You were right…

I had given someone close to me investing advice two years ago before the GFC. I can remember thinking long and hard before opening my mouth on this topic. I marshalled my arguments and collected a number of pieces of evidence. I said to them that I felt they needed to take a defensive investment position and to think about moving into gold for a proportion of their portfolio.

Now, whilst they read what I gave them and heeded my advice to some degree, they moved into a defensive position and hence lost less in the GFC period, they did not move into gold. They could see that what I had showed them about the short term was likely to be accurate and the potential losses large enough to move, the shifting of assets into gold was a long term move and they just couldn’t bring themselves to see things getting that bad.

I had a phone call yesterday, and as we were talking of a mutual friend who has bought gold at the top of the market as it stands now, this person said to me that if they were to get into gold, it should have been 2 years ago when I advised the move. Now given I don’t forecast, it is true that I am not often right. Being so did not fill me with joy.

This experience has demonstrated once again that we need to develop our ability to act on foresight. I am also likely to fall prey to this, as I ‘know’ I need to move or household to a level of self-sufficiency to weather the possible ructions that will appear over the next few years, but I seem to move very slowly. It is difficult to act in one present in order to bring about or prevent another. It takes great imagination, persistence, and high hope. What I see as normal really isn’t what others see, and this can result in a feeling that is Cassandra-like.

I think this feeling has begun to spread and intensify for many people. We can ‘see’ that there is the potential for the environment we live in and the society we take for granted to move into a phase of discomfort or even sustained descent. There is a feeling of generational inequity as the children growing up today face a future less prosperous than that their grandparents knew. Climate change is part of the picture, but the main issue will be the intersection of climate change adaptation and peak oil. Just when we need the ability to be flexible and resilient we will find ourselves ham strung by the lack of access to cheap energy. Some are hearing the message and making moves to do the thinking that is required of us. See this report from The Oil Drum.

The growth in cleantech will go someway to mitigating this trend, but only those cleantech industries that don’t rely on petroleum product feedstocks, which I imagine are few as the use of the crude oil is so pervasive in our societies. This reliance will increase the cost of these products enormously over coming years.

See the list below of commonly used products from crude oil.

Artificial Limbs	Bags (garbage bags, shopping bags)	Balloons
Bandaids	Candles	Clothing (polyester, nylon)
Combs	Computers, calculators	Crayons
Credit Cards	Dishwashing Liquids	Disposable Diapers
Eye Glasses, Sunglasses	Fertilizers	Fishing Rods
Flooring (linoleum, tiles, carpets)	Garden Hose	Hand Lotion, Cream, Petroleum Jelly
Helmets (bicycle, hockey, etc.)	Heart Valves	Helmets (bicycle, hockey, etc.)
Insect Repellent	Insecticides	Life Jackets
Milk Jugs	Paint Brushes	Panty Hose
Parachutes	Patio Furniture	Pens
Perfume	Rope (nylon)	Safety Glass
Shampoo	Shower Curtains, Shower Doors	Soft Contact Lenses
Soft Drink Bottles, Plastic Bottles	Tape (clear, masking, etc.)	Tapes – (cassettes, vcr tapes)
Telephones	Tennis rackets	Tents
Toys, Dolls, Model Cars	Tires (synthetic rubber)	Toothbrushes, Toothpaste Tubes
Trash Bags	TV Cabinets	Umbrellas
Unbreakable Dishes	Waterproof Jackets, Boots, Pants

This over-reliance on crude oil, coupled with the peak of rare earth elements, makes our ability to manoeuvre our economies highly constrained.

An immediate switch to a no-growth paradigm could help but whatever we choose to do – there is pain acomin’

The role of foresight – or where Cassandra plays

How do we adjust to a new reality before that reality emerges?

Foresight is an innate human capacity – we can all think about the future and imagine how things might play out.  Let’s call this Innate Foresight. It is this capacity that I spend a large chunk of my time helping people bring consciously to their decision-making in organisations. Foresight thinking or innate foresight, allows us to imagine the future is ways that haven’t happened yet. Usually we do this by day dreaming or thinking about something we have read or seen. We might do some planning or goal setting for ourselves in an abstract sense – thinking about buying a house or having children one day. We are guided by what is expected and seen as ‘normal’.

