Tag: strategic foresight

strategic foresight

Foresight, Growth and the J-shaped Curve

on May 2, 2019

The business of futures is to see what possibilities lay ahead to better anticipate how to meet them when or if they become reality. When this story line follows a linear path this is a lot easier; when it follows a more complex path reality can bite.

Foresight models look at trends and curves in trajectories of things including those that might disrupt the status quo. Using tools and frameworks (PDF), foresight professionals and futurists seek to better understand the contributors (drivers) and patterns associated with decisions, activities, and circumstances to anticipate what might come and better prepare for it (strategic foresight). Foresight is being used in fields ranging from natural resource management to energy policy to healthcare planning.

A rational look at foresight finds many reasons to embrace it for an organization. Who wouldn’t want to have a better sense of what is coming and prepare for it? The problem foresight poses is that it can lead people to look for the right things in the wrong way and that has everything to do with our human tendencies to see narrative arcs in the stories we tell ourselves instead of seeing either exponential or j-shaped curves.

Both of these models for data have enormous consequences for how we understand some of our greatest challenges as humans and as organizations as we shall see.

Exponential complication

A linear distribution or data structure is what humans see most easily. It’s the maintenance of a status quo, gradual change, or the progressive rise and fall of something over time. It’s what we see when we see in most trends and patterns. This perspective has the tendency to view much of the system in which this change takes place as relatively stable.

Stability is largely a matter of perspective. Everything is in motion to some degree; its the rate of change that we notice. In linear systems, that rate of change is relatively consistent or at a pace we understand while exponential change (or growth curves) are more challenging to see — and potentially more dangerous as the video below illustrates.

Al Bartlett’s lecture and other notes provide just one example exponential growth and how our perception is challenged by these kind of data structures in the world and the systemic effects they can bring.

Without an understanding of the growth dynamics associated with a particular phenomenon, we are at risk of grossing under-estimating the potential implications of what might happen. In these cases we need fixes, but not just any fixes as we shall see.

Deceptive Fixes

Another type of curve that can distort foresight models is the ‘j-shaped curve’. This curve describes situations where there is a long-term trend that is briefly countered in the short-term. An example is the case of alcohol consumption and health. There is evidence that alcohol consumption (e.g., a glass of wine or beer) can have a beneficial effect on a person’s health (at the population level, individual results might vary significantly). However, beyond that certain amount — that varies by person — and alcohol becomes toxic and can substantially contribute to a variety of health problems, injuries, and premature death. The j-shaped curve forms from data showing a mild reduction in health risks associated with modest alcohol intake as illustrated below.

For alcohol use, a single drink can lower your mortality risk before the risk starts rising again. Contrast this against cigarette use where a linear pattern of risk is seen: the more you smoke at any level, the higher your risk. Both patterns have linearity to them, but one is far more deceptive in it’s short and long-term implications.

Where this can fool foresight researchers is that there may be a trend that is showing a certain set of properties assumed to be on the trajectory like that on the left hand side of the graph when it is really similar to the right. Depending on the time horizon you use to inform your decisions based on this data the implications could be markedly different and potentially catastrophic.

Our fixes or strategies to anticipate change based on the wrong model could actually serve to amplify the very problem we sought to solve. A possible example of this is the move to ban single-use plastic bags. While the evidence of the environmental impact of plastic is considerable, a shift from plastic bags has its own negative implications, including the increased manufacturing of (with resulting waste and potential increased consumerism from) reusable tote bags or the increased use of forest products to support paper bag production.

The loss of plastic shopping bags which are often re-used (despite being called single-use) as garbage liners is now resulting in more purchases of plastic-intensive garbage bags. If the systemic implications are not considered in the design of such policies, these well-meaning fixes can profoundly fail. What is needed is a change in the way we consume, store, and buy goods, not just carry them home.

Systems change changes systems

The idea that you could be surrounded by literally thousands of people, connected to most of the planet through a device that fits in the palm of your hand, and still experience profound loneliness would once be considered the most profound oxymoron to anyone born before 1980.

Yet, here we are in a state where the very fixes for connection are failing us. The benefits of social media, social connection, artificial intelligence, and new production methods (e.g. 3D printing) are now starting to show some negative effects on our social and economic systems. Are these linear progressions of technological advancement that are simply generating a few of the inevitable bumps along the way? Are they exponential trends about to explode and profoundly transform the way we live? Or are these j-shaped curved trends that once provided us the benefits of finding connection in the modern world only to entrench our social systems into being online, not off?

We are creating systems that are changing themselves and having profound effects on the fundamentals around us. Retail conveniences created by online shopping means changing the relationship we have with our local merchants and that changes their viability. Handheld computers like an iPhone are engineered to hold our attention; what happens when we stop paying attention to the world around us?

These are systems questions and ones that foresight — when applied well — holds some promise in allowing us to anticipate and maybe deal with before its too late.

We can’t see these things coming if we hold models of the future that are based on a linear framing of what is happening now and what is to come. We also can’t adapt if we assume that even non-linear change will take place and persist within the same system it started in. Systems change changes systems.

Data models are fundamental to foresight and understanding them is the key to knowing whether your ahead of the curve, behind the curve, or sitting in the middle of the letter J.

Photo Credits: Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash and Cameron Norman

public healthstrategic foresight

Futuring the Past

on February 7, 2019
Flat Earth to Measles: Did We See That Coming?
In the first month of 2019 the United States saw more measles cases than it did in all of 2010. This disease of the past was once on its way to extinction (or deep hibernation) is now a current public health threat, which prompts us to think: how can our futuring better consider what we came from not just what it might lead to?

