When no news is good news

Sorry for the radio silence but I’ve been in Paris for a week doing some work and reveling in the joys of disconnection (i.e. I gave my ancient GF4 Powerbook to someone recently and I can’t decide whether to replace it with a Macbook Air or an iPad).

Anyway, two discoveries. First, my zero email tranquility was enhanced by the fact that I didn’t read any newspapers for the week either.

Second, I am totally in love with Paris (Sorry Greece). Something about the aesthetic pleasure mixed up with civility and pace. Anyway, if you are in Paris anytime soon check out a restaurant called Les Cocottes Christian Constant. It’s possibly the best little restaurant in Paris.

Quiet desperation

I’ve just been to New York and was lucky enough to get whisked through a private security channel at Heathrow. This was obviously so that I didn’t get caught up with the chaos elsewhere in the airport. I presume that somewhere in the airport – probably most airports – are routes that are more discreet.

I think this is to some extent analogous with the world these days. There are people that get whisked and there are people that don’t. There are the wiskees and the whiskers. One group zooms around barely noticing the struggle that’s going on. They don’t see – or choose not to see – the crumbling infrastructure, the queues, the overcrowding, the things that don’t work and the sheer cost of everything.

For these people (the whiskees) it’s a quiet, high-speed, interconnected world where money buys you time and space. For everyone else, life is loud, slow and constantly interrupted by everything from the weather to small incidents of rage.

So the question is, at what point do these small incidents turn into something bigger? At what point do you create a revolutionized economic middle class?

“Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time. 
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines. 
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way. 
The time is gone, the song is over.  
Thought I’d something more to say.”

Too Much Stuff

Are you suffering from stuffocation? There are 800 self-storage facilities in the UK, the same number as the whole of the rest of Europe put together. What are people keeping in there? Why can’t they just get rid of it? Is it some kind of national obsessive compulsive disorder?

Why death and dying are important for creativity

I have written at length about where people do their ‘best thinking’ and which tools should be used for different types of problem. But there’s one place where people think very clearly indeed, but which is not spoken about very much. A place we all go to at some point in our lives, but a place that was not mentioned by a single one of the hundreds of respondents that helped me with the research for my book Future Minds.

Where – or when – is this place? It’s somewhere Steve Jobs knew all about. A place he faced when he got fired from Apple and visited again when Apple almost went bankrupt. It’s somewhere he mentioned in his famous commencement speech at Stamford.

It’s death and I firmly believe it’s a misunderstood opportunity for individuals and institutions alike. Here’s what Steve had to say about death:

“Death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be because death is very likely the single very best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. “

This might all sound a bit morbid, especially since he has now passed away, but it needn’t be. Indeed, facing death doesn’t always mean that you end up dying. It simply means that you are threatened with the end of something, like being fired, failing a really important exam or facing bankruptcy.

It is threats such as these – whether they relate to an individual or an institution – that can result in fresh thinking. A threat of extinction, more often than not, creates a clarity of thought that is so sadly lacking at other times in our lives.

Why would this be so?

I think the answer is connected to why necessity and austerity are the mother and father of invention. Too much time allows us to prevaricate. If we have too much time we will put things off – or allow ourselves to be distracted – by things that appear momentarily urgent rather than universally important.

Things never get done. You are never forced to act.

Similarly, too much money often prevents people from really changing things significantly. If you are loaded up with cash, individually or institutionally, your first priority is often to preserve what you’ve already got. Too much money allows you to do nothing rather than something.

The impulse is preservation not innovation.

Conversely, if you’ve got next to nothing (perhaps you are a young employee not invested in the current corporate hierarchy or a cash-strapped start-up thinking of ways to reach customers without a million dollar marketing budget) you will often think of things that are unusual or unexpected or will try new ideas that older, more established, individuals or institutions will not.

In short, you will think. As Ernest Rutherford, the chemist, and father of nuclear physics once said: “Gentlemen, we haven’t got the money, so we have got to think.”

Urgency, too, creates a sense of focus. If you don’t have long you will think of ways to quickly filter what’s important from what’s not – a bit like the old cliché that says if you want something doing well, give it to someone that’s really busy.

If you are threatened with a crisis you tend to be bolder. If a company is fighting for its survival it sometimes take risks that it wouldn’t usually take. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t, but if you think you are probably history anyway way not give a new idea a go?

So here’s the question.

If you are not facing death how can you create a culture or process that creates a similar level of empowerment and action? How can you create a metaphorical forest fire that gets rid of all the dead wood and creates some space for new growth?

You possibly can’t, although I’m reminded of a technique widely used by an ex-CEO of a multi-national packaged goods company. If a new product development project was going really badly he’d cut the budget in half and shift the deadlines forward by several months.

