Category / Futures Thinking

by Roger Dennis

The role of the corporate innovation team

Over at BankerVision, James Gardner weighs in on the importance of strategic innovation for financial institutions.  Having worked for egg (a London based online bank), and seen some of the thinking first hand, I agree entirely with his point:

Try this experiment. Dream up some bank-important scenario. Create two stories, one in which the bank makes a decision, and the other in which it doesn’t. Present both. Watch the mind set of leadership change as they begin to rehearse the implications through for themselves. I have to tell you, having now spoken to a very large number of innovation teams for Innovation and the Future-proof Bank, that few organisations do this kind of work in a very structured way.

James is right. Very few organisations – let alone just in banking – carry out this process in any structured manner.

Bear with me while I dive into some detail and pick up on his ideas around “what if” future scenarios.

I’d suggest that the way in which you present the scenarios is critical to this process.  Don’t rely on black and white A4 documents.  Don’t rely on documents at all.  Develop your picture of the future by using images, sounds, actors – whatever you need to bring the scenario to life.

If the scenarios challenge a critical strategy, then the way in which you present the information is critical too.  Take your CEO on a journey – and make sure it’s not one that involves narcolepsy –  by not just telling a story, but involving him in it.

But let’s not stop there.  If we’re looking at the role of the ideal innovation team, let’s keep pushing the boundaries to see what else they could be doing.

The role of an innovation team should not  be limited to future thinking and proposing ways to add value (although finding a team that does these things alone is a rarity in any organisation).

The ideal innovation team should also perform the role of the Court Jester.  Consider the following extract from Wikipedia:

In societies where the Freedom of Speech was not recognized as a right, the court jester – precisely because anything he said was by definition “a jest” and “the uttering of a fool” – could speak frankly on controversial issues in a way in which anyone else would have been severely punished for, and monarchs understood the usefulness of having such a person at their side.  Still, even the jester was not entirely immune from punishment, and he needed to walk a thin line and exercise careful judgment in how far he might go – which required him to be far from a “fool” in the modern sense.

When you consider some of the group think that pervades senior management structures, the role of the Court Jester becomes an important one.  Who better to perform the role than the team that regularly examines the futures, deals in complexity and thrives on creativity?

This point is reinforced in a Harvard Business School publication called “Seven Ways to Fail Big.”  For a summary, view the video summary, and take note of the last point.  The authors talk about empowering internal devils advocates to ask the tough questions.

Sounds like a Court Jester to me.

To summarise here’s what your corporate innovation team should be doing:

  1. Empowering change in the organisation (a colleague of mine at AMP in Sydney has the wonderful title “Catalyst for Change”).
  2. Communicating a view of the future in such a way to identify risks to the organisation or spot opportunities.
  3. Acting as court jesters.
by Roger Dennis

Bringing the future to life

An Australian television network has produced a TV movie set in 2012 that examines what happens to Sydney when it is faced with a combination of bush fires and water shortages.

The movie – called Scorched – depicts a Sydney that has not received rain for 240 days.  To make the movie scenario really compelling, in the true vein of all good disaster movies the problem is compounded when the city then gets surrounded by bushfires.

It’s enough to make you want to call everyones outback hero, Skippy the Kangaroo, but I digress.

The smart move the producers made was to go beyond a simple TV series, to develop an entire backstory online with fake company websites and video blogs from the characters.

This is a fascinating take on creating a future vision, and will get far more attention than any public consulting exercise or newspaper article. Why?  Because it brings the future to life.

Never mind that some of the ‘facts’ in the series are a little far from the truth, as pointed out in this article:


…the producers of the program didn’t bother to speak to Sydney Water or the Sydney Catchment Authority before going to air. They would have discovered that even in the worst-case scenario, Sydney already has enough water in its huge network of catchments to meet demand until 2014. The city’s new desalination plant will come on line by 2010 and will be able to supply 15 per cent of Sydney’s demand, but has been designed to quickly double its capacity to a half-billion litres of water a day.

The interesting thing is that by tapping into the visual medium, but not in a “lecture me like Al Gore” fashion, the story will gain traction.  So much so that public authorities were concerned about the impact of the movie:

Water Services Association chief executive Ross Young says he is concerned the show might spark a wave of panicked callers to water authorities on Monday morning.