Measles was something that my parents worried about for me and my brothers more than forty years ago. Measles is one of those diseases that causes enormous problems that are both obvious and also difficult to see until they manifest themselves down the road. Encephalitis and diarrhea are two possible short-term effects, while a compromised immune system down the road is some of the longer-term effects. It’s a horrible condition, one of the most infectious diseases we know of, and also one that was once considered to be ‘eliminated’ from the United States,Canada and most of the Americas (which means existing in such small numbers as not worthy of large-scale monitoring).

In the first month of 2019 there have been more measles cases tracked than all of 2010. The causes of this are many, but largely attributable to a change in vaccination rates among the public. The fewer people who get vaccinated, the more likely the disease will find a way to take hold in the population — first of those who aren’t protected, but over time this will include some of those who are because of the ‘herd protection’ nature of how vaccination works.

Did We See That Coming?

Measles hasn’t featured prominently in any of the foresight models of the health system that I’ve seen over the course of my career. Then again, twenty-five years ago, it would have been unlikely that any foresight model of urban planning would have emphasized scooters or bicycles — old technologies — over the automobile as modes of transportation likely to shape our cities. Yet, here we are.

Today, those interested in the future of transportation are focused on autonomous cars, yet there is some speculation that the car — or at least the one we know now — will disappear altogether. Manufacturers like Ford — the company that invented the mass-market automobile — have already decided they will abandon most of their automobile production in the next few years.

The hottest TV show (or rather, streamed media production) among those under the age of 20? Friends (circa 1994).

Are you seeing a trend here?

What we are seeing is a resurgence of the past in pockets all throughout our society. The implications of this are many for those who develop or rely on futurist-oriented models to shape their work.

One might argue that a good model of the future always assumes this and therefore it isn’t a flaw of the model, but rather that, as William Gibson was quoted as suggesting: the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet. The Three Horizon Framework popularized by McKinsey has this assumption built into it from the beginning. But it’s not just the model that might be problematic, but the thinking behind it.

Self-Fulfilling Futures

Foresight is useful for a number of things, but I would argue very little of that benefit is what many futurists claim. The arguments for investing in foresight is that, by thinking about what the future could bring we can better prepare ourselves for that reality in our organizations. This might mean identifying different product lines, keeping an eye out for trends that match our predictions, improving our innovation systems and “the impact of decision-making“.

Why is the case? The answer — as I’ve been told by foresight and futurist colleagues — is that by seeing what is coming we can prepare for it, much like a weather forecast allows us to dress appropriately for the day to account for the possibility of rain or snow.

The critique I have with this line of thinking is that: do we ever go back and see where our models fit and didn’t fit? Are foresight models open to evaluation? I would argue: no. There is no systematic evaluation of foresight initiatives. This is not to suggest that evaluation needs to concern itself with whether a model gets everything right — that the future turns out just as we anticipated — but whether it was actually useful.

Did we make a better decision because we saw a possible future? Did we restructure our organization to achieve something that would have been impossible had we not had the strategic foresight to guide us? These are the claims and yet we do not have evidence to support it. Such little evaluation of these models has left us open to clinging to myths and also to an absence of critical reflection on what use these models have (and also a wasted opportunity to consider what use they could have).

Yes, the case of Royal Dutch Shell and its ability to envision problems with the global oil supply chain in the late 1960’s and early 70’s through adopting a foresight approach gave them a step up on their competitors. But how many other cases of this nature are there? Where is the evidence that this approach does what it’s proponents claim it does? With foresight being adopted across industries we should have many examples of its impact, but we do not.

Layering Influence and Impact

Let’s bring it back to public health. There is enormous evidence to point to the role of tobacco use and lifetime prevalence of a litany of health problems like cancer and cardiovascular disease, yet there are still millions who use tobacco daily. Lack of retirement savings is a clear pathway to significant problems for health, wellbeing, and lifestyle down the road. The effects of human behaviour on the environment and our health have been known for decades (or millennia, depending on your perspective) to the point where we are now referring to this stage of planetary evolution as the Anthropocene (the age where humans influence the planet).

We can see things coming in various degrees of focus and yet the influence on our behaviour is not certain. Indeed, the anticipation of future consequences is only one element of a large array of factors that influence our behaviour. Psychologists, the group that studies and support the evidence for behaviour change, have shown that we are actually pretty bad at predicting what will happen, how we will react to something, and what will influence change.

Many of these factors are systemic — that is tied to the systems we are a part of. This is our team, family, organization, community, and society, and time — the various spheres outlined in Bronfenbrenner’s Social-Ecological Model. This model outlines the various ‘rings’ or spheres that influence us, including time (which encompasses them all). It’s this last ring that we often forget. This model can be useful because it showcases layers of impact and influence, including from our past.

Decision Making in the Past

By anchoring ourselves to the future and not considering our past, our models for prediction, forecasting, and foresighting are limited. We are equally limited when we use the same form of thinking (about the future) to make our models about the past. In this case, I think of Andrew Yang who recently spoke to the Freakonomics podcast and pointed out how our economic thinking is rooted in past models that we would never accept today. He’s wrong — sort of. We do accept this and it is alive and well in many of our ways of thinking about the future.

In speaking about how we’ve been through economic patterns of disruption, he points out that we are using an old fact pattern to inform what we do now as if the economy — which we invented just a few hundred years ago — has these immutable laws.


The fantasists — and they are so lazy and it makes me so angry, because people who are otherwise educated literally wave their hands and are like, “Industrial Revolution, 120 years ago. Been through it before,” and, man, if someone came into your office and pitched you an investment in a company based on a fact pattern from 120 years ago, you’d freakin’ throw them out of your office so fast.

Andrew Yang, speaking on Freakonomics

Foresight would benefit from the same kind of critical examination of itself as Yang does with the economy and our ways of thinking about it. That critical examination includes using real evidence to make decisions where we have it and where we don’t have it – we establish it.

