Sure-Fire Crystal Ball Gazing

It is always interesting how I stumble upon some great thinking and writing by serendipity but rarely have the wherewithal at hand (pencil, paper, laptop, iPad, whiteboard) to ponder and tease and work those thoughts into coherence and direction for my professional and personal life. This was one time when I was by my computer while I was reading an extremely pertinent article for all of us who are in enterprise architecture, technology strategy and the crystal ball business.


I was reading the April 2012 issue of Smithsonian magazine and came upon an article on FUTURISM by the celebrated science fiction writer and author of Tomorrow Now, Bruce Sterling. Aside from the extremely witty and apt quotations, his observations on forecasting the future were very interesting. His thesis is that you don't need to be clairvoyant to predict the future.

If individuals have never encountered modernity, then you can tell them about real genuine things that already are happening NOW. For them, that is the future.

As a person interested in thought patterns, process patterns and information patterns, I lapped up the classification scheme used by futurists to predict the future

1. Statistical: analyze the volumes of hard data collected by businesses and government and sift out underlying trends. It's demographic research, not clairvoyance, that predicts that a new Starbucks coffee shop will appear in a heavily foot trafficked urban locale.
2. Reportorial: The future is often a dark mystery to people because they haven't invested the effort in finding out what's likely to happen. Some simple shoe leather spadework (interviews, search engines, social networks) coupled with basic questions of who, what, when, where and why can be of great use here. (This method is the basis for what has become known as "Open Source Intelligence")
3. Historical Analogy: Sterling believes is radically inaccurate, yet also dangerously seductive, because people are profoundly attached to the seeming stability of the past. In practice, though our ideas of what has already happened are scarcely more solid that our predictions of tomorrow. If futurism is visionary, history is revisionary.
4. Scenario Forecasting: What Sterling calls a set of strange rituals which assists bewildered clients who can't frankly admit to themselves what they already know. The job is to encourage mental change through various forms of playacting and rehearsal.
5. The fifth and final method, Sterling believes is the most effective of all. If individuals have never encountered modernity, then you can tell them about real, genuine things that already are happening now - for them, that is the future.

Put another way, Sterling argues, the future is already upon us, but that is happening in niches. The inhabitants of that niche may be saint-like pioneers with practical plans for applying technology to eliminate hunger or preserve the environment. Far more commonly they are weird people with weird ideas and practices and are objects of ridicule.

Sterling cites the example of the French cartoonist Albert Robida who he claims is probably the greatest futurist of the 19th century who predicted all the advances of the twentieth. His cartoons depicted the use of electricity, flying machines, the emancipation of women, and other then far out prospects. Sterling also wryly observes that "Even the cleverest, most deeply insightful forecast becomes paper thin when time passes it by. Visions of the future are destined to fade with the dawn of tomorrow."

There are a few well phrased quotations buried in Sterling's extremely readable prose:

"Tomorrow obeys a futurist the way lightning obeys a weatherman."

"If futurism is visionary, history is revisionary."

"Visions of the future are destined to fade with the dawn of tomorrow."

Robida's cartoons are excerpted at Smithsonian.com/robida.