MINING THE FUTURE

TAPPING TOMORROW isn’t easy. The struggle to map trends and keep pace with change has upended a number of business models. Take photography, for example. In the past 10 years digital cameras have displaced 35mm cameras. To that extent Nikon (which started life as a paper mill) recently announced that it won’t make 35mm cameras any more, and Konica Minolta – the world’s third-largest maker of film – has pulled out of wet film manufacturing because the market has dried up. Times are a changing and the face of business shows it.

Mankind has always harboured a desire to peek around the corner. It’s part of our survival instinct. It’s also a catalyst for discovery and innovation. But the speed of change, primarily due to advances in technology, has become so fast that it’s leaving business breathless. Look at the sub-prime crisis, the emergence of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) banking, the liquidity of the CHIME nations (China, India and the Middle East), open innovation and the growth of radical transparency.

These concepts caught a number of idle corporate giants off guard, and as a result there is now a big effort to forecast the future. This is because any small advantage, like being the first to know something, can be turned into serious profit. Conversely, it can be used as part of risk management to avoid a loss.

For me, anyone who thinks professionally about the future is by default a futurist, or more accurately, a futurologist. The job title covers anyone working in strategic planning or innovation – they’re all involved in a guessing game. There’s no formal training as such, but in my view, historians make the best futurists. Being able to see where we’ve been is useful when charting the direction of tomorrow. But while organisations such as IBM, British Telecom, Nokia, The New York Times and the FBI have futurists either on the payroll or in residence, the great irony is that no futurist foresaw the rise of their own profession.

What does a futurist actually do? The answer is not simple. For starters, many futurists don’t actually think much about the distant future at all. Instead, what they do is think about the now. That’s the trick. It’s the ability to wear an “invisibility cloak” and sit and stare out of the windows and sip lattes in cafes without the constrictions of a normal job. Having freedom to think is essential. It is also vital to have access to an organisation and its management in order to witness the deep ocean currents that run through it.

The horizon futurists look at is sometimes as short as 18 months. Gazing beyond this can be difficult. The credit crisis seemed obvious to me ages ago when the media started writing about “Ninja” loans (banks in the US giving loans to people with No Income Job or Assets). Futurology isn’t rocket science, it is just common sense.

The methods of a futurist are just as varied as futurists themselves, but it always involves some degree of environment scanning. This means looking for early signs of change in areas such as society, technology, economics, the environment and politics. Then the task is to extrapolate out what the implications of the signals might be. For example, the ageing of society (hardly a weak signal but still invisible to most companies) will have profound effects on business in the years ahead.

Where do you find the early indicators of change? First, you read widely. Second, you talk to a lot of different people. Third, wander around with your eyes and ears wide open. Clearly knowing where to look helps, and my tip is that new ideas usually start at the fringes of markets or at the edge of mainstream thought, so start there first.

But here’s the rub. Large organisations tend to be data driven. This is fine when you’re dealing with things that have already happened, but the future isn’t obvious. The best thing you can do is use a fact-based approach to analyse what’s happened in the past (which includes the present because the moment you observe it it’s already history) and use this information inform and inspire your future-focused thought processes. But beware. Unchallenged assumptions and simplistic extrapolations can ruin otherwise sound strategic plans.

Richard Watson the founder of nowandnext.com. His latest book is Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years.