Maybe then, we might anticipate that measles are not gone. Let’s keep our eye out on polio, too. And as for a flat earth? Don’t sail too far into the sunset as you might fall off if we don’t factor that into our models of the future.

Image Credit: “Flat Earth | Conspiracy Theory VOL.1” by Daniel Beintner is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0

behaviour changecomplexitypsychology

Foreseeing the Unpossible

on December 2, 2016

scream_snapseed

Change may be the only constant and, beyond wet babies, few of us welcome it. Foresight is about looking ahead to what change(s) might be coming to help us prepare, but that doesn’t help much if we don’t know where we are right now. 

Last night I had a wonderful conversation with some foresighting peers, all fellow alumni from the Strategic Foresight and Innovation MDes program at OCADU. We were coming together to talk about what we, as ones with training in the foresight theories, methods and tools that help people consider possible futures, can do to help and heal the world in the wake of Donald Trump’s election and the social collisions that have come with it.

Trump’s election was an example of where the foresight community — like pretty much every other scholarly field — failed. Few, if any, saw it coming. No matter your slant on the media coverage, 18 months ago no one was talking about the Trump presidency in serious terms – hardly even Donald Trump, himself.

Even after securing the Republican nomination his candidacy was seen as taking on the impossible. Now, it’s the unpossible.

Today we have someone going on a campaign-style crusade against his opponents after he’s won the election. It’s as if the presidential outcome was never decided. No one saw that coming, either.

Or Brexit.

Or…you get the picture. There are a lot of things that have been missed by very smart people with powerful tools, theories and resources and it’s happening a lot.

This is less about bad foresight as much as it is a lack of insight into the present day and the present moment and the human beings who inhabit it. It might be time to bring psychology into foresight and that begins with understanding how people live their lives day-to-day and what they think, feel, pay attention to, and gravitate to (and away from).

Putting difference in context

To see the unpossible we need to start going deeper into the heart of human life.

While many laud the accomplishments of the maverick, the inspired trailblazer, or the wonders of diversity, the truth is that we are wired more tightly to sameness than difference. (Like it or not). Difference and change are two things we humans don’t have innate attraction to at a macro level, yet it is the hallmark feature of the cosmopolitan, modern (and certainly Western) world. Complexity is about diversity, change, instability, and non-linearity — the very things we humans have trouble with and yet we keep making systems that are ever-more complex making for a paradox of epic proportions.

Take the Syrian refugee crisis as an example of difference in-the-world. Canada is taking in over 35,000 refugees and has a commitment to maintain a slightly reduced level of refugees (from all over the world) for the foreseeable future. This pales in comparison to what other countries such as Lebanon or Turkey have taken in, but shames its larger neighbour to the south.

These new citizens bring new ideas, energy, culture to a country that has more than enough space, plenty of relative wealth and a population who are willing and able to help. Syrians (like so many refugees) have experienced  horrors and more human suffering than anyone should have to endure.

While these new Canadians are contributors, they also require resources to help them settle. For many, it will be some time before they integrate into Canadian life enough that they no longer require government or charitable assistance. In the meantime, this group is hungry to work, to study and to create a life for themselves in their adopted home. The problem comes when there are others already here who also want to work, study and create a life for themselves and can’t do it to the levels they want and who might see the scarce resources being further reduced by these newcomers.

If I am a Canadian without work, how happy should I be that we are committing to providing 35,000+ people who are also looking for work with a place in my country? If I’m waiting for healthcare treatment, how is this going to affect me? How might I feel when I see that these newcomers get food, shelter, community support, job training and programs aimed at supporting them to integrate when I don’t believe I can get anything like that and I’ve been here my whole life? When has the Prime Minister ever come to welcome me to anything?  If I was a refugee from another place just a year or two earlier, why didn’t I get this treatment when I arrived?

These aren’t just Canadian questions. They are being asked in Germany, Lebanon, Turkey, England, Jordan, Sweden and anywhere there is a perception of scarcity of resources (which is pretty much everywhere).

This is but one example. The humanitarian impulse that many people feel when looking to help those in need is why Canada and so many nations around the world have stepped up and taken in these Syrian ‘strangers’ as their new friends, neighbours and family with open arms. It’s heartwarming and represents some of the better angels of our nature. Yet, this doesn’t make the concerns that someone who is already settled here any less legitimate. This is that part of the equation that is easy to miss or dismiss when we see resistance to change or opposition to these kind of initiatives.

The psychology of difference

For those who identify as a progressive or liberal, opposition to change, diversity and global integration is often labeled as ‘small-minded’ at the least, racist at the worst. Certainly there are elements of that which can reside within what might be considered ‘conservative’ movements, yet it’s unfair to use these labels to describe an entire worldview. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt recently commented on the pull between globalist and nationalist thinking, pointing to the way worldviews about change and stability help us understand the rise of Donald Trump and other radical candidates. His analysis an application of moral psychology provides what may be the most powerful explanation of why we are seeing the ‘unpossible’ become possible.

As a caricature for illustration, liberals are biased to see positives in change while conservatives are biased toward promotion of stability. When change is constant and stability is comforting, this dichotomy is not easily resolved, if at all.

Psychology can help us in other ways when looking to the present and future of our world. One is to consider the cognitive biases that we hold when we bring a worldview that sees change and stability, globalism and nationalism, unity and diversity in everyday life.

One bias or mode of thought is attribution theory— taking one thing and ascribing qualities from it to another. In the case of a Trumpist United States that positions difference — Mexicans, Muslims, immigrants, other countries’ trade policies — as a threat we can find examples of how this thinking plays out. It might be easy to look at what is the most obvious — people who are new, dress differently, speak differently, believe different things, and look different — as the culprit. After all, when things were good — when “America was Great” — these people weren’t here and this situation didn’t exist. Simple cause and effect, right?

