Category Archives: My Next Book

Future Vision

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Future Vision was officially launched today in Australia. I blogged the preface a while ago, so here’s a tiny bit more (part of the forward from an early version) as promised. If you want to buy the book here’s the Amazon/Kindle link.

Forward: into the unknown

Several years ago, an office worker in Tokyo dropped dead at his desk and wasn’t discovered until five days later. This was despite the fact that his co-workers regularly walked past and said “hello.” In a similar incident, a fifty-one-year-old had a heart attack in an open plan office in New York on a Monday morning, but nobody noticed the fact that he was dead until the Saturday, when a cleaner attempted to wake him up to ask whether he was working over the weekend. Apparently it wasn’t unusual for the man to be there because, according his boss, without any hint of irony, “he was always the first to arrive and the last to leave.”

Is this the future? Is this how things will eventually work out for many of the so-called free agents inhabiting anonymous desks inside vast corporations or for the emerging class of digital nomads electronically tethered to virtual offices via a compote of Blackberries and Apples?

The answer is no. It is one possibility. It is one future, but there are many others.
One future might be a cross between Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. This would be a dystopian future where people are forced to work longer hours for larger bureaucracies in a futile attempt to earn more money to offset rising food prices, higher energy bills, declining real wages, increasing debt and disappearing retirement. Conversely, people might willingly choose to spend more time inside lifeless cubicles at work because, while the work is mind numbing, they feel increasingly isolated and uncomfortable at home.

This could be because the family, as a building block of society, has atomised and more people are living alone, or because a relationship hasn’t turned out as planned and work offers more satisfaction and companionship. Add a pinch of ubiquitous media, autocratic data-driven governments, brain-to-machine interfaces, GPS, RFID, facial recognition, genetic prophesy, predictive modelling and CCTV and, while this future isn’t quite like Orwell’s 1984, the date could be seen by some to be getting closer not further away.

Alternatively, we might see a move in a totally different and much more utopian direction. Maybe we’ll start to see that there’s more to life than dropping dead at your desk and people will start to fight for the right to re-balance their lives in their favour. Perhaps automation – especially robotics and artificial intelligence – will finally deliver on its promise of a leisure society and people will spend more of their time re-connecting with their families and doing more of the things that really interest them. This could also be a world where the state limits freedom of choice in areas such as healthcare and pensions and provides a higher degree of security in return for higher direct or indirect taxation. A sustainable world driven as much by the heart as the head, where local forces start to push back against globalisation and where new technologies are carefully scrutinized for long-term social impact and value. An ethically driven world where physical community is rediscovered and corporations are restrained due to, amongst other things, skills shortages, the high cost of energy and limited raw materials.
A world not dissimilar, in many ways, to the one described many decades ago in Ernst Schumacher’s book Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered.

And there are many other possibilities, many other paths and many other futures too. How, for example, might oil costing upwards of $200 per barrel change the world? Perhaps people and products would move around less or the high price of food would lead to an unexpected decrease in obesity. What if we invented a new technology based upon photosynthesis that made energy almost free? What if a new ideology capable of challenging free-market capitalism were to appear? Or if the next Russian Empire decided to broaden its borders beyond their current limits. Or what could happen if the heavy use of mobile phones (of which there are already more than 5 billion worldwide) started to cause the death of tens of millions of young people through brain cancer after a long and largely invisible gestation period?

There are many ways in which we can think about the future and looking at the past (i.e. how we got to where we are today) is a good place to start, partly because what happens right now can influence what happens next and also because both are often related to what happened a very long time ago. And there is a third reason. By understanding the complexities of how we got where we are today we will be better served in how we think about the future. Complexity is the name of the game. Of course, history is not always the most reliable guide to the future because nobody owns the facts. The way we interpret the past can cast a long shadow that hides other important facts. Similarly the future can be buried in the fringes of the present, which essentially means that knowing precisely where to look, or who to talk to, can pay dividends and give you a head start compared to less creative and less curious thinkers. Whichever way you look at it, it’s worth remembering that the future is always present.

