Penguin Random House has shared an excerpt from Thinking the Future: New Perspectives from the Shoulders of Giants by Clem Sunter and Mitch Ilbury!

Every decision we make is a decision about the future. We constantly make choices that affect the next week, year or decade, but get blinded by what we want or expect the future to be. Cognitive traps lie everywhere: failing to question our assumptions; believing in greater certainty and personal control than life allows; or missing signals because we’re distracted by the noise.

The post-2020 world demands a revolutionary way of looking ahead, and in these unpredictable times, the key to good futures thinking is good thinking. The goal of constructive futurism is not to forecast specific events, but to plot a series of scenarios that show what could happen. Consequently, we can work towards the future we want, avoid the ones we don’t, and be prepared to manage the risks and opportunities no matter what.

In Thinking the Future, scenario specialists Clem Sunter and Mitch Ilbury teach us the futurist’s art of decision-making, where the flexibility of thinking like a fox plays a key role in adapting to a complex and interconnected world. The book rejects the appealing but misleading self-help narrative that you can decide your future through sheer determination in pursuit of your goals and replaces it with a more dynamic approach.

Isaac Newton said: ‘If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ By reimagining seminal concepts thought up by some of history’s greatest thinkers, the authors detail the dos and don’ts for thinking the future and handling its uncertainty in a constructive way.

