts. This is equally true for effective analysis and writing.

There are new connections to be made, insights that need time to germinate and ground to sprout in. “A ha!” moments need to break through, from your subconscious. Must they contend with the latest on the Jets or J-Lo? The Dow or the Dodgers? The boss’s memo? It seems they must, until we reach for the “off” switch, or put down the i-thing for a little while. And when you write, don’t always stop to look things up, consult other sources. Sometimes let the ideas flow, the writing come out. Fact check later.

To have some success thinking about the future, you really need to think about it. That includes time away from distractions, absolutely, but it even includes time away from the facts and finds that you may be using to try to understand your future. If you don’t stop taking in information long enough to think about it, you won’t quite get there.

Image: saturn ?, via Flickr, CC attribution license.

On an October 2011 visit to a college dorm hallway in Colorado, we saw a spot where a water fountain had been removed, and the wall cavity patched with cinderblock. The dorm residents had put up a sign: “Occupy Water Fountain”. It was during the height of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Also during the Fall of 2011, scattered across the Internet were pictures of funny (really funny) protest signs from the Occupy Wall Street protest and its affiliated protests across the US.

And each weeknight, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report hysterically slay hypocrisy and make fun of politicians.  I am a huge fan. This past few weeks, Stephen Colbert’s elaborate satirization of American campaign finance, notably the new mechanism of the SuperPAC, has intensified, gaining all kinds of attention, support, and condemnation.

Do irony or satire or humor have a place in changing our society for the better? I think there’s enormous power in them to do so, but I also think that there is risk that they take us off task, and actually weaken resolve. Satire, in effect, can diffuse or divert anger, even as it may educate more people about hypocrisy, injustice, and government foolishness.

I am concerned that the United States has become a mockutocracy–a place where mockery is the standard behavior and where it may often supplant the sequence of anger, organization, and action that we need to drive needed change. Does mockutocracy work?

The jury is still out. What is satire accomplishing in the current wave of events, including the problems in US electoral politics and the US Congress. It can feel good and entertain us, but does the satire just create an alternative to a political party–a club of cynics? The participants of that “party” participate mainly by endorsing the mocking, and expecting not much to change. Are many even motivated to vote and take other political action?

It’s not that the fans of satire don’t want things to change, but more that they succumb to the sense that the mockable will always be that way. That, I think is the risk. Can we learn to go more reliably from satire to political action? I think we must.

In a controlled study, researchers found people routinely willing to swap similar pens with others, but less willing to exchange lottery tickets. The reason? The lottery ticket in your hand has a potential future value which may—you don’t know—exceed that of another ticket. You don’t want to swap away a ticket that might turn out to be the winner. This happens even if the subjects of the experiment are reminded that probability shows either ticket has an equal likelihood of being a winner.

With pens, you are not likely to come out behind. A pen’s a pen, and neither your pen nor the other guy’s is the key to a future fortune. This shows how potential future regret shapes our decisions in the present.

So we have a tendency to anticipate having regret in the future. That means regret is not only a back-facing emotion, it also shapes our view forward, and so it shapes our future. The regret we feel can be about a missed future chance, an anticipation of failure, or an expectation that we will come up short in how we handle change.

The antonym of regret is satisfaction, and I would argue that anticipated satisfaction can be a powerful motivator for the future. But we have to allow ourselves to proceed with confidence armed with a vision of a positive future. That means that positive scenarios of our future are a strong motivator.

There’s not likely to be much of an outcome if you go around expecting the worse, starting up with your regret even before things have transpired. This sort of sour approach to the present and the future is nothing but destructive. In my view, Pollyanna had it about right—we need a positive outlook and we can help build that with a focus on the future that gets us to positive ideas about the future. Along the way exploring people’s fears, but also their hopes about the future will help the cause.

See also a recent Time piece, “The Optimism Bias” on how we have an optimism bias and why we should.

I’ve also weighed in before on hope, optimism, and the future:

• The right kind of hope in futures thinking
• It doesn’t seem like the world is going to hell

For more in this series, see #Consumer4sight

Domino's makes pizza buying fun with an iPad game, Pizza Hero

The future consumer wants to play: with you and with her friends. That means having more options, choices, new experiences, and interaction with you, your products, systems, and services. It means variety and fun in the course of using a product or service and engaging with a company. We have come to talk about “gamification” in this context. That means that a system or user experience is made more like a game, with interaction, puzzles to solve, players to compete with, rewards and “levels” along the way.