Moving from this innate capacity to developing structured thinking skills around foresight and especially scenarios. These skills will also encompass some understanding of how we relate to others. We apply this thinking at first to ourselves – what scenarios might play out for us, what paths might we need to follow to achieve our goals. Applied Foresight takes lessons we learn from the future for ourselves to change our direction or keep ourselves motivated in the present. We may or may not discuss this with others. We may talk about my ‘life’s direction’ or ‘being on a journey’. We understand that we are in time and so need to allocate energy to various activities to bring about preferred future states.  We might need to influence people along the way and we do so by referring to the end state we are trying to reach: “I want to be a lawyer when I grow up”. There is some room for movement away from the accepted but we tend to think inside the bounds of the usual. I am happy to take the expert forecast of what could happen, confident that they see further and more clearly than I do.

Applied foresight works very successfully for myself and my life but once I decide that the future I am ‘seeing’ is one others ‘should’ also want to achieve or prevent, I have hit Perspective Foresight. I might start being interested in how to influence others to my view. I will also want to acquire skills that allow me to understand how others think about the future and to surface what they see coming. Perspectives can be useful for understanding, and they help me try to influence the way people see the world so I can ‘sell’ them my vision or direction. The future is a competition of these perspectives, and although some co-habitation is possible, the most popular view will prevail and I may well want it to be mine. I understand how others develop their views but I am still mystified at times about how they think they are right. I am starting to see that there may be development over time in my thinking and values. I am trying to build a zone of non-commitment before I react to others. I can see my beliefs and views as a river and I want a strip of beach on which I can park new ideas and play with them before deciding whether to add them to the river or throw them back into the neighbouring bush.

The concept of ‘rightness’ and the role of the system in the development of the future starts to become an issue when I want to create change at a large level. Perspective foresight shows me that not all people see the future the way I do. I am understanding now that there are levels of development in all types of cognitive and psych-social variables. Systemic Foresight helps me to understand that I am in a system within a system (turtles all the way down), that reality is socially constructed and so I have the ability to see both of these and therefore possibly create something new.  A systems understanding of the world may come from systems thinking, it may come from a post-modern discipline, it may also arise from being oppressed or outside the dominant system and so aware that one exists at all. At a systems level, the role of values becomes key – what do I value and how do I bring this to bear in the world?  How do I know I am doing ‘good’ work in the world? What systems do I want to change or sustain and why? Systemic foresight looks at what exists in the world as being fit for purpose at the time it developed in the world and asks ‘if we think the system has poor outcomes, what has changed in the world for this to be the case?’ The second question is then, ‘how do we design system that we bring the now ‘good’ outcomes to existence?’ Systemic foresight asks many more questions than perspective foresight as it has accepted that reality is how we see something, it is not a fixed state.

Once I have sat in systemic foresight for a good, long while it starts to dawn on me that there must be more than just this. What that means for each of us will be different, but there is usually a spiritual dimension to the question. The role of what is good and true becomes more than reference to a moral code, there is a choice about the stance taken, the boundaries that are set, the agreements that are made. This activity is moving from cognitive to embodiment. It is no longer enough to think in this way, and choose perhaps to act. Action becomes central and predominant in terms of my personal energy use and where I choose to spend my time. The paths to embodied foresight are varied, it may be you came from the work of Ken Wilber and Integral, or through Robert Kegan, or Steiner, Aurobindo, energy work etc. The step change between systemic and embodied foresight is that the future becomes a driver for action rather than a support for decision-making. I make decisions based on the future impact on others – human or not. I have not found people who have developed this level of foresight thinking are usually deciding whether they support the ongoing development of the human race. They are weighing up the pros and cons of humanity on the planet and deciding whether to support the dominant paradigm or try to transform it or undermine it in some way. Part of embodiment there is the wish to want to move to enactment. To bring the future that wishes to emerge through us into being. I do this through the social technology of Scharmer, Senge etc, others may be working in empowering people to act through other methods. Enactment may actually be another level, I haven’t seen enough of it to know as yet.

