Measuring the future : Statistics and the information age

If the information age is to be more than a slogan, we need to address the issue of how to measure its emergence, and how to assess developments within it. This may well pose challenges to our existing statistics-,since structural change can render established definitions and frameworks inadequate. So far, most discussion of this issue has been conducted within a tradition of counting up the ‘information workforce’. This article argues for a different approach, focusing on the generation, diffusion and application of new information technology (IT). It considers how far available statistics can be used to throw light on IT-related developments, provides some examples of what these data tell us about possible future developments, and examines the implications for the future of statistical frameworks and statistical analysis itself.     

Exploitation versus exploration in multinational firms: Implications for the future of international business

Given the economic weight of multinational corporations and their privileged access to resources, many different scenarios can be built about the future of international business and about the future impact of international business on economic, technological, and social development. In this paper, we argue that multinationals do not form a uniform organisational population, and we provide empirical evidence of the existence of traditional, rigid entities seeking benefits from low-risk exploitative strategies on one hand, and of flexible multinationals seeking higher performance levels by balancing the trade-offs between exploration and exploitation on the other hand. As these two sub-populations compete with one another for resources, we use a population ecology perspective to study likely ecological scenarios for the future. Our conclusion is that traditional multinationals tend to prevail over flexible multinationals, and the conditions required for a future society to allow a genuine growth of flexible multinationals are unlikely. This implies that multinationals remain primarily exploitative, and that as such, they will only be associated with marginal economic, technological, and social developments in the future. Other organisational forms, such as entrepreneurial small business and communities of practices are shown to be much more likely vehicles through which society can progress and innovate.     

Transitions in a globalising world

The increasing complexity of our global society means that sustainable development cannot be addressed from a single perspective or scientific discipline. By using the concept of transitions, we examine current and future tensions between welfare, well-being and the environment, and focus on four major issues that are of global importance: two of our key natural resources, water and biodiversity; the health of human populations; and the developments related to global tourism. In our global assessment, we base ourselves on the most recent scenario efforts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Future developments are explored along the lines of four development paths (scenario groups), defined along two dimensions (global versus regional dynamics and emphasising economic objectives versus environmental and equity objectives.     

Scanning the periphery

Companies often face new rivals, technologies, regulations, and other environmental changes that seem to come out of left field. How can they see these changes sooner and capitalize on them? Such changes often begin as weak signals on what the authors call the periphery, or the blurry zone at the edge of an organization's vision. As with human peripheral vision, these signals are difficult to see and interpret but can be vital to success or survival. Unfortunately, most companies lack a systematic method for determining where on the periphery they should be looking, how to interpret the weak signals they see, and how to allocate limited scanning resources. This article provides such a method-a question-based framework for helping companies scan the periphery more efficiently and effectively. The framework divides questions into three categories: learning from the past (What have been our past blind spots? What instructive analogies do other industries offer? Who in the industry is skilled at picking up weak signals and acting on them?); evaluating the present (What important signals are we rationalizing away? What are our mavericks, outliers, complainers, and defectors telling us? What are our peripheral customers and competitors really thinking?); and envisioning the future (What future surprises could really hurt or help us? What emerging technologies could change the game? Is there an unthinkable scenario that might disrupt our business?). Answering these questions is a good first step toward anticipating problems or opportunities that may appear on the business horizon. The article concludes with a self-test that companies can use to assess their need and capability for peripheral vision.     

Some reflections on the high expectations as formulated in the Internet Bubble era

Since the breakthrough of the Internet to the broader public in the 1990s, expectations of the converging information technology, telecommunication and media industries and technologies as a catalyst for economic growth and social welfare have been high. Futures scientists were involved in predicting the future of these technologies during the Internet bubble. In this paper, we use a meta-analysis approach to examine how well futures studies have been able to describe future reality. We limit our studies to futures research in the ICT and Internet domain that were published between 1995 and 2000. Because the number of relevant studies can hardly be called impressive, we selected a number of available futures studies that were conducted by official government bodies and individual companies, based on various approaches, ranging from technology forecasts [1] to highly creative visions [2], and from predictions [2] to essays [4]. These studies were carried out by Dutch as well as by international organizations. Based on a framework we developed for the analysis of business models, we wanted to see whether technological drivers, regulatory/policy issues and market development as well as competitive behavior, on the input side, and the way value for customers and providers is provided, on the output side, were discussed. Our analysis made it clear that, looking back with what we know now about business models, futures studies and recently developed tools like road mapping, developments in futures studies have made tremendous progress since the Internet Bubble. However, here is still room for more rigor when it comes to methodology and reporting. More recently, there has been a promising integration of scenario analysis and business model approaches that opens new avenues for futures studies.     