This is not to say that the process of thinking ahead is not fraught with difficulties, but a bigger problem is time. Thinking seriously about worlds to come takes time, which is in very short supply nowadays. As a result, many organizations focus almost exclusively on short-term issues, which means that reactions are often too immediate and management often consists of racing from one crisis to the next. More often than not, especially in commercial organizations, the focus is on the next 12 weeks (the next financial quarter) or the next 12-months (“results”), which are then compared to the last 12-months. Thinking beyond this, especially 36-months or more ahead, is almost unheard of. As a result, deep questions, along with longer-term opportunities and risks, tend to go unanswered until its too late. And this anomaly is not just a ‘business’ issue. How many of us defer thinking about pensions and superannuation until way past the ideal start date? The economic rise of China went unnoticed by many for many years. In the ‘nineties, world economic forums would get excited by China but then revert to the old concerns about NATO, Japan and the tensions in Europe. But now, while the opportunity is slowly being seen, the risk of a potential reversal, with associated bubbles and concentration risks, is not. The same could be said for fertility or the impact of social media on democracy.

History, as the author and security and intelligence expert George Friedman has pointed out, “can change with stunning rapidity.” If the Chinese economic miracle were to come to an abrupt end, this would create a very different future, parts of which we can instantly imagine if we only put aside the time to do so.

Put in a slightly different way, while there are many trends and traits that at first glance look set to continue for the immediate future, nothing is ever certain – a thought, crisply echoed by the writer JG Ballard, who once said that: “If enough people predict something it won’t happen.” On the other hand we are well aware how expectations are realised in the performance of stock markets so it’s never all one thing rather than another. In fact our favourite word is ‘and’ rather than ‘or’.

The history of prediction is interesting in this context and is littered with false prophets, much as it’s strewn with false profits, and it is important to distinguish between what is probable with what is possible. The best way of doing this is, as the detective Sherlock Holmes once pointed out, is to start by removing whatever is totally impossible and then, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, must be considered as being possible. There is also a technique developed by the Strategic Trends Unit at the UK Ministry of Defence in which probabilities are assigned to specific words. “Will” is assigned a probability of “Greater than 90%” “Likely/probably” is “Between 60% and 90%”, “May/possibly” is “Between 10% and 60% “and “Unlikely/Improbable” is “Less than 10%” However, this is never easy to do. Probability is of little value when engaging with the future, even if we had the time and effort to undertake quantitative analysis. The future is not at the end of a trend line. No wonder then that so many individuals cling resolutely to the past. It’s much easier that way. Similarly, it’s hardly a surprise that so many institutions structure themselves to deal with the immediate present.  It’s much cheaper that way.

But by the time the relevant strategies are in place, the horse has bolted and we are already somewhere new. Most organizations create strategies to deal with yesterday’s problems . But thinking about the distant future is essential if we, as individuals or organizations, are to take full advantage of the myriad of opportunities that lie ahead.

Developing a situational awareness for emergent risks is absolutely essential if we do not want to end up standing on the wrong side of history on an ongoing basis. In our work with organizations world-wide, we have also come to the conclusion that workable short-term strategies have the longer-term embedded within.

All well and good, we can hear you saying, but how can one sell the idea of futures thinking to an organization run by an individual that is focused on that set of numbers that will take shape over the next 12 weeks? The honest answer is that you can’t. However, if you are fortunate to work for an organization with an incoming or outgoing head there is hope because these leaders are either concerned with creating a vision or leaving a legacy and both of these mindsets fit rather well with futures thinking.

Furthermore, dark clouds have silver linings. In our view a critical function of leadership is to embrace the plurality of opinions – of diverging worldviews – in order to have a better chance of making sense of the future. The recent history of reactions to climate change is a case in point. If an organization is facing an extinction event (i.e. new technology, government regulation or customer mindsets mean that current products, services, business models or margins appear doomed) this is precisely the time when closed minds are opened up to new possibilities.

One of the features of good leaders is that they have an understanding of past and present. They understand the historical reasons for failure and success, but also appreciate some of the challenges that lie immediately and more distantly ahead. Outstanding leaders do something else too. They have a vision for the more distant future. More often that not, they see things that others cannot, and while their visions maybe partially obscured they are often able to create and communicate compelling stories about why other people should follow them down a particular road.

This skill can work extremely well, but this too can contain a fatal flaw, which is that individuals and organizations can sometimes end up being held hostage to a particular point of view, or vision, of the future. The more dominant a leader – or organizational culture – the more that people will be drawn into agreeing with a particular point of view and the less that people will seek to challenge either it or the hidden assumptions upon which it’s built. The more credible or powerful a source the less likely we are to think that something they say maybe wrong. The more popular or widely circulated something is the more likely we are to agree with it, especially if we are busy.