I don’t know that the world needed another step model of foresight but this one emerged and here we are. This maps well onto the experience I had whilst teaching foresight to post-graduate adult learners. Most came in at the perspective foresight level and by the time they had left the program they were solidly into systemic foresight with some moving into embodied. This model is also influenced by the work of Richard Slaughter, his five levels to social foresight draw on the use and spread of foresight tools and techniques to drive understanding. See here for explanation. I agree that this is the case, I also think we have to spend time on our moral basis of decision-making; our leadership skills and self understanding; and a process of embodying the future in the present, of acting as though the future is emerging through us. If you are familiar with Cook-Greuter, Lovinger and Graves you will see echoes here as well.

I’ll sit with this for a while and see if it still makes sense down the track.

Ideas bank

I  want to list and summarise where the ideas I will be discussing in this blog originate from – this is a way to me to document some of my own reading but can also act a starter place for someone wanting to begin to understand what might be happening around them. There are a number of blogs that I have been following for a variety of insights, some of these are listed on the right and I will add more as time unfolds. The following books are those that I have bought rather than just read and returned to the owner or library. I think this says that I found them more compelling – or in some cases – I needed to make up my amazon order 🙂

These books are representative of the descent ideas rather than the ways we might think about descent. I have not included anything in the foresight/futures realm as we will get to those in a later post – this is the ‘content’ area rather than the ‘process of thinking’ area I want to cover here. I have listed them in the order I read and acquired them.

‘Woman on the edge of time‘ Marge Piercy 1985 The first book I read (in 1990) about the possibility of a techno-agraian future with a completely different way of organising society. I found it radical and visionary and re-vistied it in 2002 when I began studying the Master of Strategic Foresight at Swinburne University. Worth a look for the alternative visions brought to life.

‘Believing Cassandra‘ Alan Atkisson 1999 Seven principles of sustainability and ideas about how we might be different, this book tries very hard to be optimistic and look at the opportunities rather than just seeing everything as a challenge. I especially liked the Cassandra reference and have often felt the way she must have when talking to people about reality as I see it which is usually rather different to their perception. Systems play a central role in the problems and the solution.

Hope, Human and Wild Bill McKibben 1995 McKibben talks about the area of the US in which he lives and what has happened there. He then moves onto Curitiba in Brazil and gives the reader insight into what has happened in that very interesting city. There are some interesting glimpses of the future as it is emerging from developing countries that have become powerhouses in the 15 years since this was written.

‘God’s Last Offer‘ Ed Ayres 1999 A prescient book where Ayres talks about the four spikes – Carbon, extinction, consumption and population. Brings it back to the individual and the choices we make personally, professionally and at the ballot box.

‘Gaviotas‘ Alan Weisman 1998 – This book follows an intentional community in Coloumbia and what they did to build their world. There is insight into what is required for innovation and change, but also inspiration for how things could be post-scarcity.  They were doing what needed to be done without high technology and the level of innovation was incredible – very hopeful.

‘Towards a sustainable economy‘ Ted Trainer 1996 An Australian book about finite limits and the requirement for new ways of thinking about society and the economy. Trainer advocates for a third way – the radical conserver society. A good introduction to the ideas of post-scarcity and sustainability.

‘State of the world atlas‘ 1999 Published every few years – a nice book of visual global trends. There are sites on the net that have superseded this but is a good quick snapshot of where things stand. Latest version is 2008.

‘The Social Construction of Reality‘ Berger and Luckman 1967 This is a seminal work and needs to read by anyone trying to get a handle on what we are facing and how we might deal with it. It is heavy going but a very useful understanding of how we create the understanding of the reality we see. It is also insightful in terms of ability to imagine change and difference.

‘Cradle to cradle‘ McDonough and Braungart 2002 I bought the edition that is made from plastic fibres that is waterproof, durable and recyclable. I loved the idea that the object I was reading exemplified the ideas contained within it. Talks about using the waste from one process as feed in material for the next. The authors are talking in whole systems and looking to measure waste across it rather than in each discrete operation.

‘The Human Web‘ McNeill and McNeill 2003 I have a preference for books that try to explain the system to me from a macro view. This is a perfect example, the authors are looking at the whole of human history and use the idea of webs to explain how webs have worked to link people together resulting in innovation and new civilisation. Meticulous in the research and the idea is compelling.