Compelling and a good pointer to how to engage people in future focused conversations.

(Thanks to Bob Frame for the pointer)

by Roger Dennis

A Chinese recession and the World Economy

Although I’ve been looking around recently, there’s hardly any discussion about the scenario that China’s economy could nose dive.  The prospect would be interesting to say the least, and would have a dramatic effect on the world economy.  However yesterday The Independent published a piece looking at the possibility of China slowing down post-Olympics.  The most riveting statement was this:

The basic point is that Chinese consumers have taken over from those in the US as the main drivers of additional demand in the world economy. […] All eyes will be on China over the next month. It will be the first time for most of us in the West that we will have to contemplate a world where China takes over from the US as the largest economy. That tipping point is probably still 25 years away, but long before that the shift of power will shape our perception of global economics.

by Roger Dennis

The Economist on Alternative Energy

I’ve been flat out with clients over the last couple of weeks, but my attention has been drawn to an interesting special report in the Economist about the future of energy. It makes the same points that have come out of the Technology Futures workshops that we’ve been running for the Shell GameChanger team. In a nutshell, these are that the hydrogen economy will never take off (too much infrastructure to build), the jury is still out of biofuels and that ‘electronification’ (an electron economy) is one of the most likely paths for energy.

One of the articles also succinctly states the case against wind power:

The ultimate goal is to harvest the sun’s energy directly by intercepting sunlight, rather than by waiting for that sunlight to stir up the atmosphere and sticking turbines in the resulting airstreams.

Recommended reading.

by Roger Dennis

A question with William Gibson

I’m really interested in science fiction as a predictor of technologies. As Paul Saffo remarked in his (highly recommended) Long Now speech, science fiction starts “meme bombs” in the minds of teenagers. These bombs detonate when they’re in a position to do something about them – usually when they are going through a midlife crisis soon after they reach 40.

If you Google on the term “science faction” you’ll find a rich sampling of material that refers to this (meme bombs that is, not midlife crises).

So when the opportunity came to put a question to William Gibson – the originator of a science fiction genre called ‘cyber-punk’ – I was interested to know his views on the extent to which science fiction is an indicator of the future. His response (in part) was as follows:


“I don’t actually see science fiction influencing the future much now […] Science fiction was a big part of the culture of our future in the previous century but the previous century was a century where we actually believed we had a future. We took it for granted that we had a future and in the 21st century we can’t take it for granted in the same way that we have a future.”

Gibson then goes on to talk about how if he went into a publishers office in 1981 – the year he started writing – and proposed a novel based on the destabilisation of Earths weather systems, AIDs, terrorists flying planes into buildings in New York and the USA invading the wrong country – they would have said “too much!”

He makes the point that actually the world is much more complex than this, and

“…we don’t have the luxury of dreaming of a Star Trek future because we have too much ‘how do we get there from here’ going on to make that realistically possible. You can still do that kind of science fiction but it require far too much wishful thinking to convince me.”

You can download the entire William Gibson interview here.

(As an aside he says a similar comment in this Rolling Stone interview)

by Roger Dennis

Rich Source of Futures Thinking Resources

The Foresight Department of the UK Government Office for Science has released a new update to The Horizon Scanning Toolkit. “Exploring the future: tools for strategic futures thinking” discusses 24 different futures techniques.

If you are in any way interested in futures approaches, methods and case studies, this is a treasure trove of information which will keep you occupied for days.

It is a project that has been put together by the ever enthusiastic and sound futures/innovation/branding thinker Patrick Harris of thoughtengine.

I’ve made a small contribution to the toolkit via a recording of my thoughts on the subject of using folksonomies.

by Roger Dennis

Unevenly distributed futures

William Gibson once insightfully observed that “the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

As if you needed more proof, the BBC reports that a neuro-headset which interprets the interaction of neurons in the brain will go on sale later this year.

Bike helmets will never be the same again

Still not convinced of Mr Gibsons forsight? I recommend you read this article in MIT Tech Review from August 2007 entitled Second Earth (free registration required), which details real world data being used in Second Life.

The photo below gives a glimpse of what is possible – this is real time weather inside Second Life.

Real weather, real time but virtual world