Let’s get back to the two dead bodies. Both of the stories about workers dropping dead at their desks were featured in newspapers and TV channels around the world, including The BBC and The Guardian. They were widely circulated on the Internet too. But both were untrue….

(continues)

Scenarios for the world in 2040

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For those of you that have missed out on the free e and p copies of Future Vision here is the first bit of some more free bits.

About this book

People have always been curious about what lies over the horizon or around the next corner. Books that speculate about the shape of things to come, especially those making precise or easily understandable predictions, have been especially popular over the years. Interest has not diminished of late. Indeed, the number of books seeking to uncover or explain the future has exploded. The reason for this, which ironically no futurist appears to have foreseen, is that rapid technological change has combined with world-changing events to create a future that is characterised by uncertainty and thus anxiety.

The world offers more promise than ever before, but there are also more threats to our continued existence. During the preparation of this book we have seen the sudden collapse of Egypt’s Mubarek regime and the domino affect it has had on the Middle East; the emergent recession in parts of the United Kingdom; the economic plight of Italy, Greece & Spain; the medieval atrocities being perpetrated in Syria; the continuing demise of Barack Obama and the introduction of the iPad which is selling over one million units every month – not to mention 911-style attacks on confidential government and commercial data and John Galliano being caught on a phonecam making racist remarks in Paris.

In short, the future is not what it used to be and needs rescuing. There is now a high degree of volatility in everything from politics and financial markets to food prices, sport and weather and this is creating ubiquitous unease – especially among generations that grew up in eras that were characterised, with 20/20 hindsight, by relative stability and simplicity. A world more like Downton Abbey than Cowboys Meet Aliens!

Thus the interest in books that explain what is going on right now, where things are likely to go next and what we should do about it. But there’s a problem with all these books about the future. Indeed, there’s a fatal flaw with almost all of our thinking about what will happen next. Regardless of our deep desires, a singular future doesn’t exist and there is no heavenly salvation in sight. The present, let alone the future, is highly uncertain and we are even starting to question what happened in the past. At a recent futures summit in Provence, Grigori Yavlinsky, the ex-presidential candidate, admitted to us that the most uncertain thing about Russia was its past. Logically, if the future is uncertain there must be more than one future.

There are, of course, different ways in which the future might unfold and suggesting, as many futurists and technologists do, that one particular future is inevitable is not only inaccurate, but is dangerously misleading. What is worse is when we are asked to assign probability to this future emerging rather than that one. Linear analysis and the extrapolation of current events is a very straight road that promotes directly unforeseen shocks coming from all sides.

As the historian Niall Ferguson has observed: “It is an axiom among those who study science fiction and other literature concerned with the future that those who write it are, consciously or unconsciously, reflecting on the present.” Or as we like to say – all futures are contemporary futures in the same way that all prediction is based upon past experience. This is one reason why so many predictions about the future go so horribly and hilariously wrong.

For example, in 1884, an article in The Times newspaper suggested that every street in London would eventually be buried under nine feet of horse manure. Why would this be so? Because London was rapidly expanding and so too was the amount of horse-drawn transport. Londoners would, it seemed at the time, soon be up horse manure creek without a paddle.

What the writer didn’t foresee, of course, was that at exactly this time the horseless carriage was being developed in Germany by Daimler and Benz and their new invention would change everything. But four years later, in 1898, Karl Benz made exactly the same mistake by extrapolating from the present. He predicted that the global demand for automobiles would not surpass one million. Why? Because of a lack of chauffeurs! The automobile had been invented but the idea of driving one oneself had not. Thus it was inevitable, he thought, that the world would eventually run out of highly skilled chauffeurs and the development of the automobile would come to the end of the road.

The preoccupation with trends analysis is doubly misleading. Not only must trends be lined up with ‘discontinuities’, counter-trends, anomalies and wild cards, which have a nasty habit of jumping into view from left field, they are also retrospective and not ‘futuristic’ at all. A trend is an unfolding event or disposition, which we trace back to its initiation, and trends tells us nothing about the direction of velocity of future events. It is true that occasionally an idea or event occurs that is so significant that history is divided into periods of before and after. The steam engine, the automobile, the microprocessor, the mobile phone, the world wide web, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, Google, Facebook and Amazon are all, arguably, examples.

