It’s been a long and very rewarding journey working with the Canterbury District Health Board (Christchurch, New Zealand) and the fruits of the labour are starting to be born. One of the latest projects to come out of long term transformation thinking was featured on a local news channel, and can be seen below:
From the excellent Futures Group in the Singapore Government comes this short video entitled The Age of Turbulence. It covers off four drivers of change that the team has identified, and the first of these is most relevant for The Sensing City initiative for Christchurch.
To give more context, it references the fact that over the coming decades there will be a huge demand for the development of new Tier 2/3 cities, and that many of these will be financed privately. This in turn will require the development of new technologies, processes and techniques for managing the complexity of cities. If you’re pushed for time, watch the first few minutes:
This is a fascinating view of macro scale changes from a very unlikely source – an ex-senior official in the CIA Clandestine Service. His comments echo some of my recent thinking about the potential impact when social movements meet social media, and the impact upon modern-day governance structures. Here’s the view of Henry Crumpton (with my emphasis in bold):
The most important change on the global security and business stage is the empowerment of the individual and their ability to have inexpensive, exponential impact through technology and collaboration. This revolutionary development has led to an unprecedented shift in relationships, with a degree of asymmetric power never seen in the history of human conflict or commerce. There are micro actors with macro impact operating on a global landscape and they constantly challenge the status quo, and this trend is accelerating.
This post is intended for those that attended the Australia and NZ School of Govt Masterclass I held in Wellington on July 24th.
It’s a list of resources that may be of use when thinking about different ways to think about the future, and how to tell your story. Firstly, here’s a list of organisations that think about the future, and share that thinking:
With regards to telling rich stories that resonate, here’s a list of the links I referenced in my presentation:
A quick link to something that has been discernible for a a while, and something that was clearly identified when we ran Future Agenda two years ago. However now the clever (and time rich) analysts at McKinsey has quantified it:
A thousand years ago, the economic centre of the world was in central Asia, just north of India and west of China, reflecting the high levels of wealth enjoyed in the Middle and Far East at that time, says the report, Urban world: Cities and the rise of the consuming class. At that time, Asia accounted for two-thirds of the world’s wealth.
By 1900, the centre had shifted to northern Europe, which had leapt far ahead of the rest of the world thanks to the Industrial Revolution. And by 1950, the centre had shifted to the North Atlantic, reflecting the economic rise of the United States.
But now that trend is reversing itself, and at a stunning speed. What took 1,000 years to travel west will have travelled all the way back east in a matter of a few decades.
According to the McKinsey report, the economic centre of gravity has been shifting east for the past decade at a rate of 140 km (87 miles) per year, and by 2025, it will have returned to a spot in central Asia just north of where it was in 1,000 A.D.
“It is not hyperbole to say we are observing the most significant shift in the earth’s economic centre of gravity in history,”
via World’s Economic Centre Of Gravity Shifting Back To Asia At Unbelievable Speed: McKinsey Institute.
Quick update that has implications for distributed manufacturing, supply chains and last, but not least, intellectual property:
The Pirate Bay, announced a new, legitimate direction yesterday: It’s going to host physibles, downloadable models for constructing 3D objects.
The Pirate Bay’s move into physibles breaks new ground, since 3D printing is territory copyright lawyers have barely begun to fathom.
A “physible” is a digital plan for an object that can either be designed on a computer or uploaded with a 3D scanner. Those plans can be downloaded and used to assemble real, tangible objects using a 3D printer. Printers are getting more affordable, but they’re still limited by the kinds of materials they can use. But that just means it’s the dawn of this technology, and The Pirate Bay is getting in early. “We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare [parts] for your vehicles,” TPB writes on its blog. “You will download your sneakers within 20 years.”
via Forget MP3s: Soon You’ll Download Your Sneakers From The Pirate Bay.
In October last year the Singapore Government held it’s first ‘Foresight Week.’ I was invited to both the International Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning Symposium, but, more interestingly, also the Foresight Conference. I make this observation about the latter event because it was organised by a team in the Prime Minister’s Office called the Centre for Strategic Futures (CSF). While the Risk Symposium was attended by a couple of hundred people from around the world, the Foresight Conference was held over three days and had an invite-only audience of about thirty.