There’s nothing like a bit of pressure to get the grey matter moving.

Is Europe the new Japan?

Remember Japan’s lost decade in the 1990s? Possibly not, but essentially what happened was that a combination of low interest rates, rapidly rising land/real estate values, borrowing and speculation ended when Japan’s Ministry of Finance suddenly raised interest rates. This created a debt crisis followed by a banking crisis, with a number of banks being bailed out by the Japanese government.

The result was a collapse assets prices and a ten year recession with almost no economic growth. Sound familiar?

A critical difference though is unemployment, which in Japan at the time was high, but was nowhere near the levels now being seen in Europe, especially among young people. For example, the jobless rate for youth in Spain is currently 46%, in Greece it’s 43%, in Ireland it’s 32% and in Italy 27%. Trouble on the streets of Europe anyone?

Japan Watch

When it comes to the adoption of new technology, (eg, robotics and digital money), Japan is usually ahead of other countries. It’s also leading the trend demographically. The rapid ageing of Japanese society is a sign of things to come for regions like Europe. Japanese firms are now fighting to keep hold of retirees as labour shortages start to really bite.

Another new trend in Japan – which is also emerging in the US – is the huge boom in emergency kits and so-called FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) products. These are products such as mobile phones and radios that can be manually charged (i.e. wound up) and emergency survival products such as cookers and water filters. For example, one of the big sellers in Tokyo currently is a series of maps to help you find your way home after an earthquake.

Scenarios for the future of aviation

OK, I need some help. I’m doing a talk about the future of aviation to the British Air Line Pilots Association (BALPA). It’s essentially a trends talk, but I want to end on a slide showing a rough scenario matrix outlining four alternatives futures. I think it’s a no brainer (or maybe not?) that one axis takes into account the price of oil ( the deep driver being something else).

So what’s the other axis? In an ideal world it would be something technical or professional because BALPA is a professional association and trade union. I quite like degree of automation or something around business models, but I’m not sure.

What else is there? Maybe something around the expansion of low-cost airlines (maybe a link here with union representation, training budgets and so on?), level of substitution from other forms of transport, climate change (carbon costs), evolution of technology (especially UAVs), need/desire to travel (growth of telepresence through to terrorism), level of affluence (economy in general), airline industry consolidation or something around professionalism or reputation.

BTW, in my travels around cyber-space I’ve found a few quite good sources around the future of aviation. The best one, in my view, is the Future of Aviation 2025 another reasonable one is Rethinkng Aviation and there is also a Future Scenarios for European Aviation report, some 2050 Vision work from Airbus  and something quite nice from IBM.

Thought for the day

Thought for the day is from Rob Campbell, Head of Planning at Wieden + Kennedy in Shanghai:

“Behind every what is a why”.

BTW, interesting set of pictures of Liam Fox (MP) caught in an embrace with an adult film actress in the papers this morning. Now why would these pictures have suddenly appeared I wonder? Why indeed.

An Age of Anxiety

Some nice thoughts in Rohit Taiwar’s Fast Futurescape newsletter (issue 24) a few days ago. One thing that especially caught my attention was around austerity and anxiety:

“As government austerity measures set in across the more heavily indebted nations, a marked downward psychological shift will become increasingly apparent. The age of anxiety will evolve into a new grumpier era. The negative attitude shift will be fuelled by rising unemployment, withdrawal of social protections, reduction in public services and declining living standards amongst the previously comfortable middle classes. The impact will be felt in areas such as declining public trust, workplace behaviours and family dynamics.”

I agree with this, but where does this anxiety and anger ultimately go? Do people just get grumpy, buy a ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ mug/teatowel/poster and moan about how things were so much better in the olden days (i.e. pre-2000) or do things start to turn really nasty?

In my opinion the chance of the wheels falling off the global economy (certainly the US/European economy but in reality it’s probably all linked) has shifted from about 1 in 100 to 1 in 10. So what’s now safe? Where can you stash the cash?

Gold? Maybe, but it still feels like a bubble to me. Bonds? Nope, unless you are talking corporate bonds rather than country bonds. Real estate? Maybe if it’s very top end and a very long-term hold. Wine. No, another bubble at the top end. Art? Don’t ask me. Agricultural land? Quite possibly.

Of course, those sensible enough to have saved some cash over the past few years (i.e. those not partly responsible for creating the financial crisis by borrowing too much money) could be in serious trouble, either because the financial institution they thought was safe actually isn’t or because low interest rates and high inflation will wipe their savings out over the longer term.

So what to do? Ironically perhaps the solution is to spend it.

BTW, big shout out to Shane who correctly noticed that 1 in 13 US citizens are not in fact in jail. The correct figure is 1 in 130 (See ‘The drug war is just a waste’, latest issue of What’s Next).