But even here there is confusion. We all have a particular lens through which we see the world and no two individuals ever experience the present in the same way. Moreover, our memory can play tricks. As a result, there is always more than one reality or worldview as we like to call it.

Equally, it is not a binary world. It is a systemic one in which influences making for change interact with each other in complex and surprising ways. It is also a world where it is rare for a new idea to totally extinguish an old idea, especially one that has been in common usage for a very long time. For instance, despite the facility with which mobile technology can deliver ‘media content’, there’s still something reassuring about the daily newspaper dropping with a thud on to the hall mat as we begin another day. Moreover, while means of delivery, business models, materials, competitors, profit margins and even companies may change radically the deep human needs (e.g. the desire to tell or listen to stories) often remain relatively constant.

Change happens rapidly, but in most instances it takes decades, often generations, for something new to result in a linked extinction event. The slow pace of fast change is observable. We all witness this. Like the destroyer in Sydney Harbour’s Maritime Museum at Darling Harbour – built in 1943 – which has in its ops room a fax machine. More often than not different individuals and institutions will experience present and future in slightly different ways depending on where they live, what they do and how they have grown up (i.e. more than one reality again). There is more than one present let alone more than one future.

This is a good thing, as is the level of uncertainty that surrounds the future. Indeed, in many respects this is one of the most interesting times ever to be alive, because almost everything that we think we know, or take for granted, is capable of being challenged or changed, often at a fundamental level. Even human nature if Joel Garreau the author of Radical Evolution is to be believed.

It is the view of the authors of this book that the only rigorous way that one can deal with a future that is so uneven and disjointed is to create a framework that reveals a set of alternative futures covering a number of different possibilities.

This technique, called scenario planning or more properly scenario thinking, originated as a form of war-gaming or battle planning in military circles and was then picked up by, amongst others, Royal Dutch Shell, the oil company, as a way of dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty. In Shell’s case, scenarios correctly anticipated both the 1973 oil crisis, which hiked prices dramatically, and the corresponding price falls almost a decade later.

Other incidences where scenarios have foreseen what few others could include Adam Kahane’s Mont Fleur Scenarios in South Africa in 1992, which foresaw a peaceful transition to democratic rule, and two sets of scenarios created by the authors of this book for a major bank in 2005 and the future of the Teaching Profession in 2006/7, both of which identified futures around the global financial collapse that occurred in 2008/9

This, then, is a book about the future that offers readers a number of alternatives for dissection and discussion. It is not a book about trends, although key trends within demographics, technology, energy, the economy, environment, food, water and geopolitics are commented upon in depth. Equally, it is not a ‘how to’ book about scenario planning, although in the second half of the book the authors explain how scenario planning works and outline how each of the four different scenarios presented in the book were developed. Rather it is a book that considers a number of critical questions and then uses a robust and resilient process to unleash four detailed scenarios about what it might be like to live in the world in 2040 from a variety of different perspectives. It is not simply about where today’s trends might take us but about what the world in 2040 might be like.

It is not our intention to predict the future. We are not seeking, as it were, to get the future totally right. This is impossible. Our aim is rather to prevent people from getting the future seriously wrong. This is achievable, but only if we give ourselves the chance to think bravely and creatively. The book is intended to form part of a deep conversation. It is designed to open peoples’ minds to what is going on right now and create a meaningful debate about some of the choices we face and where some of the things that we are choosing to do – or allowing to happen – right now may go next. It is intended to alert individuals and organizations to a broad range of longer-term issues, assumptions and decisions and to firmly place a few of them on the long-range radar for careful monitoring and further analysis. It is about challenging fundamental assumptions and re-framing viewpoints, including whether or not people are asking the right questions. And in this context disagreement is a valuable tool.

Most of all, perhaps, we would like liberate peoples’ attitude towards the future. In all our work we discover that people from all kinds of professions and backgrounds want to make a difference – to generate change as well as adapt to it. As Peter Senge once remarked: “Vision becomes a living thing only when most people believe they can shape their future.” So, yes, people need to understand the opportunities and threats that lie ahead but also consider in which direction they would like to travel. For example, is mankind on the cusp of another creative renaissance, one characterised by radical new ideas, scientific and technological breakthroughs, material abundance and extraordinary opportunities for a greater proportion of the world’s people, or are we in a sense at the end of civilisation, a new world characterised by high levels of volatility, anxiety and uncertainty?

