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.

I made the case in my previous post Experiencing the future Part 1: Getting beyond analysis and changing minds that experiencing the future is vital to good foresight and benefits organizations. I don’t claim to be a practitioner of the most exciting and advanced experiential futures, but I have decades’ experience getting real business execs in real organizational situations to engage the future better, adding experiences that fit what business seems able to embrace and make useful.

Below I offer some “how to”  suggestions for making foresight more experiential. For more on the leading edge, have a look at The Sceptical Futuryst, Stuart Candy’s blog—his topic list is chock full of intriguing and valuable ideas about helping people experience the future. And try a Google search on “experiential futures”.

The ideas below range from the simple to the somewhat more challenging and complex.

Better scanning – See Talk to the Frog and the ideas I share in Ideas on effective environmental scanning in the digital age which make the case for understand how the world is changing better, where possible experiencing that change first hand. The philosophy there is, “get out from behind the mouse.” This is the key to getting a more visual, tactile, and experiential sense of future possibilities–where the first clues or examples of them are in our world now.

Clear ideas about the future – The best foresight concepts are evocative descriptions of future possibilities, which begin to get our heads into something new. For example, the concept of virtual reality. This kind of futures experience is in our thoughts, but that is already more powerful than just engaging with data and analysis about change.

An image of something that may become big in our future. The Espresso Book Machine produces books on demand

Images – There are, by definition, no pictures of the future. But we can do at least two things about that:

1). Create pictures of the future as an artist can, or you can do without art skills, simply doodling, collaging, etc. and

2). Finding pictures of things that may already exist, but aren’t commonplace, and represent something we may see much more of in the future. For example, a picture of a goods-producing kiosk such as the Espresso Book Machine is inspiring of a wide-range of future ideas about goods produced on demand.

On these first two points, I’ve shared some advice for when you are presenting to groups in Giving presentations on the future.

Role playing – Having people get their heads into a particular identity, different from their own, is a powerful way to begin to shift their understanding and give them a different experience. And you can get a group to do this together, putting them into a simulated situation where their identities and circumstances are different, showcasing what might be true in the future. We also like to work with the “TOPs” (technical, organizational, and personal) multiple perspectives method with groups. This concept, described in brief here and in full detail here, was originated by futurist and systems science expert Hal Linstone. It helps a group understand the common perspectives that shape and are shaped by an organization’s decisions. We’ve had great success asking a group to break into three groups, each taking up one of these perspectives to confront issue or ideas about change.

“suffering” – A version of role playing is to have people lose something, or simulate losing something to highlight a potential future change. We had this experience with a futures team who decided to have those participating in a dinner be fed in three ways: normal food, a lavish feast, and plain rice and (simulated) dirty water. Each group had something to think and talk about, from different, simulated perspectives. You can also consider the opposite of “suffering”–Why not try out some utopian ideas and get people to describe and play with what the future would be like if something great happened, such as the end of hunger or cancer.

Getting people to see, touch, experience the leading edge of change: Packaging Executives visit a Center for Hard to Recycle Materials

In the world – It’s particular powerful with office-bound people to get them “out from behind the mouse” and out into experiences different from their own. That can mean seeing things that exist today, but that represent a change we will likely see more of. For example, we put a group of packaging executives on a bus and took them first to a standard municipal recycling plant and then to a center for hard to recycle materials (aka a “CHaRM”). The CHaRM is a rare facility–at the time there were only a few in the world. But it may represent a vital future in their business. Despite their being in the packaging business, some had never been to a conventional recycling facility, let alone to a CHaRM. It was eye-opening for some and idea-provoking for most of them. I reflected on this kind of experience in an earlier post, Offsetting your suburban, middle class, white collar bias which advocates for you getting loose of whatever built-in perspectives and biases you might have.

Scenario building – I’ve written several times about the scenario method and my fondness for it. Its power in really getting people’s head into the future is remarkable and reliable. Scenarios go far beyond basic trend analysis and forecasting to depict in words and/or pictures whole futures, with the changes we are thinking about portrayed in real situations. The greatest power of the method is in experiencing the process, though the outputs can be terrific tools for communicating about the future and sharing the experience with others.

Farmville and other mobile/web games teach people about big complex systems

Gaming – Games give players the power to shape future outcomes. They are a way to bring alive the forces and countercurrents possible that we try to convey in scenarios. Consider for example the power of fantasy ball teams in bringing to life the meaning and power of strategic decisions. More games are about life and decisions than ever. The mobile/computer game Farmville is teaching its virtual farmer users about climate change, for example.

Other tools, techniques and methods

• Virtual worlds – online and console gaming can simulate futures in elaborate and immersive ways, including allowing players to game out outcomes of decisions.
• Experiential scenarios – a method for bringing future possibilities more alive for people’s learning and understanding, debate and discussion. It goes beyond art and narrative storytelling to, for example, create experiences in the real world, such as simulating a pandemic’s effects on a city, as was done in Coral Cross.
• Artifacts from the future – a long-time feature at the back of Wired magazine that features similated objects; consumer products, for example, from some future year. See: Found futures.