Of course, we know that the ‘good old days’ were rarely ever as good as we make them out to be. This is because of a collection of other cognitive phenomena.

Hindsight bias is a way of confirming present feelings and thoughts based on seeing the past through a distorted lens that allows us to say things like “I knew it all along”. Nostalgia is a form of hindsight and allows people to reflect back on positive feelings and experiences in life, but also to connect to simplicity, which is why we remember simple, but strong feelings (love, fear, conviviality) but lose the details of just what was said or the specifics of an encounter. It’s the feelings that matter most.

A quote attributed to Toni Morrison is particularly apt here:

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Finally, confirmation bias takes these thoughts and reformulates them into the present, which is a way of saying that we fit our memories and thoughts from the past to fit our current belief system.

Understanding time and change

Change is always relative. The parable of the frog in the boiling pot is a good one to illustrate this. We might not perceive the water getting too hot until it’s too late because change is so persistent, yet gradual. The distresses we find in modern life are the ones that often promote loneliness, disconnection and separation from the natural world. These are all things – communion, connection, engagement with nature — that promote wellbeing and comfort.

Difference can be a source of inspiration, new ideas and innovation, but it can also be a source of distress because of this perceived separation from the stable. When I’ve had traditions, practices and a way of living that has provided comfort for me my whole life and, in a time when I need comfort more than ever, am having trouble seeing those things that once brought me comfort in everyday life, how am I going to feel about difference? To what might I attribute this difference, this change to? The answer sometimes comes in the form of racism, sexism, sexual discrimination, and ethnic nationalism.

Trump and others are capitalizing on the fog that comes with memory and our self-selection and editing of history in our minds. What we long for are those feelings associated from earlier times and those feelings are connected to the simplicity of the practice (as we construct it in our memory). When you recall your day to a friend or loved one you summarize: that’s how memory works for you. You don’t speak of the day in terms of how your brain actually functions moment-to-moment with the gamut of feelings, thoughts, memories you have at any one time because you’d sound like a lunatic with all the chatter, contradiction and stream-of-consciousness going on. That’s your memory at work in bringing clarity to the chaos of a waking moment.

The distress, discomfort and dissatisfaction with all of this change is reasonable and legitimate. The manifestation of those feelings into hatred is not. Add in our bias toward in-groups — however we personally define it — and the reaction that we are seeing isn’t surprising at all. We are forward-oriented beings, we see things moving ahead and when social or economic situations force us backward by having less — friends, social engagements, money, buying power, security, stability — we don’t handle it lightly.

Time plays many tricks with our mind whether we view it as being in abundance, scarcity or even relate to it at all in the moment.

Light on our shadow

Add in another feature that we often overlook: our darker, shadow side. Jung spoke about the importance of the shadow and using it to understand the light. We all have a shadow, that darker side of our nature that emerges in times of stress or when we least expect it.

The human shadow is that part of the self that revels — even momentarily — on revenge**. How often have we, in fleeting moments (or even longer), wished ill-will on someone else? That person that cuts us off on the way to work; the clueless person who stops at the top of the escalator in a busy shopping plaza; your cousin who always takes more than his share at family dinners; queue jumpers; the telemarketer who interrupts your quiet night at home to sell you something; the sports fan who cheers for your team’s rival and revels in your team’s defeat; the person that votes for the candidate who’s not yours.

Why are revenge movies so appealing to so many? The Revenant wouldn’t be much of a story (although a glorious testament to the Alberta mountain landscape, which is well worth seeing on its own) if we didn’t, at some level, relate to the characters’ desire for revenge. It feels good. And it makes many of us recoil in horror and deny it when we consider it as part of us.

I experience this all the time and I’m not proud of that. I’ve not met a person yet who hasn’t confessed (when pressed) that they feel the same way. It’s part of being a human being.

Seeing the unpossible is about seeing ourselves as humans, not just fellow citizens who we think ought to mirror our own personal ideals. Humans get scared of change, they are overwhelmed with information, have few tools at their disposal and even less time and energy to apply those tools, and they are willing to seek comfort in anything that holds the promise of making life simpler.

If the present and future will be shaped by humans, then we need to add our humanity, including the ugly parts of it, into the mix. Consider that when you make your predictions, generate your models and envision the world ahead and also ask yourself whether you’re comfortable getting a little darker in your outlook on life right now.

Only by seeing us as humans can we imagine what seems unpossible as possible.

** A fun way to soften the harshness of thoughts of revenge on others is provided by the Canadian comedy troupe Kids in the Hall.

behaviour changecomplexitydesign thinkingsocial systemssystems thinking

Ethics and Systemic Change

on July 5, 2016

7163119469_1cad4f288a_k

Systems change is a goal for many social advocates — whether aimed at politics, climate change, social norms or beyond — because often it’s only through changes to the interrelationships and boundaries that contain a system can lasting shifts be noticed. With great potential and power comes a responsibility to ensure that change yields more benefits than drawbacks and that’s not as simple to determine as we might desire. 

In the week after the historic Brexit vote we’ve seen massive destabilization in the United Kingdom, Europe and markets worldwide as the British populace seeks to understand what happened and what happens next for them. In the wake of the vote we’ve seen the sitting Prime Minister David Cameron, and Remain vote advocate, announce he will be stepping down and two of the most prominent leaders of the Leave campaign — Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage — announce they would not be seeking to lead or be heavily involved in what comes next.