Are we entering a peaceful period where serious poverty, infant mortality, adult literacy, physical security and basic human rights are all addressed by collective action or are we moving more towards an increasingly individualistic and selfish era in which urban overcrowding, the high cost of energy and food, water shortages, social inequality, unemployment, nationalism and increasingly authoritarian government combine to create a new age of misery and rage?

Some urban economists and sociologists are predicting a future in which between one and two billion people will be squatters in ‘edge cities’ attached to major conurbations – Mexico, Mumbai, Beijing and more – while others believe in the concept of a smart planet in which our expertise delivers a triumphal response to the drivers of change and we create local self-managed inclusive communities which resonate with traditional democratic value.

Just what does the future have in store for us? This is what this book aims to find out.

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know

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Just been re-working the contents on one of my new books. Here’s the final (?) contents. Note that synthetic biology and climate change are featured despite not being headings. No cover yet but I’ll blog one when we have it and it’s public.

Contents
1. Politics & Power
Ubiquitous Surveillance
Digital Democracy
Cyber & Drone Warfare
Water Wars
Rise of the East

2. Energy & Environment
Resource Depletion
Beyond Fossil Fuels
Precision Agriculture
Population Change
Geo-Engineering

3. Urban Landscape
Mega-Cities
Local energy networks
Smart Cities
Next Generation Transport
Extra-Legal & Feral Slums

4. Technological Change
An Internet of Things
Quantum & DNA Computing
Nanotechnology
Gamification
Artificial Intelligence

5. Health & Wellbeing
Personalised Genome Sequencing
Regenerative Medicine
Remote Monitoring
User-Generated Medicine
Medical Data Mining

6. Social & Economic Dimensions
Living Alone
Dematerialisation
Income Polarisation
What (& Where) is Work?
The Pursuit of Happiness

7. Towards a Post-Human Society
Humans 2.0
Brain-Machine Interfaces
Avatar Assistants
Uncanny Valley
Transhumanism

8. Space: The Final Frontier
Alt.Space & Space Tourism
Solar Energy from Space
Moon Mining
Space Elevators
Extra Terrestrial Intelligence

9. Doomsday Scenarios
Mobile & Wireless Radiation
]Biohazards & Plagues
Nuclear Terrorism
Super-Volcanoes & Mega-Quakes
The Sixth Mass Extinction

10. Unanswered Questions
The Singularity
Me or We?
Mind Modification
Is God back?
Future Shock
Glossary of the future

Why trends bend

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If one more person had said “Have a magic day” I might have hit them. I’ve been in Hong Kong for a night staying at the Disneyland Hotel. Mickey Mouse in Cantonese and Mandarin is somewhat weird. Anyway, amongst other things, I’m putting the finishing touches to a new book called The Future: 50 Things You Really Need to Know. Here’s what used to be the end before it got thrown out (I hate throwing things away, which is why have a habit of recycling them here).

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Ideas can be tricky in the sense that they often combine in novel and unexpected ways. Thus, the future rarely ends up as a logical extension of our current thinking. Some ideas will move much faster, or much slower, than we expect, either because we will underestimate the speed of technological change or because we will forget about the impact of human psychology and the inertia of history. This latter point is hugely important. Futurists, especially techno-optimists, often focus on technology at the expense of other important factors, especially the psychology of their fellow human beings, many of whom can be emotional, subjective, irrational, forgetful and stark raving mad.

Therefore, while science and technology will exert significant influence on the future, other, more prosaic, ideas or events may prove to be far more influential, especially when they combine with inherently human responses. For example, it is likely that machines will one day become smart enough to replace people in many more roles. At this point capital effectively becomes labour. But what will the human reaction to this situation be? Similarly, a major man-made or natural disaster could trigger a seemingly illogical technological regression, while a prolonged economic depression might result in anger or resentment towards other nations that ends up with a steady retreat from globalisation and many of the values, institutions and beliefs that we currently take for granted.

If you are thinking that this all sounds a little unlikely and that the future will most probably be a predictable and logical extension of the present, then consider what a handful of men armed with a simple idea, together with some low-tech box cutters and a rudimentary knowledge of flying, managed to do to geopolitics, US military deployment and the global zeitgeist on 11 September 2001.