Economic Growth and Inequality: Why It Matters and What's Coming Next

This article makes the case that the recent rise in income inequality in OECD countries reflects profound changes in the economic model that previously resulted in growth, prosperity, and social progress during the second half of the last century. The author begins by citing French economist Thomas Piketty's identification of the key driver of rising income inequality as the recent sharp increase in the share of national income going to capital (defined as interest, dividends and other investment returns) and the accompanying decline in the share going to labor (in the form of wages, salaries, pension, and other work‐related benefits). For most of the last 100 years, a successful balance was struck in a majority of OECD countries between the returns to capital and labor. Within the framework of nationally defined economies, labor could effectively advocate for its share of the productivity gains by capital, and governments had the ability to constrain the free movement of capital, set labor compensation standards, and redistribute income through progressive taxation. The author explores how two developments—globalization and the rise of machine intelligence—are disrupting this social contract and reshaping our economy and society. The combination of these two developments, by accelerating the flow of income to capital and away from labor, is eroding the historical relationship between capital, labor, and governments that has long prevailed in most OECD countries. As this happens, we are seeing rising income inequality and the erosion of the middle class, which had been the driver of economic growth for most of the past century. Indeed, the thesis of Piketty's book, Capital in the Twenty‐First Century, is that such an effect may well be taking us back to the pre‐20th century norm of high income inequality and low economic growth. In his closing arguments, the author suggests that avoiding this scenario will be more complicated than simply raising taxes on capital, as proposed by Piketty. It may well require a fundamental rethinking of the role of employment as the primary mechanism for income distribution in society and how we prepare our workforce for an economy and society in which the concept of work will be radically redefined.     

Using signposts in future studies: Lessons from the Justice for tomorrow project

Within the field of future studies, the scenario method is frequently applied. In the literature it is often stressed that it is important to know as soon as possible which of several scenarios is closest to the course of history as it actually unfolds. However, tracking scenarios via early warning mechanisms or signposts, is not a common practice. A standard methodology seems to be absent. Within the context of the Justice for tomorrow project, a scenario project of the Dutch ministry of Justice, we developed and applied a signpost method. We used this method to answer the question of how actual developments relate to the development paths depicted in the scenarios. In this paper we evaluate our approach. We explain what lessons can be learned regarding the use of signposts in future studies.     

Pirsig's ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’: Quality, reason and binary opposites

Robert Pirsig's celebrated novel has lost little of its impact after 30 plus years, and still speaks to us in the West and our highly technological society. None of the issues raised regarding our relation with technology have changed. As fits the schizophrenic pattern of the book, this article is arbitrarily divided into two disparate sections: the first covers some of the sources for the book and the range of critical views on the book. The second, a more speculative conclusion, drawing on a contradiction in Pirsig's text, looks forward to the books continuing relevance as we see the promise of a new dawn for computers: quantum computing. I am unsure of how to equate the forceful rhetoric against dualism, with the facile mystical acceptance of the Buddha residing in the circuits of a digital computer. This fracture in Pirsig's work becomes more visible when he talks of the Japanese term ‘mu’, meaning ‘no thing’. Binary computation is challenged by alternative logics to binary logic. I examine these issues along with the current definitions of Pirsig's quality. A future ‘definition’ of Pirsig's Quality could be the undecided state of a quantum computer (or quantum processes in the mind).     

Asymmetric positioning and emerging paths

Emerging technologies give rise to speculation, new strategies and a redistribution of roles. A broad range of actors anticipates to future developments on the basis of commonly available expectations. These anticipations allocate roles to selves, others and imagined future artefacts. The allocations of roles can hamper future developments. In this paper we investigate the dynamics of the allocation of roles and their importance for emerging technological fields. We draw on positioning theory as developed by Harré and Van Langenhove.In this paper we compare speech-acts from relevant actors in the emerging field of Lab-on-a-chip technology for medical application. Data was collected by conducting 50+ interviews throughout the innovation chain. In these interviews we elaborated interactively socio-technical scenarios of which speech-acts were derived. In the analysis we focus on about 300 speech-acts that relate to the story-line of Point-of-Care testing. Analysing the resulting patterns gives insight in the self-restricting effects that result from asymmetric positioning. Asymmetry results from the lack of overlap in positionings of selves, others, and future artefacts. We will show asymmetric positioning in our data and will show how our analysis contributes to an understanding of the state of emerging technological fields and to positioning theory.     

The future (and the now) according to Jacques Ellul: Deterministic or mindful?

Across a point–counterpoint interpretation, we argue that Ellul's thesis of the technological society is perhaps not as deterministic or fatalistic as some of his critics may claim. At once, divergent and similar to Touraine's more optimistic message of the transformative subject, Ellul proposes a dialectical approach, which in many ways reminds us of Weick's own call towards mindfulness. It is a way forward for mankind that is far from easy: one that involves self-critique, humility and overcoming our passions of greed, coercive power as well as our fear of authentic freedom.     