The resignations by Mr Cameron, who’s decision to hold the referendum in the first place, and Mr’s Johnson and Farage, who led the winning side, stung many on both sides. The argument is that they were largely responsible for what has been described as a mess and yet have opted not to take responsibility for implementing what they created. It is something of a Mary Shelley novel.

Great Britain (and Europe) will be forever changed by Brexit and it will remain to be seen what balance of positives and negatives will come from it. While even dark decisions can yield positive outcomes (that silver lining we often look for in the clouds) there is a responsibility that must come from our actions and design choices to ensuring they minimize harms.

Ethics and Systemic design (thinking)

For a field that is literally shaping the world, design discourse is remarkably devoid of conversations on ethics. Only recently did the first book appear that took ethics in design research as its topic. Yet that is design research, the amount of work on design ethics — how we choose responsibly about what to create along with how to create it (and what role, if any, designers choose to take once something has been sent into the world) is painfully thin. While there’s been a growing movement towards sustainability and environmental responsibility in product design, there’s not as much on social system design.

One area where we are seeing these discussions starting is in the area of systemic design. Systemic design is, as its name suggests, a systems-focused, design-oriented approach to changing human systems. Systemic design is not just about changing social conditions in an ameliorative approach to change, but shaping the very conditions in which those conditions arise. In many ways is it the design manifestation of community psychology. Systemic designers seek to transform the world. However, much like the (mostly) men who led the Brexit Leave campaign, there is a need to have one’s intentions clear and ensure that what is designed is responsible and responsive and that’s not what we’ve seen in that case.

This might be because motivation for change is often very blunt — perhaps based on fear or dissatisfaction — that might not have a specific focus. This is the challenge for systemic design. Systems thinking is a powerful vehicle in systemic design, however its often a tool to determine where to intervene and what could transpire if certain actions are taken once chosen, but not as good as determining what actions are best suited. This is where design thinking comes in and together the two approaches inform systemic design.

Peter Jones, a systemic designer and professor at OCADU (and colleague of mine), has written on this and draws on his experience with healthcare and the Occupy Movement as part of his work in advancing systemic design research. In his paper on systemic design principles (PDF), Jones points to the limits that design thinking approach — that solution generation aspect of systemic design — can present:

Design thinking has been influenced by rapid prototyping culture. When virtual trials and failures are cheap, multiple prototypes are less expensive than in-depth analysis and research. However, this design thinking bias leads to a short-term bias that rewards immediate responses to prototypes.

Jones adds that this approach is suitable for certain products (and arguably, system types), but that this approach can fail to address systemic problems if not critically applied:

For industrial products, those bias’ risks are minimal. However, for complex social systems a prototyping mindset evaluates component subsystems (at best) selected by a saliency bias. This bottom-up approach fails to acquire a system-level understanding and even erodes a holistic view. New system relationships are formed through iterative trials and informal sample evaluations, but current relationships are not necessarily discovered, leading to significant gaps in systemic understanding.

From design thinking to conscious creation

Systemic design, if not carefully done, can end up creating these gaps as we saw with the ‘grassroots’ movements in both the Leave and Remain campaigns in the Brexit debate.

A powerful, simple technique to determining causes and consequences of current behaviour is to ask the question ‘why’ as many times as possible. Five ‘whys’ asked on any issue will likely lead to a revelation about fundamental drivers behind a particular activity. Systemic design seeks to address change at this level as much as possible by creating, with intention and purpose (i.e., by design), structures that support and shift behaviour and thinking to transform the situation and context that can lead to a more profound and sustained change.

A corollary to this approach to understanding root causes might be the five whats? What might happen if we do X? What might happen after that takes place? And then what? And so on. This is similar to The Future,Backwards technique that Cognitive Edge has developed based on research into foresight, strategic planning and systems thinking. Just because we can change something doesn’t mean we should and wise design informed by systems thinking, strategic foresight and ethics can help us understand what ought to be done rather than simply highlight what can be done.

To that last point, a fair criticism of design is that it too often focuses on possibility without responsibility. Even on social issues we see design jams, hackathons, and ideation sessions that produce more ‘stuff’ (too often an ‘app’, as if the only solution to the worlds’ problems originate from a handheld electronic device) that is cool, sexy and disruptive without paying attention to what kind of disruption comes with that ‘solution’. A recent story on CBC Radio on the future of farming considered this as it explored how robotics are shaping how food is being produced. One of the comments made was that the ‘savings’ that often is incurred by having robots do more work is the kind of ‘lock in’ that it produces as farmers now get committed to buying, maintaining and upgrading technology for the long-term.

Conscious creation and technology adoption is something that groups like the Quakers and Amish have mastered and might be worth more of a look by more people — particularly designers. For design — and particularly systemic design — the ethics of what we make, maintain and adopt affects not only us, but all of those around us. For that reason, we need to build in ethics to our design work, by design.

Note: If you’re interested in learning more about systemic design consider attending the 2016 Systemic Design conference (RSD5) in Toronto, Canada October 13-15. Registration is open until the spots are filled.

Photo credit: Sea Ice Patterns by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center used under Creative Commons License via Flickr. Thanks NASA — as always, you rock (and space and sea and space and….) 🙂

innovationstrategic foresight

Innovation Framing

on May 17, 2016

6085347780_1a6eba300c_b

Innovation is easier to say than to do. One of the reasons is that a new idea needs to fit within a mindset or frame that is accustomed to seeing the way things are, not what they could be, and its in changing this frame that innovators might find their greatest obstacles and opportunities. 

Innovation, its creation and distribution is a considerable challenge to take up when the world is faced with so many problems related to the way we do things. The need to change what we do and how we live was brought into stark view this week as reports came out suggesting that April was the hottest month in history, marking the third month in a row that a record has been beaten by a large margin.