We might also find that many of our new ideas, especially major scientific and technological breakthroughs that would benefit mankind, are constrained, modified or rejected by large numbers of people in favour of illogical beliefs and superstitions. Rather than a new enlightenment, we may enter a new dark age where it is illogical beliefs, rather than facts, that flourish. Again, you might believe that this future is implausible, but it’s already happening in some regions where the teaching of evolution is being rejected , either in favour of the balanced teaching of various viewpoints, or because religion considers such ideas to be dangerous and subversive.

Or perhaps we will abandon the internet, either because we no longer trust much of the information it contains, or because governments, or corporations, around the world start to censor it or remove many, or all, of its open and generative qualities.

We should also remember that important things happen by accident and that people often find uses for ideas that their creators did not foresee. Sending texts via mobile phones is just example of the unintended consequences of technology. Similarly, Twitter was largely created ‘on the fly’ by its users and not the unfolding of a long-term master plan. We often make long-terms plans based on an imagined future, but life then makes unexpected and unwanted turns. The challenge, to some extent, is dealing with the realities that we get rather than those we expect. Life, as John Lennon said, is what happens to you while you are making other plans.

It would also be a mistake to assume that the future will be a singular experience. Some people will experience the future sooner than others, which is much the same as saying that how you experience the future, 5, 15 or 50 years hence, will to a large degree, depend upon what age you are, where you live and what you spend your time doing. There is also the point made about prophesy by the philosopher Karl Popper many years ago, which is that the future is dependent upon the growth of knowledge, which is itself unknowable or, at the very least, unpredictable.

To conclude, the only thing that we really know about the future is that it will be different. Nothing is inevitable and equally nothing will happen in isolation.
Overall, the future offers us many wonderful possibilities, but it remains up to us whether the opportunities are embraced, squandered or ignored. The future is already here, but it’s unclear what we’ll decide to do with it.

Should we be optimistic about the future? On balance, the answer is probably yes. In the shorter term there are serious issues on the horizon and everyday life is likely to get more difficult for many people, especially in relation to food, water, energy and resources. Mankind also has a habit of doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, often due to short-term pressures, or messing things up completely by leaving things until it’s too late. But we usually muddle through and eventually fix any serious wrongdoings.

Over the longer term things are looking brighter, largely due to forthcoming developments in areas such as healthcare, energy and the Internet. These changes won’t benefit everyone, so one of the key challenges is to ensure that any newfound optimism is evenly distributed and that more of the world’s people can engage in a debate about what kind of future we would all like to live in.

Jottings

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The blog is getting to be a bit of a struggle with two new books, both with the same deadline. Fortunately one is done, but I keep having ideas for things that should perhaps be included. And don’t anyone mention the stack of unread magazines or lost issues of Brainmail!

Anyway, it’s 6.05pm and I had enough of books for today, so here are a few snippets from my backlog of newspapers.

1. More than 25% of young people aged between 10 and 12 years of age in the UK now need a calculator to do basic sums. 33% don’t know how to use apostrophes either and their parents are now too busy to help them, with most parents spending less than 10 minutes helping kids learn per day.

2. A study from the University of Nebraska in the US says that right-wingers are more negatively inclined than liberals, who tend to look on the bright side. Reminds me of a quote that went something along the lines of left-wingers wanting to banish the past and right-wingers wanting to banish the future.

3. Another study (what do some people do all day?). This time it’s for Macmillan Cancer supports in the UK and it says that young people (thoseyoung people!) are surrounded by friends, but have very few that they can turn to in times of crisis. The survey of 1,000 people aged between 18 and 35 discovered that around 70% only had 2 or less real friends with 13% saying they had none at all. Apparently males are more likely to have fewer real friends than women.

The average number of Facebook friends remember is 130.

Reminds me of some research I quoted in Future Minds by sociologists at the University of Arizona and Duke University that found that Americans have fewer real friends than they used to. Back in 1985 the average American had 3 people to confide in about their problems. Now the figure is just 2. Fairly consistent then.

Harry Potter and the Da Vinci book of Sodoku

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Future Minds has now gone off to print, which is why the blog has suddenly become so active. BTW, did you know that authors are now under pressure from publishers to write books that have titles that are search engine optimised? So I’ve been thinking about what my next book should be called. So far I’ve come up with three ideas.

1. Harry Potter and the Da Vinci code book of Sodoku
2. Six sigma secrets to time management trends
3. What Paris Hilton and the New York Yankees know about innovation

Preface From New Book (pre-edit)

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“Google knows everything” – Nick, aged 8.