A key driver of this new consumer expectation is digitally-enabled interactivity. We’ve already set new standards for engagement with technology, e.g. with i-devices and even with Siri, the voice recognizing iPhone agent. Technology is also making this possible with non-electronic products, since any product or brand can have associated apps. More consumers will look for the chance to interact and play.

The bottom line for business  – Interactivity and engagement are essential for consumers. There will always be products that are used without much thought, e.g. trash bags, but the sense of fun and the positive possibilities for it for business can come just about anywhere. If a product cannot be interactive and fun, maybe the buying experience, or the ads for it can be. Consumers increasingly crave variety and interest, and reward the companies that offer it.

Here’s a nice example: Dodge, to promote its Journey model, hid cars around the world, offering clues for people to find them. The first to find one of the cars got to keep it.

i-device enabled consumer life is more and more app-driven. That means with a service or access to a product, such as through a store’s app, there are ways to build in fun. The goal is to enchant the consumer and build interest and loyalty. And there’s plenty of room for more fun in the consumer marketplace.

American strict constructionists say that the U.S. Constitution is an inviolable, bible-like guide to what must be in U.S. governance. The Constitution’s words, interpreted from the perspective of the framer’s “original intent” are to be adhered to no matter what.

It has become common in current U.S. politics for people to say that judges interpreting the law to fit new situations is “judicial activism”. This view and the political conflict from it seem likely to expand in the emerging U.S. political climate.

Strict constructionism does not allow for much if any modern interpretation of the Constitution’s articles and amendments, despite the historical and ongoing practice of interpreting the Constitution for new legal situations. Judicial review, in fact, is 209 years old, dating to the Supreme Court case Marbury vs. Madison, 1803. Yet it seems to be under challenge by some people today. They want to stick to the original language of the constitution, and what they think the Framer’s meant by it.

But living by standards set in 1789 is impossible. So what does it mean to wield the Constitution and “original intent” as a measure of what is right and wrong with the country?

Environmentalists have a different Constitution to wield. It is, to put it simply, “nature” or “natural.” Nature, in their view means the Earth as it was before humans altered and manipulated it. “Natural” means a state of things unaltered by humans, and implies that we should use pristine nature as a guide for what we do and don’t do, and presumably work to reverse human-driven harm to the ecology, to put things back to their natural state. At the extreme end of this is the Earth First movement, which offers radical action as a way to put things back to their natural state.

But living by that standard is also impossible. It is too late to reverse civilization and its effects on the earth.  So then what does it mean to wield “nature” as a measure of what is right and wrong with the planet?

There is no guidebook for the future, no prescription or recipe for deciding what the future should look like. It’s not available in the Constitution, and it’s not available by studying what is “natural”. We have to find it as we go along.

We can keep to the spirit of the Constitution, the philosophies and broad goals of the founders of the United States, and I believe we should.

We can keep to the ideal that more natural is better than less, and protecting and putting right ecologies is a goal, and I believe we must.

The United States of 2012+ cannot be the United States of 1789. And the Earth cannot be the pre-human or pre-human civilization Earth. Each has to be devised, managed, and adjusted now, in today and tomorrow’s terms. There is no guidebook for the future.

Why do people turn to the U.S. Constitution, or an ideal of what is “natural” as a guide? Rather than trust others: policymakers, scientists, etc. to decide how things should be changed, they prefer to not trust today’s people to monkey with things. The independent text of the Constitution or a seemingly objective notion of what is natural are reassurance against contending groups who might have different plans and ideas. So we adhere to impossible standards, and assert their inviolability. Most people know better, and pragmatism finds its way through.

In neither case is it possible to chart a future course wielding a literal recipe for what should be. We have to foster change, adaptation, innovation. We can hove to the philosophy of the Framers of the Constitution, and we can fight hard to take care of nature, but ultimately we have to invent new ways forward. A nice summation of the environmental situation and the notion of how we will pilot “spaceship earth” can be found here.

