Life Sustaining Organizations

Organizations can be like Falling Water

2011-11-07T01:35:00.032-05:00

A few weeks ago, we visited one of Frank Lloyd Wright's many masterpieces, Falling Water, the Kaufman house in Mill Run PA. Wow! What an amazingly beautiful place!

Organic architecture was Wright's first principles, a coherent integration of the whole experience; the the context of site and structure as one. This unity is manifested in the combination of natural stone and other elements of the site with man made materials in a many ways at Falling Water. For example, the fireplace, pictured at right, is built around the stone outcroppings already present.

The idea of holism with nature applies to all human endeavor. We are, after all, animals who inhabit the natural world. Art of the Future is particularly interested in the application of this design principle to organizations of all types. Organizations could thrive by relishing the life that sustains them. They could work with that life energy to create contexts that are flowing with positive energy in a completely fluid and natural way. When people are truly at home in their organizational contexts, they are both deeply relaxed and highly energetic. They are engaged. Their organizations are life-sustaining.

Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer have recently published powerful and rigorous research on the deep satisfaction of hard work: "As long as workers experience their labor as meaningful, progress is often followed by joy and excitement about the work. 'This time it looks good! I feel more positive about this project and my work than I’ve felt in a long time,' one programmer wrote after she’d completed a small but difficult task. This kind of rich inner work life improves performance, which further supports inner work life — a positive reinforcing loop." Note the use of the word "joy" in this description: when people love their jobs, they're having fun. They're like kids at a swimming hole. Nobody has to tell them how to act. They know what to do...and they'll take real risks with true gusto.

Unfortunately, most organizations are not life-sustaining. In fact, it's arguable that a majority of people hate their jobs. The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which has been polling 1,000 Americans a day on how they're doing since January 2008, gives us Americans a very troubling "D" grade on happiness. Quoting Amabile and Kramer, "People of all ages, and across income levels, are unhappy with their supervisors, apathetic about their organizations and detached from what they do. And there’s no reason to think things will soon improve." The social price tag is ENORMOUS! Estimates run as high as $300,000,000,000/year!"

It's not just people working in organizations who feel miserable. Everyone interacting with a life draining organization is affected by its toxicity: its customers, its partners, the communities in which it operates, and, of course, nature, which has to accommodate a dead zone.

We experienced of the truth of this concept recently at a shopping mall. I was hunting for a New York Times to read over lunch. Going into a Duane Reed, I asked two employees standing at the counter if I could buy a newspaper: "You get one of those from a news stand. This is a pharmacy." I pointed out that I was standing right next to an entire rack of chocolates and candies; so, the store carried more than medical items. "Yeah, well, we don't know about that." Being already in the store, I bought something else I needed and approach the counter to pay and check out. The women were engaged in an extremely vulgar conversation about a third person they both knew and didn't like. I was astonished that I was even hearing that kind of language in a work place. They hardly looked up to make any eye contact with me as I handed them my credit card. I didn't exist, and it was unpleasant. All I wanted to do was leave.

We turned next to Best Buy to find a land line telephone. None of the three employees [again engaged in conversation amongst themselves] knew the stock and only one out of three could point in the general direction of telephones. We found many types of phones with myriad distinctions in specifications and price points, so we sought help to make a choice. Only a "phone specialist" could help and no one knew where to find him. When we did get the specialist, it turned out that he didn't know the differences between the items and would we please wait while he spoke with his superiors. He clearly didn't know where to start with his own inventory and we had to guide him through the options that were available to try to gain clarity on what would best fit our needs. Another experience we wished we weren't having.

We decided that we needed to compare the phones at Best Buy with the ones on sale at a much smaller Radio Shack store a few doors down the way in the mall. Two clerks were at the main counter. We approached and described what we were looking for. A young woman spoke right up, and "Sure, I can help you," and we started feeling pretty good. She proceeded off to a direction in the store where there were no phones and had to come back to main counter to ask her co-worker, with a giggle, do you know where we keep the phones. Things were not looking up. We then did proceed to where the phones were and were again confronted with the problem of a sales assistant who had no idea how to help us find our best option and manifested a sort of detached boredom through the entire transaction, as though something much more interested was going to be happening on her cell phone just as fast as she could get back to it. Again, we didn't get what we wanted substantively or emotionally.

Finally, like people who had been out on the dessert too long, we arrived at an Apple Store to ask a technical question about a couple of our products. We were handled seamlessly from the moment of intake by a friendly young guy who not only was ready to set us up with an appointment with a technical specialist but who said, "While you're waiting on that, why not tell me what the problem is and maybe I can fix it," which he did in about 15 minutes, finally providing us with a moment of psychological completion after a series of frustrations. The transaction occurred in a bright and pleasant environment, didn't cost us anything and provided us with a nice connection to an assistant we'd be pleased to work with again. It was the type of life affirming moment that a lot of people associate with their customer experience at Apple, and it was an example of how that trait contributes to the brand's popularity.

Apple's customer interface isn't perfect, and, in fact, the company has started using that horrid, scratchy muzak while you're on hold that drives us nuts. (The security firm, ADT, has made this torture into an absolute art form, by the way, requiring everyone making an incoming call to be rung out on an auric rack for a minimum of 13 minutes.) We're hoping that this isn't a retreat from the sort of design integrity that was such a passion for Steve. (And we sure do hope that someone at Apple is reading these comments and coming up with a fix! It's an annoying problem, and Steve would bite your head off if he knew about it!)

But, in the main, Apple delivers a customer experience that is head and shoulder above everybody else. And this adds tremendously to the obsession that customers have for this brand. It's a phenomenon.

And we think the phenomenon goes beyond the sheer functionality and the beautiful look and feel of Apple's products. We think that there is such a level of longing to interact with organizations that have a life sustaining quality that any organization that does is mobbed by people who have longed for something they couldn't name and just want to eat it up on those rare occasions when they find it.

Organizations like Apple have a lot in common with Elvis on any other superstar. Because so few organizations are manifesting a high level of vitality, those that do are in extraordinarily high demand. It's not that they are ultimately so different or that its people are so dramatically unique. Rather, it is simply that a life positive climate has been established that encourages people to bring more of themselves into the organization and to construct an organizational strategy that makes it easy for employees, customers, and members of the local community to do so, by hiring extraordinarily diverse teams of talented people drawn from all different creeds, colors, nationality, appearance and sexual orientation, for example.

Many, if not most, people feel good coming to an Apple store because they are coming home, in a sense. They are in an environment that sustains their life on many levels.

And that's great, but there's a definite down side. Apple is one company and the staff at its stores are largely under the age of 30. This company and these young men and women cannot be expected to pick up the slack for so many scores of thousands of life-draining organizations. That's a sure recipe for burnout for Apple employees and the company as a whole. (After all, look at what happened to The King.)

So what's the answer? Lots and lot of organizations all over the world need to become life sustaining. (We've written a book with our ideas on how to do that.) It is not the heroes that save society; it's the society that is constantly improving its standards of everyday organizational behavior that saves itself.

Living in the Question

2011-09-02T13:17:00.006-05:00

Some Critical Uncertainties of the Era

"A ball of confusion/that's what the world is today!" So exclaimed The Temptations four decades ago and things haven't changed that much since then. There are probably many more questions about what the future is likely to look like than there answers. Maybe that's always been the case, but it certainly is now.

For many of us, that is an uncomfortable reality. Chronic uncertainty can breed unpleasant stress and anxiety. On the other hand, not knowing how things are going to turn out can be exciting. It makes life an adventure!

In this blog entry, we explore some critical uncertainties in an effort to identify the universe of big questions within which we all live. Critical uncertainties are dynamic forces whose direction matters a lot on an international basis -- or at least a national one. A true critical uncertainty is outside the control of any one entity, even a very powerful one like the government systems of the US or the EU or China. How it tips should impact the zeitgeist of an entire era. The tone of a society, a set of societies or a significant industry should tilt one way or another depending on what happens to a critical uncertainty or to a set of interwoven critical uncertainties. What moves a critical uncertainty one way or another and when it is going to tip can’t be fully known or understood in advance. However, having a good handle on might shape the destiny of the future, i.e., knowing what questions to ask and what possibilities to follow, is an important compass to use in comprehending what might be unfolding, even if the exact outcome and destination cannot be foretold.

So, in that spirit here is a list of powerful gyroscopes of change-in-motion whose spin momentum Art of the Future follows. Add your own to this inventory!

The rights and power of women worldwide: Many Westerners believe that the expansion of women’s rights and power are inexorable, but there are a range of forces opposing the expansion of these rights in many places and in many belief systems.

The impact of climate change: Many observers are absolutely convinced that human activity is jeopardizing the stability of the Earth’s climate and threatening to introduce an era of devastation. Many others think that the threat is non-existent or overblown.

The mix of public and private power: Will government power at all levels expand in the decades ahead, Or will the power of large corporations and other institutions supercede government influence across a range of geographies?

Governmental control vs personal liberty: Will governments use new technology to become “Big Brother” monitoring and controlling every aspect of its citizens’ lives, Or will individuals demand and achieve the right to autonomy and freedom from continuous oversight?

The internationalization of law: Will sovereign nation states be increasingly brought under the authority of international bodies, Or will the significance of international regulation and law diminish in the face of more local forms of power?

Source: MakingIt Magazine

Shifting Global Power Blocks: Is a multi-polar world emerging where international economic and ideological centers will compete on a much more level playing field, Or are anticipations of the end of the single superpower status of the United States overblown and based on a faulty analysis of real world economics and military power?

Terrorism: Will fanatical groups spring up with increasing frequency and cause unprecedented levels of disruption to civilian society Or, will dissident groups express their views by entering into mainstream politics and use non-violent means of expressing their positions?

Image source: MedicineWorld.org

The level and type of educational achievement: Will literacy of all types and knowledge acquisition expand in the future as millions use the web for information, Or will it decline due to population increases, limited investment and disinterest in academic work?

The city as a strategic entity: Will metropolitan areas become increasingly integrated wholes pursuing policies to benefit urban dwellers, Or will cities be primarily inchoate regions stalemated by interest group based politics?

The availability of food and water: Will existing food and water supply chains support human activity worldwide, Or will they be increasingly stressed by multiple breakdowns that imperil lives and well-being?

The supply of raw materials: Will critical raw materials such as rare earths run out, creating havoc with production processes and slowdowns in technological advancement, Or will shortages be avoided through invention, miniaturization, and/or substitution?

Energy sources: Will the number of viable energy sources supporting human activity proliferate driving down the price of production and transportation, Or will experimentation with non-carbon based forms of fuel prove to be too expensive and unreliable?

Global vs Local production: Will trends toward the global manufacture and assembly of components parts of all sorts of goods and services continue, Or will regions refocus their concentration on what they are distinctively able to create, manufacture and trade?

Source: Honda Motor's Assimo

The incorporation of robotics and artificial intelligence into everyday living: Will robots and expert systems of various kinds take over many of the chores that make human existence unpleasant, Or will the technological utopias that get so much air time turn out to be mere fantasies and no substitute for hard physical and mental work?

Man/machine fusion: Will the explosion of computing power, genetics, nano-technology and robotics merge into new life forms, a singularity that will transform the very essence of what it is to be human, Or will these technologies fall short of expectations or be regulated in ways to prevent such a transformation?

Epidemics and treatment: Will civilization be increasingly faced with wide-spread, fast moving epidemics for which there is no adequate response, Or will invention, innovation and investment master transitory medical threats?

Transparency and privacy: Will social media and global interconnectivity prove to be a great boon to human inventiveness and productivity, Or will it create a hive environment where no one has privacy, the ability to be alone or the right think independently?

The supply of skilled workers: Will economic conditions of low consumer demand and diminished horizons create a permanent reserve of highly trained personnel ready to work for low wages for at least a decade ahead or will demographic trends and burgeoning emerging economies and aging industrial ones stretch the supply lines of skilled workers very thin and in surprisingly short order?

Community and individual: Will individual see themselves as members of a larger community toward which they owe allegiance and responsibility, Or will they think of any group with power as unwarranted and unnecessary constraints upon their own liberty?

Unions: Is the labor movement dead because it impedes private enterprise, Or will it become revitalized as a result of the growing power of labor in the emerging economies and globalization?

Source: Reuters 2007

Violence and security: Will people with opposing interests and objectives increasingly resort to violence against each other leading to an endless cycle of anxiety-laced security measures and retaliatory action, Or will norms of behavior and civility bring ever-larger segments of the population into self-regulating mutual respect?


Gary "Ironman" Passler, 58

Health and well-being of the aging: Will the aging population be increasingly unwell and despairing, requiring ever-greater investments in their health and well-being, Or will the aging become more mindful of the need to stay healthy and active with the financial and physical ability to achieve such objectives?

Source of picture: keplarllp.com

Stability of the financial system: Will central bankers, economists and political leaders agree upon means to achieve and maintain global financial stability, Or will governments prove insufficient to the task and plunge the world economy into an extended era of self-protectionism?

Source: Thinkstock

Innovation and inventiveness: Will scientists and entrepreneurs discover and develop new “killer apps” that revitalize global, national and local communities, institutions and organizations, Or are we entering a “me-too” era where investment in research and development will slow down and new ideas be slow to emerge and slower to find acceptance?

From an article by Andrew Wye

Consciousness: Are radically new realizations regarding the human potential, such as mental telepathy or the use of dreams as guides to life, about to break through into common use, transforming the human prospect, Or are these supposed possibilities no more than the hogwash of pseudo-science?

Design integrity: Will consumers demand products that are well designed and aesthetically pleasing, Or will price be the primary and, in many cases, the only factor affecting purchasing decisions?

Ataturk/Khomeni

Secularism versus Sectarianism: In the US, the population is split between those who hold traditionally sectarian views and those who have a secular orientation. A nearly equal number believe that the Earth was formed according to the biblical description vs those who believe that it evolved according to the scientific view. Proponents and adversaries of abortion and sex education are also in standoff positions. Will social schisms based on religious and spiritual beliefs proliferate, Or will a new openness emerge mitigating disputes that seem intractable from the present perspective?

Source: Flickr User MakeMoneyMall

Income inequality: In many societies, including the US, Brazil and China, the gap between the lives of the Haves and the Have-Nots is widening and concern about this bifurcation is increasing. Will the trend toward greater social and financial inequality continue, Or will the needy manage to overthrow entrenched plutocracies?

Racial and ethnic dynamics: Diversity, integration and multiculturalism are often lauded as not only moral but as smart business. Will this view prevail, Or will a will sense of threat from change and suspicion of outsiders–reliable and long-standing human tendencies–endure?

Monitoring via electronic skin

Remote care: Distributed electronics make it possible to treat many health ailments remotely. This, coupled with innovations such as the ability to make, print and apply new skin tissues and limbs, will create new health care options. However, many do not to trust technologically-mediated medical approaches due to potential malfunctioning, lack of empathy and judgement, etc.. Will remote care be widely adopted, Or will it remain a relative oddity, full of unfulfilled promise?

Source: Second Life

The nation state vs. the cyber state: The internet enables world spanning communities of all sorts. Very powerful stateless communities may bond in cyberspace with little or no physical location or contact. Will national governments lose clout as people conduct business and social relationships in cyberspace, Or will there be the sort of continued sense of citizenship and unity of national identity?

Space travel and colonization: Will the ancient urge of humanity for adventure take it past its planetary boundaries into an never-ending era of exploration, Or will the huge investments required and the fear of a greater unknown than has ever been broached prohibit off-world excursions?

Success to the Successful

2011-08-25T16:35:00.005-05:00

Calling Steven P. Jobs "one of the most successful chief executives in corporate history," the New York Times today reported that he "once said he never thought of himself as a manager, but as a leader. And his notion of leadership revolved around choosing the best people possible, encouraging them and creating an environment in which they could do great work." This touches on several themes near and dear to Art of the Future. Jobs is an anticipatory leader who has been able to integrate his vision into the hearts and minds of everyone in the Apple organization. Apple attracts top creative talent and retains them through challenging assignments and a supportive workplace environment. Apple is a great example of a life-sustaining organization.

The NYT article goes on to quote Jobs discussing the role of design integrity and elegant solution s in making the company a success. "When discussing Silicon Valley’s lasting contributions to humanity, he mentioned the invention of the microchip and 'The Whole Earth Catalog,' a kind of hippie Wikipedia, in the same breath. Great products, Mr. Jobs once explained, were a triumph of taste, of 'trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.'" Anticipatory leaders, like Jobs, have the ability to synthesize information existing in the present, project it forward into the future, and create the next generation of products and services. In the past 15 years, Apple has produced a series of "blockbuster, culture-changing hits like the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad"- often to the surprise and delight of customers who never dreamed of such things.

As Jobs transitions to Chairman of the Board, the triple play of attention to its people, its products and the environment has endowed Apple with a strong legacy that bodes well for its ability to survive and thrive in the wild and wooly environment we face going forward. As the NYT puts it, "success begets success. And at this point, few companies have as high a concentration of geniuses — in technology, design and marketing — as Apple. Leaders like the design god Jonathan Ive and the operations mastermind Tim Cook won’t let the company go astray."

Life Sustaining Organizations as Talent Magnets

2011-01-25T19:14:00.002-05:00

David Brook's terrific column, "Talent Magnets," appearing in the January 25th, 2011 Op-Ed section of the New York Times deserves attention and appreciation. Brooks describes a virtuous feedback loop that Anticipatory Leaders can generate by creating conditions in organizations that attract and hold creative talent: "The nation with the most diverse creative hot spots will dominate the century."
There are many creative centers in the United States. Take Greenville, North Carolina, for example, a city of about 85,000 people, named one of the nation’s “100 Best Communities for Young People” by America’s Promise Alliance.
Greenville doesn't get a huge amount of press, but it is home to East Carolina University and the site of an excellent medical school, with specialists like Dr. W. Randolph Chitwood, who performed the first mitral valve repair surgery in the United States in 2000. This far off corner of North Carolina that you probably never heard of is one of the best places in the world to learn robotic surgery.
Our point: While 47% of the US population presently believe that China is the world's largest economy, there is still a tremendous window of opportunity for the planet's leading democracy to demonstrate the competitive vitality of its more open system.
Unfortunately, there are many ways in which the United States is squandering its key advantages in the competition to nurture creative hot spots. Its children have not learned the fundamentals of science, for example, and this is clearly a weakness to the country's prospects for continued influence as the 21st century unfolds.
A problem in the present doesn't foreclose the prospects of improvements in the future. In fact, the recognition of a short-coming can incentavize needed change. Will it in this instance? U.S. scores in science have been lousy for quite a while; so, that's not a good sign. But, it could change. The future of science education and the importance of scientific understanding to educators in the public school systems is uncertain.
It's a Critical Uncertainty.
In our book, Life Sustaining Organizations–A Design Guide, we show how anticipatory leaders can play an essential role in energizing organizations and societies by exploring alternative futures. They do this by asking big questions to which there are a lot of legitimate answers, each one of which can lead to a different kind of future. "What role will science play in the United States in 2025?" is an example of that sort of question.
Ideally, a set of these questions are looked at simultaneously, like looking at several striations of soil to understand what might grow.
For example, we think that the future of women's rights and political power is a world-wide critical uncertainty. It's up for grabs and, as others have noted, it's a fundamentally important political, economic and moral issue of our era. Art of the Future as an entity is four-square in support of women's rights on a planetary basis. That and $3.50 will buy you a latte at Starbucks. The rights of women are certainly not guaranteed in a global context where women own less than 5% of the planet's assets.
The power of women is interacting with many, if not all, dynamics on the planetary stage. So, what happens with women is going to have a big impact on what happens with science education. Women are key to creative hot spots. The organizations and the societies that have no problem with that have an advantage over those that do not. That doesn't mean that they're going to come out on top, it just means that we think they've got a head start.

The future will not look like the past. The slope of change is dramatically accelerating everywhere. Thoughtful observers like Ian Morris anticipate that the level of social development that will occur in the next 100 years will equal that which humanity achieved in the last 15,000 years... if we don't kill ourselves first.
As a species, we may be reaching lift off velocity, moving through an opening that will make the present seem like a very distant past...and, then again, maybe not. Anticipatory leadership entails helping us explore where we are and what that means for where we might be going. It is the catalyst for insight and learning. It requires a willingness to take a real risk.

We are pleased to announce...

2011-01-12T18:04:00.016-05:00

The publication of our new book,
Life Sustaining Organization–A Design Guide

What is a Life Sustaining Organization?

* An organization that understands itself as a living system embedded in nature
* An organization that looks at the members of its system-whether they are formally employed or informally connected-as agents of the whole
* An organization that cares about its overall well-being, the health of its human representatives, and the vitality of nature in general

Why are they important?

* Complex human systems are shaping the destiny of the planet
* Talented, creative people want to work in organizations that will care about them and the natural environment
* The competition for curious, conceptually agile, life-positive human resources may become incredibly intense in the decade ahead

The purpose of this guide

* To show you how to use Structural Dynamics to analyze the unique conditions of your organization and your industry to design your organization to be extremely attractive to the kinds of people it needs to face the future-whatever it might look like-with confidence
* To support your efforts to be a workplace that fulfills your highest aspirations
* To increase the odds for the survival of human species in an era of discontinuity
Structural Dynamics is an approach to considering the future that doesn't claim to know what's coming but can help us identify what we need to be thinking about. It does this by identifying critical uncertainties that could go in any direction, and, by doing so, set the future on a course.

A critical uncertainty is something that is very important, but whose direction is not clear. As Esher's print of Night and Day© demonstrates, where things are headed is dynamic: the same set of factors and forces can interact toward starkly different, even if related and symmetrical, outcomes. In our work, we look for forces that everyone sees as fundamental to the well-being of their organization or to the situation of interest but around which there is a lot of disagreement or confusion.
Understand the nature of your critical uncertainties to set an path for organizational adventure and achievement. Miss them and court failure and worse.

Unique features

* A richly illustrated, step-by-step description of the structural dynamics process with an extensive case study showing how to apply each element of the approach to a specific organizational setting
* Self-assessment instruments to help you understand where your organization stands at present as a life-sustaining organization
* A discussion of how Anticipatory Leaders develop and practice powerful skills as Integrators, Futurists and Strategists
* An exploration of the Scenario Game Board© at the heart of Structural Dynamics that demonstrates how to use combine systems thinking with archetypal scenarios to strengthen your organization's strategic capabilities Game Board

Who is the Audience?

Leaders, executives, strategists, ecologists, advisers, radical thinkers, policy makers, idealists, academics and anyone who wants to make a positive difference to their organization's prospects

The Authors
Michael Sales and Anika Savage founded Art of the Future five years ago to support organizational vitality. Anika is an architect, corporate strategist and consultant with wide ranging experience in technology and finance. Michael is a leadership trainer and strategy consultant who has worked across a wide variety of economic sectors. Life Sustaining Organizations represents the culmination of their individual and collective study of organizations over an extensive range of experiences.

Critical Uncertainties: Pivot Points for the Future

2009-12-30T11:03:00.030-05:00

In spite of the fulminations of the best prognosticators, futurists, pundits and astrologers, no one really knows what the future is going to bring. We all want some things to happen and we probably don't want other things to happen, but our ability to bring things about is limited. The world is an infinitely complicated place. In fact, as if matters weren't already confusing enough, string theory and quantum physics is positing that ours may be but one of an infinite number of universes including a full-blow version that may be a bubble tangential to the one we are in right this moment!

Structural Dynamics is an approach to considering the future that doesn't claim to know what's coming but can help us identify what we need to be thinking about. It does this by identifying critical uncertainties that could go in any direction, and, by doing so, set the future on a course.

A critical uncertainty is something that is very important, but whose direction is not clear. As this Escher print of Night and Day demonstrates, where things are headed is dynamic: the same set of factors and forces can interact toward starkly different, even if related and symmetrical, outcomes. In our work, we look for forces that everyone sees as fundamental to the well-being of their organization or to the situation of interest but around which there is a lot of disagreement or confusion.

Through a process that involves scanning, discussion and voting, each organization arrives at its own conclusions regarding its particular critical uncertainties. We would expect the uncertainties of the utility industry to be different than those faced by a professional nursing association, for example (although we have found commonalities in exploring the question!).

Ron Heifetz and others have pointed out the powerful learning opportunities that come from probing the thinking and worldviews of people, groups and institutions who hold strong conflicting views and, yet, have a degree of respect for each other. The process that leads up to the identification of critical uncertainty legitimates these diverse perspectives, so it is an excellent way for leaders to facilitate strategic conversations that generate organizational and social movement.

Typically, an organization or a community will confront a number of these critical uncertainties simultaneously. Discovering them and exploring their interactions is a way of developing very rich scenarios of possible futures. This allows the building powerful organizational and community strategies. Critical uncertainties are like fulcrums, and the organization that sees where the leverage points are is in a position to take advantage of its insight and foresight to attract and hold the key talent it needs to thrive in whatever future unfolds.

There are a number of macro critical uncertainties that all human systems face, and knowing what these are is a way of considering the dynamics of the world system as a whole. Much hangs in the balance on the spinning of these particular wheels.

Here are some that we've been thinking about:

The rights and power of women worldwide
The impact of climate change
The mix of public and private power
The internationalization of law
The level and type of educational achievement
The city as a strategic entity
The reliability of food and water supply
The availability of raw materials
The introduction of robotics and artificial intelligence into everyday living

Of course, there are probably other drivers that come to your mind immediately and there may be factors mentioned in this list that don't seem all that uncertain or important, but, hey, it's our list and we're sticking to it!... (At least for now!)

Let's explore a couple of these briefly to see why they qualify as critical uncertainties out book:

The power and rights of women: Many educated people in the West assume that women's rights are expanding in an inexorable fashion. Women are serving at virtually every level of government, e.g., Chancellor Merkel in Germany and Hillary Clinton as the US Secretary of State. Academic achievement by women is outpacing men in a number of countries, including the United States and Algeria. Female athletes are setting strength and endurance records and entering sports that were once off-limits. The list of these sorts of achievements is very long. Women seem unstoppable!

However, the forces opposing the equality and power of women start at birth. Multiple studies demonstrate that the preference for male children is virtually universal. In India, a special "ladies train" has been created for women administrative workers to provide them with protection from the harassment they experience when commuting with male passengers, but men still get on the women's train and berate them. In Iran, Guinea, and countless other societies, women are the particular target of angry men working to maintain the power of established governments, which frequently lace their ideology with religious doctrine that specifies a subservient position to women in the social and family order. Orthodox Jews yell at women seeking to pray at the Wailing Wall and throw things at them; Southern Baptists assert that women must submit to their husbands. Catholicism remains adamant in the view that women cannot and will not serve as priests.

Seen from the perspective of these data, the expansion of women's rights do not appear to be guaranteed in any respect. In fact, a female colleague of ours wonders if the last decade hasn't seen the zenith of the power of women, and whether ten years from now we might not see a much more rigid set of conditions than we do at present. Misogyny and traditional views on the role of women are alive and very well, thank you!

So, there is a powerful dynamic tension between these expansive and contracting forces. Whatever way the story works out, the condition of women's right is and will have incredible impact on all work organizations. How a particular organization positions itself vis-a-vis this tectonic tension and how it makes its stance clear will have a major impact on its attractiveness to women and the role that women will play in shaping its future.

The city as a strategic entity: While we haven't seen him in a long time, Jeb Brugmann is a deeply respected colleague and a friend. His Urban Revolution is a recent contribution that builds upon his decades as a global citizen, describing a range of solutions to help local communities access the benefits of globalization, and to help global organizations engage in local communities and markets. Jeb lays out the success of a number of "strategic cities," including Barcelona, Chicago, and Curitiba, Brazil, in galvanizing the true and stable elites of a city--not necessarily its most well-to-do, but the people who constitute the metropolitan areas local leadership and community networks--to develop and implement innovations that put those places out front while other cities founder.

In other words, Jeb is a member of the professional urban planning and development community, which has long sought to influence cities to be rational entities pursuing the best interests of a maximal number of its citizens. And, of late, very powerful technologies, such as the Smarter Cities initiatives at IBM, are being brought to bear on the conditions of large metropolitan areas in ways that seem to be full of hope for improvement in the functioning of urban life. When one sees crime in New York City falling to levels not seen in forty years, there is reason to believe that the quality of urban life might be moving toward a positive tipping point.

On the other hand, the problem with this strategic orientation is that cities are continuously rent asunder by a phenomenal range of forces that can make them absolutely hellish places to live. Overcrowding, poor infrastructure, inadequate resources, crime, lack of housing, social/political/ethnic hierarchies and tradition, pollution, suspicion, architectural and topographical barriers to communication and interaction, etc. all make cities places where people look out for themselves and their own.

According the United Nations, 60+% of the world's population is now living in cities, including 19 cities with more than 10,000,000 inhabitants. Furthermore, the UN asserts that 100% of the world's population is linked in to urban life, so that's about as critical as any critical uncertainty is going to get! The status of cities is key to the life-sustaining quality of the millions of organizations that reside within them and depend upon them.

So, what is going to happen with cities? Again, the crystal is murky: Global interconnectivity, the press of common problems and an onslaught of new thinking could usher in a new, much more strategically-focused era; on the other hand, long-standing animosities, the sheer weight of a seemingly endless number of problems, the press of other concerns could take the city deeper into the pit of dysfunctionality. The future of cities is very important, but it's absolutely not predetermined.

We believe that this kind of analysis could be applied to each of nine domains listed above (and probably more). The organization and the leaders who are seeing and using "big picture" forces such as these to build their strategy, in general, and their work environment strategies, in particular, will be way out in front of those who assume that tomorrow will be like yesterday or that whatever comes along will be manageable through the existing repertoire of behaviors and mental models.

A Visit to the Kennedy Space Center

2009-12-05T15:24:00.005-05:00

We spent a few days in Florida recently, and a visit to the Kennedy Space Center was one of the highlights. It was truly inspirational to be reminded of what human kind, and the United State in particular, is capable of once our mind is set to a purpose. Something like 400,000 scientists and engineers worked on the Apollo project over the course of the 1960s, many starting their career as a result of the investment that the US made in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000,000 separate systems had to work together pretty much flawlessly for the moon landings to be successful.

The entire visit was quite awe-inspiring. Here are a few of the incredibly powerful moments:

One, was the IMAX description of the design and construction of the International Space Station and seeing how the astronauts live on a daily basis. Wow!!!! The 45 minute film is in 3D, an entertainment technology that, by the way, seems poised on the edge of a powerful resurgence. Untethered by gravity has a very dream like quality as people and things float around everywhere in a surrealistic landscape that would have made Salvidore Dali's mouth water. Furthermore, knowing that the space station was initally the result of collaboration between the former Soviet Union and the United States and that now something like 69 different countries have been involved in the project is, again, an indication of the positive consequences of holding common cause.

Second, hearing John Kennedy proclaim "We choose to go to the moon!" was a thrilling. (This video clip's dramatic music is really unnecessary; Kennedy's energy alone is sufficient.) His declaration that it is the hard things that are really worth doing is a powerful reminder of what it takes to achieve something really great, and one that is sorely needed in such a graceless age as ours is too often. Furthermore, John Kennedy may have been a man with real flaws--as many very powerful people are--but the man could really speak when he had something to say.

Third, at one point during the tour of the Apollo command center where some of the twelve astronauts (only twelve!) who actually walked on the moon remark on their experience. One, perhaps Alan Shepard, spoke of crying upon looking back at the glorious beauty of the Earth, seeing its fragility from a far perspective, seeing it whole, and lamenting the pettiness and hostility that jeopardizes the well-being, the future of our species on this wonderful speck on life in the vastness of the universe. Talk about a call to action for the sustenance of life in our complex organizational systems that do so much to determine what our fate on this planet will be!

We did feel that there was a bit more of an emphasis on humanity's "destiny!" to explore space than we feel. It is probably true that humanity is innately adventurous and thrills at exploration. We want to know what's "out there," and, increasingly, many of us want to know what's going on inside of us as well. But, it may be that realizing the real potential of this planet, e.g., simply addressing poverty, would be a sufficiently gripping process of discovery for many of us. We've gone to the Moon, and we will probably go beyond it, but we still face a daunting set of challenges right here on Earth.

A book in progress on Life Sustaining Organizations

2009-12-04T10:14:00.014-05:00

We continue to make progress on our newest publication, Life Sustaining Organizations, a manual devoted to the challenge of creating of work environments that will attract, house, support and retain key talent that organizations can rely upon to lead them forward into whatever challenges and exciting possibilities the future may bring. Life-sustaining organizations nourish the vitality of the people who give them life, purpose and direction, and they recognize their dependence on the well-being of the natural environment within which we all exist.

We're writing this book because we've both had really excellent working experiences and we've both had and observed many work environments that were deeply unsatisfying. A wide range of factors that contribute to the quality of an organization's life sustaining qualities, including, for example: Are people encouraged to be creative? Do they get to see the effect of the efforts? Does the workplace acknowledge our needs as social animals? Is there a conscious and continuous consideration of the relationship between the organization and the natural environment.

Architectural choices are certainly important to the creations of life-sustaining organizations. For example, Malcolm Wells, recently deceased, (at left) developed a potent ecological perspective that included a set of goals for all new buildings, e.g., the requirement to "use solar energy, to consume their own waste, to provide wildlife habitat and human habitat, and to be beautiful." Wells had an epiphany after designing the RCA pavillion at the 1964 World's Fair in New York and realizing that his work and all the other buildings were going to torn down just as whatever had been there before was destroyed to make way for yet another temporary design. He concluded that maybe whatever the natural environment was before humanity started imprinting its impression upon it needed to be treated with greater respect.

The book lays out a way of developing life-sustaining organizational strategies by combining systems thinking with scenario planning. The graphic at right presents an overview of the process, which we call structural dynamics.

The process begins with an effort to convene the whole system for a inquiry into the forces driving the future of the organization. Every organization faces its own particular set of "critical uncertainties"--big issues whose direction is unclear--although there are probably a set of uncertainties that virtually all organizations face, e.g., "How will we be able to attract and hold the critical talent we need to survive and thrive in the future?"

This sort of question has all sort of ramifications for whether an organization is life-positive: What environment can it design, and create that will support the vitality of its workforce? What forces will be shaping the context of the organization as the future unfolds, determining the behaviors and internal conditions that will define what it means to be life sustaining? The Discovery phase of the process develops an organizationally specific response to this sort of strategic question. Persistent poking at the driving forces affecting the organization yields a structural dynamics model, symbolized in the center of the graphic. For example, we think that the status of women, i.e., their political rights and their social status on a global basis, is a global driver of the future although we are not at all sure how it is going to work out. It's relationship to the position and condition of women is likely to be an important consideration for all organizations. It is another critical uncertainty having a powerful effect on the workforce.

Identifying and analyzing the structural dynamics of its Critical Uncertainties enables an organization to articulate a set of plausible scenarios of the future. The word plausible is very important because many scenarios, e.g., in the science fiction genre can make for great stories but it's hard to see how one might get there from here. And, the idea of a set of scenarios is also significant because planners need to challenge themselves with starkly alternative futures in order to articulate strategic Options, especially those that are robust, i.e., hold promise of being effective regardless of which direction the future actually does take. A strategy matrix, such as the one at left, is one of the key products of the Options phase.

The organizational challenge now is to Apply or Embody the strategies to the entire range of organizational action. If an organization wants to become an employer of choice for a certain demographic of women, for example, all of its activities ought to align organically with that aspiration. We approach the manifestation of strategic choices via fractals, i.e., allowing each component of the organization to deploy the central strategic theme in its own distinctive, subcultural fashion.

Sustaining is the phase of the strategy process in which signs, indicators and warnings are used to calibrate earlier hypotheses, e.g., the expectation that the gap in academic achievement between young men and women which has been developing in the United States will continue and become more of a world wide phenomenon. Sustaining also entails acting in ways that cement, ground and perpetuate the learning orientation that the structural dynamics process is designed to inculcate into the DNA of the organizations that use it.

We're obviously very excited about this work and the prospect that a distillation of our theory and practice may make a contribution to organizational science and to the vitality and spirit of people and their organizations.

Life-sustaining organizations attract and hold creative talent

2009-12-02T15:28:00.006-05:00

Art of the Future has made a number of presentations to CoreNet, an international network of corporate real estate professionals who oversee the design and corporate deployment of millions of square feet of owned and leased buildings and land. In a recent webinar, we discussed the way in which the need to attract and retain creative talent could play out in alternative scenarios.

The proposition that organizations face critical uncertainties is one of the key ideas we work with. A critical uncertainty is a driver that is very important to the success of the organization, but whose direction is uncertain. While it is clear that creative talent is critical to the well-being of organizations, it's not certain whether particular skills will be in short supply or whether there will be such a talent glut in the future that organizations will be able to pick and choose among a galaxy of stars. We looked at a range of data that might validate either conclusion.

In many instances, there is an "official" accepted view regarding critical uncertainties: there's either going to be a shortage or a glut or some combination of the two, end of story. Other views tend to be driven under ground, deligitimized. Michael recalls vividly having purchased a Datsun in 1973 shortly before the oil embargo and driving around in his new car listening to the CEO of General Motors declare that "Americans will never buy small cars. We just aren't the sort of people who are willing to jam ourselves into one of those vehicles." This was not a person, nor a company, that wanted to hear from a guy who loved America but just didn't want to own a gas guzzler.

Of course, life doesn't actually turns out the way we'd planned or anticipated. The future may go in one direction, change course, wobble around, bee line the opposite way, oscillate for a year or two, etc.. Life-sustaining organizations explore strategies that will enable them to be nimble in the face of whatever happens. How do organizations position themselves for a scenario where there will be a high demand for creative employees in short supply while at the same time being able to take full advantage of a potential buyer's market for such talent?

The participants in the webinar used this framework for considering the future to share their views on how the need for creative talent would play out in the future and did a little toward developing a set of the scenarios from which strategies could be built. That is, they did some anticipatory thinking about what forces, e.g., the power of women at work and in society more generally, might influence the need to attract and retain creative talent and, therefore, what sort of strategies the organization should adopt in light of those possibilities.

We believe that becoming a life-sustaining organization is a winning strategy regardless of how the future unfolds. While we have a great deal to say on this topic, essentially life-sustaining organizations are committed to their employees thriving and to the well-being of the natural environment. They want their members to feel free to bring their full range of skills and authentic selves to work. Life-sustaining organization recognize that all human systems are part of the larger living system of our planet. Having this orientation toward being a living system goes a long way toward becoming the employer of choice. If there's a talent glut, life-sustaining organizations will benefit from a demonstrated commitment to people and planet; they will attract the best of the best. If those with talent are able to name their terms, they are still much more likely to choose an organization that is used to having people like them around--one that already has a well-established reputation for working with deeply talented people--than one that is just getting used to having high autonomy creatives around for the first time.

Too Much Time Away!

2009-10-02T13:11:00.008-05:00

We've been hard at work on our book, tentatively entitled Life Sustaining Organizations: A User's Manual, which describes how Structural Dynamics can be applied to the conscious design and maintenance of organizations that affirm the vitality of the workforce, rather than draining life out of people by demanding the fragmentation of skills, character and spirit.

The good news about this entry is that we're making headway; the bad news is that we haven't had a lot of bandwidth for blogging!

To remedy our absence from the web, we're going to try something different and more Twitteresque than what our entries have been to date, i.e., short and, hopefully, more frequent references to items of current interest. We have some concern that the graphic quality of our posts may decline, but we're willing to accept that risk for a while and hope that you will still find some relevance here to your interests.

1. The NYT continues to be one the great information bargains available, as far as we're concerned. People at this institution have spent generations thinking about how to organized huge volumes of data across a wide range of categories and present it in a compelling way to people like us. It is full of useful information virtually every day. For example, one of the lead stories today concerns the way in which MIT uses its students' blog to recruit new applicants by conveying a first hand experience of the school, rather than simply a formal presentation of institutionally vetted data.

In discussing the "blogosphere" at MIT, student Cristen Chinea exclaims: “M.I.T. is the closest you can get to living in the Internet,” and Ms. Chinea reported, “IT IS SO TRUE. Love. It. So. Much.” [Emphasis added] The concept of living in the Internet strikes us as being very important. It seems to be a vivid manifestation of someone who has transcended time and place to take up full-time residency in the cyber world. Of course, this way of being is customary to millions, but, as the article indicates, the fact that so many young people are living in (as contrasted with "on") the Web, is viewed with alarm by institutions used to more rigid boundaries of who's in and who's out.

2. Youth Magnet Cities is a recent piece from the Wall Street Journal that also explores what Creative Class young people want in the way of a home town. Richard Florida, creative class sociologist, (at right) is one of the panelists who developed the metrics that led to the selection of Washington DC as the current top destination city for charged up men, women and others in their teens and twenties. Here's a list of the panelists, all of whom are probably worth knowing more about:

Steven Cochrane, managing director, Moody's Economy.com, head of the Web site's U.S. regional forecasting service and editor of its monthly Regional Financial Review.

Ross DeVol, director of regional economics, the Milken Institute, a Santa Monica, Calif., nonprofit, and researcher on technology and its impact on regional and national economies.

Richard Florida, author of "Who's Your City" and "The Rise of the Creative Class," and director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.

Rachel Franklin, senior lecturer, public policy, at the University of Maryland; former deputy director of the Association of American Geographers, and author of a 2003 Census Bureau report on migration patterns among young, educated workers.

William Frey, demographer and senior fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program of the Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., and a research professor in population studies at the University of Michigan.

David Plane, professor of geography and regional development, University of Arizona, Tucson; a senior editor of the Journal of Regional Science, and researcher on age-related factors in migration.

3. The influence and freedom of women is one of the key drivers of global change to which we pay attention. There is a fairly wide-spread assumption in liberal, Western circles that the political and organizational power of women is growing, and there is a lot of data to support that view. For example, the Financial Times recently published a "definitive ranking of the world's 50 most powerful and successful female chief executives," including power houses like Areva's Anne Lauvergeon, a French woman who is responsible for a workforce of 75,000.

However, as the graphic below indicates, there are many continents where women play an infinitesimal role in private sector power, and only 3 per cent of Fortune 500 chief executives are women.

So, it is certainly not inevitable that women will achieve anything like full equality with men in the halls of power. In fact, some international conflict scenarios would result in significant reductions of the gains made by women, e.g., those that involve armed forces dominated by men. A force such as this, which is clearly important but whose exact direction cannot be known is called a "critical uncertainty."

The Future that Hasn't Happened Yet

2009-06-08T06:52:00.010-05:00

As the Future Catches You: How Genomics and Other Forces are Changing Your Life, Work, Health and Wealth by Juan Enriquez Cabot is one of the books we've been reading recently in our thinking about Life Sustaining Work Environments. Published in early 2001, Enriquez (who drops the Cabot off the dust jacket for some reason) argued that the Millennium was only the beginning point of the "digital-genomics convergence" and the even more complex proteomics revolution. Seen from the perspective of eight years ago, the new life sciences were going to present breakthroughs shortly that would enable millions of us (especially those lucky and smart enough to be in the developed world) with the prospect of living well past 100, as we gain "control directly and deliberately [of] the evolution of our species and that of every other species on the planet." Enriquez says that "if you're thinking about Iraq, if you're thinking about politics, if you're thinking about the stock market, you are missing the single most exciting adventure we've ever been on." Pretty big assertion!

And, furthermore, he could be right. Genetics and the life sciences certainly present a prospect for an existential breakthrough in the human condition. What would it mean to you to know that a very, very slight altercation in your genetic code could enable you to live to be 130? Without serious reflection, the implications seems almost unimaginable. First off, who could afford it?! What about all those other people just being born: will they live to be 300?! Methuselah move over!

However, this is not a note about the genetics revolution. In fact, the point is that this revolution hasn't happened. Enriquez says that "Celera is ground zero" in the "New World" of genetics. Celera is a company founded by Craig Venter, and, according to how one reads the data, was either first or tied for first in mapping the human genome. You could have purchased Celera stock for about $50/share as Enriquez' New World was getting underway in February 2001...and it would be worth about $8.50/share today. There seems to be a degree of growth in life sciences hiring, but the graphic at left doesn't give the impression of the explosion in the field that was being predicted in 2001.

Enriquez presents a lot of potent info to back up his claim that "genetics is a hockey stick," but it turns out that there are a lot of hockey players on the field. Remember global warming, for example. While there's been a degree of controversy about the accuracy of the global warming data, most of the graphics depicting the rise in temperatures worldwide have caused a tremendous amount of concern about the rate of change in that metric and what it means. Global warming is a hockey stick too.

So, which of the two should we be paying the most attention to? Which one is the most pressing? Which one involves the biggest changes? The short answer is both, depending on what's important to your thinking at a particular moment in time.

Wait, it turns out that there are a whole bunch of other hockey sticks that are also worth considering. For example, look at a trend graph showing the aggregate differential in military expenditures over the last twenty years between the US and its nearest competitors. It is estimated that the US spends one third to one half of the world's budget on arms every year. It spends more on arms than the next closest eleven also-rans, $375B in 2004 vs. $60B by China, for example. So, the US has an enormous lead in this category. No one can or will catch up to the US in conventional arms expenditures. That isn't pleasing to everyone, which is one of the drivers of asymmetrical warfare and its attendant behaviors, also known as terrorism.

How about the volume of international trade over time or the flow of capital across markets? Hockey sticks with a past and, probably, a future.

So, at this moment, there are a lot of very potent and prospectively game changing phenomena occurring simultaneously in many different domains of human experience. To the extent that one is wrapped up in a particular field where there is a rapid pace of change, it becomes easy to see the impact of an inflection point in one's own focus of attention.

It is much more challenging (and fun!) from a strategic point of view to acknowledge the presence of multiple inflection points all happening in concert or in contradiction to one another. The playing field for every organization thinking about its future is much more dynamic when seen from this perspective. Virtually anything and everything is possible, and very little is certain.

Mystics like John Michell believe that there was an epoch in human history, before the officially recorded past, where a natural order pervaded human activity. Affirming the "dimensions of paradise," Michell found a similar architecture in a multitude of ancient sites--a geometry for the New Jerusalem--that supported his thesis that there once was a time of cohesiveness regarding what human beings were supposed to do with their lives, i.e., bring about an alchemical merger of stimulative solar and receptive lunar energies on a personal, subjective, intrapsychic level and on the external, organizational and social level. (Michell's study of the Glastonbury Abbey is one of his most famous.) Architecture, social activities and daily personal practice were, according to this legend, all designed to support spiritual attainment and the readiness of Earth to receive divinity. This is a claim that certainly has a lot of implications for the design of life sustaining work environments.

Ours is an amazing era full of both beauty and dross. It is a time of great possibility and horrific anxiety. Perhaps humanity will so lose its balance on the planet as to be thrown off by the centrifugal forces we have set spinning at an ever faster pace. Or, perhaps a beautiful, fractal order will appear to us all, revealing an underlying Michell-like harmony that the most recent story in the headlines can never find. Maybe it's always been like this.

Rainforests, Women in the Workforce, and Big Science

2009-06-03T07:18:00.007-05:00

A recent study publicized in The Financial Times asserts that "cattle ranching it the single most important cause of the tearing down of rain forests in Brazil." The Greenpeace photo at left captures one image of the rain forest being burned to make way for cattle grazing. I find this deeply upsetting because the rain forests are critical to the Earth's overall ecosystem. What I find encouraging in the information, however, is the fact that, like so many other ecological nightmares, what is happening to the rain forests in Brazil is totally reversible through human choice. Stop eating Big Macs and rib eyes five days a week, and you can help save the rain forests and sustain the planet for future generations. This is not really that difficult to do; it involves changing some habits. Furthermore, the story also highlights the interconnectedness of all elements of the Earth's living system. Everything is vibrating with everything else, amplifying and perpetuating some frequencies while extinguishing others. Seen from that perspective, individual action is part of a very complex musical score.

The graphic at right is taken from a recent Manpower Employment Outlook Survey, which indicates that the tune being played by the economy may not be all sad. As reported by The Financial Times, 30% of employers around the world are finding it very difficult to fill open positions in skilled manual trades, sales, technical work, and engineering, among others. No better case could be made for a focus on designing life sustaining work environments than this study's conclusion that "organizations need to identify the values, character and style that sets them apart and create an emotional connection between employer and employee...that make people love working there and bring them fulfillment."

It should not be too surprising to find that financial services, the industry at the heart of our worldwide recession, is one of the least life sustaining work environments around, especially for women. As reported in The New York Times, research on Harvard College alumni women by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, found that careers in finance, with their 70 hour work weeks, are uniquely difficult for those trying to combine work and family. And, it's not only the long hours that are giving Finance a questionable reputation with women, it's a bottom-line pocket book issue. Harvard grads working in Medicine who took off a year and a half (to have a child, for example) earned 16% less than co-workers who had not done so during the same time period. But, those who earned MBAs and went into Finance suffered a much steeper 41% decline in earnings as compared to peers.

An ironic structural ingredient of this story is that students of employment dynamics hypothesize that many talented women have been lost to the sciences and mathematics in order to pursue high paying careers in Finance, only to be penalized financially for their gender and to find themselves in an industry that continues to be dominated by men in large part because women must step out of work at least temporarily to have children. So, an industry whose primary innovation in recent years has been credit default swaps has benefited from the involvement of talented women who might have made more dramatic social and technological contributions through fields that would have treated them better as the members of a biological class. Hmmm. This seems worth considering not only in terms of individual career choice but also from the perspective of Finance organizations that would like to start doing a better job of supporting women in their workforce.

Another recent study, also reported in The Times, indicate that women are pulling even with men in compensation in the sciences, but are still underrepresented in applicant pools creating "a puzzle that offers an opportunity for further research." Maybe it's because the really bright women under study were thronging to Finance during the years of the analysis?! (Parenthetically, this is the sort of comment that is somewhat maddening to the reader of this
newspaper. Two stories carried within three days of each
other that are obviously related don't get connected by the reporters working for the same institution. No wonder the price of the Times as a company has fallen by something like 90% in the last five years!)

Turns out that some of these science jobs can be absolutely
fantastic! Take the pursuit of fusion in occurring at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore CA. The objective of this mammoth project is to use lasers to create a "tiny star" in which hydrogen atoms will be fused into helium under heat conditions hotter than the temperatures found at the core of an actual sun.

The intent of the project is extraordinarily exciting in that, according to its advocates, it holds the potential of releasing thermonuclear energy safely and allowing radically new types of non-polluting power plants to come into existence. According to NIF's director, Dr. Ed Moses, "if fusion energy works, you'll have a limitless supply of carbon-free energy that's not geopolitically sensitive."
However, it is the scope of the work environment dynamics that is particularly of interest to Art of the Future. First conceived in 1972, the NIF is now a 24/7 facility that has involved 10,000 workers and contractors over the last twelve years to arrive at the point where there will be an initial ignition soon of lasers (They hope!) that will be fired for the next 30 years. To design a work environment that will successfully maintain the continuity of the project seems to be a truly daunting task. For example, right now, the US taxpayer is funding the operation of the project to the tune of $140M/year. What happens if there are snafus that delay the project (further) and Congress starts demanding a quicker payoff? What will the organization's strategy be in that eventuality? How will the project be handed off from Moses to whomever comes next as its Director? What will happen to the NIF's organizational culture in a post-Moses era? How will be effective in recruiting key talent from around the world to work on this project if work visa restrictions continue to be tightened? What sort of requirements will the talented members of this workforce make on the NIF if progress there is slow but rapid in competing energy generation industries?

To achieve its ambitions, the NIF not only has to do more than get the science right; it has to build and maintain a work environment where the scientists will do their best work over a very long period of time filled with many prospective uncertainties. This can happen organically by just bringing talented and dedicated people together and allowing them to evolve; and it can happen consciously by asking that same set of people to be involved with the design of a work environment that will foster their achievements.

These seemingly disparate stories are actually not that far removed from each other: If more women were in the scientific workforce there might well be a more rapid pace of developments that would protect natural habitats, such as those of a rain forest, that are in many ways a womb for life on earth. And, the good news is that there seem to be a number of forces in play that will bring that outcome about.

Recently Noticed News

2009-05-23T13:03:00.018-05:00

Like a lot of people, I am a regular reader of The New York Times. In fact, I break out in a rash when I don't get to read it on a daily basis. I love the on-line site which has innumerable features, but I am an abiding fan of the print version as well. I like being able to underline information as I read it and write in the margins of the paper. I clip photos because I find there to be quality of color that occurs when ink meets newsprint to be, occasionally, quite beautiful.

Of course, it is a time consuming occupation, this Times reading, but it is certainly rich in discovery and information. I wanted to share a few items that have captured my attention.

1. Jonathan Ruach's review of Judge Richard Posner's The Failure of Capitalism is deeply sobering. Posner is a federal judge who has written on a range of topics, including the power low-probability, high impact events (e.g., an asteroid hitting the Earth) in Catastrophe: Risk and Response. Unfortunately, these darned low-probability, high impact things keep happening. (Remember Condaleezza Rice' "Who could imagine that someone would crash an airplane into the World Trade Center?!") In the futures business, we call these sorts of possibilities critical uncertainties or wild cards, depending on how incredibly far out, yet still plausible, they seem.

I felt a little sheepish when Rauch, a guest scholar at Brookings, asserted that the reader "knows that story" when reciting the set of interlocking drivers that have created the current Great Recession/Minor League Depression, since I certainly hadn't seen it put together so succinctly. And, just in case you're as shell shocked and uninformed about the systemic picture as me, here it is: "Cheap money and an inrush of foreign capital fueled a lending boom, which poured credit into the housing market. As prices went up, up,up, even risky mortgages seemed safe and everyone piled in, including banks. Financiers relied on securitization and complicated financial instruments to dilute the attendant risk, but the result was to spread that risk through the financial system, making it impossible to locate. When the housing bubble popped, everyone was holding bad debt, but no one was sure how bad or even how much. With banks suddenly looking undercapitalized, lenders stopped lending and started selling assets to raise cash. The faster everyone ran for the exits, the faster asset prices fell, dragging banks' balance sheets down with them. Credit markets seized up, depressing the economy, causing more mortgage defaults and asset-price deflation, further weakening banks, further paralyzing credit, depressing the economy still more...repeat ad nauseam."

Posner's assertion is that this crisis "came about precisely because intelligent businesses and consumers follow market signals." In other words, the capitalist system, which believes in market driven self-regulation doesn't function in that way at all. In fact, the market of "an interrelated system of financial intermediaries is inherently unstable...[it is] a kind of epileptic, subject to unpredictable, strange seizures." Put a bunch of bankers in a low interest rate environment without a lot of regulation and economic depression will be the product. Ouch! It's not about irresponsible people. People made very rational and responsible choices under these conditions resulting in the fact that the overall world and US economies are going to be screwed for at least a couple of years.

Posner presents us with a very troubling dilemma: On the one hand, conditions of easy money and light regulation ought to be just what's needed to promote innovation in a capitalist economy. You should be able to get that without the credit system seizing up, but that's not what happened. And, to make matters worse, there aren't any easy answers: Socialism, too bureaucratic; Communism, death; Fascism, bad history. If liberal capitalism is the "end of history," I sure hope it doesn't have another heart attack anytime soon.

2. Here's a story that didn't come from The Times but is worth knowing about. The Russians Are Coming (to Facebook)! Art of the Future's principals have been using for the last few months with tremendous pleasure and with positive consequences in terms of making new friends and establishing new professional relationships. Facebook is a creative revelation. It is very easy to post material to one's sign, including video, and there are a virtually infinite number of groups of prospective interest.

Facebook is great fun, and it is also a big business. For example, in 2007 Microsoft announced that it had purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million, giving Facebook a total implied value of around $15 billion at that time. Today, a Russian firm, Digital Sky Technologies, announced that it is seeking to purchase employee owned shares for between $100-150 million. This development strikes me as noteworthy, not only because it's indicative of the dynamic power of globalization--I mean, seriously, Russia, the supposedly re-emerging autocratic society becoming a stakeholder in Facebook, the sine qua non of open boundaries--but also because Russia has been so dismissed by authorities such as Parang Khanna, whose Second World is one of several books postulating the dismemberment of the Russian Federation. Maybe there's more to Russia than Putin and his natural resources strategy. We hope so.

3. Get ready for either a really, really long weekend or complete servitude and irrelevance as The Singularity approaches. The Singularity is a concept coined by science fiction writer, Vernon Vinge, that asserts that supersmart computers will outstrip human intelligence sometime soon. The Big Bang was the original singularity, as far as I know. There was absolutely nothing and then--poof--there was suddenly something from which everything else has unfolded! So, this singularity business is a very big deal. The acceleration of technical innovation has placed us at "the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth." Some futurists, such as James John Bell, lay out the possibility that, beginning somewhere around 2025, everything that humanity has ever imagined may, in fact, be achievable virtually instantaneously via the advances that occurring in technology. The unique and beautiful film, Waking Life (which lays out something like thirty alternative philosophies reviewed and comprehended in the last minutes of a young man's life) includes a presentation of what this sort of hyper-telescopic evolution might look like, i.e., where something is envisioned and can, therefore, be subject to experimentation and experience immediately.

The Singularity is the epitome of what people mean when they say, "This is the stuff of science fiction." However, there is considerable reason to believe that what never seemed possible previously, e.g., the prospect that we could transcend mortality and never have to "work," in the way that we presently conceive of that process, or that we are inventing technologies that will come to rule us (and not necessarily in a nice way; reference: The Matrix), has to be taken increasingly seriously. Even if the human prospect isn't about to be reset in its entirety, it's completely clear that phenomenal change is afoot in technologically assisted expansion of life expectancy, for example.

The point for Art of the Future is that these sorts of considerations are virtually off the radar screen when it comes to typical strategic planning processes. Very real and indescribably huge forces shaping the future are often met with such a sense of powerlessness that they are not included in an organization's strategic conversations. The more that is true, the more the overall direction and meaning of all of the technological innovation that is occurring will be left to the very few people who do actually think about "Big Issues." Therefore, the perspectives enunciated by elites, the Best and the Brightest of whatever generation, will demarcate the terms of the conversation.Often , that is not a good thing. It means millions of intelligent and concerned people and organizations around the world won't be thinking together about where our technologies are taking us. So, if the Singularity (or any of its near relatives) breaks into reality, the highest probability is that most people will be completely paralyzed in shock, fear and awe by its effects. They'll have never thought about it, let alone have discussed its organizational consequences. This is a recipe for a lot of distressed people and broken, useless organizations.

Art of the Future's mission is to support the evolution of life sustaining work environments that support creativity and the ability of organizations to survive and thrive in many different social-economic contexts. We are not necessarily adherents to the Singularity hypothesis, but we definitely believe that organizations that want to build powerfully compelling work environments need to incorporate logically presented, unconventional views into their strategic analyses to do justice to the full scope of possibilities that are shaping what work will be, how it will be done and where it will occur.

Geopolitics and Structuralism

2009-05-16T10:29:00.020-05:00

The US Navy is the key driving force that will determine the destiny of the world over the course of the 21st century. That is the assertion of George Friedman in his current best seller, The Next 100 Years.

A talented structural thinker, Friedman explores the way in which the elements of a situation affect, shape and sometimes even determine the choices we make. His firm, Stratfor, operates within the world of geopolitics, which he describes as: "a method for thinking about the world and forecasting what will happen down the road.

Friedman's point of view ought to be very refreshing to those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about organization and leadership theory. Organizational studies concentrate extensively on the actions of individuals, teams, particular organizations, and, occasionally, industries. Economists talk about an invisible hand, in which the self-interested, short-term activities of people lead to ‘the wealth of nations’ (ala Adam Smith). Here are a few quotes from Friedman explicating his views on Geopolitics:

"Geopolitics applies the concept of the invisible hand to the behavior of nations and other international actors. The pursuit of short-term self-interest by nations and by their leaders work result, if not to the wealth of nations, then at least to predictable behavior and, therefore, to the ability to forecast the shape of the future international system."

"Geopolitics and economics both assume that the players are rational, at least in the sense of knowing their own short-term self-interest. As rational actors, reality provides them with limited choices. It is assumed that, on the whole, people and nations will pursue their self-interest, if not flawlessly, then at least not randomly…in chess you do not have limitless moves. The better you are at chess, the more clearly you see your options, and the fewer moves there actually are.

"For the most part, the act of governance in foreign policy is simply executing the necessary and logical next step. Political leaders know how to be leaders or they wouldn’t have emerged as such. Geopolitics does not take the individual leader very seriously, and more than economics takes the individual businessman too seriously.

"The core of the method I have used in this book has been to look at the constraints placed on individuals and nations, to see how they are generally forced to behave because of these constraints, and then to try to understand the unintended consequences those actions will have

"Geopolitics assumes two things...

First, it assumes that humans organize themselves into units larger than families, and that by doing this, they must engage in politics. It also assumes that humans have natural loyalty to the things they were born into, the people and the places. Loyalty to a tribe, a city, or a nation is natural to people. In our time, national identity matters a great deal. Geopolitics teaches that the relationship between these nations is a vital dimension of human life, and that means that war is ubiquitous.
Second, geopolitics assumes that the character of a nation is determined to a great extent by geography, as is the relationship between nations. That includes the physical characteristics of a location and the effect of a place on individuals and communities. Sparta was a landlocked city and Athens was a maritime empire. Athens was wealthy and cosmopolitan, while Sparta was poor, provincial and very tough. A Spartan was very different from an Athenian in both culture and politics."

Organizational interventionists put great stock in micro theories: change individuals or small units and you’ll alter the dynamics of the situation in some overarching fashion. Concentrate on the workings of the organization as an entity. Sometimes this is true. Apple runs a hell of a lot better under Steve Jobs than it does under anyone else. He mobilizes the company's design masters and the customer analysts in a way that no one else has. However, is it not also the case that someone like Jobs do a much better job of bringing the forces shaping the future more generally, including Friedman’s geopolitics, inside the firm than most others do? Most executives and managers treat the big picture as exogenous, something that “greater minds” should pay attention to, at least in their official personae. But great organizational leaders--we call them Anticipatory Leaders--are not afraid of the big picture; in fact, they recognize how important it is to embrace the full range of forces confronting their organizations.

Friedman's analysis begins with “the permanent: the persistence of the human condition, suspended between heaven and hell….[Therefore,] the 21st century will be like all other centuries. There will be wars, there will be poverty, there will be triumphs and defeats. There will be tragedy and good luck. People will go to work, make money, have children, fall in love, and come to hate. The permanent human condition is not cyclical."

In fact, Friedman's analysis assumes that war will be ubiquitous and inevitable. This is where we part company. We believe that humanity not only has the possibility of resolving powerful conflict through some other method besides war, but we feel that it must. We are of the view that human evolution is seeking to transcend warfare. Optimists and people who hold that there is some sort of progress in humanity away from violence have long held this view. In fact, the people who invented the Tarot have a card that is meant to convey this forward motion, The Wheel of Fortune which shows the ears of the red Hermanubis protruding into a new realm of human consciousness. (Unfortunately, the data indicate that the decline in conflicts around the world, which had characterized the 80's and 90's seems to have plateaued at about 30; so, hold the champagne.)

What Friedman's thoughtful, rational analysis does demonstrate is that those of us who long for a world without war must realize that such a condition is not going to inevitably occur. There is no New Age that will bring this about. In fact, the geopolitical deck is stacked against peace and for war. Can we strategically position our organizations, our societies, ourselves in a way that make peace more rather than less possible? The answer is "Yes!" and achieving it entails a lot of clear analysis and good decision making at every level of human life. The nature of the weapons that humanity has developed makes it unacceptable for the anwer to this question to be "No."

Life Sustaining Work Environments: A Book in Progress

2009-05-14T16:52:00.009-05:00

Anika and Michael are hard at work on their newest publication, a manual devoted to the challenge of creating of work environments that will attract, house, support and retain key talent that organizations can rely upon to lead them forward into whatever future the next twenty years may bring. A life sustaining work environments welcomes the full range of human potential that people can bring to their work knowing that positive human energy promotes economic viability.

We're writing this book because we've both had really excellent working experiences and we've both had and observed many work environments that were deeply unsatisfying. A wide range of factors that contribute to the quality of an organization's life sustaining qualities, including, for example: Are people encouraged to be creative? Do they get to see the effect of the efforts? Does the workplace acknowledge our needs as social animals? Is there a conscious and continuous consideration of the relationship between the organization and the natural environment. Architectural considerations are important, as captured in the compendium of illustrations you can link to on the left.

As we've considered in several previous articles, the quality of the work environment all too frequently falls between the cracks. It's everybody's concern, but usually it's nobody's job. Yet, as we've tried to capture in graphic below, the work environment has powerful strategic implications for all sorts of organizational outcome measures, such as productivity and employee engagement. A lot of people complain about the work environment, but, unlike the weather, it is something that one can actually do a lot about!

Of course, this is an extraordinarily exciting endeavor that is putting us in contact with a great deal of stimulating information, such as this set of videos on IDEO's very innovative workplace or via the brilliant thinking of the scientist and architect, Christopher Alexander, who has written on The Timeless Way of Building in such exquisite terms. (The picture to your right links to an in-depth presentation of Alexander's thinking.)

A particular way of considering alternative futures and articulating strategy is at the heart of this book. We have found that, in general, organizations don't do a very good job of thinking broadly about the environment that they are in and that they, therefore, miss potent driving forces that shape the general political and economic destiny of societies and industries. Not seeing factors that seem completely obvious in hindsight represents a powerful strategic error. The leaders of many organizations and communities spend truckloads of time considering their values and the vision and/or piling through veritable encyclopedias full of spread sheets and charts without having the ability or willingness to look outward at the critical uncertainties that will determine what the profile of the workforce will be and what incentives will appeal to it.

We've developed a three step process for investigating life sustaining work environments through the integration of systems thinking and scenario planning in the service of strategic leadership. We call it Structural Dynamics. The approach is sort of like participatory theater, where the structure of the drama--the movement from pre-production to staging to rehearsal to performance to post-production--is mapped out in some detail, but the actual content of the play itself will be generated by the members of the specific organization working within a particular industry (or set of industries) that is seeking to design a life sustaining work environment. The process is designed to yield discoveries at each step along the way, creating a sort of flow state of new thinking, which as Charlie Keifer and Robin Charbit have discussed, is a constant companion of insight.

We'll be writing more about developments related to our book periodically. So, stay tuned!

Exploring Environmental Futures

2009-05-13T09:59:00.017-05:00

Using Scenarios to Improve
Environmental Decision Making

A 90-Minute Experiential Workshop

We have described this workshop previously, and we continue to be very pleased with its reception and utility. We are pleased to announce that the Society for Organizational Learning will be offering this program to members as part of its Conversations with Global Citizens program on December 10th from 3:15 to 5:30PM. Participation may be available to non-members. Chris Doyon (617-300-9515) at the SoL office if you wish to attend.

Overview: There are multiple, conflicting perspectives on the threat posed by the aggregation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and the strategic implications of climate dynamics remains a hotly debated topic. Instead of imposing any one point of view, this experiential learning approach uses the thoughts, feelings and impressions of a group of participants to explore the implications of four archetypal scenarios for organizational choices and strategy development. It encourages robust conversations regarding the facts associated with greenhouse gases while legitimating a range of differing opinions. Better strategic decisions emerge when a group engages a controversial subject using a process based on mutual respect. This program has been piloted to positive reviews in 2009 at the University of Hawaii’s Research Center for Futures Studies and the Association for Strategic Planning’s national conference.

Elaboration: Despite an enormous body of scientific evidence emphasizes its dire consequences, global warming remains a virtually invisible, low priority issue to the vast majority of people and organizations in the world. Discussions of global warming and climate change often take place among people who already agree with each other. And, as captured in Jared Diamond's of the environmental debates that are raging in Montana and elsewhere, when people don’t agree about ecological matters, their conversations and their actions quickly polarize. What is needed is a method that gets people to listen to each other, consider possibilities and arrive at decisions together.

We believe that it is not necessary for participants to fully embrace the reality of global warming in order to support cleaner, healthier environments and sustainable practices. No one wants to live in a waste dump. And, there is no disagreement that CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere and that temperatures are rising. What these facts mean and how much they should concern us is, however, a source of intense contention.

This workshop uses the impact of the rising level of atmospheric CO2 as a “critical uncertainty” upon which to focus. It is critical because greenhouse gases have tremendous actual and potential impact. While most people accept as fact the rising level of CO2, the impact is uncertain; there is wide spread divergence over what can be done and when to take action.

Using Art of the Future’s Scenario Game Board, participants position themselves according to their beliefs regarding two dimensions of change:

• The speed with which greenhouse gases will exert an impact on human life -- one person may feel that New York City will be under water in the foreseeable future while another might contend that climate change is a complete hoax.

• The nature of the response to these impacts -- paralyzing fear or engaged action?

Divergent perspectives spark the process; they are woven into alternative scenarios for the group’s consideration.

Our own research indicates that these dimensions (gradual vs. abrupt impact and reactive vs. creative response) are fundamental to understanding the images of the future held by people across a wide-range of cultures. The future will always be different than what we expect, and our expectations are frequently way off the mark. However, learning to see and accept a range of possible future conditions is a powerful step forward in the expansion of thought and resulting action.

The dimensions create a two-by-two matrix that provides the basis for four archetypal scenarios crafted by Jim Dator and his colleagues that can be applied to many critical uncertainties. Briefly stated, these scenarios are:

1. Discipline: Making forward movement through mature, disciplined choices.
2. Status Quo: Preserving current or idealized values and life-styles
3. Transformation: Finding a breakthrough pathway to a dramatically improved set of conditions
4. Collapse: A breakdown of social, economic and/or political systems

The participants in this workshop, based on their position along these dimensions, discover that they are aligned with one of these archetypal scenarios. They are then asked to elaborate the conditions of life in that scenario, exchanging information and insights that everyone finds useful, surprising and provocative.

The workshop concludes with the search for robust and contingent strategies. The group arrives at its own conclusions regarding strategies that would be effective in all scenarios (robust) and those that work in one or several (contingent).

Art of the Future offers versions of this stimulating workshop to any organization, institution or community that would like to explore the range of perspectives held on environmental issues. Please contact us via email by writing michael@artofthefuture.com or by phone at 617-335-9776.

Sharing Workplace Approaches Across the Atlantic

2009-01-24T15:38:00.017-05:00

Art of the Future received a visit from the executive team of the VC Business Company located in the Netherlands. They were on a mission to talk directly with thought-leaders in the field of workplace strategy. On a learning expedition organized by principals Carolien de Heer and Michael Kloprogge, VC closed their offices for several days, boarded a plane to New York and drove to Cornell to talk with Professor Franklin Becker, author of Offices at Work: Uncommon Workspace Strategies that Add Value and Improve Performance (2004) and the classic Workplace by Design: Mapping the High-Performance Workscape (with Fritz Steele, 1995). Although Becker has now turned his attention to healthcare, the VC team garnered insights from their discussion. The next day, they again fit their group of seven into a minivan and set out on a 250 mile journey to Art of the Future, located north of Boston. We were pleased to have this opportunity to share our research, experience and perspectives with this thoughtful, energetic and dedicated group.

The VC Business Company is a consulting organization specializing in the optimization of workplaces for corporate and public organizations dealing with changes induced by market dynamics. VC has a workplace concept which focuses on activity-based working; meaning that the types and number of spaces are tailored to the needs of the user. They start with an investigation of the customer needs, utilizing online surveys, interviews, occupation measurements and technical information about the building. Their workplace concept consists of modular blocks that are combined into a lay-out. VC also takes part in strategic discussions regarding the future of the workspaces, the workplace and the use of real estate. They take qualitative aspects into account along with the quantitative, building a business case for the customer, so that they can make a well-reasoned decision.

VC is seeking to strengthen and further think through this workplace concept. Hence, their learning journey to the U.S.. They report that they found their interview with Art of the Future very inspiring, giving them new views on workplace dynamics. We noted that the Art of the Future approach begins further "upstream," working with clients to integrate their strategic context with their workplace plans in order to engage employees and improve productivity, which translates into better customer relations and business performance. Once the client organization has identified the right mix of places, technologies, policies and processes to optimize their workplace solution, Art of the Futures works with a firm such as VC to translate these insights into design solutions.

The team from VC says “It was surely a good idea to share experiences. We also hope that we have more discussions on the various topics that we reviewed...” Lunching together after the interview, we all gained a better understanding of our respective American and Dutch views on culture, politics and society. Following their intensive interviews with Becker and Art of the Future, they took a day or two for sight-seeing in New York City and were soon hard at work back in the Netherlands.

The Structural Dynamics of Patient Safety

2009-01-24T13:49:00.006-05:00

For the last fourteen months, Art of the Future principal, Michael Sales, has been working on a mammoth patient safety initiative at the Massachusetts General Hospital. This program, entitled Engaging Leadership in Patient Safety, is sponsored by the Hospital and by the Donaghue Foundation. It has provided participants with in-depth insight into the structural dynamics underlying hospital systems in relation to patient safety issues. Structural dynamics identifies and connects the driving forces comprising the elements of a system. Intervening one or more of those factors impacts the entire system. Virtually every single feature of a hospital system is related to patient safety, and the importance of this issue is truly enormous. Every year, there are thousands of fatalities and serious injuries that result from preventable lapses in patient safety within hospitals. Unfortunately, hospitals can be very dangerous environments. In addition to the heart-wrenching human costs of patient safety problems, the social costs are very high. Think of skyrocketing malpractice insurance rates and their impact on health care costs.

This research initiative focuses on the role of leadership as a driving force in hospital systems impacting the quality of both clinical and non-clinical group's patient safety performance. The effort has been led by Dr. Sara Singer, a professor of Health Care Management and Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health. Sara's research on the construction of patient safety culture is extensive, involving a national consortium of 135 hospitals prior to her work at MGH. Building on her previous research and the work of others as well, Sara's model for hospital leadership in support of patient safety emphasizes seven interrelated elements:

The unquestionable demonstration that hospital leadership really cares about patient safety.
Hospital leadership displays a welcoming response to the expression of patient safety concerns by any staff member
Leadership acts in a way that encourages the discussion of patient safety
Leadership is skilled at facilitating communication and teamwork about patient safety
Leadership takes visible action directly related to patient safety
Leadership mobilizes the information needed to support patient safety initiatives
Leadership seeks input from relevant stakeholders before and after taking actions related to patient safety.

Singer's hypothesis is that hospitals where leaders focus on these seven factors will become learning systems in which everyone will be active protectors and protagonists of patient safety.

The research project has been testing this thinking by running multiple groups through an intensive training program called Healthcare Adventures based at the Center for Medical Simulation, a collaborative effort of Harvard, MIT and a number of other players. Michael has been one of the chief designers and trainers associated with Healtcare Adventures, along with our close colleague, Jay Vogt of Peoplesworth, Sara, and members of the staff of the Center. In this particular version of Healthcare Adventures, Singer will compare and contrast the performance of these groups on a number of measures with those of others who have not been exposed to the training after the passage of one year and the results will be the subject of a variety of planned reports.

Among the components of the training, the leadership groups going through the training are exposed to an intense teambuilding experience in the form of a simulation that challenges them to act as leaders confronting a complicated patient safety situation. They also spend time reflecting on their own practices as patient safety leaders and planning a significant intervention in support of patient safety that will be monitored and measured over a period of time. All of this is accomplished over the course of a full day of training.

Additionally, each participating group gets a two hour follow up session in the form of a structured Booster Shot that looks in on their successes and learnings since the completion of the one day training and reviews their activities related to their intervention project. The preliminary results of these Booster Shots have been quite encouraging. Not only have the teams made significant progress in their specific patient safety activity, but they have also come out of the follow up training session charged up to function together more effectively as a leadership team. It is striking to see how powerful a brief structured follow up can be to a training session. It is so often the case that a training experience is treated as a "one off" activity that might have resulted in learnings for the day but recedes quickly into the drift of life. Periodic reviews of what was learned and what results were accomplished are very much worth the investment. Many times groups will discover they got a lot more out of a training than they thought they did when they look back upon it through the lens of subsequent action.

The impact of this research project is just beginning to be appreciated. It may become one of those rare, high leverage activities occurring at the right time and in the right institutional context to have far reaching effects on the delivery of health care in hospital settings. If so, it will to a great extent due to the focused attention of the project's champion, Sara Singer, and two well-connected sponsors, Prof. Jeff Cooper, Executive Director of the the Center for Medical Simulation, and Dr. Gregg Myers, MGH's SVP for Quality and Patient Safety. The positive connection of project champion and sponsor is one of the important factors contributing to this effort's success.

What could be more relevant to Art of the Future's focus on Life Sustaining Environments than patient safety in hospitals? Stay tuned for more progress reports!

A Strategic Approach to the Necessary Revolution

2009-01-16T16:28:00.030-05:00

Sustainability and Organizational Strategy

We are writing from Kauai Hawaii. Yes, we know: we are very fortunate to be able to work a warm, blissful environment while our home base, the Boston area, is experiencing a very snowy winter with single digit temperatures. New forms of social, economic and technical realities allow us to continue being productive wherever we are in the world. We are already finding that the change of scene is benefiting our minds, bodies and spirits, allowing us to flower in the development of our thinking and aspirations. As we settle in, we want to discuss some of our current thinking, which we will elaborate upon as we delve into our work here.

Sustainability Drives Strategy

"Sustainability" is a term that is at risk of becoming as meaningless as "natural foods," which now includes products that are way too sweet and fattening. As our colleague, Kim Novick, points out, many organizations today are turning blue in the face "signaling" how green they are without really changing their fundamental beliefs and actions regarding the relationship of human activity to the natural environment. As a species, we are continuing to treat nature as a waste dump and it's getting sicker and sicker. Since we are completely dependent on the natural environment, we are risking failure and self annihilation. We are in an abusive relationship with this Eden called Earth. We continue to propagate an enormous web of denial about the ecological consequences of our actions. We continue to deplete resources that cannot be replenished. We implicitly assume that some other generation with a new technology is going to take care of our mess. In doing so, we are reinforcing the denial.

It is imperative that we truly alter our relationship to our environment by acting in ways that will make it possible for human and natural systems to thrive into the future. That's a definition of sustainability. We can't interfere with the capacity of living systems to regenerate. Doing so invites disaster. The requiem scenario confronts the possibility that the past will not extend into the future and that humans may not continue to populate the planet.

Renowned systems thinker, Peter Senge, and his organizational colleagues in the Society for Organizational Learning's Sustainability Consortium have stepped up to the challenge of sustainability with energetic pragmatism and are dedicated to doing something about it. In the book, The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World, Senge and his co-authors lay out a compelling case for change -- identifying in very specific and devastating terms the degree to which humanity has compromised its environment throughout the Industrial Age. They also report on many promising initiatives around the world, focusing on the role that large corporations like Alcoa, duPont and Coca Cola are playing in bringing about a new relationship between their complex organizations and the ecological context in which all of us are embedded. They go inside the heartminds and the behavioral repertoires of the men and women who have successfully introduced ecologically-oriented systems change in the corporate world. They feel that the Industrial Age is inevitably giving way to a new age in human history. In our opinion, the book glosses over a number of important issues in order to make its point. For example, the authors praise Costco executives for going to prayer meetings with their suppliers in Central America, but their stores continue to be ecologically insensitive and their employees uninspired, reflected in their unwelcoming attitude toward customers. Such criticisms aside, this is an important book because it clearly identifies the necessity to make sustainability a fundamental organizational strategy.

Art of the Future has been working closely with the Association for Strategic Planning to heighten awareness of the importance of sustainability among an international community of practitioners. ASP is dedicated to advancing the profession and practice of strategic planning. Their Annual Conference on February 22-24, 2009 in San Diego is focused on sustainability as a strategic principle for organizational success. Art of the Future has been integrally involved in the design of this program, which includes multiple break out sessions, deep dive workshops, and presentations from CEO's like Neal Schmale of Sempra Energy and Jeff Dunn of Bolthouse Farms who are immersed in the day-to-day choices that turn sustainability into a reality rather than an abstract concept.

We are particularly pleased about the warm reception that Dr. Lisa Shaffer, executive director of University of California at San Diego's Environment and Sustainability Initiative, has extended to conference attendees as a Learning Journey to their campus. Lisa will lead a three hour tour of UCSD's broad range of sustainability initiatives. The University's Vice-Chancellor for Planning, Gary Matthews, will be joining us to discuss why the University has made such large investments in sustainability initiatives.

We invite everyone to join us in participating in this important conference. If you think this might be of interest, click here for more information and registration.

Pondering our Hopes and Aspirations for 2009

2008-12-19T10:43:00.077-05:00

Wow! What a year. Obama's election is a powerful symbolic and concrete reminder of how much there is to be hopeful about even amidst breakdown everywhere we look - social, economic and ecological. The world system is under great stress. Yet, at the same time, this age of discontinuity is also teeming with an infinite range of opportunities, as demonstrated in the New York Times' always intriguing Year of Ideas.

We gave ourselves iPhones for the holidays, but what we really want is to reinforce qualities that will see us through the tough times with peace, joy and love.
This message is a reflection on the values and principles we feel we'll need to face 2009 with confidence.

We thought some of you might find our personal meditations of interest. Whether our reflections intrigue you or not, we certainly do wish you all the best in 2009! It is going to be a fascinating and, quite possibly, a wonderful time.

In Tumultuous Times We Need....

1. Courage:
It seems to us that no quality is more needed and more difficult to possess during rough periods than courage. This familiar image of an unknown hero on his way back from a trip to the grocery who just decided to hold the line against an onslaught of tanks conveys something fundamental about courage: Courage comes down to the ability we have to face dangers of any and all sort at the actual moment we are confronted with making a choice between engagement and fear. In the anticipation of events, we can believe that we will be courageous. Reflecting upon what has already transpired, we can evaluate whether we were courageous or not. But what really counts is our capacity to be present in the moment when an act of bravery of some sort is necessary. We believe that a new era will begin next year, one that will require many of us to "step up" in new, exciting and sometimes uncomfortable ways.

For example, we hope (and believe) that race-based discrimination and segregation is about to change more rapidly than most Caucasians anticipate. Discrimination based on ethnicity, gender and sexual preference will also move rapidly toward extinction. Even a cursory review of the annual reports of the Fortune 1000 demonstrates that the private sector power structure is largely white and male. A dramatic acceleration of integration will mean that towns, suburbia and exurbia in the US will start looking more like Park Slope/Brooklyn, San Francisco and Toronto than it does today. The impact of the enormous talent possessed by populations that have long been excluded from the center of American private and public sector decision-making apparatus is about to burst onto the scene as never before.

What does inclusion have to do with courage? People from starkly different racial and ethnic backgrounds are going to be getting to know each other in neighborhoods and in white collar organizations as never before. Long-standing assumptions, mental models and stereotypes are going to be confronted. It can be very scary to let go of strongly held and long-standing ways of seeing other groups and classes of people. It will take courage to step into the change rather than avoid it.

The shifting of race relations is but one of the many, many tectonic upheavals shaking the status quo in this electric time. Fundamental changes in world economic relations and in nature of consumer choices are other areas that come to mind easily. We're in uncharted territory; we hope that we have the fortitude to let courage guide us.

2. Will Applied to Purpose:

"If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there."

Credited to both Mark Twain and Lewis Caroll

Unfortunately, there are a lot of us who have perfected the ruinous strategy of unconscious impulsiveness at a personal and societal level. Human will is directed toward achieving something, and if that something is in accord with what society and the planet need to discover and learn, over time that will succeeds in the transformation of people and their social systems.

Psychosynthesis was developed by psychologist Roberto Assagioli to explore the possibilities of the human being who could put imagination, intuition, thought, desire, sensation, and feeling together into a will that serves the self in a way that actually moves humanity ahead in some way. In this era, a will that supports the well being of biological diversity is an example of a worthy ambition.

Like millions of human heroes spanning history, Mark Twain is an example of someone whose accomplishments were truly amazing. He had the ability to channel his will in a particular direction, toward a specific focus. Twain and his ilk demonstrate the ability to integrate their energies and aspirations toward goals that comport with a universal "good." That's one of the reasons their contributions live on -- while those who have exerted great power toward selfish ends are remembered primarily as epitomes of evil rather than as contributors to the condition of human beings and their environment.

Has there ever been a more important time than 2009 for people of purpose and good will to come together to sustain the world system? If so, we aren't aware of it. 2009 is the year where a purpose beyond materialism and selfish personal benefits must prevail; a year that demands that we (the writers of this letter) commit to becoming bigger than we have been by bringing impact of our will and desires into sharper focus.

This isn't an easy order. We are set in our ways. We like predictability. But, 2009 is asking us to dig deeper. It says that the world system is in crisis. It says that we turn away from this fact at our collective and personal peril.This year stares people like us -- who take pleasure in our lifestyle -- in the face and says that we must focus our energy and join the effort to save our beautiful blue speck from destruction, despair and disdain. The financial crisis can't be allowed to trump the environmental crisis. These two concurrent global crises must be addressed concurrently taking into account their co-dependent interconnectedness.

3. Hope: At the closing of Kubrick and Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, an infant approaches the Earth in a womb-like bubble, and that must, in fact, be the condition of every birth. Day in and day out, like a Kabbalistic manifesto, from no where comes infinite possibility. A recent conversation with a pessimistic friend reminded that the human record, as reported by authorities such as Jared Diamond, is not encouraging when it comes to long term thinking or self-preservation. Civilizations that once shone brightly disappear leaving only vague markings for archeologists to analyze as a result of their excesses and indulgences. If the "requiem scenario" is fulfilled, maybe that's what is about to happen at a global level. Were that to occur, Jimi Hendrix' bleak vision in one song of there "Ain't no life, nowhere" might be fulfilled. And that would certainly be sad, tragic, disastrous, catastrophic beyond comprehension or description! The Apocalypse may hold an appeal for a lot of people, but we're no fans of it here at Art of the Future.

It is true that a sober analysis of the facts might lead us to conclusion that humanity is a failed experiment. We found a beautiful garden and we have littered it with waste, war, and weaponry. Game over.

But, of course, that is not the way of the Future; it is not the way of Art. The weight of facts do not define destiny. We hope that humanity has the ability to renew, refocus, realize its intention to create a truly glorious set of possibilities. May 2009 be the year in which we, together, create a reality from that hope.

Structural Dynamics Applied to the Credit Crisis

2008-10-14T07:24:00.011-05:00

Thank God that the Nobel Prize for Economics has been awarded to Paul Krugman!

Krugman is a professor at Princeton who won the Nobel for his work on global trade patterns, specifically challenging the classical theory of competitive advantage, which asserts that countries should concentrate on producing something that is distinctively particular to a regions, with facts that seem to demonstrate that trade is dominated by a few countries who all produce somewhat different versions of the same thing and do that well.

That is not, however, why his receipt of the award is being celebrated here. It is his work as a columnist for the New York Times that makes him special to us because he's had so much practice writing for the general public that one can actually understand what he has to say without having to earn another graduate degree! (To emphasize the importance of this point, let us note that we are also currently reading "Causal Layered Analysis: poststructuralism as method" in Metafuture.org, which--while it promises to be an important article--has more challenging words in its title than have ever been spoken to our current American President!)

Krugman's writings in The Times has severe critics, mostly because his work frequently reflect the perspective enunciated by the Democratic Party. However, as noted by his many fans like fellow Nobel laureate, Paul Samuelson, Krugman may be opinionated but, he sure has been right recently. He has been beating the drum to take the economic perils that have been unfolding in the US and worldwide over the course of the last year plus much more seriously than mainstream politicians and policy makers were willing to do. Even today Henry Paulson was describing the step of the "government owning a stake" in US banks, the quasi-nationalization that Krugman has been calling for, as "objectionable to most Americans, me included," but it certainly seems to be one of the steps that is needed to keep America, and the world as a totality, working.

Krugman has the ability to reduce complex conditions to their simplest terms, as he did in the column published on the day that he was awarded his Nobel laureate:

"What is the nature of the crisis? The details can be insanely complex, but the basics are fairly simple. The bursting of the housing bubble has led to large losses for anyone who bought assets backed by mortgage payments; these losses have left many financial institutions with too much debt and too little capital to provide the credit the economy needs; troubled financial institutions have tried to meet their debts and increase their capital by selling assets, but this has driven asset prices down, reducing their capital even further. What can be done to stem the crisis?... The natural thing to do, then — and the solution adopted in many previous financial crises — is to deal with the problem of inadequate financial capital by having governments provide financial institutions with more capital in return for a share of ownership. "

Here's our Structural Dynamic way of capturing that description:

This is a troubling time when the policy makers who have been responsible for steering the American economy and, therefore, exerting tremendous influence over the world economy have been profoundly wrong. If Krugman doesn't claim to understand what the precise solutions are, there is certainly no way that we do either. But, we certainly seem to need more transparency and conversation about options and less screaming by people who claim to know something that they do not. It is difficult to reflect and analyze when worry demands action. Yet, wisdom requires us to understand what has happened to us before we rush off with too many fixes.

Me, I hate this way of thinking. I'm losing money every day. Like a bad dream, I want it to be over. But, unfortunately, I guess I get to be one of the grownups in this situation, just like Krugman. This is an era in which we all have a chance to be grownups, people who resist the blandishments and anxieties of the moment to make good choices for the long term.

The power of distal stimuli

2008-09-01T10:38:00.004-05:00

Freakonomics is the study of how powerful causes have distant effects. Henry Kissinger once asked Zhou Enlai, premier of People's Republic of China, to assess the consequences of the French Revolution. His response: "It's too soon to say." That's what we mean by the art of considering and discovering distal stimuli!

Using massive data sets, Levitt and Dubner methodically dismantle the "conventional wisdom" that the economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, disdained: "We associate truth with convenience...with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being." Real understanding of economic and social behavior entails attention to complexity. Comprehending the true character of events "is mentally tiring. Therefore, we adhere, as though to a raft, to those ideas that represent our understanding," rather than to those that might lead us to richer insight.

Because Structural Dynamics is a way of seeing connections that might not be intuitively obvious, it is closely aligned with the mode of thought presented in Freakonomics. This way of thinking can lead to radical and controversial conclusions. And, nowhere is this more evident in Levitt and Dubner's work than in their analysis of the sharp decline in crime rates that began in the 1990s.

Ranking their frequency of mention in article in the US' ten largest circulation newspapers from 1991-2001, eight crime-drop explanations are investigated:

Innovative policing strategies
Increased reliance on prisons
Changes in crack and other drug markets
Aging of the population
Tougher gun control laws
Strong economy
Increased number of police
All other explanations (e.g., gun buybacks)

Their conclusions: While a few of these factors contributed to the drop in crime (e.g., increased incarceration sentences for violent crime), none come close to explaining the extent of the decline.

Instead--and here's where it gets controversial--the authors found a direct and powerful connection between the decline in unwanted babies being born and the drop in crime that occurred approximately eighteen years later. "A woman who does not want to have a child, usually has a good reason. She may be unmarried or in a bad marriage. She may consider herself too poor to raise a child. She may think her life is too unstable or unhappy or she may think that her drinking or drug use will damage the baby's health. She may believe that she is too young or hasn't received enough education....Two factor--are among the strongest predictors that a child will have a criminal future. Growing up in a single-parent home roughly doubles a child's propensity to commit crime." Thus, in 1973 when the US Supreme Court said that Norma McCorvey (aka Jane Doe), a poor, alcoholic drug-user who had already given up two children for adoption at age 21 had privacy rights that included the right to an abortion, the pool of those who were likely to commit crimes against others became much smaller. (It should be noted that McCorvey renounced abortion in 1994.)

Even though Levitt and Dubner take great pains to not state an opinion on the morality of abortion, the very fact that they demonstrated a direct link between the right to an abortion and a precipitous drop in crime has made their book both reviled and celebrated.

LIke manyexploration of systemic dynamics Freakonomics is an presents the narrative without presenting the picture. (See our blog entry on Microtrends for a more detailed example of the negative consequences of this approach to information.) However, it makes a potent case for the value of structural dynamics. Understanding anamolies--phenomena that aren't easily explained--will usually take us far past the first, the second or even the third answer, the conventional wisdom, into an analysis of the system of interrelated forces that tweaked one way or the other produce very different outcomes.

All-Hands-On-Strategy: Strong Relationships Make for Better Decisions

2008-09-01T09:18:00.023-05:00

Anika and Michael are on the board of directors of the Boston Chapter of the Association for Strategic, with Anika serving as President and Michael as Program Chair. We are very pleased that our colleague and friend, Diana Smith, will be addressing the September 10th meeting of the ASP at the new InterConitnental Hotel in downtown Boston. Diana's talk, "When Good Strategies Go Bad: Strategically Critical Relationships Are Usually At Fault" will present ideas developed in her current top selling book, Divide or Conquer: How Great Teams Turn Conflict into Strength.

A $50 registration fee includes a networking reception with hearty appetizers and wine/beer as well as the presentation. So, this occasion is definitely a great reason to spend the evening in the heart of Boston. [Diana's talk will occur in conjunction with a conference on measurement in organizations hosted by the Palladium Group: contact us for special pricing for the conference.]

Diana and Michael were both students of Chris Argyris, with whom Diana and Bob Putnam authored the important book, Action Science. Like Diana, Art of the Future's perspective emphasizes the relationship between cognition, emotion, and language in the behavior of individuals and groups. Our particular concentration is on the way in which decision-makers consider and make choices about organizational futures.

Divide or Conquer offers a range of concepts and tools the "reflective practitioner" (a term coined by Don Schön, another mentor to Michael, Diana and many others and a close collaborator of Argyris') can use to consider his or her or their own practice in strategically critical relationships or in any interaction that is important. We all hold "frames" about others, i.e., interpretations of who others are, what they mean, what they want, how they are feel about us, what we can expect of them. As a reviewer of Diana's book notes, "Frames turn patterns of interaction into more enduring relationship structures without the people involved even realizing it."

The notion that "only senior managers can or should be involved in strategic planning" is a common frame that limits organizational creativity and resilience. As our article, "Futures Thinking by Middle Managers" points out, this assumption is tied to other unseen and/or undiscussible dynamics of organizational life. For example, left on automatic, organizational forces will push middle managers away from one another. They become weaker partners in strategic thinking because their relationships don't incline them to share information, insight and wisdom. Encouraging middle managers to develop closer, authentic connections can bring a fuller spectrum of organizational talent to the challenge of making good choices. Making the assumed, but unconsidered, frames that shape the realities of organizational life explicit can yield transformative results.

Diana's work demonstrates tremendous power comes from designing and constructing an "all-hands-on-deck" learning system that pays attention to the quality of key organizational relationships. It may take time for the payoff to reverberate throughout the system, but the positive consequences are long-lasting. Our own work indicates that contributions to organizational learning about the possibilities of the future exist at all organizational levels and leadership with foresight will commit to building a relationship system that releases understanding and wisdom wherever it resides.

Applying Structural Dynamics to Microtrends

2008-07-22T12:37:00.011-05:00

Mark Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne's Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes is a fast paced, breezy read on 75 trends in 15 categories. Before, during and after he got hired and fired as Hillary Clinton's chief strategist during her presidential run, Penn ran a polling firm that focuses on emerging forces shaping American and other cultures. Microtrends are under the radar screen and typically involve something like 1% of the overall population. Fathering, for example, shows up several times as an emerging trend. There are a lot of "old new dads" these day (50+ y.o. men having babies) but politicos, to their peril, are ignoring fathers in general by spending all their time with soccer moms (a term invented by Penn) and "ardent amazons," i.e., the growing number of women going into jobs that demand physical strength, such as the military, fire-fighting, plumbing, sports and building. Penn's thesis is that the dynamism of these (and other) multiple microtrends is both positive and negative socially. Positive because they demonstrate the boundless energy and inventiveness of humanity; worrisome because they indicate that we are radically fragmented, moving in a multitude of directions simultaneously.

Our point here is not to add another concise distillation to this already concise and distilled book. Rather, it is to point out the assistance that Structural Dynamic can bring to even as crisp a presentation as Penn's. Structural Dynamics seeks to identify the persistent, core elements of a system and then to use that analysis to generate a range of alternative futures. Penn does an excellent job of laying out these ingredients for the microtrends he examines, but he does not do so in a graphic way that allows the reader to hold his entire argument in mind, nor does he make much an attempt to demonstrate the linkages between the trends he studies.

In every section, Penn pulls together data from a number of sources to support his assertion that a relatively unnoticed group of people are exhibiting a behavior that has aggregated into a social phenomenon. Lets take "Pet Parents" as an example. More and more people in childless households are giving extremely VIP treatment to their pets. The first class jogging pet stoller at right is available "just for pets" for a mere $169.99 (including shipping) is one of a myriad of goods and services (think health insurance) for pets that were basically unheard of five years ago.

So far, so good: Something's happening here/what it is ain't exactly clear, but then the situation comes into shaper relief via the microtrend analysis. That analysis then opens up a raft of possibilities that one might not have thought of previously, e.g., the burgeoning employment opportunities emerging in all things pet.

However, the linkages between the elements of the pet parent system aren't really apparent with Penn's approach and that's where Structural Dynamics comes in.

Here's a picture of the factors that Microtrends offers in its thinking about pet parents, modified by the addition of one element that creates a systemic look at the phenomenon.

Many factors are creating childless households, such as increased
longevity and the delaying of child birth by women into later years. Women in particular seem to be pampering pets in droves prior to giving birth to children and couples without children are likely to be pet owners. Increasingly, people who either have been parents and want to continue to have an experience like that or people who have never been parents of children but want to pamper somebody are going all out for their pets, as Penn demonstrates in a way that was mindboggling to us. Not surprisingly, all of the advanced goods and services being purchased for pets is causing them to live longer, providing humans with the proven healing power of pets for a longer period of time, which is another factor that is driving human longevity. (This was the force we added to Penn's analysis.) The more that pets are part of the family, and we mean really part of the family, the more they'll be coming to work, and that has its own set of dynamics. Of course, there are critics of the so-called pampered pet phenomenon, including animal rights activists who think that the whole concept of "owning" an animal should be prohibited or at least overseen by various watchdog agencies, no pun intended. The "o" associated with the arrow between animal rights activists and pet parents means that the more powerful pet rights advocates become, the more strictures pet parents are likely to face.

This comment about the power of pet rights advocates allows us to make a summary point: just as in every other system, each element affects the whole. If pet insurance rates fall drastically because life insurance companies become convinced that something furry or reptilian or winged is going to help people live longer under all sorts of conditions and, therefore, make the pet owners better insurance risks, one could expect more spikes in pet ownership and pet parenting. If, on the other hand, pets become associated with law suits and higher and higher veterinarian malpractice insurance rates leading vets to perform fewer and fewer procedures intended to extend the lives of animals and charging higher and higher rates for whatever they do in fact do, pet pampering is likely to suffer.

Microtrends is a great read, and we would like it to have gone farther. A systems analysis, such as the one we've developed here, would have made it more powerful. By the time the reader gets to the end of each section, he or she is likely to have a hard time remembering all of the ingredients of the argument that have been presented. A Structural Dynamic approach pulls the information together.

Penn worries about social fragmentation. Graphically illustrating the linkages between the various trends identified and pointing out the prospects for high leverage interventions that would touch the many interacting components identified in these 75 stories might have pointed toward transcendent, macro factors that may reduce the the tensions that arise when individuals and small groups pursue their specific interests. If interest groups are only passionately disintegrated, a "tragedy of the commons" with all of its attendant hostility and conflict is virtually guaranteed.

The expansion of the rights, power and individuation of women, which is a big part of the Pet Parent picture, seems to be showing up across cultures, nation states, and economic strata. Women may be microtrending in all sorts of directions, but they are macrotrending toward having a greater influence in all matters. Perhaps a whole raft of microtrends are differing manifestations of this one larger phenomenon.

At the moment, the book's celebration of microtrends seems to only be adding to the shattering of social cohesiveness it laments.

New Directions in Work Strategy

2008-07-10T13:50:00.007-05:00

Increasingly--and perhaps irrevocably--questions regarding the environment are moving to the fore of strategic thinking.

I was recently on a conference call planning for a conference which will have "sustainability" theme. The call organizer seemed a bit uncertain about introducing this word, as though it were not quite kosher for a conference that will attract a lot of people in suits to have sustainability as a core consideration. She said, "I don't mean sustainability in the environmental sense only. Every organization has to be sustainable. It's not like this is going to be a Greenpeace conference. But, environmental sustainability is certainly part of the equation." But, as the conversation unfolded, it became clear that a lot of us who are strategists see the relationship of organizational futures to ecology as very central to organizational viability. You can't really have an organization if you can't find raw materials because they are in short supply, if your people can't get to work because they can't afford gasoline, and if your customers can't go out to buy your goods and services because the rate of increase in asthma is 75% and a goodly amount of that is attributable to environmental pollutants.

The people and organizations that become part of the solution to these terrible environmental conditions we're facing will become the survivors and the heroes of the future; those who are in denial or locked into benefits of the old way of doing things are coming to the end of their tether.

The situation is both extraordinarily dire and incredibly rich with opportunity.

Lets take consumer plastic trash (pictured above) as an example. According to Business Week, "almost 30 million tons of solid plastic waste is dumped at sea or buried in landfills [per year!]." Only a very small percentage of the plastic that could be recycled is. The result: a vast amount of plastic--both recyclable and indestructible--finds its way to a vortex in a remote area of the pacific ocean in the region of Hawaii. There a mass of floating plastic, sort of like The Blob from the 50s, twice the size of the State of Texas congealing and threatening the world ecosystem.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is just one of innumerable ecological nightmares that are becoming increasingly difficult to sweep under the rug. If we don't address them, we can forget about it, we're going to be toast. Bring up that doleful music playing for the requiem scenario. I don't know if it will happen before my lifetime is over or in the next 100 years, but the human species can't continue to deny the conditions it has created for itself and for the entire planet with impunity.

The good news is that there are thousands and thousands of efforts underway to ameliorate the current crisis and improve matters. Some, like bicycles, are no-brainers. Portland Oregon has become the United State's premier bicycling city with 6% of the commuters using the non-polluting two wheelers. Washington DC is following the lead of Paris in bike-sharing, and other American cities are close on its heels.

One four letter word is definitely implicated in the bicycle story: JOBS. While, unfortunately, it appears to be the case that bicycle ridership is down China it is still huge there, with something like 450M riders, and it is clearly a growing phenomenon in the traditionally developed world. So, every organization would be wise to begin to take its biking employees and customers more seriously.

Other approaches to reducing the environmental impact of our present economy , such as bio-plastics, are more controversial. Like all genetically engineered products, bio-plastics, which can be used as plastics but bio-degrade as plants, critics suspect it of being unnatural or injurious to a more organic form of agriculture. However, whatever the concerns, it seems highly likely that some firms like Metabolix, with its Mirel that might replace millions of tons of plastic per year, are bound for an enormous success in the decade ahead. And, the people who are really doing the research for their organizations on what will make an environmental difference and what won't, are also bound for some big successes.

The curtain is closing on the era where we couldn't pay attention to the world we're in, the world we're creating. Like Sam Cooke said, "a change gonna come." The gaia is coming to the place that it's always been, center stage.

Can Success Get In Your Way?

2008-06-10T17:06:00.038-05:00

Promoting life sustaining work environments [LSE] is one of Art of the Future’s key commitments and organizing principles. We believe people should live and work in contexts that lead them to feel alive, creative, focused, energized, reflective, at ease, stimulated, loose, natural, engaged...sustained. To that end, we are constantly scanning information and talking with clients and colleagues about their strategies for attracting and holding the creative talent that differentiates organizations from one another. What follows is a distillation of ideas from our conversation with Warren Ashton, Group Marketing Manager/Staffing Marketing at Microsoft Corporation. Ashton is responsible for crafting Microsoft’s communications programs to recruit prospective tech hires, and he has made a study of branding the company's message in a way that will be attractive to this highly sought-after workforce. We have put Ashton’s precepts into a systemic framework and added other, sometimes contra-veiling, forces that are logically related to Ashton's thinking to present an intriguing picture of how a strategic initiative might be affected by unintended and unnoticed consequences. We use data from a conversation like this one or a published source to analyze driving forces suggested by the data to develop an awareness that opens up new possibilities for strategic thinking and action.

Ashton’s team identified the key factors that make Microsoft one of the best places to work in the United States and throughout the world (according to the Best Places to Work Institute):

“Compensation and salary are the primary drivers. But it isn't all about money. We look at our own strengths and weaknesses, where are we strong and weak. Three things pop out where we are very strong or it is very strategic:

Working with high quality people - “I want to work with people who are on a par with me.”
Career upside - “I can get promoted, make more money, grow my technical skills.”
Big impact on team, company, and, sometimes, society - “I’m looking to work on big projects with volume impact - something that will affect millions of people; impacting the future by coming up with new ideas.”

Ashton also pointed to two “proof points” in the organization’s ability to hire and retain the people critical to their success, i.e., factors that may not be the most salient to a decision but reinforce an inclination and “close the deal.”

Reputation: “Everyone is aware of us. Now we're seen as sort of an old school company. We were missing the reputation of being a place with real people. People didn't know we had a personality. Where we did have a personality, it was a negative one. We needed to get the story out that we are a company of real people. When people meet us for the first time, so many of us have the experience that people tell us that they are pleasantly surprised.”

Workplace environment: “Most people in our business get personalized private offices for employees. We're mixing those things up. Some people would really like to work on open floors or environments with petitions that can be opened and closed. We're creating flexible environments. The Vice President running a facility can get the sort of space they want; kitchens, couches and chairs - customizing the environment for a particular team but being able to reconfigure it to something else after a period of time.” Microsoft’s Copenhagen facility is an experimental design organized around many small teams with a project incubation focus. “It is a vibrant, compelling, teaming environment. There is nothing there that looks like cubicle hell.”

Let’s take a look at how these factors interact with each other. [The factors that Ashton focused on will be highlighted in dark yellow in the following diagrams.]

1. Working with high quality people
Ashton’s analysis begins with a simple set of reinforcing elements: the stronger the reputation of the company, the easier it is to hire and retain top-notch creative talent. That creative talent bolsters the organization's reputation which, in turn, enhances the organization’s ability to hire the best talent. This is a virtuous cycle or reinforcing loop. 2. Career upside
The ability to hire & retain leads to a larger workforce. The quality of those people will improve the product and process quality, innovation and speed to market. This will have an impact on business results and grow revenues. As the company expands, it will find it necessary to introduce more levels of specialization, with differentiated functions and roles. As the number of levels in the organization increases, the likelihood of being at the top of the hierarchy decreases; even star performers are apt to experience the number of levels between themselves and the CEO increasing. This can be seen as improving opportunities for promotion, which adds to the attractiveness of the job; and, thus, positively impacting the organization’s ability to hire and retain talent. You can follow this logic in the diagram below. The result is another reinforcing loop. However, there are at least two other dynamics occurring [shown in blue in the diagram] that would make a job offer to a complex organization like Microsoft less attractive and leave current employee open to competitive propositions:

While it is true that a large, prosperous organization is able to offer training to its employees, increased specialization diminishes the diversity of tasks and, thus, reducing learning opportunities on the job. In a smaller company, there is a lot more ambiguity about the specifics of the job and all hands are encouraged to “pitch-in” as needed, increasing learning opportunities on the job.