This is a book about how the digital era is changing our minds. It is about how new digital objects and environments, such as the internet, mobile phones and e-books are re-wiring our brains — at home, at work and at play.

Technology clearly has a lot to do with this, although in many instances it is not technology’s fault per se. Rather it is the way that many trends are combining and technology is either facilitating this confluence or accelerating and amplifying the effects. This may sound alarming but it needn’t be. We have created these digital technologies using imagination and ingenuity and it is surely within our grasp to decide how best to use them — or when not to.

But can something as seemingly innocent as a Google search or a mobile phone call really change the way that people think and act? I believe they can — and do.

This thought occurred to me one morning when I was looking out into space, from the rooftop of a hotel in Sydney. But then I reflected. Would I have thought this if I were on the phone, looking at a computer screen, in a basement office in London?

I think the answer is no. The hotel was a calm and relaxed environment with expansive harbour views, whereas an office can be a box of digital distractions. Modern life is indeed changing the quality of our thinking, but perhaps the clarity to see this only comes with a certain distance or detachment.

Does this matter? I think it does. Mobile phones, computers and iPods, have become a central feature of everyday life in hundreds of millions of households around the world. There are currently more than one billion personal computers and more than four billion mobile phones*(1) on the planet. In 2005, 12% of US newlyweds met online, while kids aged 5-16 years of age now spend, on average, around six hours every day in front of some kind of screen. This technological ubiquity must surely be resulting in significant attitudinal and behavioural shifts — but what are they? The answer is that nobody is really quite sure. The technology is too new (the internet is barely 5,000 days old) and our knowledge of the human mind is still too limited.

We do know the human brain is ‘plastic.’ It responds to any new stimulus or experience. Our thinking is therefore framed by the tools we choose to use. This has been the case for millennia but we have had millennia to consider the consequences. This has arguably changed. We are now so connected though digital networks that a culture of rapid response has developed. We are so continually available that we have left ourselves no time to properly think about what we are doing. We have become so obsessed with asking whether something can be done that we have left no time to consider whether something should be done. Perhaps the way our brains are constructed means that we just can’t see what is going on.

Moreover, the digital age (the internet, search engines and screens in general and mobile phones and digital books in particular) is chipping away at our ability to concentrate. As Professor Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation points out, screen reading “conditions minds against quiet, concentrated study, against imagination unassisted by visuals, against linear sequential analysis of texts, against an idle afternoon with a detective story and nothing else”. We are therefore in danger of developing a new generation that has plenty of answers but few good questions. A generation that is connected and collaborative but one that is also impatient, isolated and detached from reality. A generation that is unable to think in the ‘real’ world.

It’s not just the new generations either. We all scroll through our days without thinking deeply about what we are really doing or where we are ultimately going. We are turning into whirling dervishes, frantically moving from place to place in search of superficial ecstasy, unaware that many the things we most yearn for are being trampled by our own feet. It is only when we stop moving and the dust settles that we can see this destruction clearly. Our attention and relationships are becoming atomised too. We are connected globally, but our physical relationships are becoming wafer thin and ephemeral. Digital objects and environments influence how we all think and are profoundly shaping how we interact.

Ultimately, I believe the quality of our thinking – and ultimately our decisions – is suffering. Digital devices are turning us into a society of scatterbrains. If any piece of information can be recalled at the click of a mouse, why bother to learn anything? We are all becoming google-eyed. If GPS*(2) can allow us to find anything in an instant, why master map reading? But what if one day the technology doesn’t work? What then?*(3)

It is the right kind of thinking – what I call deep thinking – that makes us uniquely human. This is the type of thinking that is associated with new insights and ideas that move the world forward. It is thinking that is rigorous, focused, deliberate, independent, original, imaginative and reflective. But deep thinking like this can’t be done in a hurry or in an environment full of noise and interruptions. It can’t be done in 140 characters or less. It can’t be done when you are doing three things at once.

Yes it’s possible to walk and chew gum at the same time but I am concerned about what happens when you add a Twitter stream, a Kindle and an iPod into the mix. In short, what happens to the quality of our thinking when we never really sit still or completely switch off?