If we are to mitigate or mediate the effects of climate change we will need to innovate on matters of technology, social and economic policy, bioscience, education and conservation….and fast and on a planetary scale that we’ve never seen before.

In the case of climate change we are seeing the world and the causes and consequences  posed by it through a frame. A frame is defined as:

frame |frām| noun

1) a rigid structure that surrounds or encloses something such as a door or window, 2) [ usu. in sing. ] a basic structure that underlies or supports a system, concept, or text: the establishment of conditions provides a frame for interpretation.

When discussing innovation we often draw upon both of these definitions of a frame — both a rigid, enclosing structure and something that supports our understanding of a system. Terms like rigidity can imply strength, but it also resists change.

Missing the boat for the sea

If we continually look at the sea we may assume it’s always the same and fail to notice the boat that can take us across and through it. In a recent interview with the Atlantic magazine, journalist Tom Vanderbilt discusses how we can miss new opportunities because we feel we know what we like already, much like the kid who doesn’t want to eat a vegetable she’s never even tasted before. Vanderbilt hits on something critical: the absence of language to covey what the ‘new’ is:

I think often we really are lacking the language, and the ways to frame it. If you look at films like Blade Runner or The Big Lebowski, when these films came out they were box office disasters. I think part of that was a categorization thing—not knowing how to think about it in the right way. Blade Runner didn’t really match up with the existing tropes of science fiction, Big Lebowski was just kind of strange

Today, both Blade Runner and The Big Lebowski are hailed as classics — only after the fact. It’s very much like the Apple Newton in the 1980’s failing more than 20 years before the iPad arrived even though it was a decent product.

Believing to see

A traditional evidence-based approach to change is that you must see it to believe it. In innovation, we often need to believe in order to see.  This is particularly true in complex contexts where the linkages between cause-and-effect with evidence are less obviously made.

However, it’s more than about belief in evidence, it’s belief in possibility. It is for this reason that foresight can make such an important contribution to the innovation process. Strategic foresight can provide an imaginative, yet data-supported way of envisioning possible futures, outcomes and circumstances. It is a means of enabling us to see future states in possibility, which enable us to better ensure that we are ready to see the present when it comes.

This is part of the thinking behind training exercises, particularly obvious in sports. A team might imagine a number of scenarios, which may not happen as outlined during a game, but because the team has imagined certain things to be possible, there is an opportunity to have rehearsed or anticipated ways to deal with what comes up in reality and thus helps them to believe something enough to see it when it comes.

Spending time envisioning possible futures, whether through a deliberative process like strategic foresight, or simply allowing yourself time to notice trends and possibilities and how they might connect can be a means of imagining possibilities and preparing you to meet them (or create them) sometime down the road.

Do so gives you the power to select what frame fits what picture.

 

For more information on strategic foresight check out the library section on this blog. If you need help doing it, contact Cense Research + Design.

Photo credit: Innovation by Boegh used under Creative Commons License.

 

 

environmentsystems sciencesystems thinking

Systems thinking and the simple plan

on January 12, 2016

Building Castles in the Sky

Building Castles in the Sky, But Not Wheels on the Ground

 

Planning is something that is done all the time, but the shape in which these plans unfold is often complex in hidden ways. Without the same resources to evaluate those plans (and make different ones should they change) many organizations are left with great expectations that don’t match the reality of what they do (and can do). 

In my neighbourhood in Toronto there are no fewer than 10 building projects underway that involve development of a high-rise apartment/university residence/condominium on it of more than 20 stories in a 5 block radius from my home. Most are expected to be about 40 stories in height.

As a resident and citizen I was thinking one day: How does one even engage with this? I could attend a building planning meeting, but that would be looking at a single development on a single site, not a neighbourhood. There is a patchwork of plans for neighbourhoods, but they are guidelines, not embedded in specific codes. I was (and am) stuck with how to have a conversation of influence that might help shape decisions about how this was all going to unfold.

At the risk of being pegged as a NIMBY, let me state that I am fully able to accept that downtown living in a fast-growing, large urban centre means that empty lots or parking pads are a target for development and buildings will go up. I get to live here and so should others so I can’t complain about a development here and there. But when we are talking about development of that magnitude so quickly it gets quickly problematic for things like sidewalks, transit, parking, traffic, and even things like getting a seat at my favourite cafe that are all going to change in a matter of months, not years. There’s no evolution here, just revolution.

Adding a few hundred people to the neighbourhood in a year is one thing. Adding many thousand in that same time is something quite different. The problem is that city planning is done on a block-by-block basis when we live in an interconnected space. An example of this is transit. Anyone who takes a bus, streetcar or subway knows that the likelihood of getting a seat depends greatly on when you travel and where you get on. Your experience will radically change when you’re at the beginning of the line or near the end of it. Residents of one neighbourhood in Toronto were so tired of never being able to get on packed streetcars because they were in the middle of the line they crowdfunded a private bus service, which was ultimately shut down a few months later.

Planning for scale: bounding systems using foresight

On a piece-by-piece basis, planning impact is easier to assess. Buildings go through proposals for the lots — a boundary — and have to meet specific codes, which act as constraints on a system. Yet, next to these boundaries are boundaries for other systems; other lots and developments. They, too are given the same treatment and usually that produces a plan perfectly suited to that individual development, but something that might falter when matched with what’s next to it. Building plans are approved and weighed largely on their merits independent of the context and certainly not as a collective set of proposals. Why? Because there are different stakeholders with separate needs, timelines, investments and desires.

