Today we reached that day!

• Film on: 7 billion

Today: 7 billion, have we become a crowded planet?

• Hans Rosling’s explanation of population growth

New year’s resolutions

• What new year’s resolution do you have?• Why do people formulate new year’s

resolution?• Why do you think people don’t stick to their

new year’s resolution?

What does the future mean to you?

• Future (adjective): Belonging to that part of time that has not yet occurred but that will occur.

• Future (noun): 1. The period of time following the present moment and continuing

indefinitely2. The situation or condition of someone or something in the future3. One of a plurality of possible future conditions or situations.

These are sometimes defined as alternative futures or just futures• Futuring (verb): the act, art or science of identifying and

evaluating possible future events.

Development: what paths do we choose?

Everything is connected to each other…

Fragmented illusion“From a very early age, we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world. This apparently makes complex tasks and subjects more manageable, but we pay a hidden, enormous price. We can no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole. When we then try to “see the big picture” we try to reassemble the fragments in our minds, to list and organize all the pieces. But, as physicist David Bohm says, the task is futile –similar to trying to reassemble the fragments of a broken mirror to see a true reflection. Thus, after a while we give up trying to see the whole altogether.” (Peter Senge, 1990)

Everything is connected to each other

• When we give up the illusion that the world is created of separated, unrelated forces, then we can start creating sustainable futures

• A pond that ripples, when you throw a stone in it…

A paradigm that can help to think and imagine the multiple connections between the individual parts: Systems Thinking

• A system may be defined as any group of things that are connected together so that they act in some ways as a whole:

Examples of systems:• The universe• The human body• The ecosystem• The social sector• The economy• An organization

Charachteristics

• The system concept helps us think in very broad terms about how events occur

• It adds structure • It focuses our attention to on relationships

rather than on things: “It is the relationship among things themselves, more than the things themselves that shape events”

Focus on relationships, rather than on individual things:

7 levels of Living systems (Miller, 1979)

• Living systems are divided between: biological systems and social systems

• 7 levels of living systems:1. The cell (the amoebae, a muscle cell, a cancer cell)2. The organ (heart, liver, brains)3. The organism (a man, plant, dog)4. The group (family, gaggle of cheese)5. The organization (school, factory, government)6. The society (Aruba, US, Australia)7. The supranational system (NATO, EU)

Infinitive future potentialities/possibilities

The historian focuses on the actualities of the past; The futurist must deal with the infinitely more numerous potentialities of the futureSince potential events have never had any actuality, we can only imagine them, and many lie beyond the reach of our wildest imagining. However we get a few hints of how incredible must be those things that we cannot imagine

Difference between a historian and a futurist

Chance and Chaos: Butterfly effect

A metaphor to illustrate sensitivity to initial conditions.The metaphor was popularized by MIT’s Edward Lorenz with his 1979 paper: Predictability: does a flap of a butterfly’s wind in Brazil sett off a tornado in Texas?

Class of change agents: creators of sustainable futures

Explorer’s Attitude: setting out on the expedition

• Prepare for what you will face in the future• Anticipate future needs• Use poor information when necessary• Expect the unexpected• Think long term as well as short term• Dream productively• Learn from your predecessors

Tools: Futuring methods

• The goal of futuring is not to predict the future but to improve it. We want to anticipate possible or likely future conditions so that we can prepare for them. We want to focus in particular on opportunities and risks that we should be ready for.

• For this we have a number of useful methods: ordinary procedure that most of us use occasionally in ordinary life, but then more refined

Some futuring methods

1. Scanning2. Trend analysis3. Trend monitoring4. Trend projection5. Scenarios6. Polling7. Brainstorming8. Modeling9. Gaming10. Historical analysis11. Visioning

Scanning the world around Us• Scanning: The process of identifying significant changes in the

external environment –that is, in the world beyond our immediate area of operations-

• It can be thought of as the effort to identify and understand those phenomena or aspects of the world that are most relevant to the people or groups who need this information for important decisions.

• Is an ongoing process• Scanning is based on systematic survey of current newspapers,

magazines, research findings, websites and other media for indication of changes likely to have future importance

Indicators: “we are what we measure”

Indicator• A statistic or measurement used to gauge the condition of

something (simplified definition)• As a tool that should make it possible both to have a sense

pf the state of specific system and also to report on that state to the whole of system, in other words to whole of the country (and afterwards, an other aggregated system levels eg. Supranational level, e.g. Millennium Goals)

• Misunderstanding to avoid: an indicator is not an elementary item of information. It is information processed, so as to permit the study of an developmental phenomena.

• Meaning has to been given to raw data!