‘The Weather Makers‘ Tim Flannery 2005 A book by an Australian author that takes a systems view of the climate change issue and lays the issues out in a way the inexorably leads the reader to understand that it is complex and that we have no where near enough information to act but act we must.  A good introduction for the new reader or someone who is looking to understand the climate debate more fully.

‘Collapse‘ Jared Diamond 2005 This is an enormous piece of work that takes the reader through a number of examples to illustrate that human societies have reached their limits on a number of occasions in area around the globe and attempts to map what happened next. Especially chilling are the chapters on the Anasazi and the Easter Islanders – always leaves me with the question – what was the person who cut down the last palm on Easter island thinking as they did it?

‘A Big Fix‘ Ian Lowe 2005 A slim book from an Australian author that looks to offer some solutions for a sustainable society. Equity, stable consumption, stable population and zero waste are some of his suggestions.

‘The Upside of Down‘ Thomas Homer-Dixon 2006 Using systems theory as a base this book links growth, peak oil, increasing poverty and environmental issues with the mapping of the Roman empire’s demise.  Easy to read and understand, it echoes Diamond’s work in collapse and argues for resilient societies with foresight. There are a couple of metaphors that entered my thinking from this book – the ‘slaves’ we all have due to the use of fossil fuels and that the lessons of descent were learned in the Roman empire 2000 years ago so we can take note.

‘Parable of the Sower‘ and ‘Parable of the Talents‘ Octavia Butler 2000 These two books follow the story of a family that is hit by the crises following environmental and economic breakdown of society. There genius is in the images she outlines about how the world may look and feel to a person living through the descent. In the novels, a new religion is created to assist people to understand and engage with the changes required of them.

‘Plan B 2.0‘ Lester R Brown 2006 This work looks to re-frame the challenges into opportunities for innovation. Now in version 4.0 (2009) Brown outlines a number of solutions that could be used to change the trajectory we are currently on. Another systems thinker, this a good source for finding hope and inspiration.

‘The Road‘ Cormac McCarthy 2007 A dystopic post-nuclear future that chilled me to core and should not be read at the same time as the Butler books. I have yet to see the movie as the book ensured I had one running in my head for days after I finished it. Very good for providing motivation to change the world now while we have a chance!

‘Deep Economy‘ Bill McKibben 2007 The year of eating locally and the idea of the durable future. McKibben says we need to move beyond growth to something more durable and satisfying.

Blessed Unrest Paul Hawken 2007 I bought this looking for sources of hope and it delivered. Hawken has collected details on a huge number of organisations that are working to try and chnage the world. Many of these are doing amazing work, and it was heartening to read about them.

‘Six Degrees‘ Mark Lynas 2008 A colleague saw the National Geographic show of the same name and recommended it. I bought the book and it makes compelling reading. Lynas has had a shot at trying to imagine what the world will look like at 1, 2, 3 up to 6 degrees of warming. This approach helps focus the mind when politicians talk about just 2 degrees.

‘World made by hand‘ James Howard Kunstler 2008 A nice piece of fiction based on his book ‘Long Emergency’ – which I have also read but not bought so can’t be included here – it tells the story of how society operates after climate change and peak oil. The most thought provoking part of the book for me is a scene where a young man tells of his disillusionment as the college education he was told he had to have didn’t prepare him for the world he now faced. My kids will be the age of the character in the book in the same year, so this really hit home – what are we currently educating our children for?

‘Peak Everything’ Richard Heinberg 2007 This book has self contained chapters dealing with topics such as coal, oil, gas, water, arable land, fisheries, climate change and peak oil, and the psychology of peak everything. A good guide to what we may face and what we encounter trying to deal with it. Heinberg asks us to wake up to the problem and start to deal with it.

‘Blue Gold‘ Barlow and Clarke 2002 An interesting insight into the water wars that will be coming our way due to the corporatisation of water and our insistence that consumers in developed countries buy water that is usually worse than what comes out of our taps.

‘The Transition Timeline‘ Shaun Chamberlin 2009 A book that can be used by communities to develop their energy descent plan. It talks about the idea of transition towns and how these are developed. It also outlines the link between peak oil and climate change. The UK the focus of this work.

‘The Long Descent‘ John Michael Greer 2008 From the man that brings us The Archdruid blog, this book lays out the descent trajectory and starts to engage with might be needed in a deindustrial world. Uses the histories of other civilisations as a roadmap for where we might go. Interesting for the idea of salvage – how many local council areas are thinking about mining licenses for their landfill sites?

