What pathway should we choose
to secure our kids’ future?
On the surface, major issues threaten the futures of our children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews – not to forget unborn generations. They include: global climate change; the widening economic divide; and the standoff between different cultural systems. All have the potential to whip up violence as a means for resolving disagreement, and this is worrying as the nuclear debate revives. The signals for these predicaments have been around for decades but have gone largely ignored through wide-spread apathy and self-absorption. So, what now?
Clues for dealing with these issues may lie in the underlying causes: the crises humanity faces in meaning and in governance. Our problems in ecology, social equity and cultural acceptance are symptoms of deeper difficulties in our mindset -- the way we understand our world, and our futures -- and in the way we govern our local and global societies. Even if the urgency of these issues proves to be overblown, the key question becomes: What pathway do we choose to tackle the challenges and opportunities lie ahead. Maybe it is time to look beyond yet more analysis and focus on visions and actions that bring wisdom and understanding to human governance.
Reimagining technologies
to solve a crisis in meaning
Information and communications technologies, and artificial intelligence, must be used to serve humanity. They must stimulate human creativity in order to solve problems that threaten humanity’s in the longer-term.
Rethinking Oz:
Seeing our futures differently
The entrenched assumptions Australians most commonly bring to an understanding of their present and future world are examined. Does Oz realise that the attending problems cannot necessarily be solved by the industrialist, short-term thinking that bred them?
The present authoritarian thought system reaches back through two millennia of Western civilisation, almost unchallenged. It lacks long-term vision. Still, this industrialist perspective largely defines the understandings that Australians have about their choices for the future, limiting creativity for dealing with the dilemmas and opportunities ahead. This mindset is linear, exclusionary and competitive. It seeks either to take charge of nature’s rhythms or ignore them.
An emerging mindset of networking, rather than top-down control, may be starting to clear the smog. It would be organic, inclusive and collaborative – and certainly aware of longer-term horizons. It could replace the buccaneering, conformist mentality with self-responsibility and respect for diversity.
Knowledge: Economy
or community?
Corporate interests already well laden with power and money are amassing knowledge capital at the verge of the human spirit. The emerging biotech industry, driven by a new science, deals in the engineering of living organisms, including human tissue. By invading this sacred space, and taking upon itself the mantle of universal creator, knowledge capital has found yet another commodity to sell to the highest bidder in the so-called global free market.
Access to the most valuable information -- even when published – has become increasingly expensive. For researchers in developing countries there are obstacles to joining international networks and collaborative projects.
An alternative future for new knowledge is that it become widely accessible for rethinking governance, community and learning. This could help reinvent our libraries and other learning systems to have them look something like multimedia hubs, in space and cyberspace.
Organising tomorrow: Managing
your future and the journey
How will we make the journey to the future and then manage it? First, look at how the corporation has evolved over the past 200 years, that social instrument which has become today’s dominant organisation.
Early industrial organisations borrowed ideas of top-down control from the army and the church. By mid-century the behaviourism of earlier bureaucratic and “scientific” management was seen as limiting productivity. Employees had creativity and skills that could be harnessed when given meaningful work and a role in decision making. Thus, sociologists and psychologists zeroed in on the field of management. But the bean counters prevailed over organisational change agents when a 1970s’ fad, the MBA, saw high-flying young experts take charge via the executive suite and the emerging merchant banks. The organisation was the new stage to celebrity.
Now theories stem from the natural sciences: non-linear change informs organisational theories of chaos, complexity and paradox. Firms are reengineered as “complex adaptave systems”, or reorganised to “fit” the corporate ecology. There are learning organisations and matrix and network structures. The big fashion is in adapting to the global “free” market.
But, what will organisations look like in another 200 years? There should be two main pathways for organisations in the short term: the just-do-it and the organic. Beyond that, there could be a mix from each. Or networks of small community groups; even a return to the family – but an extended family; partnering along common interests; and things harder to imagine. But the very social technology of future organising can be the real breakthrough. This may use coordination, rather than control, when a network has more than one seat of power. Organising tomorrow demands imagination for dealing with uncertainties and complexities.
Embracing the future:
Australia in the new Asia-Pacific
Asia-Pacific is where western modernity faces an ascendant east, the site of a global shift. How will it play out for tomorrow’s human existence? What are the roles for Australia as a middle-ranking largely-western actor? What can its roles be; and has Oz got its thinking right and the appropriate economic and diplomatic potential?
Learning from the future:
Questions, issues and opportunities
The key assumption is that we can play some part in co-creating our preferred future, barring major catastrophe like war or natural disaster. So the very act of thinking about the future -- learning from it -- can in fact change it.
Three big ideas from the past century -- science, the market and mass media -- are still acting to change the future. To these we add the emerging trends and counter-trends, evident today. These include: globalisation, human domination of nature, social disengagement, dumbing down of human imagination, widening gaps in wealth and knowledge, the once-dominant white population becoming even smaller, the rise of new epidemics from super viruses, the convergence of emerging technologies and the way we engage reality. Designer technologies reshape the world and life itself as humanity sits on the throne of God.
How can foresight help us question our alternative futures in order to learn how best to make the journey?
Linking today’s decisions
to long-term visions
We are both driven and drawn into the future. Change is a complexity of push and pull. Do we sit back and get pushed into the future that somebody else has chosen for us? Or should we use some compelling image of the future that we prefer to live in as a template for a more desirable future?
Traditional strategic planning relies largely on analyzing trends, that is, projecting in the present from the past into the future. But, alone, such forecasting fails to take heed of what kind of future we’d prefer to work towards. Neither does it consider the big changes rushing at us from the future to counter the trends.
Foresight methodologies, such as emerging issues analysis, visioning, scenario-writing and backcasting, are available for helping manage the uncertainty of the future. Through anticipation we have much to learn from the future, although it is not yet here.
Future mind:
The struggle for meaning
A mediated global market, too often illegal or unethical, may be altering the human mind. As several big new ideas converge into the immediate future, what will our minds be like in ten years, twenty, even one thousand?
Where we once understood reality mainly through the mystical, then the sacred, now we look through the eyes of a creator. Designer technologies reshape the world and life itself -- for good or ill. As entertainment media threaten the diversity of human imagination, we talk of technology for altering neural networks, allowing direct-to-mind marketing. Will the alliance of Big Pharma and Biotech make drugs even more acceptable?
Will we, can we, take our minds out of others’ pockets to let them
recover the meaning of being human – to put relationships ahead of
money? Do we want to? Do we sit back and let the future arrive,
whatever it may be? Or do we play an active part in building our
preferred future with clear minds, having learned from challenging
our habits, past assumptions and perspectives?