The wonders of the smoke-detector

Metaphor: “the smoke detector”

Choosing indicators: criteriaThe characteristics of a good indicator may be outlined asfollows:1. Its relevance2. Its ability to summarize information without distortions3. Its co-ordinated and structured character, allowing it to be related

to other indicators for a global analysis of the system4. Its precision and comparability5. Its reliability6. It is better to rely on multiple different indicators than on only one:

connections become clearer! 7. We are what we measure:

choosing the right indicators is crucial

Choosing indicators: criteria It should make it possible to:• Measure how far or how close one is from an

objective• Identify problematic or unacceptable situations• Meet policy (plan) concerns and to answer the

question leading to its choice• Compare its value to a reference value, to a

standars or to itself as computed for a different observation periodtrend monitoring, -analysis

Scanning focuses on trends rather than events

• Based on a indicator, or a combination of indicators, we can see emerging trends.

• A trend: changes that occur through time• Events: changes that occur very quickly and

generally are less significant for understanding the future

visualizing and animating data

• Hans Rosling’s video on global health data

Six broad categories of trends:DEGEST

• Demography• Economy• Government• Environment (the natural environment)• Society/Culture• Technology• Or STEEP categories: Social, Technological,

Environmental, Economic, Political

Procedure (simplified)

A. With for e.g. the DEGEST system (or the STEEP) we can think sequentially about demographic trends then economic, then governmental etc…

B. We then can combine a number of trends into a single major trend that includes them all

C. After that we move to the more complex part of making connections across the categories

D. We look at the relationships among the trends: causes and consequences

Example trend cycle (climate monitoring)

e.g. Trend analysis• Trend: A rise in life expectancy• Causes: (might be caused by)

– rising living standards, better medical treatments, healthier environments

• Impact: – A longer portion of people’s life will be spent in retirement– Increasing demand in goods and services for the eldery and maybe

bigger financial strain on families to care for aging parents/grandparents

• Golden question:– What kind of environment should be designed in order to

accommodate these changes?

Systems thinking:connections

Society:• Population• Lifestyle• Culture

• Social inequalities• Education,

• organization, etc…

Economy:• Agriculture• Households• Industry• Transport• Services

• Tourism, etc…

Environment:• Atmosphere• Hydrosphere

• Land• Biota

• Minerals, etc..

Governance:• Democracy:

choices, voice• Policies and

regulations of the other sectors

6 Super trends, the great transformation (Cornish, 2005)

1. Technological progress2. Economic growth3. Improving health4. Increasing mobility5. Environmental decline6. Increasing deculturation

Scenario’s

Scenarios: contemplating different stories

Scenarios• Conjectures about what might happen in the future• A simple way to develop a scenario is to project a current

trend into the future, but this gives us only one scenario• We need to develop others because not all trends may

proceed as we anticipated• Our imagination is important in developing alternative

scenario’s• Scenarios are created by means of narratives: “we are

defined by the stories we tell each other and ourselves” (Venessa Miemes, 2010)

It is advisable to create a minimum of 3 scenarios when considering future events or situations by identifying futures that are:

possible, probable, and preferable

five sample scenarios from Cornish’s (2004) book:1. A Surprise-Free Scenario: Things will continue much as they are

now. They won’t become substantially better or worse.2. An Optimistic Scenario: Things will go considerably better than

in the recent past.3. A Pessimistic Scenario: Something will go considerably worse

than in the past.4. A Disaster Scenario: Things will go terribly wrong, and our

situation will be far worse than anything we have previously experienced.

5. A Transformation Scenario: Something spectacularly marvelous happens – something we never dared to expect.

Imagining systems:Interrelatedness and Change: plausibility!

http://www.subblue.com/projects/guilloche

Let’s experiment with systems thinking by using the metaphor of theGuilloche pattern generator**Guilloché is a decorative engraving technique in which a very precise intricate pattern repetitive or design is mechanically engraved into an underlying material with fine detail. Specifically, it involves a technique of engine turning ,called guilloché in French after the French engineer “Guillot”, who invented a machine “that could scratch fine patterns and designs on metallic surfaces”.

E.g. The Great Transition: 6 scenarios for global future

6 scenarios & a value re-boot!Conventional worlds Barbarization scenarios Great transitions

Market forces The breakdown Eco-communalism

Policy reforms Fortress World New Sustainable paradigm

Forecasting and Backcasting planning for the future

forecastingA statement (scenario composed of trends) that something will happen in the future. Forecast implies less certainty about the events occurrence than prediction, but the terms are often used interchangeable

backcastingA method for forecasting or planning in which an event is posted as already having occurred in the future. The question then becomes: How did this event come to be? Backcasting offers a way to envision a desirable future and then determine what must happen in order for that goal to be reached

Back to an other kind of butterfly metaphor: metamorphosis

We create our future with the conscious actions in the now

“A bright green future begins when each of us, today, decides to live as if that future were already here.”

- Alex Steffen (World Changing)