More consumers are greening it up – Soon regulatory and social pressures will meet economic pressures to drive greener lifestyles. People are already subject to local recycling laws and often laws relating to their use of energy and water resources. But higher prices are an even surer way to wake up consumers to the need to conserve, reuse, etc. And shifts in consumer values are, at least for some, in the direction of less material consumption, but you don't have to care about the earth to be greening up your lifestyle. The bottom line for business. Though it’s not a majority of consumers who are acting on green values as they consume, plenty are. And sometimes the green option is the choice when two choices are otherwise about equal. It's also critical to get ahead of evolving regulation on matters of sustainability. Playing catch-up is expensive. At some point a company’s overall profile is a critical brand attribute, and if that profile looks anti-green in the marketplace, that company loses. Sustainable practices will be an integral part of corporate processes and a prominent brand matter. And the sustainability bar is regularly raised, as we gain knowledge and awareness of what matters. Image: photologue_np, via Flickr cc attribution license

It’s not possible to directly experience the future, it hasn’t happened yet, you cannot go there. And it’s also not possible to directly experience the past—we don’t have a way to go back. The situations have a lot in common–our understanding of past and future are challenged in much the same ways.

I’ve played with the problem on both ends. Before I became a futurist, I was intent on becoming an archaeologist, and studied archaeology at the bachelor’s and master’s levels. Over those years, I met a lot of archaeologists who went beyond books and field research to understand the past better. They tried out ancient technologies and lifeways. They were experiential archaeologists.

Eccentric Flint, Late Classic Maya

My own experiential effort was brief—I tried flint knapping—the shaping process used to make stone tools from cryptocrystalline stone (flint or chert). That gave me an appreciation for some of the finer specimens of stone axes, blades, spear points and arrowheads we were excavating at a Woodland Indian site in southern Illinois, and the amazing Mayan eccentrics (see picture) I learned about when working in Belize. The main results of my experiential effort were cut and blending hands. But I gained an appreciation for ancient technologists.

A recent article in the New Yorker brought this back to mind (abstract here). It tells the story of Lucy Worsley the Chief Curator, at Historic Royal Palaces, a non-profit that runs the Tower of London, Kensington Palace, and Hampton Court Palace, Kew Palace, and the Banqueting House at Whitehall.

Worsley’s work is about bringing to life the lives of Britons (mainly royals) from centuries ago. Among the big experiences she has worked on is recreating and eating a meal served to George III on February 6, 1789.

Leading edge futurists are doing things like this too, and their efforts are a superb way to bring the future alive—to get people beyond the analytical to ideas (experiences) about the future they can actually feel and understand.

Futurist Stuart Candy is one of the field’s leading practitioners. He frequently blogs about experiential futures at The Sceptical Futuryst. Stuart has developed techniques around experiential futures scenarios and recently completed a PhD on that topic, “The Futures of Everyday Life: Politics and the Design of Experiential Scenarios.”

Lucy Wolsey—the experiential historian—has caught a lot of flack from more “serious” historians who think her efforts are silly, misleading, etc. The experiential futurist risks the same thing, with the most likely push-back being from business clients who think their people won’t tolerate things like role playing, and that good business behavior is about PowerPoint briefings in a meeting room, not going places, seeing things, and trying things.

There is at least one blog that focuses on what’s wrong with “experiential archaeology”, it’s called Bad Archaeology. Its authors make the reasonable point that “We cannot shake off the contemporary nature of the experience” when trying to simulate the past. And further, “When we experience places like Stonehenge, Giza or West Kennet, we are experiencing 21st Century, contemporary places.” I think these guys go too far, and they’ve painted themselves into a philosophical corner. There’s plenty of learning and insight to be had by standing at the foot of the Great Pyramid.

The same problem applies to the future, our presentist tendencies are unavoidable as we try, pretend even, to experience what the future might be like.

But I’ve seen over the years that to shake people loose from their fixed thoughts about the future, and to get them to examine their assumptions, you have to try to take them new places, and analytical thinking won’t always get that done. Experiences help change minds.

Lucy Worsley, debating the validity and value of experiential work, told a scholarly audience: “I don’t feel my job will be done until history is as popular as the ‘The X-Factor.’” I am sure they hated that thought, but she’s right, you get more done if you engages people’s minds and hearts, whether trying to have them understand the past or the future.

Not being from a traditionally, academic-based discipline, futurists are less persnickety than historians about the value and validity of experiences. But these efforts can still be a hard sell. It’s worth trying.

Note: A little more on my overarching point about experiences is in my post Two sides of foresight work.

I’ll follow up straight away with ideas on how you can build the experiential side of foresight.