Why does all this matter? Because a knowledge revolution is replacing human brawn with human brains as the primary tool of economic production.*(4) It is now intellectual capital (i.e. the product of human minds) that matters most. But we are on the cusp of another revolution. In the future, our minds will compete with smart machines for employment and even human affection. Hence, being able to think in ways that machines cannot, will become vitally important. Put another way, machines are becoming adept at matching stored knowledge to patterns of human behaviour, so we are shifting from a world where people are paid to accumulate and distribute information to an innovation economy where people will be rewarded as conceptual thinkers. Yet this is precisely the type of thinking that is currently under attack.

So how should we as individuals, organisations and institutions (the latter being those deliberately built environments where we spend most of our lives) be dealing with the changing way that people think? How can we harness the potential of new digital objects and environments whilst minimising their downsides?

Personally, I think we need to do a little less and think a little more. We need to slow things down. Not all the time but occasionally. We need to stop confusing movement with progress and get away from the idea that all communication and decision making has to be done instantly. The tyranny of the next financial quarter is just as damaging to deep thinking as a noisy office fitted with fluorescent lighting.

I’m sure that by writing this book I will be accused by some people of going backwards, or of being a pastist. But remember that some of the tried and tested technologies of yesteryear have grown old precisely because they are good and we should think twice before deleting them. Equally, being a member of the Tech No movement doesn’t mean smashing the nearest digital device. It simply means questioning potential consequences or asking for some level of balance. It is about arguing that we need a little more of this and a little less of that.

This is a book about work, education, time, space, books, baths, sleep, music and other things that influence our thinking. It is about how something as physical, finite and flimsy as a 1.5 kg box of proteins and carbohydrates can generate something as infinite and potentially valuable as an idea. Hence, it is for anyone who’s curious about thinking about their own thinking and for everyone who’s interested in unleashing the extraordinarily potential of the human mind.

Whether you are interested in how to deal with too much information, constant partial attention, our obsession with busyness, leisure guilt, the myth of multi-tasking, the sex life of ideas, or the rise of the screenager, this book explores the different aspects of how digital objects and environments are re-wiring our brains – and makes some practical suggestions about what we can do about it.

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* (1)Half of British children aged between 5 and 9 now own a mobile phone. For 7 to 15 year-olds the figure is 75%. This is despite government advice that no child under-16 should be using one. The average age that children in the UK now acquire a mobile phone is 8 years.

* (2) I interviewed someone for a job recently and one of her questions was whether or not she could use my car. I said she could, so she asked whether my car had a GPS in it. It doesn’t. She turned the job down. I wish her luck, whatever direction her life goes in. The point here is that GPS and Google give us information but they do not impart understanding and in some cases they can prevent us from properly planning ahead.

*(3) We assume the internet will always work. But what if it doesn’t? A US think-tank (Nemertes Research) says internet use is rising by 60% each year worldwide. Unless we can increase capacity they claim ‘brownouts’ (frozen screens, download delays etc) will become commonplace, relegating the internet to the status of a toy. How would you cope with that?

* (4) A study by McKinsey & Company, a management consultancy, claims that 85% of new jobs created in the US between 1998 and 2006 involved “knowledge work”.

Where Do People Do Their Best Thinking?

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You may remember that as part of my new book (Future Minds) I spoke to a few people asking them the question: “Where and when do you do your best thinking?” Here are some more responses…

“Over the decades, I think that my best thinking has occurred when I am visiting a foreign country, have my obligations out of the way, and am sitting in a pleasant spot – in a café, near a lake – with a piece of paper in front of me.”

“Usually when I am not working, and most often when I am travelling!”

“The most relevant (issue) for me is ideas needed for a piece of writing. As a drummer I am generally required to avoid deep thinking of any sort. So it’s probably whilst driving on a motorway, or on the start of a transatlantic flight. I think it’s to do with some distractions so that the thinking is a little freer – there is nothing worse than tidying the desk, sharpening a pencil and sensing the creative part of the brain creeping out the back door… also there’s a nice reward element that can be employed. No motorway fry up, or extra dry martini before there’s an opening line invented.”

“Lying in bed in the dark, with the white noise generator producing a soothing whoosh, I sometimes have a few seconds of modest insight.”

“I love doing household chores: loading the dishwasher, scrubbing the floors, scouring the pans; the polishing, the cleaning. All the time I am thinking of ways to improve upon the equipment; what would bring forward the technology.”

“I’ve had creative thoughts while walking down the street, in the shower, on the squash court, in the bathroom (of course), while shaving… .”

“I do my best thinking in bed – sometimes even when asleep. I wake up having solved a problem.”