All this, in my view, is an argument for the suite of tools from foresight for informing, interpreting, envisioning, and communicating about change.

Of the 41 posts to ForesightCulture during 2011, the 12 below got the most visitors. The list reflects my main focus: the art and craft of exploring the future. Two posts got particularly personal for futurists, and drew a lot of interest from people in the field:

“I am a futurist, leave off the quote marks” and “A typology of futurists”

Just one post on the “content” side, i.e. about the future, made it in too, a 2021 scenario of a shopper.

Here are the top posts for 2011 in order:

1. Get comfortable with complexity — How we have to fight the tendency to explain change as have a single cause, and embrace that things are complex: many forces, interacting.
2. Foresight tool: A simple scanning technique to open up your thinking — A simple tool for triggering more and deeper thinking in your environmental scanning.
3. I am a futurist. Leave off the quote marks! — Why futurist is a genuine profession. How futurists bring value. An argument to leave off the air quotes when you talk about futurists.
4. A typology of futurists — Musing over different “types” of futurists; what they do and why it’s powerful.
5. 5 critical things in foresight — The five things you must have for foresight: a purpose, a mindset, a habit, a toolkit, and a community.
6. The short-term view and the long-term view — How we need to acknowledge, but not limit our thinking to, people’s immediate, near-term concerns.
7. Foresight illustrated: Choosing how broad a view to take when exploring the future — A visual model for exploring “what future?” and how far into the future you should look (your time horizon).
8. Get comfortable with uncertainty — How you have to tolerate uncertainty, and help others do so, when you explore your future.
9. Offsetting your suburban, middle class, white collar bias — Ways to relieve the biases you may bring to looking at the future by getting out and seeing how things are made.
10. A 2021 shopper’s path to purchase — A scenario of a possible 2021 consumer experience: the consumer’s path the purchase, enabled by technology.
11. 9 things that “lock us in” in our thinking — Nine ways our thinking is narrowed, clouded, or misguided, and some advice on what to do about it.
12. Experiencing the future Part 1: Getting beyond analysis and changing minds — Comparing the problems of the historian/archaeologist and futurist in getting people to deeper understanding, and a call for the experiential in foresight.

Thanks to all my readers for their interest this year. Have a terrific holiday season and a happy new year.

iPad-experienced toddler encounters a magazine: "It doesn't work"

Consumers now and going forward expect a screen to be a touch screen and to respond to voice and gesture. Pad devices and Siri are moving those expectation along quickly. Just behind this are the demands that things be interactive in general and by that means offer the user a personalized experience. A recent video of children playing with iPads points this out: they find when they turn to a print magazine, that the magazine won’t respond to touch—it “doesn’t work”.

For more in this series, see #Consumer4sight

What it means to business – Interactive is the base standard for your systems that consumers encounter, but that’s only the base. On the way to delighting the customer, you will succeed most if those systems are intuitive, respond to touch, voice, or gestures or all three. The broader demand is for user experience design, but that design often critically includes a technology interface. And consumers have high and ever-evolving expectations for those interfaces.

A provocation on all this is the interplay between fear of germs and touch interfaces. Imagine the ideal ATM—you would not need to touch the screen or the buttons a dozen or more times to get your cash.

Slumdog Millionaire opened up Indian pop culture to a much bigger North American audience

Consumers have gone global too. The consumer increasingly is and feels like a citizen of the world, at least as far as media, food, fashion and other consumer tastes are concerned. Globalization means big things for big systems like trade, and everyday things for many consumers. More of us are partaking of products, ideas, trends, and cultural elements from some other part of the world. For example, Bangra music from India blends with American Rap, and shawarmas have become a lunch staple in US towns where the average consumer may not even know what continent they’re from. Technology is enabling this: it’s rendering geography irrelevant or at least differently relevant and giving us instant access to ideas and products from other places.

For more in this series, see #Consumer4sight

The bottom line for business: the consumer wants variety, and the world is now his or her consumption playground. If you don’t help them find new and interesting products and experiences from around our world, someone else will. And Western companies especially need a wake-up call: they are no longer the font of product innovation, nor do they have a guaranteed spot in the pantheon of global brands—new brands and products are emerging from the emerging markets, and that trend will accelerate.