Included in this thirty were the likes of Paul Saffo, Peter Schwartz, Jeremy Bentham, Neal Stephenson, Dave Snowden and Ian Goldin. The mix of people, backgrounds and theories in the room was extraordinary, and here’s my long overdue notes from the session (note that it was Chatham House Rules so no specific attributions are made).
The richness of the sessions made for one hell of a mind map, and looking at it now I’m only going to pull out the highlights that caught my attention:
However the overriding theme through the three days was complexity and how it impacts the world today. The world today is not the world of 50 years ago, however the governance structures that create order in the world today were created when the world was much more stable. What do governments of the future look like in a world that screams complexity at every turn?
I don’t know the answer to that but would like to finish my notes with two quotes that resonated with me over the week in Singapore:
“Religions are like operating systems for societies”
and
“Risk is the price you pay for opportunity.”
This post is for attendees of the workshop for Leadership NZ on 28 Oct. It’s a list of resources that may be of use when thinking about different ways to think about the future, and how to tell your story. Firstly, here’s a list of organisations that think about the future, and share that thinking:
With regards to telling rich stories that resonate, here’s a list of the links I referenced in my presentation:
Every so often I read something which stops me in my tracks. “A Long-Wave Theory on Today’s Digital Revolution“ on the Booz & Co Strategy and Business site falls squarely into this category.
It’s an interview with historian Elin Whitney-Smith and has a range of insights that are worth sharing. Whitney Smith has spent 30 years researching and refining her theory of economic progress as a series of information technology disruptions, drawing on studies of subjects as varied as digital media design, medieval gender relationships, and the extinctions at the end of the Pleistocene epoch.
Her theory is that:
There have been six information revolutions in human history. Each represents a major change in the organizational paradigm — a change in how people form themselves into groups.
- The first was among hunter–gatherers just before the invention of agriculture;
- second, the rise of counting and written language;
- third, the fall of Rome;
- fourth, the invention of the printing press;
- fifth, the electric information revolution that accompanied trains, telegraph, and telephone; and sixth, the digital information revolution that we are now living through.
In the last three, the economics follow the same pattern: a long boom followed by a crash. Then a difficult and turbulent struggle begins. New ways of organizing emerge and the old ways, supported by established elites, fail.
This has close parallels with the theory of technology innovation as proposed to Ray Kurzweil, and has led him to propose his theory of ‘the singularity’ where humans and machines merge. Kurzweil’s theory is that each technology wave – from the discovery of fire - has happened successively faster. Whitney-Smith makes a similar observation:
Throughout history, the time frame has gotten shorter. Among hunter–gatherers, it took thousands of years to make the transition to agriculture. From the fall of Rome to the press was almost 1,000 years. The printing press revolution took 220 years. The electric revolution [trains, telegraph, and telephone] took 110 years, and, as I count it, the digital revolution started about 50 years ago. So, in recent information revolutions, there is a kind of rule of halves.
According to Whitney-Smith this has wide ranging implications, including changes for organizations:
We’re just starting to see the organizational innovation of the second phase emerge. These new companies take the Internet for granted. They are designed by a generation that had access to computers from childhood. Businesses that are less bound by old forms of hierarchical authority, such as Facebook (where any engineer can modify any part of Facebook’s code base), are thriving. So are companies with massive line worker input such as the “open management”
…companies that use these new ways of organizing will out-compete the old. If the rule of halves still applies, we would expect this new information order to manifest itself by sometime around 2012.
This is supported by evidence that companies are already embracing a ‘co-creation’ framework rather than a top down approach. For example I’m working with a number of forward-thinking clients on the deployment of Spigit – an online idea management tool which empowers everyone in an organization (especially front-line workers).
Whitney-Smith’s theory also has implications on a global scale:
In the short run, it’s better to be a member of the elite in China than a college student elsewhere with free information access. But bottom-up innovation will always be more successful in the long run. Therefore, if China continues its closed information policy, its success won’t last because regular people won’t be able to innovate.
Last but not least, the theory weighs in on the importance of moving away from the core to look for changes at the periphery and the edges:
“Lasting innovation in an information revolution doesn’t come from the elite, or from people who already have access to wealth and authority. It comes from the edges…”
I’ve just got back from a weekend of cognitive overload at Science Foo Camp at the Googleplex. Given that there’s just so much to take in, here’s a list of three interesting links that are worth exploring more:
