TEDxMunich - Richard Watson
[Music] if you gave an infinite number of futurists an infinite number of amount of time would one of them eventually get something right I wrote a book a few years ago about what I thought would happen over the next 50 years and I was instantly called a futurist and I'm now regularly called upon uh to make predictions but the history of future prediction isn't particularly good I'll give you a couple of examples in 1886 the engineer Carl Benz confidently predicted that the worldwide demand for automobiles would never surpass 1 million 8 years later in 1894 an article appeared in the Times newspaper in London suggesting that within 50 years every single Street in London would be buried under 9 ft of HSE manure how did they get it wrong extremely simple both predictions were based on past experience they extrapolated from current trends and they used critically false assumptions in the case of Carl Benz who I suppose should have known better he assumed that cars would always required Chau would always require a chauffeur and that the supply of Highly skilled chauffers would eventually dry up in the case of the article in the times the mistake was to assume that the growth in Horse Transport would go alongside the growth in the population of London and also they critically failed to see the the impact of the invention of the Motorcar by Mr Benz now on the other hand um the accuracy of some predictions can be actually quite good um especially if you give them enough time to come true I mean it seems that hindsight is almost a necessarily a compliment to futurism a few years ago I was uh wandering through the English Countryside and I came across a church selling old books and I bought a couple of books the first one is this one it's called originality by T sharper n and it was written um in 1917 and it was about the future uh here he is quoting somebody called Sir Aston Webb who was talking about the London of 2014 from the perspective of the 20th of January 1914 obviously 1914 being quite an interesting year he says this is his prediction there are two great Railway stations one for the North and one for the South the great roads out of London are 120 ft wide with two divisions one for slow moving traffic and the other for fast moving traffic and there will be a huge belt of green fields surrounding London I mean that's that's not bad by the way this actually book is 97 years old and smells rather good and I'm just not sure you can do that with a Kindle now the second one that was a pound by the way this one was 50p it's uh Future Shock by Alvin Toffler from 1970 so it's 41 years old and if you're not aware of this book get a hold of it it's really quite interesting um but it's getting more interesting because the central idea of this book is that technological change is accelerating and it's making people really quite delirious and quite anxious and I'll just read um a passage out of this and he's talking about organizations and youve got to remember this was written in 1970 the high rate of turnover is most dramatically symbolized by the rapid rise of what Executives call Project or task force management here teams are assembled to solve specific short-term problems then exactly like the mobile playgrounds they are disassembled and their human components reassigned sometimes these team teams are thrown together to serve only a few days sometimes they are intended to last a few years but unlike the functional departments or divisions of a traditional bureaucratic organization which are presumed to be permanent the project or task force team is temporary by Design I mean I don't think that's too bad now admittedly some of these things aren't aren't specific predictions I mean the list of this goes on I mean you've got Peter Ducker talking about the need um of portfolio careers in the 1980s you have Warren Bennis who was talking about the need for really radical innovation in the 1960s uh you go back even further you've got HG wells in his book The Shape of Things to come in 1933 talking about launching ballistic missiles from submarines you've got Arthur C Clark in 1945 for seeing a network of communication satellites orbiting the Earth and who could forget James T Kirk using what appears to be a Motorola Razor cell phone way before any such thing is actually been invented now as I just said these aren't specific predictions in a sense nobody's putting a date against anything necessarily but this doesn't negate the fact that occasionally a few seers do actually get it right and I think the the future would actually be a really good subject for study if only a few of the sources were a bit more forthcoming now if you're thinking about the future I think a map's quite useful um so this is a bit of a doodle that went a bit mad that I did last year and it's it's what I think is going to happen over the next 50 years on a piece of A3 paper and the way this works and I know you won't be able to read this but I'll just explain the center is now and we have a lot of hotpots or Mega Trends so we have globalization smack in the Middle with localism coming off it we have urbanization uh we have volatility debt anxiety which is coming off the debt and a few other things uh we have climate change we have sustainability the power shift eastwards aging this is all now and then you have time zones and the minute you go out of the current day you obviously get into predictions and the predictions get more playful and more provocative as you as you move further out I should also explained the colored lines are different things so Finance I think is red and you've got media a different color science and technology and and so on and so forth I mean some of the predictions that are in there um we've got people renting dreams we have got robot population surpassing the human population we've got brain holidays which I badly need we've got converg the convergence of Health Care and financial planning because we know what we're going to get ill from decades in advance we've got face recognition doors we've got augmented reality contact lenses we've got online communities starting real communities and so on and so forth um and I say that one to just bear in mind is the anxiety which is coming off this General mess I mean this has got far too much information on it's far too complex but you could argue well that's just the future get used to it but you've got to be careful be very very careful um trends like the ones in the middle can get you into an awful lot of trouble in fact I think they can probably get you into more trouble than the predictions around the edges because there's a nasty habit of of actually people believing this stuff uh which is as I've said earlier on is is is a little bit tricky um Trends really I suppose represent an unfolding of an event or events or or dispositions and they don't really tell us anything about the future at all um they don't tell us about future Direction They Don't tell us about the velocity of events and so on they certainly don't usually consider counter Trends anomalies um weird and seemingly illogical combinations of events that actually Clash but I think there's actually a much big Bigg ger problem than this and that problem is is essentially that in my view there is no such thing as the future I mean if you accept that the future is is uncertain or at least ambiguous I would argue there must be many alternative futures um you know there's not one there are lots of different possibilities and I think that's quite a clever way of of looking at the future now the alternative is is to make some logical um forecasts this is an oil supplies company in the early 1980s in in the US who were trying to work out the demand for their products so they were trying to work out how many active oil rigs there'd be and they did a very logical high low medium forecasts which are the solid line these lines here this is actually what happened whoops how did that happen well again they misread a trend a long-term trend is actually it was actually a short-term Trend there was a very high oil price there were very low interest uh rates and there was very high government support for drilling and that essentially warped reality if you sense I mean they they essentially made the same mistake as Carl Ben in the Times newspaper they extrapolated from experience um they also failed to remember I think a very important point which is that whilst nearly all of our knowledge is about the past virtually all of our most important decisions are actually about the future so what can we do to address this sort of central problem of prediction I mean is there actually any point at all trying to predict the future is it a better idea to just sit back and let the future happen to you probably be more relaxing um letting the future happen to you is actually not a bad option it can really really work but only if you are quite Nimble I think you have to have a very open mind and you have to move adapt very very quickly and then a sort of fast follower strategy can work very well however most organizations in my experience are neither Nimble nor open they're actually mentally closed uh to the outside world and they tend to be stuck with s of systems and and and assets and attitudes that were created in the past they are built around historical ideas and they're constrained by Legacy issues and they're concerned primarily particularly commercial organizations with numbers that relate to the last 12 months and they're worried about what's going to happen to those numbers over the next 12 weeks or the next 12 months so they don't go out very very far a much better bet in my instance in my experience is a thing called scenario planning now scenario planning essentially has its origins in in battle planning or in war gaming particularly uh a 6th Century Indian game G called karunga meaning four divisions and also a German war game that was invented in 1812 called Ciel now wargaming is still used by the military today and it's also used by companies like shell that are spending a lot of money in the future and and they they develop sort of narrative scenarios to look at the potential impact of a number of variables on on things like long-term capital or expenditure and so on now to illustrate how scenarios work here's some scenarios I did a little while ago with a few friends and we well first of all you need a question about the future you know you can't just say what do you want to know about the future you got to have something quite specific and the way I like to explain this is pretend that time travel really exists and the inventor has just come back from the future to say hi what do you want to ask you can ask one question what is it and yes you can ask when will I die or when will Germany win the World World Cup again but it should really relate more to sort of an Institutional thing something like that the the the question here was around uh consumer mindsets in 20 years time and once you've got your question sorted you then need to look at what Consultants would call critical uncertainties but I tend to call really important stuff we don't know the answer to and we've got two here one is pessimism and versus optimism around the economy and particularly climate change and the other is the level of customer or consumer activism versus passivism so down here it's very very passive it's purely about me I mean it's individualism up here it's it's much more about the group it's much more collectivist it's getting very very involved and if you impose one axis against the other four future worlds pop out in the middle it's the same world but they become more distinct and more Extreme as you move out into the corners and this is clearly a dotted line because they do bleed into each other now over here we have morismos and it's built around the individual so it's all about growth consumerism shopping very much focused on me etc etc and was it was very much where we were prior to about 2008 it's it's Global it's free markets it's deregulated ated and so on and so forth over here we have personal Fortress where people think it's the end of the world and there's nothing they can do about it so the best beted is to just sort of run to the mountains with lots of Cann food and ammunition um up here it's actually quite Pleasant it's quite local and community-driven but down in the corners it gets quite nasty gets quite xenophobic and when we're looking to blame somebody we don't like anyone that's not considered to be part of the group so it's very protectionist very isolationist the good thing is it's quite self-reliant and community-driven um we were there for a little while when the recession hit and a few other things but we kind of got bored with that so we we've come up to anism a bit now and this is a sort of attitude that we've got enough and we've had enough we've got to change how the model Works how the world works it's not a sustainable model so it's a world of sort of switching things off on living or getting used to living on less it's very very ethical it's lots of environmental policies social policies and so on more of a sort of work life balance you'd measure happiness in this world and so on so forth and Innovation is is focused on an end goal and it's very sustainable over here we have Smart Planet we've talked a bit about Silicon Valley already this is the the the personification of Silicon Valley I mean smart planet is in a unshakable belief in science and technology it will solve all of our problems so this is the land of Google and apple and so on and so forth very technologically driven it'll get increasingly virtual accelerated digital and so on and so forth and the question to some extent is you know where are we and where are the big shifts occurring and so on and so forth now this is all sort of very well but there's there's still a bit of a problem with this um and the problem really is that yes you can track emergent scenarios you can have contingency plans for all four or for another four but you can't really have four strategies so really at the end of the day I think you actually have to commit to where it is you actually want to go to and and therein lies a bit of a problem our leaders are supposed to have a clear vision of the future they are supposed to understand what will happen if we take a certain path but in my experience most leaders in in business or in politics Etc these days they don't do this they wait to see what everybody else wants and then they say they agree with them and also they they're such focus on such a short time period they won't commit to anything that takes too long or is too difficult or too expensive and so on and so forth and I think that's that's so so fundamental change is actually out of the question in most cases and it's really to some extent a sort of classic case of power being derived from a sort of battle between memory and forgetting and and and they're winning it but my point would be that we don't need them we can all be leaders we can actually drive things forward ourselves all we have to do as individuals households corporations countries the entire planet is decide where it is we want to go and slowly start moving in that direction in other words you know if we can actually sort of pick the future we want and start building it and this is clearly going to be very very difficult we will get a phenomenal amount of things wrong but if we could at least agree amongst ourselves where it is we're actually going I think we'd soon start to rep perceive the present in a different way and I think the future would be a much better place to live and if I take you back to the map at the beginning with with anxiety on it one of the reasons that one of the fundamental reasons that anxiety is a problem at the moment I think is that people don't have a clear view of where we're going if you go back to the 60s and to 70s maybe even to the 80s there was General consensus about where the world was heading in about the last 10 to 15 years it's got very blurry indeed and I think that's causing the anxiety but if we could actually agree where it is we're going then I I think the world will be a much better place now I have 2 minutes and 53 seconds left so I have one other chart for you this and again you can't read this but I'm going to read it for you this is an Extinction timeline so this is predictions about what's going to die out now the future is usually thought of bit like that first map as new stuff that's going to happen particularly technological stuff but it's equally about old stuff stuff we're incredibly familiar with that we use every day that's going to slowly or suddenly disappear so this is sort of touching more on on the uh the social side of things and it's it's it's largely serious but you can't help but have a bit of fun with things like this so yes coins are going to go I mean I read recently that it now takes more than a cent in America to actually make a scent because the cost of the metal I know people throwing them away because they're a pain in the neck um so I think coins are going Spelling's gone desktop computers will go free roads wallets while it's going into your phone ashtrays gone landline telephones voice Communications not looking too healthy at the moment it's all going towards text um libraries now I made a mistake on libraries I just was being GB and maybe logical I just thought well why do we need public libraries when we've got ebooks and Google what's the point of them they're going to be dead so I showed this um to a group of people and there were an awful lot of librarians in the audience for some reason and they've got very good eyesight and they spotted it so I got roped into looking at the future of libraries in in 30 years time and I Repent because in three out of four scenarios libraries actually do do very well they do really badly in the future you expect but in the other three for various reasons they do very well um I've also got into an awful lot of trouble for putting Belgium on the list now an apologies if you're from Belgium now I was trying to make a point which is when you look at things there is a tendency particularly with kids to say that's how it's always been um you know I saw a kid recently with a printed photograph trying to tap it and do that to get the image to move um you look at a an atlas or a map and you look at the lines around the countries and you just immediately assume well that's how it's always been you know no we put those lines there they move around I mean they moved around really recently with South Sudan and you know if there's a country that might become south Belgium North Belgium well that that would be the one so I'm just making a sort of relatively serious point about that and there's a whole load of other stuff on there and you know you can find just Google this you get all this sort of stuff um and it's just a way of getting people to actually think more deeply I think about what's going and I'm I'm a huge fan of sort of visualizing this stuff because I think if you did that as a Microsoft Word document nobody would give it the time of day but if you plun that in front of somebody and say you know here's an Extinction timeline for the museum sector they get really upset and it actually then causes them to think quite deeply and the inverse is also true if you actually put an in Innovation timeline down looking at Key Innovations within a particular country or sector or industry and then project it forward and try and imagine new ones um that's also a way of getting people to actually think more deeply about what they're saying um I have 7 seconds left I'm going to stop thank you very much [Music] indeed thank you