Meeting the future halfway
Patrick Dixon
Fellow of London Business School Center for Management Development
When you find yourself described as a futurist, some people may expect you to start predicting what will happen on a specific date. Patrick Dixon, author of Futurewise and labelled by the media as Europe's leading futurist, is quick to put the record straight.
"None of us can out-guess the future and I certainly wouldn't claim to do so. My job isn't to say what will happen in 2010, but to make some intelligent speculations and to build scenarios of what is likely. That is a fundamental of risk management. It is entirely based on that discipline.
"We can divide the future into two areas:
-
the foundation stones, in which trends are beyond dispute and the only issues for discussion are timing
-
the wild cards - those untamed influences that can strike at any time, for example, major product failures, or changes in technology that change the way people think
"All wild cards have two things in common: they are low probability events, but will have huge impact if they happen. I often set a risk management exercise for senior teams by asking them to think of the most damaging headlines they could possibly imagine about their companies. Most organisations can produce a stack of such headlines very quickly.
"Because of our post-Enron environment, a huge number of these risks are ethical. A typical wild card, for example, would be for a former employee of a private bank to use access privileges to remove the entire client list and publish it on the Internet. Or for a chocolate manufacturer to find that contaminated food oil, containing cancerous dioxins, had found its way into the entire product range."
Getting to market at the right time
So where should companies focus in this confusing futureworld? "The critical skill for business comes with being more accurate than the competition about the timing of getting things to market. A large number of debates about the future are over the timing rather than the actuality of what is going to happen, with the exception of politics and geopolitical issues.
"A proper view of risk should involve quite a sophisticated future exercise. If you are doing that on a broad basis, you will also be looking at business opportunities.
"In this complex world in which we live, we have to create a very sophisticated model of the different kinds of future. There are many huge uncertainties or risks, but there are foundation stones on which the future will be built, and they are pretty solid.
"Take demographics. Today, for instance, there are only half the number of children in certain years in German schools that there were ten years ago. That means I can tell how many college students there will be in ten years' time, and so on. Barring a nuclear war or a viral holocaust, we can be pretty sure what the age distribution of the population will be in the next 20-30 years.
"Anyone can tell these kind of aspects of the future if they just use an ounce of common sense and spend a few minutes thinking about it. The pensions crisis, for example, was set in stone 25 years ago. There is the same institutional blindness in most companies today about the impact of ageing of their consumers and demand for products, as there was in governments 15-20 years ago about pensions."
The digital revolution
Patrick Dixon foresees two great revolutions dominating the next 20 years - digital and biotech. "The digital has the power to change what we do, and the genetic to change all that we are. We are in the first week of the digital revolution and only the first hour of the first day of the biotech revolution, but they are founded on rock and are beyond debate.
"You don't need to be a genius to see that the next 20 years will see huge changes in personal life, business products, consumer choices etc. In 2050, people will look back and say that the digital revolution didn't really get going until 2015. They'll say that in the late 20th century, people were playing with chips, wires and radio waves and experimenting with new technologies. They will describe a rather odd experiment called the Internet, which was long overtaken by 2020 and buried in the depths of history, replaced by a world where everything is connected to everything else all the time."
The biotech revolution
Dr. Dixon admits that there is a dark side to the biotech, or genetic, revolution, but his natural optimism focuses on the positive outcomes. "I am a physician and I have an intense interest in the manipulation of life to cure people - reprogramming of bacteria to heal our bodies, engineering human tissue to replace organs. A growing number of scientists are convinced that within the lifetime of people alive today, we will see a dramatic increase in life expectancy. It is clear there will be fundamental changes in health care, medicine, rebuilding damaged brains and hearts, repairing broken spinal cords, cures for cancer and Aids.
"All this accelerates the demographics issues. Put these together with digital issues, and you have a potent mix."
The future can be a scary place, as well as an exciting one. But here's where Patrick Dixon will make a prediction - and a comforting if lyrical one. "People will still do the same things in 2050 - have teenage identity crises, fall in love, have children, watch a sunset and see stars at night, hear wild birds in the trees and walk in the woods. Human beings are conservative by nature."
You can learn more of Dr Patrick Dixon's views on his Web site:
http://www.globalchange.com
It also contains his Lucerne presentation:
http://www.globalchange.com/ppt4/risk/index.htm