Read the excerpt:

~~~

What Is ‘Thinking the Future’?

Every decision we make relates to the future in some way. Whether it be the subject choice of a child in school; when and where a family decides to move home; how a business maps out strategic decisions for future profits; or the way a government goes about fiscal policymaking to address a looming debt burden: decisions made in the present are shaped by what we believe or hope the future holds. To this extent, the deliberations of today are intimately tied to our thoughts of tomorrow.

The thing is, thinking the future can be done well, or it can be done poorly. Because of its importance in our decision-making, falling on the wrong side of this divide can have marked consequences. The subjects you learn at school, the neighbourhood you live in or the fiscal policies that a government implements will all affect the experiences you have after those decisions are made and, in the worst-case scenario, those experiences can prove to be tragic. Thus, thinking the future has a make-or-break element to it that lies in the quality of the decisions we take.

This prompts the question: How do you know if you’re thinking the future well? You may think the answer is simple: Accuracy. Surely your futures thinking is effective if your vision turns out to be an accurate prediction of what plays out in reality? Undoubtedly, accuracy is important – if it was not part of the answer, then all estimates for how the future may play out would have equal value. It wouldn’t matter if you were right or wrong and there would be no accountability – no yardstick for success.

But assuming that it’s just about accuracy is misleading. Focusing on accuracy leads to three problems. First, we tend to home in on more precise estimates than the uncertainty of the situation allows, which means failing to account for the complexity and unpredictability of the world. Second, it leads to the assumption that we should bet big on one single answer, when it would be wiser to prepare for multiple eventualities.

And third, it puts all the emphasis on the outcome of the prediction, when the process underpinning it is of equal importance. You might guess the future out of pure luck or intuition, but that doesn’t necessarily teach you anything about how to make decisions. Conversely, you may have followed a robust process that turns out to be wrong simply because life is unpredictable, but the method itself and the information gathered will reveal something useful about the patterns at play. So, accuracy is part of the answer, but not all of it.

The essence of thinking the future is to understand the pattern of forces propelling the present into the future and to see where those forces can lead. It is about posing the right questions to help you detect the changes in the game in which you are a participant, whether it’s related to where you live, the occupation you are in or the interests that you have. It can extend to global issues like climate change, but it can also be about the societal trends in your own country or community that are bringing people together or driving them apart. It can be about technology and what industries are becoming obsolete or more relevant. At present, it is very much about how the nature of work, private life and education will be altered by the coronavirus pandemic and economic lockdowns.

It is also about coming to terms with certain facts of life that won’t change in the foreseeable future, which we can use to rule out scenarios that contradict those facts. For example, humans won’t be migrating to another planet if this one becomes uninhabitable, at least not in the near future, so we need to focus on how to keep living here and not continue behaving as if we have other options.

Once you’ve figured out the pattern of forces shaping the future you’re interested in, the next step is to see where those forces might lead. This can take various forms, one of which is forecasting. This type of futures thinking follows the existing pattern of information along a single line of projection to provide one prediction. The weather report is perhaps the most common example. However, this singular, right-or-wrong approach has its pitfalls, and our preferred technique is scenario planning, where you use the pattern of forces to plot out a plausible narrative, or set of narratives, about what could happen in the next year, decade or century – whatever the time period you’ve selected.

You can only do this by consulting your experience of the real world around you and envisaging the possible chains of cause and effect that lie within the realms of reason. This is why we favour the Aristotelian approach as opposed to that recommended by Plato: having a preconceived notion of the future based on an ideal world does not help in this regard. Your hopes may be dashed by an unexpected turn of events that could not be captured by pure introspection.

Putting an emphasis on experience and reason does not mean that the future will look like a logical continuation of the past. Such extrapolation can be just as dangerous. Indeed, we all know that this century is already like no previous one because of advances in technology and the planet being home to a record number of human beings. The challenge is to see where these factors will lead, along with any other forces identified. Imagination is a helpful assistant in the task of thinking the future creatively and seeing how it can differ from the past. That said, too much imagination and not enough logic can lead to wild speculation that’s not grounded in reality.

Reason and imagination must go hand in hand.

Finally, we must dispel the notion that thinking the future only applies to long periods of time. Futurists, like prophets, are considered by many to be an exclusive cadre with a rare talent or skill for gazing into the distant unknown. We are writing this book so that our readers can look at something important next week, next year, or even in five to ten years’ time and make a more careful and informed decision about it. Uncertainty grows the further you look ahead, but even the next twenty-four hours can contain a surprise.

Obviously, you sometimes need to balance the short-term against the long-term future, in which case you must ensure that the narratives you compose for both do not contradict one another. For example, planning a whole set of overseas trips next year will inevitably increase your carbon footprint, which may conflict with your long-term scenario that humankind must work together to ensure that your children have a sustainable future.

Having defined what we mean by thinking the future, we would like to develop another duality that reveals our preference for flexibility over rigidity. However, even though the idea also originates in ancient Greece, we must fast-forward 450 years from Raphael’s Rome to twentieth-century Oxford and a philosophical giant in his own right: Professor Isaiah Berlin.

He put the duality on the map.

Foxes and Hedgehogs

In his famous essay ‘The Hedgehog and The Fox’, Isaiah Berlin unearths a seemingly simple line from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’

Berlin cultivated this small shoot into a wider analogy and used it to distinguish the philosophical bent of some of history’s greatest thinkers. Some, he said, were singular in their thinking, relating everything to one big idea. They constructed an all-encompassing theory and saw the world according to that theory. In this sense, they were hedgehogs. Others were more diffuse in their thinking and operated on multiple levels. Through experience, they saw things for what they were in themselves without seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unitary inner vision. They were foxes.

Berlin considered the likes of Dante, Lucretius, Proust and Nietzsche classic hedgehogs, and thinkers such as Herodotus, Montaigne, Goethe and Joyce typical foxes. Modern-day examples may include Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, Adrian Gore and Angela Merkel as foxes: they’ve seen things from different perspectives and have managed to balance competing views to arrive at innovative solutions. On the other hand, Lee Kuan Yew, Margaret Thatcher, Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump could be considered hedgehogs: for better or for worse, their thinking has been guided by a stubborn, singular focus. If Berlin were gazing at Raphael’s School of Athens, he’d point to Plato and say ‘hedgehog’, leaving Aristotle as the fox. Although not designed to be a rigid classification, the hedgehog–fox analogy fits what Raphael captured in his illustrative distinction between Plato and Aristotle.

Hedgehogs try to find simplicity in the complex – a unifying thread that ties everything together. Foxes are more comfortable with complexity. They don’t risk pushing down too hard on the puzzle pieces so as to force them into a predetermined shape. Instead, they assess each piece and allow for the possibility that it might change the pattern and the picture as a whole.

So, what does this all mean for thinking the future? Well, how we make sense of the world informs how we think it will unfold. If you’re a hedgehog, you’re going to lean towards one unifying theory to explain a causal chain of events. For example, an economist relying purely on classical economics to forecast future trends is going to operate on the assumption that individuals function as rational actors. While this undoubtedly simplifies things, it doesn’t capture the full picture, and misrepresents reality in the name of a preconceived puzzle-box picture.

If you’re a fox, you’ll be more open to different explanations for how things may turn out. The foxy economist knows that humans are not always rational and will therefore look to other theories in behavioural economics.

~~~

Categories Non-fiction South Africa

Tags Book excerpts Book extracts Clem Sunter Mitch Ilbury Penguin Random House SA Thinking the Future