As specialization increases, we’ve seen that positional level in the organization is likely to decrease, negatively affecting salary, stock options and other compensation. In a smaller, fast-growing company, the recruit has an opportunity to get in on the ground floor. So bright, young recruits will see real trade-offs -- both in terms of learning and compensation upside -- between joining the large firm vs a smaller one. [Of course, as the reader may now be thinking, “What about risk?” While a hot, young company might not be around in twelve months, there is no assurance, in today’s business environment, that your job won’t be eliminated in the next corporate reorganization. This is another one of the trade-offs entailed in the employment choice.]

3. Big Impact - Larger company, larger projects, more opportunity to have an impact; that's a natural sequence of consequences. But, if specialization and functional differentiation make you a relatively small part of a large team with relatively limited responsibilities, your individual contribution and the recognition it receives may well be limited. [Note the blue causal link in the diagram.] The individual’s position in the hierarchy mitigates his/her potential impact. The organization may even blame the individual for not meeting expectations without seeing how the system drivers affect personal results.

Reputation and Workplace Environment:
At any size or stage in its life-cycle, positive business results enable an organization to invest in its people - both in terms of a terrific work environment and the best tools for the job. These enhance productivity as well as the organization’s reputation as a desirable place to work.Other factor’s impacting a organization’s reputation include the quality of its people [as we’ve shown], and its products and processes. These things are also independent of organizational size or maturity.

Macro/environmental forces:
Ashton also pointed toward one more factor that will impact all organizations competing for technical talent - "Fewer and fewer students are studying computer science in college. The U.S. is facing a perfect storm." Add to this the increased number of retiring baby boomers in the years ahead and the number of companies vying for the best and the brightest. Large companies like Microsoft do have the advantage of being able to locate in multiple countries around the world to take advantage of low cost, high skilled labor markets; countries like China, India, Russia and Israel where technical degrees make up a relatively high percentage of recent college graduates.

Above we have linked all of the factors we've been discussing. Of course, this doesn't present a full picture of the structural ingredients contributing to Microsoft's ability to hire and retain key talent. We couldn't define that on the basis of one conversation. But, we do believe that this type of systemic thinking has a sort of holographic quality, in that any one data point like our interaction with Warren contains elements of the whole, if you know how to look at the overall situation holistically.

Skillful designers of recruitment strategy like Ashton understand the importance of whole systems thinking: “During our period of hyper growth we didn't have problem hiring the best and the brightest. Microsoft never had an employment story that defined the core anchor of our message to the market place. It was very ad hoc. But as we became more mature, we … had to come up with the marketing plan and a value proposition [that would appeal to those] in the technical field...that distinguishes us and would lead people to join us, especially since a lot of people think of us as 'The Evil Empire!' [laughs].”

To sum up, Microsoft is obviously pursuing a powerful and well-considered strategy to hire and retain skilled technologists. However, a systemic analysis reveals ways that its competitors can turn the company’s own branding approach against this dominant player, perhaps in a manner that is not being anticipated. Rivals may be able to make the case that Microsoft is a Goliath that is less able to utilize creative talent to its full potential and less apt to recognize and reward them for outstanding performance than a smaller, more nimble David. If so, smaller firms win the battle for the star performers and the next Bill Gates won't be working in Redmond. On the other hand, if Microsoft can produce example-after-example of employees who have made a big difference -- in terms that are truly meaningful to the high talent prospect -- it will demonstrate that they have a better story to tell to key players who can keep it performing at the top of its game.

The Fallibility of Inevitability

2008-06-10T10:04:00.017-05:00

Big Brown was paraded in front of the crowd at Belmont not once, not twice, but three times as part of the pageantry demonstrating the complete dominance of this unbeaten three year old. In the Derby and the Preakness, this horse made his competitors look like they were walking, even though they were running with all their might. This was the horse that made winning look so easy, the one whose capture of the Triple Crown at Belmont was so inevitable that his trainer guaranteed it as a "foregone conclusion." He was also the horse whose thoroughbred pedigree seemed to disappear while his jockey was still riding him; he seemed to age irreparably in one quarter of a mile; he was Errol Flynn at 50.

I was there to witness it, I was one of the throng applauding Napoleon launching his attack on Russia, watching the Yankees take the field against the Red Sox at Fenway for Game 4 in 2004, and I was that good looking guy wearing a superior smile as I squired a beautiful date past a wonkish Roy Orbison as he whistled a forlorn version of "Pretty Woman."

Yes, I was full-throatedly with the conquerors when Big Brown came into the home stretch in the third position a little on the outside just like he had in the Derby and the Preakness just before moving out to an unbeatable lead. Thousands and thousands of us were hailing his supremacy. But, we were wrong.

It was quite an experience being part of a mob that was so sure that it was right about something only to see the longest of all the long shots, Da’ Tara, pay $79 for every $2 bet on him to win. It was a lesson in how little we know, a reminder of the power of futuring.

Futuring is the learning process of considering the logical and improbable possibilities present in every moment. Da' Tara's triumph is the stuff of magic; a reminder of how much there is to fear. It is exactly the thing that is never supposed to happen, and, yet, it so frequently does. It is the tragic comedy of Condeleeza Rice saying "Who could imagine that someone would use an airplane as a weapon" only to find herself equally shocked that elections in the Gaza Strip would bring the fanatics of Hamas to power: "Nobody saw it coming."

Deep futuring through methods such as Structural Dynamics frequently demonstrates that somebody did, in fact, see it coming. Katrina, forecast by many. Resolution of the energy crisis, just around the corner according to the modern day Edison, Stan Ovshinsky. Dentistry upstaged by a mouthwash? Hey, it could happen.

Over and over again through such publications as his Book of the Damned, reality critics like Charles Fort have provided data to prove that the absolutely and often ridiculously impossible is, in fact, an everyday occurrence. Got a problem with today; follow Annie's advice and just hang on till tomorrow.

As implied by the deeply thoughful (and very wealthy!) Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Black Swan, the inevitability of the highly improbable has tremendous ramifications for leadership, especially in this era where more and more drivers of change and stability are matrixed to each other. Randomness is to be expected. Chance is certain.

The psychological consequences of such an era are absolutely monumental. It is natural to search for meaning and certainty, but they are likely to be ephemeral, especially the latter.

A leader and a leading organization or social unit brings a degree of unity to this cacophony of stimuli. He, she, they or it impart a sense of meaningful journey to what might otherwise be no more than a horrific stampede of noise. Just like Gregory Hines in Tap, a leader discovers the combinations where there aren't any.

So, Da' Tara, this one is for you. May every one hit wonder be as beautiful. Thanks for proving, yet once again, that inevitability ain't all that it's cracked up to be.

Beduoins to the Rescue

2008-03-19T19:30:00.031-05:00

On the occasion of Starbucks annual meeting, it seems appropriate to consider the state of the wireless office. Anyone who is a Starbucks shareholder knows that the price of the company's stock has declined by 50% in the last year.

Starbuck's experience economy scene is quite pleasant, but the company must be doing a lot of things wrong. And one of them--for sure--is the creation of any sort of barrier to wi-fi access by patrons. Until recently, anyone wanting to hop on the web at Starbucks had to pay $9.99/day for the privilege to T-Mobile.

While this bar seems to be dropping slowly (with an assist from the iPhone/ATT alliance), it is emblematic of the sorts of unnecessary transaction costs that seem to rear their ugly heads so regularly in the US economy--an economic system which, by the way, needs to truly encourage the members of the industrious creative class who are its best bets against the devastating Depression that lurks just beyond today's headlines. It is both an oversimplification and an accurate observation to assert that the short sighted interests of the power holders of the current status quo are obstructing the work of the world's problem solvers. The absence of national (let alone international) free wi-fi is bad enough. The fact that it is not even an issue in the current presidential campaign, where it is once again supposed to be about the economy, is outrageous.

The creative class is always "fired up and ready to go." As Arnold Toynbee Study of History argued so powerfully, over and over again, civilizations depend on the ability of a creative minority to face and master the great challenges of the day. Ours is undeniably an era of great turbulence and complexity, putting not only American civilization on the line, but also challenging the West as a totality and potentially world as well. (One nuclear exchange can ruin your whole day.) So, to Starbucks or any other entity that is putting plaque into the circulatory system of communication by inventive, productive people Art of the Future say: Get out of the way! You're holding up progress, and we really need it!

Okay, do we all feel better now that the diatribe is over, because it is becoming easier and easier for anyone to become a 21st Century Bedouin, who can set up shop anywhere. Nomadic people capture the imagination of everyone with a spirit of adventure. Increasingly, our tools of production allow us to have a hydroponic economics, where we don't have to be planted in a particular place to be gainfully employed. New tools are being devised daily to support a humanity with ever-greater freedom of movement.

Daniel Casciato's recent review of the emerging wi-fi ecology provides a helicopter flyover of the state of the new nomad's art. In addition to having a device that provides easy access, e.g., a MacBook with a built in AirPort that seeks out available networks or an iPhone, knowing where to find access is obviously important. (This reflection could lead back to the diatribe against Starbucks and society in general; so lets be careful.) Unfortunately, having some clue in advance of arriving at a new destination regarding where access can be found and how much it is going to cost is a problem that R&D still seems to be working on. Each of the options we looked at is kludgey. For example, TechNewsWorld's WiFi Hotspot Locator has a somewhat cumbersome interface and may cost money and Google's WiFi net map, didn't seem to recognize any hot spots outside of New York City.

However, assuming that you're linked in, Casciato mentions a number of applications that help the new Bedouins get the job done, such as:

Amazon Web Services, such as Digital Chalk which gives anyone the ability to create on-line video-based training services. Over 300,000 developers use Amazon's web services to create computer based products, sometimes within minutes.

Portable Apps, which allows the user to carry multiple applications on a USB jump drive that can be plugged into any (Windows-based) PC and used without leaving any personal data behind: "Your computer, without the computure™." Free; no advertising. (Pretty cool, huh!)

Spinvox, which appears to be a British voice recognition service that enables the user to convert voice mail to several forms of text, including emails. (How many times have I had to call myself from the road with an idea or remember to go back over an audio tape to find a key note!? Grrrrr.)

Vonage V-Phones mean no roaming charges and can be an especially powerful application for the internationalist. (This is noted by one who recently paid something like $2.00/minute to make a call just outside of the Verizon wireless network to which he is tethered. Grrrrr again.)

An IquaSun solar powered bluetooth headset that, essentially, makes sure that the conversation never ends just because you're running out of juice. (I'm not sure of the whole kissing-while-getting-your-voicemail-via-a-solar-power-headset approach to marketing as per Iqua's website, but, hey, there's no accounting for taste, I suppose.)

Intuition leads some to hypothesize that existence is the experience of mass floating in time. If there is any truth to this concept, corporeality is weightless. We are not tied down. Increasingly, we occupy two realms, the bounded domain of physicality and the infinite virtual world of cyberspace. New workers, new work and new artifacts are bridging these realities.

Future Mind Coaching

2007-12-27T14:55:00.000-05:00

At 6:16 AM, Eastern Standard Time, the tragic death of Benazir Bhutto was confirmed by US news outlets. This outrageous act is one more demonstration that the concept of "normality" is continually being challenged, now more than ever. Normality implies that there is some sort of standard mode of being through which the present condition of a system can be evaluated, as in "It's normal to start work by 9AM." or "It's normal for American women to have 2.1 children." Normality means that you don't have to start every day wondering if it might be a complete discontinuity from the one before it.

I believe that our sense of security and well-being is deeply rooted in the implicit assumption of normality. I also believe that the presumption that tomorrow is going to be pretty much like today is no longer valid.

A sense of reality that reflects insight into the disparity of forces colliding is a more accurate description of the facts of life. It is as though a googol of vectors from every conceivable provenance are constantly putting out their energy and interacting with each other in ways both understood and awe-inspiring.

Normality is a delicate weave of these factors that we take for granted; it is the fractal we have come to know and expect. Normality can be anywhere from bland to grand, as in this Kells book image that implies/describes infinity:

Reality is the interaction, the collision, the dynamic turbulence of a multitude of fractals in ways that frequently are self-canceling (bland) and occasionally absolutely climactic, as in the literal crashing of galaxies:

When vectors collide, replicate, interact, entrain in new ways, they create feedback effects for which we have no preparation.

And that is the point.

Even though there are a multiplicity of ways in which nothing seems to be changing, ours is an era in which the pace of change is accelerating beyond all known precedents. Who will be assassinated tomorrow? Who will be born tomorrow? Who and what will be understood tomorrow?

Those of us whose minds are wedded to yesterday's assumptions are woefully unprepared for the complexity that is coming...Hell, it's already here! In fact, we may be so locked in to what we know and how we know it that we can't even begin to see what we cannot see.

So, when the inevitable happens, we are surprised. We are shocked. We might even be so astonished, we die.

Nowhere is this lack of readiness more apparent in today's American lifestyle than in the fields of energy and transportation. These massive carbon-based systems are going to collapse someday. They simply aren't sustainable. At some level, everyone knows this, but the vast majority of us live as though this impending crisis will always remain a myth instead of crystallizing into reality.

But -- in spite of the fact that I've been wrong for years! -- I don't believe that the inevitable can be permanently postponed. Someday -- and it may be someday soon -- it will be upon us. And, when it arrives, most of us will be frightened, confused, worried and surprised! (Not all of us, but most of us.)

Dramatic change in energy and transportation dynamics will exert an enormous impact on where and how we live and how we interact with each other in getting around. I believe that our sense of individualism is greatly reinforced by the fact that so many of us spend a great deal of time alone in our automobiles. And, as a result of this "freedom," we live in relative isolation from each other in our suburban and exurban environments. The consequences of these patterns of living on our individual and cultural consciousness is largely unseen, but immense. A real inflection point in energy prices will threaten assumptions we are not even aware of because they are such background constancies in our reality.

And, when we experience existential threats and conditions, we will make tremendous demands on our leaders. It will be a time when the old aphorisms and homilies fail. It will be a day when only the demagogues and the legitimate big picture thinkers will be heard. It will be a time of a great struggle between those who want to serve themselves and those who want to serve the well-being of the planet and the viability of humanity's preeminent democracy. The looming energy discontinuity won't be solved with a 35 mpg fuel standard.

Anticipatory Leaders will be ready for this moment. They have time to prepare their minds, their hearts, their communication skills, their passion, their values, their information, and their networks right now. Working with the systems thinkers of the Society for Organizational Learning, Art of the Future is offering a range of future mind coaching and consulting services to those who are ready to embrace the new reality, i.e., the recognition that a singularity of some sort is approaching, a moment when humanity will confront the possibility of consciously reinventing itself (including the ways in which it generates, uses and conserves energy) or choosing the suicide of a requiem scenario.

Future Mind Coaching includes the following ingredients:

1. The scope of Future Shock with particular emphasis on the implications of the crisis of carbon

2. Discovering and challenging fundamental assumptions -- what you take so for granted that you can't even seen it and what a difference it makes to reconsider what you think you know

3. Becoming new through a range of processes, technologies, meditations and readings devised to "change your mind" to, as Gandhi said, be the change.

The PsychoDemographics of Attracting Creative Talent

2007-12-07T12:39:00.000-05:00

We recently attended a presentation at Babson College by Tom Davenport, co-author of Winning on Analytics and a generally talented thinker. Analytics is the science of developing raw data into information, knowledge and wisdom. As presented in Davenport's talk, very smart organizations, such as Amazon, are mining data to support a remarkable customer orientation, e.g., knowing what sort of books to recommend whenever a returning customer logs on to its website. (In one of the talk's humorous moments, Davenport chided a Netflix user for not paying attention to the company's recommendation in building his viewing queue: "Big mistake.") Through analytics, the websites of large organizations can actually get to know you better and show more concern about you than a lot of smaller enterprises, especially the one where the 23 year old who is supposed to be giving you service is telling you to hold tight for a minute while she takes a call from another friend.

By linking monetary and near monetary rewards to customer loyalty and choice, organizations that study their data and learn from it are in a powerful position to drive specific behaviors. For example, what if you were to receive your favorite (and expensive) health supplements from your insurer for free for engaging in fitness related purchases? Maybe your insurance company would have an arrangement with your drug store to award everyone who made ten approved supplement purchases a year, as long as they could get a copy of the transactions. Even if a reward like this were to be a complete surprise, for a lot of people it would be an excellent "thank you" for simply making an intelligent choice.

Sounds pretty good, right. But, privacy concerns are one of the shadows to our suppliers knowing so much about us. By analyzing our purchasing patterns, our driving routines (via transponders), our food consumption, our professional (LinkedIn) and social (Facebook) networks and on and on, the owners of large data mines could actually know more about us than we know about ourselves, at least in some respects. They would become the practitioners of PsychoDemographics, the art of knowing what individuals and groups of people will do by studying the patterns of their publicly recorded behavior. For example, I know I like chocolate, but I'm not sure that I want Trader Joe's to be the ultimate repository of just how much of a sweet tooth I actually have as a result of their keeping better track of my purchases of cocoa-based products. But would I say no to the free bar of bitter sweet with almonds they'd give me at the check out line? Would the person in line behind me say no to the free cloth bag they'd give her for never using one of their paper bags? Would the person behind him say no to the free bottle of chardonay he'd get for making his sixth wine purchase in two weeks?!

Of course, somber Orwellian possibilities are easy to envision when one considers what could happen if a powerful entity uses information against the interests of particular individuals or groups. Certainly this sort of David and Goliath match up would not be new. For example, as documented in An Unreasonable Man, in the 1960s General Motors noted Ralph Nader's frequent visits to a particular supermarket, where it sent a femme fatale in an effort to seduce him and ruin his reputation, an invasion of privacy which was ultimately revealed at a Congressional hearing, causing the company significant embarrassment. Imagine what could and is being done in an era when every click is being monitored on thousands of websites. You think maybe this is why so many mail order drug companies have decided to remind me how very much I need Viagra now that I am of a certain age?

When I asked Davenport if privacy concerns were coming up in any of the conversations he was having about analytics, his response was provocative:

In Europe, absolutely. But, here in the US, we don't seem to care as long as we get rewarded for giving up our data. Of course, you know what Sun Microsystems' Scott McNealy said about consumer privacy : "You have zero privacy. Get over it."