One of the keys is to have a vision for what the city will look like as a system.  Does your city have one? I’m not talking about something esoteric like “Be the greatest city in the world”, but generating some evidence-supported form of vision for what the city will look like in 5, 10, 25 years. This requires foresight, a structured, methodical means of drawing evidence-informed speculations about the future that combines design, data, and some imagination. In fact, my colleague Peg Lahn and I did this for the city of Toronto and what we envisioned the future ‘neighbourscapes’ of the city might look like using foresight methods.  We forecast out to 2030, drawing on trends and drivers of social activities and looking at current patterns of migration, development, policy and political activity.

That report focused on the city itself and its neighbourhoods in general, but didn’t look at specific neighbourhoods. Yet, strategic foresight can help create a bounded set of conditions where one can start to imagine the potential impact of decisions in advance and develop scenarios to amplify or mitigate against certain challenges or uncertainties. Foresight allows for better assessment of the landscape of knowns and unknowns within a complex system.

From cities to organizations

The same principles to civic planning through foresight can be applied to organizations. If you are assessing operations and plans for programs independent of one another and not as a whole, yet are operating an organization as a system with all its interdependencies, then without strategic foresight plans may just arbitrary statements of intent. Consider the “5-year plan“. Why is it five years? What is special about 5 years that makes us do that? How about four years? Ten? 18?

As former US President and general Dwight D. Einsenhower once said:

Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.

The planning process, no matter what the time scale, works best when it allows for engagement of ideas about what the future might look like, how to create it, and how to tell when you’ve been successful. This is part of what developmental evaluation does when blended with strategic foresight and design. This creates conversations about what future we want, what we see coming and how we might get to shape it. The plan itself is secondary, but the planning — informed by data and design — is what is the most powerful part of the process.

To draw on another US President, Abraham Lincoln:

The best way to predict your future is to create it.

By focusing on the here and now, independent of what is to come and might be, organizations risk designing perfectly suited programs, policies and strategies that are ideal for the current context, but jeopardize the larger system that is the organization itself.

Do you have a plan? Do you know where you’re going? Can you envision where things are going to be? How will you know when you get there or when to change course?

Resources

For resources on these topics check out the Censemaking library tab on this blog, which has a lot of references to tools and products that can help advance your thinking on strategic foresight, evaluation, design and systems thinking. For those interested in how developmental evaluation can contribute to program development, check out Michael Quinn Patton’s lastest book (with Kate McKegg and Nan Wehipeihana) on Developmental Evaluation Exemplars.

Lastly, if you need strategic help in this work, contact Cense Research + Design as this is what they (we) do.

 

 

 

 

 

complexitydesign thinkingemergenceevaluationsystems thinking

Developmental Evaluation and Sensemaking

on January 13, 2014

Sensing Patterns

Sensing Patterns, Seeing Pathways

Developmental evaluation is only as good as the sense that can be made from the data that is received. To assume that program staff and evaluators know how to do this might be one of the reasons developmental evaluations end up as something less than they promise. 

Developmental Evaluation (DE) is becoming a popular subject in the evaluation world. As we see greater recognition of complexity as a factor in program planning and operations and what it means for evaluations it is safe to assume that developmental evaluation will continue to attract interest from program staff and evaluation professionals alike.

Yet, developmental evaluation is as much a mindset as it is a toolset and skillset; all of which are needed to do it well. In this third in a series of posts on developmental evaluation we look at the concept of sensemaking and its role in understanding program data in a DE context.

The architecture of signals and sense

Sensemaking and developmental evaluation involve creating an architecture for knowledge,  framing the space for emergence and learning (boundary specification), extracting the shapes and patterns of what lies within that space, and then working to understand the meaning behind those patterns and their significance for the program under investigation. A developmental evaluation with a sensemaking component creates a plan for how to look at a program and learn from what kind of data is generated in light of what has been done and what is to be done next.

Patterns may be knowledge, behaviour, attitudes, policies, physical structures, organizational structures, networks, financial incentives or regulations. These are the kinds of activities that are likely to create or serve as attractors within a complex system.

To illustrate, architecture can be both a literal and figurative term. In a five-year evaluation and study of scientific collaboration at the University of British Columbia’s Life Sciences Institute, my colleagues Tim Huerta, Alison Buchan and Sharon Mortimer and I explored many of these multidimensional aspects of the program* / institution and published our findings in the American Journal of Evaluation and Research Evaluation journals. We looked a spatial configurations by doing proximity measurements that connected where people work to whom they work with and what they generated. Research has indicated that physical proximity makes a difference to collaboration (E.g.,: Kraut et al., 2002). There is relatively little concrete evaluation on the role of space in collaboration, mostly just inferences from network studies (which we also conducted). Few have actually gone into the physical areas and measured distance and people’s locations.

Why mention this? Because from a sense-making perspective those signals provided by the building itself had an enormous impact on the psychology of the collaborations, even if it was only a minor influence on the productivity. The architecture of the networks themselves was also a key variable that went beyond simple exchanges of information, but without seeing collaborations as networks it is possible that we would have never understood why certain activities produced outcomes and others did not.

The same thing exists with cognitive architecture: it is the spatial organization of thoughts, ideas, and social constructions. Organizational charts, culture, policies, and regulations all share in the creation of the cognitive architecture of a program.

Signals and noise

The key is to determine what kind of signals to pay attention to at the beginning. And as mentioned in a previous post, design and design thinking is a good precursor and adjunct to an evaluation process (and, as I’ve argued before and will elaborate on, is integral to effective developmental evaluation). Patterns could be in almost anything and made up of physical, psychological, social and ‘atmospheric’ (org and societal environmental) data.

This might sound a bit esoteric, but by viewing these different domains through an eye of curiousity, we can see patterns that permit evaluators to measure, monitor, observe and otherwise record to use as substance for programs to make decisions based on. This can be qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods, archival and document-based or some combination. Complex programs are highly context-sensitive, so the sense-making process must include diverse stakeholders that reflect the very conditions in which the data is collected. Thus, if we are involving front-line worker data, then they need to be involved.