Broadband development in the European Union to 2012—A virtuous circle scenario

Along with many national governments, the European Commission has pushed broadband to the fore of social and economic policies in recent years. It has aligned broadband developments with furthering information society and knowledge economy developments.This paper presents a positive scenario for broadband-related developments in the European Union area from 2009 to 2012. The scenario, the iNetWorked Society, is one of four developed in an extensive multi-country project funded by the European Commission under the 6th Framework Programme.Before examining the scenario, however, the paper places into a critical perspective the EU's legacy of broadband policy to date. It highlights the limitations of technology-centred policy frames and broadband strategies, which privilege supply-side infrastructure and neglect demand-side issues of applications, uses and users. Such policy frames have been associated with great variations in the level of broadband rollout, take-up and use across Member States.The paper then outlines the socio- and macro-economic conditions that need to be in place in Europe for the positive scenario of the iNetworked Society to be realised. The iNetWorked Society comprises a plausible, internally consistent scenario for developments in a number of broadband-related areas: broadband adoption, e-business, e-work, e-government and digital content. It is based on a virtuous circle of technological, economic and socio-political developments, including strong economic growth, high broadband penetration, and high social engagement with ICTs.     

Practising the scenario-axes technique

Studying the future seems a mission impossible, since both the appearance of the future and its underlying dynamics are unknown and unknowable. Nevertheless, the future is being studied by professional futurists. So, professional futurists seem to have found ways to structure ‘the unknown’. The question is, then, how do they do this? Over the years, professional futurists have developed several types of techniques and methods to structure thinking and discussing the future. The scenario-axes technique, which aims to align divergent perspectives on how the future may unfold, is one such structuring device.In the past 2 years, we did ethnographic research at the Netherlands Institute for Spatial Research (RPB) and followed professional futurists constructing and applying scenario axes in their scenario projects. Our observations illustrate how the scenario axes are practised by professional futurists and show that the scenario axes do not function as a unifying structure fostering alignment of different perspectives in the way that scenario theorists and practitioners often suggest. Instead, not one, but three different applications and interpretations of functional meaning of the scenario axes co-existed: the scenario axes as a ‘backbone’, as a ‘building scaffold’ and as ‘foundation’.     

The critical role of history in scenario thinking: Augmenting causal analysis within the intuitive logics scenario development methodology

The historian Eric Hobsbawm stated that ‘The safest empirical generalization about history is still that nobody heeds its obvious lessons much’. Whether at a macroeconomic level or within individual organisations there are numerous examples of this, such as the economic crash of 2008, the causes of which had many parallels with those that caused the great depression 80 years previously. On the other hand however, overly-relying on the past as a guide to the future has its own obvious dangers—not least that important future events may have no past precedent. As such, the present paper firstly provides a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of using the past as a guide to the future. It then examines the role of history in scenario work, arguing that history should receive greater emphasis as part of the scenario planning process. We suggest changes to the standard Intuitive Logics (IL) approach to scenario planning which would render learning from history a more central component of the scenario process, in contrast to its current peripheral role. Rather than diminishing scenario planning’s ability to facilitate a consideration of how the future may differ from the past, we show how a greater emphasis on history can enhance consideration of the causality of future change. An adapted IL that has more emphasis on historical analysis can augment scenario planning’s effectiveness as a tool for consideration of the future.     

Futures of privacy protection: A framework for creating scenarios of institutional change

The future of privacy is a topical issue in the context of debates on mass surveillance and the increasing prevalence of social media sites in everyday life. Previous scenario studies on privacy have focused on macro trends and on forecasting technological developments, and claims about causal influences have remained implicit. This article presents an alternative approach for constructing scenarios of privacy protection. The article focuses on privacy protection as a social institution and builds on the theory of gradual institutional change. The article presents a scenario framework which includes three stages: (1) outlining the dynamics of privacy protection, (2) tracing historical processes and constructing a causal narrative, and (3) creating event-based scenarios. The resulting scenarios are narratives of plausible chains of events which are based on the results of the previous stages. The key difference to typical scenario approaches is the focus on specific actors and types of event sequences in privacy protection. The argument is that by lowering the level of abstraction in this way, researchers and decision-makers can gain a more profound understanding of possible future challenges in privacy protection and of key leverage points in the institutional change process.     

Persistent public management reform: an egregore of liberal authoritarianism?

