Is There An Objective View Of The Future?

 Hi again,

Yvonne and Loo here! We've just been reading New Zealand futurist Robert Hickson's Nov 2nd 2020 blog post: "Improve mental models not metaphorical balls" and we think it's a brilliant illustration of  the importance of not-knowing and breaking our own frame - ideas we wrote about in our manifesto.  

Robert's blogpost is a response to an article in Foreign Affairs magazine called "A Better Crystal Ball", which suggests more powerful methods to predict the future. He writes:

"In the magazine Foreign Affairs, Scoblic & Tetlock highlight that the US spends over a trillion dollars a year on national security but is continually being surprised by events. This, they put down to taking the wrong approach in thinking about the future.

The tendency (not just in the US) is to extrapolate from (and so plan for) past events, and/or focus too much on some issues, and dismiss others too quickly."

The article goes on to suggest more sophisticated methods to accurately predict the future. But Robert points out this effort is fundamentally flawed, or at least limited. It "reflects a need for certainty rather than a better way of looking at and thinking about the world." There is an underlying assumption that there is an objective future that is possible to accurately and objectively probe. There isn't!

Robert points out that this attempt at a kind of objective unbiased view of the future, can be dangerous because it provides an "illusion of rigour and insight", which leads to over-confidence and can block deeper questions - like "why is the situation emerging in this way?"

It feels important to acknowledge that there are some things we can predict with accuracy - there is a lot we already understand about population dynamics for example. But in the sphere of international politics and any other sphere involving humans interacting in complex networks, there is no such thing as an objective future. That's the whole point of futuring. We have some choice! There are no immutable laws governing society as gravity governs the movement of planets.

Robert suggests that what we need more than a better crystal ball is better ways of looking at and thinking about the world. We need to challenge our cognitive biases and improve our thinking tools.

Thankfully we do have tools to do this - and they have been around for a while. "Escaping from old ideas" is one of the key skills in the 1982 "Futures Kit" developed by New Zealand's innovative Commission for the Future, a government organisation charged with considering the country's future. In this helpful guide to futuring it says:

"Unless you can pick out the dominant ideas which shape the way a situation is seen, then you are likely to be dominated by them...The dominant idea is the one behind what a person says."

In the Foreign Affairs article the dominant idea seems to be that there is an objective future that it is possible to predict and the aim is to reduce the uncertainty. 

We would like to promote a different idea - that the future is able to be shaped and that the aim is to become more responsive, resilient and able to thrive within uncertainty.