(Hmmm. I wonder if Scott McNealy has zero privacy. I'd sort of bet he doesn't, but that's just a hunch.)

From the standpoint of future relationship between employers and the creative people they want to have working for them, there would seem to be a number of paradoxes deriving from the fact that so much is--or at least could be--known about us. On the one hand, Google's interest in hiring young people who've held leadership positions in clubs or wacky activities of some sort could lead them to track the performance of children in elementary school. Imagine how thrilling it would be to any sixteen year old to be contacted by a Google after placing 2d in a local high school debating society tournament or putting up a new mix of spoems: "Hey, we are checking out how hugely technocratic you are!" On the other hand, imagine how a teenager like 16-year-old Robert Santangelo feels about the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) suing his mom for his allegedly illegal file sharing. I bet that was a surprise, and not a happy one. I don't think Robert will be applying for an entry level position with Sony anytime soon, but I could be wrong. Who knows; maybe they'll come to appreciate his initiative and offer him an executive slot someday.

Here's my hypothesis: The companies that use the openness of the digital era against people will, ultimately, lose share in the competition for energetic self-starters to those who use it to demonstrate that they care about the people they understand through PsychoDemographics. The Palisades Medical Center will pay a very high price for having abused the privacy of George Clooney and turning his records over to the celebrity-obsessed media. Top talent won't go for that organization culture. But, companies like Apple that use available data to find people who love to be part of great teams will be big winners in a future where growing the zone of personal trust and intimacy within an organization will be an antidote to the loss of privacy in the public sphere.

A Sea of Energy Alternatives

2007-06-28T08:28:00.000-05:00

There is no energy crisis; there is no oil dependency. There is a dependency on the corporations that are wedded to the status quo, however. There are literally thousands of of viable ideas out there for alternative energy sources. Here is one that caught our attention... saltwater!

Check out a video on this.

Seems like the real deal to me in the sense that he's an inventor who's on to something.

I don't sense that the inventor is an Anticipatory Leader, who could build an organization to scale his invention, but maybe he is. Certainly, he's done something that an Anticipatory Leader could use to feed other things.

Diverging Diversity Data

2007-02-25T08:40:00.000-05:00

Last night we attended a Harvey Robbins' soul music tribute to James Brown, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner and Marvin Gaye. Great fun and a wonderful celebration of one of Black America's contributions to our society. About 500 people turned up at the 90 year old Regent Theatre in Arlington MA. About 30 of them were Black American. Anyone watching the sold out Oldies shows on PBS will note the same sort of disparity: the music is black and the audience is white.

There are probably many explanations of this particular phenomenon, but, in general, we are Caucasians who usually find ourselves in situations where there are very few non-whites present. This has many negative consequences to our life experience, our mind sets, our mental models, and our learning. The experience many, if not most, both white and black, is to live in a social world without racial diversity. This creates a sort of sad symmetry of distance, misunderstanding and mutual alienation. Not all of us suffer from this absence of connection across the races, but a lot of do.

Of the many structural drivers standing behind this situation, none is more important than economics: it's easier for whites to get higher paying jobs. Their employment enables them to buy homes in neighborhoods where the population is mostly like them. This condition has many consequences, and a lot of the explanations about why this happens contradict each other. We're not exploring those arguments at this moment, however. We're just looking at the simple fact that one is more likely to be poor if one is non-white, and poverty limits one's life options.

A recent action by Wal-Mart may prove to be an important step in making better paying jobs available to non-whites. The world's largest retailer just announced that it will be establishing diversity targets for its 60,000 suppliers. The structural consequences of this move could be enormous. For better and for worse, Wal-Mart dominates the way work gets done in its supply chain. Thousands of vendors have revamped their processes as a result of their "success" in selling product to Wal-Mart, and many, like Vlasic Pickle, probably wish they hadn't. Be that as it may, what Wal-Mart wants, Wal-Mart usually gets. Overtime, Wal-Mart's initiative will contribute greatly to racial diversity in American, and we think that is a good thing.

Human system diversity needs to be considered within the context of the larger world system. Species diversity and biodiversity are features of that larger milieu. Unfortunately, the number of different types of life forms on our planet and the quality of their existence are on the decline in virtually every domain. Humans are destroying their habitat. It's irrational to the point of being insane and it's immoral, but there it is.

The alarming reality of the situation is brought home on an almost daily basis. This week included a vivid example with the story in the NYT of the mutilation of several giant and colossal squid, including the tragic death of one. The squid, whose ecosystem resides one mile below sea level, were repeated tempted by baited probes, to which they finally succumbed. Japanese scientists announced with glee the searing off 18 inches of a squid's tentacle, which they were amazed to find in possession of regenerative properties. They expressed disappointment that a 24 foot long young female giant squid died during her third attempt to escape their efforts to catch her so she could be scientifically dissected and researched. "She put up quite a fight. She got away twice, and something must have traumatized her the third time because she died." American newscasts trumpeted the death of another member of this rare species a few days later saying, "If you were to get a calamari from this half ton squid, it would be the size of a tractor tire. Wow, can you believe that?!"

There are many people who have no concern for the well-being of the planet. Some hold that these are the "end of days," and the fate of the planet is sealed. Other religious conservatives believe that all the fruits of the earth are made for the well-being of our species and we are, therefore, not obligated to concern ourselves with their protection. One might think that the advocates of a fetus' "right to life" would be in the forefront of advocating protection for the multitude of species that have no defense against humankind's technologies, but this is not the case. In fact, a 2004 study found that the 230 members of the US Congress that received an 80% or higher rating for making "pro-life" votes on abortion-related issues voted in favor of environmental protection less than 10% of the time. The procreative abilities of Mother Earth haven't been a concern of theirs (http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2004/10/27/scherer-christian).

So, the news is mixed.

Wal-Mart's insistence that its suppliers document their diversity policies and pursue diversity objectives strike us as a good thing. Ditto for the movement that they and other mega-corporations are making in the direction of sustainability in their business practices. GE's commitment to use "ecomagination" to reorient billions produced by various business lines is, ultimately, going to be very good for biodiversity, for example (http://www.greenbiz.com/news/news_third.cfm?NewsID=31053).

On the other hand, the world system continues to be clear cut by rapacious and desperate peoples in almost every community. What good will it do us if the market place will protect the planet's biodiversity twenty year from now when all of that diversity will have disappeared?! Wal-Mart's big move may end up being nothing more that a melodic digression in the much larger cacophony of the earth's decline.

This rumination is another demonstration of the urgent need for whole systems thinking. Humanity needs a mental reboot to comprehend and address the enormity of the challenges we're facing; we need an OS XI, and we need it now! When we get it--and we think we will--we'll be amazed at how quickly so many seemingly insurmountable problems yield to new ways of thinking. May tomorrow be the first day of the rest of our lives.

Distributed Knowledge Networks

2007-02-17T16:52:00.000-05:00

If knowledge is power, American universities are engaged in an effort which is likely to make a lot of people in a lot of different locales a lot more influential.

As recapped recently in the Wall Street Journal ("Yale on $0 a Day," 2/15/07), an increasing number of eminent colleges and universities are making their course material available to the public for free on line. Not surprisingly, MIT's "OpenCourse Ware" spearheaded the effort in 2003, and by this November, it intends to publish syllabi and class notes from all of its 1,800 courses. Yale will be producing digital videos of undergraduate lectures beginning this Fall 2007. The list goes on, and this is just the beginning. We don't know what is happening in this domain outside the U.S, at the moment, but, certainly, other countries cannot be far behind.

A lot of eclectic and curious people like us could be even more tempted to never get up from our computers now that we can sit in on lectures from great profs on subjects ranging from orangutans to the Old Testament. This new step in the trend toward an ever-increasing availability of a never ending quantity of information will have a number of consequences. Here are four positive ones that we're thinking about:

1. More people are going to be informed on a wider range of topics. Teachers, especially good ones, turn data into knowledge and wisdom. They use memorable stories to make their points. People in China are going to use well-formulated analyses of American history to understand facets of the developmental challenges of their own societies, and vice versa. People in Micronesia are going to become more articulate in explaining the consequences of global warming. People in India are going to be debating the relationships between South Asian ethnic groups by translating Samuel Huntington's arguments into their own terms, and the English are going to be refuting Toynbee's ideas about the importance of creative elites by directly quoting Vietnamese intellectuals explaining the way that Ho Chi Minh simply spoke the will of the masses rather than shaping it. Cocktail parties all over the world are about to become even more interesting.

2. The Internet has already brought the thinking and the impact of the few to the many, and the availability of better and better information, information formulated into knowledge, is going to accelerate that phenomenon. Everyone will be able to tune in to Noam Chomsky's analysis of Middle Eastern dynamics and then watch Bernard Lewis challenge them. Meditation and concentration techniques will be incorporated into emerging web software and enable us to enter quasi-hypnotic states in which we will absorb this huge volume of information by using the whole brain. We'll be watching physics lectures by MIT's Walter Lewin in a quiet mind state as a result of our interaction with a feature of operating system that stills distracting noisy thoughts, like "Where did I leave my keys?!"

3. Video streaming will mean that more people will be able to learn and to know without necessarily having to read. Understanding will come from being present while teachers who really know how to explain things are talking. Just as advancements in graphic software have improved the visual component of presentations, so will the digitalization of lectures encourage higher and higher visual production values in the classroom and the need to accomplish that will drive down the costs of doing so.

4. The "democratization of education" is a feature of the adaptive quality of humanity's place in the world system. Many of us adhere to a dystopic view of world conditions. Being depressed about the prospects for greater peace is understandable, for example. War seems to be proliferating, for example. Yet, the world system produces antidotes to these ills, and the spread of knowledge and wisdom challenges the threat of annihilation. Barak Obama is a living example of what can happen when everyday people, disadvantaged people, gain access to insight: a guy from nowhere, the child of a broken home, just happens to be really bright and energetic. He's able to parley his talent into becoming a serious contender for the American presidency. How many other thousands of people are there like that who will thrive on a great education without having to pay for it?

Unmarried Women Will Set the Pace

2007-02-08T19:26:00.000-05:00

According to the New York Times (1/16/07), unmarried women fifteen and older outnumber those who are married for the first time in US history by a 51% to 49% margin. This "tipping point" is particularly prominent in a number of key groups. Forty two per cent of those 15-25 year olds were married in 1950, while only 16% are now. Among 25-34 year olds, married women have declined from 82% in 1950 to 58%. Tony Soprano once told his daughter, Mello, that "it may be a new century outside this house, but it's still the 1950s inside here." She's not listening.

As with a multiplicity of structural trends, there are many dynamic implications of the emerging dominance of single women:

1. Many workplace benefit packages and tax policies are based on the assumption of family formation and male power. These are going to be under tremendous pressure to change. Women in the workforce are going to demand that the value they create for organizations be funneled into non-traditional vessels.

2. Women already play a tremendous role in community politics and that influence is going to become greater and greater. Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, etc. are examples of very influential married women. Think Barbara Mikulski. We're going to see alot more single heterosexual women influencing community policies and communities politics in the direction of their own interests rather than in the direction of families. What is this going to mean for urban night life? What will it mean for the definition of safe streets? What will it mean for the behavior of men? We don't know, but we'd sure like to know what y ou think.

3. What will happen to advertising? A recent Kleenex presents a strong woman. She's got a career. She's confident. She's in a relationship. And, you know what, she says, "Sometimes I cry." Suddenly, by legitimating crying by women in a non-dramatic context, the Kleenex brand displayed its awareness of a huge market. Single working women are going to stop trying to act like men. In fact, we're probably going to get a lot more crying by men in public. Increasingly, women are establishing the norms for male sexuality and behavior. Instead of professional women acting like men, professional men may start acting a lot more like women.

World Futures: Irianian War Prospects

2007-02-05T15:42:00.000-05:00

Unfortunately, an increasing number of sources are discussing the possibility of an "accidential" war between Iran and the United States. There are many voices describing the threat posed to the United States, Israel, and to western interests by an Iran possessing nuclear arms. Certainly, the hateful language of that theocratically-ruled country's president is certainly of great concern. However, the sabre rattling of the current administration in Washington is occurring within the context of what can only be charitably called a debacle in Iraq, which has stretched our troops very thinly in the prosecution of an ill-conceived conflict.

War is an extremely, extremely ugly thing and Iran is a very different place in which to pursue this horrible human invention than its neighbor Iraq. Iran is a much larger country. It has a multilayered military. It is more unified religiously. It has well-armed allies in both Lebanon and Iraq. It would be able to shut down oil supplies to the West, at least for a while, and so on. In other words, when people yell and shake their fists at each other, someone is likely to make a mistake and slug the other party and, suddenly and surprisingly, we're going to have one hell of a war on our hands, a war that the majority of people in all of the nations involved would feel justified in pursuing, a war that would make a lot of people angry and afraid, a war that would not have an easy or near term end.

Obviously, students of the near and long term future have a lot to be concerned about by this. The amount of money that we're spending on the "War on Terror" is already staggering, especially since its results are so muddy. At the same time the Bush administration is proposing an increase in the Pentagon's budget by 10%, it is proposing massively scaling back social programs like Medicare, let alone not expanding peaceful versions of foreign aid. The current war has had many negative consequences for the US and its expansion would likely mean more of the same.

A severe tightening of the labor market would be one of the results of a new front in the Middle Eastern war. Full mobilization of reserve forces in the US and elsewhere would be likely and a national draft in the US would also become much more probable. Social polarization would definitely intensify in the US in the face of a draft, unless an overwhelmingly convincing argument could be made in support of it. It would be a very unstable time in the US and throughout much of the world. That might be good because instability can sometimes generate needed changes, but it sure won't be comfortable! Workplace scenaricists would be advised to develop plans that contemplate the eventuality of yet another factor cutting into the availability of qualified and focused employees. A bigger war will make it much more difficult to pursue business as usual.

Changing workplace demographics

2007-02-04T11:11:00.000-05:00

A recent study by Intuit and Institute of the Future highlights three dramatic trends affecting the evolution of entrepreneurialism over the next ten years:

1. People from the edges of middle age (teenagers, "mompreneurs," non-retiring Baby Boomers, immigrants) will increasingly start new businesses in the US and elsewhere. As in so many other instances, the stereotype of entrepreneurship in the US as a white male dominated field is evaporating.

2. The Internet's "long tail" will enable many peole to launch new businesses reaching specialized international niche markets that, previously, would never have been served because there was no mechanism to connect providers of goods and services with prospective users. Instead of a thousand flowers blooming, there will be millions!

3. Focused entrepreneurial education will add to (and sometimes replace) the learnings that come from the school of hard knocks. High schools, art schools, vocational schools, language training schools, and so on may all start to add entrepreneurial education components to their curriculum. Students who want to start their own business will learn about topics like accounting, marketing, logistics administration systematically, rather having the reactive experience so many of us entrepreneurs have when we realize that we should have understood some general business topic...yesterday!

These trends are important to us personally at Art of the Future because we are an small entrepreneurial service shop that currently works with many different types of people and eagerly looks forward to doing a lot more of that.

And, of course, these developments are significant at a larger strategic level: A multiplicity of new employment options are opening up. This means more competition for key talent, more diversity in lifestyles and workplace culture, more social and economic complexity, and more freedom of choice.

Proponents of laissez-faire capitalism herald the proliferation of entrepreneurialism as a demonstration of human capability, especially when it is unfettered by government bureaucracy and regulation. It is not clear to us what sort of net gains are actually being achieved in small business employment, however. Keeping the doors open is very hard to do for most entrepreneurs. Restaurants are the most frequently started small business, and most of them don't make it, for example. Plus, it could be argued that many small businesses add little to the overall dynamism of the American economy, e.g., franchise operations that are ancillary to the internal combustion engine. So, the jury is still out on this aspect of the goodness of entrepreneurialism.

But, smart city and town planners can take advantage of these emerging trends to make sure that they attract and hold the sort of small businesses that can revitalize communities and/or further secure their position as attractors to innovative businesses. Instituting truly universal WiFi access within the boundaries of a particular community seems like a very logical and easy first step in this direction, for example. Make it easy for young people, mompreneurs, and self-motivated people without much income to work anywhere. Rehab unused industrial facilities and turn them into low rent creative bee hives driven by a set of tenants integrated by some form of common interest and/or market. Be the first in your state to offer entrepreneurial education at the high school level! Have the media celebrate local entrepreneurial firms that crack into an international market.

These are just a few of the strategies that towns, cities and regions can use to align the entrepreneurial energy of their citizens with the desire to put themselves on the map as a thriving, destination community.

Click here to see the original Intuit/Institute of the future article.

The Future of Work and the Work Environment!

2007-02-02T10:03:00.000-05:00

Welcome to Art of the Future’s The Future of Work!

As systems thinkers, we know that everything affects everything else. Having a fascination with virtually everything is a key ingredient to being a futurist. In this blog we will be linking our facinations with their implications for the future of work. Work is not your grandfather's life long loyalty to a single employer, commute to work, nine to five rat race, full benefits package, annual review, corporate ladder climbing, pension plan, gold watch and retirement. Those things are long gone and the nature of work continues to change and an ever increasing pace.

This blog reflects our cumulative 60 years of experience, insights, research, and biases toward issues concerning the future of the workplace, the nature of community, the leadership of human systems and methodologies for studying the future. Other subjects, such as global warming and other environmental issues, security , religion, transportation, education, etc. will be addressed primarily as a result of their having a relationship to our core interests.

For example, a recent item in USA Today (1/16/07, pB1) describes the narcissistic character of many highly paid CEO’s, people who can do a hell of a job dishing out criticism, but do really poorly when it comes to accepting it. This topic is of interest to us from a number of angles, to name a few:
(1) It has ramifications for the future of training and coaching.
(2) It reminds us of Argyris and Schön’s formulation of the gap between the theories that people have about how to be effective leaders and the theories one can infer by observing their behavior.
(3) It highlights the problems created by complex systems where the leaders of organizations don’t get needed information simply because they have no contact with the people at lower levels in the hierarchy.

So, Hello Blogosphere! Art of the Future is joining the conversation!