This paper explores how we may better understand public administration and public sector management reform. We often interpret our world through stories and this allows us to mentally map where we have been and where we are going to. The paper explores developments in understanding public awareness and that of policy-makers and its impact on policy. It uses the financial crisis and reforms implemented 10 years on to illustrate the points and explore the use of the term ‘egregore’ as a tool for understanding change. A mature free economy requires a strong state to balance deregulation for economic growth with regulation for the public good, necessitating improved policy capacity and good governance. It also needs public administrations staffed with competent, honest officials skilled in the art of statehood. The story of the financial crisis, and how we got there, conveys how to avoid future dangers.     

Toward governance for future generations: How do we change course?

In 1987, the UN World Commission on Environment and Development—perhaps better known as the Brundtland Commission—concluded that our present societal course is irresponsible toward future generations. Ten years later, we have hardly come closer to a solution of our planet's long-range problems. But how do we change the course? Are there viable pathways that can take us from the present stalemate to a society that cares for future generations? The bottleneck is not a lack of good proposals for approaching sustainability. It is rather the lack of strength to implement them. Discussions about strategies and motors of social change have very often been absent on the `green' agenda, but exceptions do exist. This article will present and analyse main strategic profiles within an expanding flora of literature about sustainability.     

Future risk communication

Science and technology have transformed risks and communications in the last century. Smallpox is gone, and polio is fading fast, thanks to vaccines. Communications, commerce and risk have gone global. Wireless networks, wideband communications and immersive interfaces are already in some homes. In the future, ubiquitous communications aids in the form of smart risk agents could tailor both the medium and the message, placing a risk in context for a specific person. By sensing physical risk characteristics and collecting and synthesizing risk information, weighted by judgments about the sources of that information, and conveying these in the media of choice, a smart agent or active technology could provide the ultimate risk communication. Yet theories of risk communication are in their infancy, with some emphasizing cognition and risk control, others social and affective responses that drive behavioral change. To create moral agents, we need to understand how our own and others’ values and goals arise and change in this increasingly information intense society, and how virtual realities can evoke or displace affect, cognition, and social context—that is, life as we know it. Otherwise, we may cross the divide from informed decision making to persuasion without reason.     

Monitoring the future. Building an early warning system for the Dutch Ministry of Justice

To determine the sustainability of the policy, an Early Warning System (EWS) has been developed for the Dutch Ministry of Justice. An EWS is used to monitor various developments and to place them within the perspective of future scenarios. Without actually predicting the future, this makes it possible to determine which scenario is the most relevant at any given moment, allowing the department to adapt its policies. Regular modifications to the EWS make it possible to monitor in the direction of which scenario society appears to be moving. This creates a path to the future with which the sustainability of (new) policies can be tested periodically.     

Human redemption in (and of) the matrix of technological modernity

Despite the indifferent responses to the second and third instalments of ‘The Matrix’ series, the trilogy is nevertheless a valuable contribution to popular debate about the human implications of a rapidly emerging technoculture. In this essay, I will develop a reading of the Matrix scenario, not so much as a cautionary warning about the folly of developing intelligent machines, but as a reflection on the moral meanings of becoming increasingly immersed in a technological milieu. I argue that whilst ‘The Matrix’, the first of the trilogy, depicts a simplisitic opposition between humans and machines, ‘Reloaded’ and ‘Revolutions’ open up a more dialectical understanding of human meaning in a technological world and instead explore the tension between two competing moral trajectories of technological existence: the first, the unfolding of a bleak, nihilistic instrumentalism, the second, a reflexive recovery of human relationship made possible by the renewal of a moral ontology of sacrificial self-giving.     

‘Exploratory landscape scenarios’ in the formulation of ‘landscape quality objectives’

The European Landscape Convention (ELC) calls for the definition of ‘landscape quality objectives’ (LQO) as “the formulation by the competent public authorities of the aspirations of the public with regard to the landscape features of their surroundings”. However, it is not yet defined how the integration of the visions of the public should be carried out. Notably in regions with poor participatory culture and in rural landscapes abandoned by people and consequently by their activities, dealing with the future does not seem a straightforward task. In these marginal rural landscapes the role of agriculture is being altered under the influence of the new rationale of the Common Agriculture Policy, so it may have to assume different functions in the future. Thus, this paper aims at showing how the development of ‘exploratory landscape scenarios’ can be a useful tool, firstly to find plausible landscape futures, and secondly to trigger discussions with the public regarding their aspirations for their landscape. The development procedure for ‘exploratory landscape scenarios’ builds on the ‘intuitive logics’ approach that focuses on the production of a variety of scenarios as starting point for discussion about the future rather than on finding an optimal one, which can limit the options unnecessarily from the beginning. The methodological approach is illustrated at a local scale by using the case study of Mértola in southeast Portugal. The results of the scenario exercise point out the adequateness of the methodology in the development of futures that are perceived as plausible by local stakeholders and, thereby, able to bring out their desires and threats towards the future of their landscape.