The manner in which this is done can be more or less participatory and involved depending on resources, constraints, values and so forth, but there needs to be some perspective taking from these diverse agents to truly know what to pay attention to and determine what is a signal and what is noise. Indeed, it is through this exchange of diverse perspectives that this can be ascertained. For example, a front line worker with a systems perspective may see a pattern in data that is unintelligible to a high-level manager if given the opportunity to look at it. That is what sensemaking can look like in the context of developmental evaluation.

“What does that even mean?” 

Sensemaking is essentially the meaning that people give to an experience. Evidence is a part of the sensemaking process, although the manner in which it is used is consistent with a realist approach to science, not a positivist one. Context is critical in the making of sense and the decisions used to act on information gathered from the evaluation. The specific details of the sensemaking process and its key methods are beyond the depth of this post, some key sources and scholars on this topic are listed below. Like developmental evaluation itself, sensemaking is an organic process that brings an element of design, design thinking, strategy and data analytics together in one space. It brings together analysis and synthesis.

From a DE perspective, sensemaking is about understanding what signals and patterns mean within the context of the program and its goals. Even if a program’s goals are broad, there must be some sense of what the program’s purpose is and thus, strategy is a key ingredient to the process of making sense of data. If there is no clearly articulated purpose for the program or a sense of its direction then sensemaking is not going to be a fruitful exercise. Thus, it is nearly impossible to disentangle sensemaking from strategy.

Understanding the system in which the strategy and ideas are to take place — framing — is also critical. An appropriate frame for the program means setting bounds for the system, connecting that to values, goals, desires and hypotheses about outcomes, and the current program context and resources.

Practical sensemaking takes place on a time scale that is appropriate to the complexity of information that sits before the participants in the process. If a sensemaking initiative is done with a complex program that has a rich history and many players involved that history, it is likely that multiple interactions and engagements with participants will be needed to undertake such a process. In part, because the sensemaking process is about surfacing assumptions, revisiting the stated objectives of the program, exploring data in light of those assumptions and goals, and then synthesizing it all to be able to create some means of guiding future action. In some ways, this is about using hindsight and present sight to generate foresight.

Sensemaking is not just about meaning-making, but also a key step in change making for future activities. Sensemaking realizes one of the key aspects of complex systems: that meaning is made in the interactions between things and less about the things themselves.

Building the plane while flying it

In some cases the sense made from data and experience can only be made in the moment. Developmental evaluation has been called “real time” evaluation by some to reflect the notion that evaluation data is made sense of as the program unfolds. To draw on a metaphor illustrated in the video below, sensemaking in developmental evaluation is somewhat like building the plane while flying it.

Like developmental evaluation as a whole, sensemaking isn’t a “one-off” event, rather it is an ongoing process that requires attention throughout the life-cycle of the evaluation. As the evaluator and evaluation team build capacity for sensemaking, the process gets easier and less involved each time its done as the program builds its connection both to its past and present context. However, such connections are tenuous without a larger focus on building in mindfulness to the program — whether organization or network — to ensure that reflections and attention is paid to the activities on an ongoing basis consistent with strategy, complexity and the evaluation itself.

We will look at the role of mindfulness in an upcoming post. Stay tuned.

* The Life Sciences Institute represented a highly complicated program evaluation because it was simultaneously bounded as a physical building, a corporal institution within a larger institution, and a set of collaborative structures that were further complicated by having investigator-led initiatives combined with institutional-level ones where individual investigators were both independent and collaborative. Taken together it was what was considered to be a ‘program’.
References & Further Reading:

Dervin, B. (1983). An overview of sense-making research: Concepts, methods and results to date. International Communication Association Meeting, 1–13.

Klein, G., & Moon, B. (2006). Making sense of sensemaking 1: Alternative perspectives. Intelligent Systems. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1667957

Klein, G., Moon, B., & Hoffman, R. R. (2006). Making sense of sensemaking 2: A macrocognitive model. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 21(4),

Kolko, J. (2010a). Sensemaking and Framing : A Theoretical Reflection on Perspective in Design Synthesis. In Proceedings of the 2010 Design Research Society Montreal Conference on Design & Complexity. Montreal, QC.

Kolko, J. (2010b). Sensemaking and Framing : A Theoretical Reflection on Perspective in Design Synthesis Understanding Sensemaking and the Role of Perspective in Framing Jon Kolko » Interaction design and design synthesis . In 2010 Design Research Society (DRS) international conference: Design & Complexity (pp. 6–11). Montreal, QC.

Kraut, R., Fussell, S., Brennan, S., & Siegel, J. (2002). Understanding effects of proximity on collaboration: Implications for technologies to support remote collaborative work. Distributed work, 137–162. Retrieved from NCI.

Mills, J. H., Thurlow, A., & Mills, A. J. (2010). Making sense of sensemaking: the critical sensemaking approach. Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management An International Journal, 5(2), 182–195.

Rowe, A., & Hogarth, A. (2005). Use of complex adaptive systems metaphor to achieve professional and organizational change. Journal of advanced nursing, 51(4), 396–405.

Norman, C. D., Huerta, T. R., Mortimer, S., Best, A., & Buchan, A. (2011). Evaluating discovery in complex systems. American Journal of Evaluation, 32(1), 70–84.

Weick, K. E. (1995). The Nature of Sensemaking. In Sensemaking in Organizations (pp. 1–62). Sage Publications.

Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Obstfeld, D. (2005). Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking. Organization Science, 16(4), 409–421.

Photo by the author of Happy Space: NORA, An interactive Study Model at the Museum of Finnish Architecture, Helsinki, FI.

1 2