‘The Ecotechnic Future‘  John Michael Greer 2009 A book from many blogs on The Archdruid, this book sets out to try and glimpse what the future might be like on the other side of de-industrialisation. He makes a case for pursuing experimentation and a diversity of strategies to find a way to navigate to this age – I use the term post-scarcity for this.

‘When technology fails‘ Matthew Stein 2008 A fantastic resource with everything from food, shelter, first aid, medicine, energy – everything we will need once power starts to fail. A good read for trying to envision how your day to day life may change.  Growing a beard is not compulsory.

‘Radical Hope‘ Jonathon Lear 2006 Lear writes about the Crow and how they operated after the ‘west was won’. Plenty Coups, who last the last chief of the Crow Nation, talked about a period after which ‘nothing happened’. The idea that nothing can happen after a particular point in time is investigated by Lear and his findings are extremely interesting. What does it take to continue to live  good life in the face of cultural devastation when all the categories for understanding the world have disappeared? His idea of radical anticipation has an amazing amount of traction when we consider what will be needed in the future.

‘The Collapse of Complex Societies’ Joesph A Tainter 1988 I had not read this, even though it is mentioned in a number of other books. Good for the theory at the beginning and the in depth understanding of the dynamics of collapse.

‘Empire – How Britain made the modern world‘ Niall Ferguson 2004 I read this recently on a plane trip to the UK and coming from a colonial outpost it was interesting to see how the empire that Ferguson explains still operates at the centre, how the thinking and drivers that operated in the British Empire can still be seen today in British society. I gifted this to a hotel room in London so possibly it shouldn’t be on this list but I wold have kept it if I had room.

So this is where I am coming from. Add to this list the hours spent in the classroom with MAsters students grappling with what the future might look like and you can see where I am coming from. Over the next few posts I want to sketch out what innovation means in this context, the role that foresight might play, the psychological and behavioural developments I think we need to adopt and keep scanning the future to try and sense what is emerging.

I have my voice

So it begins, maybe April Fool’s Day is just the day for me to start writing about these topics. Not really sure who the fool is – likely to be me after a few weeks of trying to find something interesting to say. I just returned from a trip to Europe and one thing that long haul flights are good for is musing on what seems to be arising next. Over and over again, the theme of foresightful action arose. This was especially strong in the area of innovation, foresight, climate change and peak everything including oil. The first phrase that arose was ‘descent development’ but I really felt that as an oxymoron, or should be. So the phrase – descent innovation – kept coming to me. What are the innovations we need to develop in the realms of psychology, culture, behaviour and systems to try to surf the descent wave rather than have it crash over us.

I spend a good proportion of my professional life talking to people about foresight and leadership. I think this is a key aspect of the descent story – we need to use all the tools at our disposal to try to make the landing soft for the billions of people on this planet. I am not going to try to convince people that descent is coming or even that it is inevitable and I am more than happy to be wrong. However, everything I have read and seen for the past 8 years is screaming at me that the time to act is passing, we must accept that the age of progress is over and look to develop holistic sustainability to survive in the short-term.

I say to people that climate change is not a problem for the planet – it will survive the way it has done before – this is a species survival challenge. Do we believe that as a species we should continue to operate? After musing on this for a while – and it was a good 12 months – I can state that I am a humanist. I believe we should survive as a species on the planet. I would prefer that we learned to share with our fellow tenants a bit more, but nonetheless I want us to continue.

The challenges associated with climate change are many and varied, but they are further complicated by the looming end of cheap and abundant energy in the form of fossil fuels. I am not going to debate anthropogenic climate change here, but regardless of what is causing it, our arsenal of tools is hampered by the fact that many of our important metals and fuels are beginning to peak or at least become more expensive to access. This will impact our ability to mitigate the effects of a changing climate  and I believe will result in outcomes that I really don’t want to experience. But, hence the hope in the title, there are ways we may be able to soften the impacts through forward thinking, innovation, collaboration and prototyping.

So I am going to use this space to muse, converse and engage with the ideas of descent, innovation, leadership and foresight. Come join me and see where we end up.