Future of ‘I’

Future of 'I' (self – you – identity)

The Association of Professional Futurists runs a monthly 'future chat' on Twitter. See #futrchat for more information. These chats are open to everyone on Twitter and consist of a one hour mass sharing of thoughts and ideas for a future worth understanding and striving for.

This month I got 'cornered' into co-hosting one (@urbanverse and @jenjarratt – thank you for the push and shove

This month of 2012 the chat is held:
3/22 at 4pm NYC
3/22 at 8pm London
3/23 at 7am in Sydney (Oz).

As a co-host and the one who suggested the topic for this event I have prepared a few thought pointers.

Your future 'I' depends on you… and the rest of us; how you carve your way in amongst the rest of us carving our way, what you choose or don't from the menu of tools and directions for change – to make your future better for you and maybe, if we like what you're doing, to take the rest of us with you.

Many of the about 2700 tweets that have flowed 'out of my mind' to this shared mindspace have had something to do with the varying aspects of 'I', you, self or identity.

Some themes have been: who we really are (as species), where do we think we should go, what tools do we have to do that with, what is stopping us, what is making us satisfied with the journey, what is changing around us to make the journey easier or not, and then more challenging and perhaps a little 'black hole like' – what will these changes bring about?

To put some structure around some of those dimensions I have created a little framework for the Future of 'I'.

Framework

Our identity is

ONE part who we are now or how we're perceived now,

ONE part who we say we are and how many of 'Is' we project and

ONE part who we're becoming; is it a better version of who we were or a new us in some distinct way.

Life takes turns in these terms. If we find ourselves in a disruptive place (good or bad) in our lives, we shift to a new box, even if only momentarily, only to potentially be right back to where we started from.

Tools

Today we are in a strange place. The coalescence of factors that have opened our eyes to our capacity to change and provide us with important tools to change is phenomenal. What is in your toolbox for betterment?

Globally we are now faced with such a huge variety of possibilities of 'who to be', 'how to be', 'why to be' that we do not have be philosophers to possess an idea of the push and pull between what these two authors have said and the meaning of what they say to our potential and limitations:

“More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself. Everything one tries to do for the common good ends in failure.” Albert Camus

“No man is an island, entire of itself
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
it tolls for thee.” John Donne

The first tool of difference we face now is the fact that we have understood the potential for change – it is not easy but it is on offer – we can alter our bodies, our minds and our relating.

Overshooting

Like a pendulum we tend to swing with the novel until we find our equilibrium again. Some of us inherit and learn ways of being that are less than useful. Today as a society of sharers and blurters we have put a whole new spin on 'narcissism', not the disorder kind but the 'look at me' kind. When our identity takes many positions online life can turn into a surreal whirl. Then the question is: 'who am I for real?' or "Is my spin helping or hindering?" If we spin out of control with our wishes to be who we're not then we find ourselves in unfamiliar territory with not enough under our belt, for some this 'throwing oneself into the fire' works.

We all travel through many of these boxes and at times we put ourselves into positions of uncertainty or overshooting, even if just a little, and we have to. We cannot emerge at the other side of change without going through it first. Every little step towards the future 'I' is already in the unknown and we need to step into that new before we are fully competent.

Idea of identity

Will identity be what identity was? As a concept identity remains the way in which we make distinctions between people(s). Bar a world where distinctions were pushed to extinction, identity remains. What is different today? It is the speed at which we play with the possibilities. It can be as simple as changing some wording in our profiles or as big a taking on another life online (or offline).

Questions

Frameworks do not lend themselves well to the rather past-paced #futrchat, so I have created a list of questions some of which I will introduce during our conversation.

Feel free to introduce anything that you consider pertinent to the topic of the Future of 'I' and we'll see what takes off, what captures people's imagination and brings their experiences and thinking to the shared mindspace.

These questions do not frame the whole matter of the Future of 'I' but rather give us some discussion points of where 'I' (you, self, identity) may be in the Future.

The links are illustrations of what some have said about the thoughts/questions I put forward; you may agree, disagree, expand on what is in those links, just share your views on the questions or just go for the next question that comes along during our chat.
 

• "As our lives are more transparent to all – will that make us better?"
• "Will we be more (or less) defined by our connections in the future, as we interact on social networks and get enmeshed in the lives of others'."
• "The more we understand about our own neurology, the more we adjust our behaviors OR…"
• "The longer we live the more 'lives we live' and keep re-inventing our lives – does that fragment our identity?"
• "Wisdom about who we are tends to come/change with experience (age – life lived). Does an aging population make the world wiser?"
• "Will our future personal brands be more about who we are than what we do?"
• "Flippantly we say: People do not change. What does what does not ? Why/why not?"
• "If our childhood is very difficult – is our identity forever shattered? What can be done to make a difference?"
• "Tools like for example NLP (neuro linguistic programming video) provide us with some means to deal with (alter) our selves and our interactions. What is the impact on the Future of I?"
• "Eyes are the window to our soul" What is that soul? Is it reflective, do we change our souls by changing our eyes – the way we look at things and people?
• "Your body language and facial expressions are read – city cameras are studying you – is acting going to be a key skill for us all?
• "When in love we can conquer the world - we are invincible – how can we use that knowledge better?"
• "Our mind is our connected minds (e.g., Mindsight) – our sensory apparatus is part of the overall 'mind' – what does 'I' mean?

See you there!

Vignette – how to on foresight – fertile ground

SHIFT ATTITUDES TOWARDS RECEPTIVENESS TO CHANGE

George Bernard Shaw said, “You see things and say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were and I say ‘Why not?’”

It is important to cultivate receptiveness to the new: “Let’s try and understand this better.” The new disturbs existing comfort zones and positions and as a consequence is often dismissed or challenged–it just does not fit with the established order. It is important to recognize this behavior and to educate the organization on its potential consequences, and to give specific ideas for better ways to deal with the new and surprising. In an organization this requires some investment in thinking. If the organization is in a hurry to get results, encourage it to invest twice as much–this is the wisest investment it can make.

Key steps

Executives who have grown up in one kind of organization or in one industry are often firmly invested in their opinions. Eventually many of their views become hard-wired into the organization as conventional wisdom. The more firmly invested in these views an organization is, the harder it is for the analyst to help it let go and explore new ideas.

A simple starting point and approach is to gain agreement that it is important to the organization to improve its receptivity to the new. Model the causes and consequences of behavioral differences towards new information and ideas.

Next, research and understand the key areas where the organization is concerned with the new. These might be about industry growth or decline, as an example of areas where blinders are the most expensive to the organization.

Armed with this knowledge, create a few workshops specifically about highlighting the meaning of the program and the methods to get to some change–focusing on the behavior and the selected content elements. If possible, connect this goal into a leadership development program or other similar programs. Push participants to “lead by example,” and model it yourself.

Be sure to connect the behavior-oriented push to a programmatic approach to foresight. Make a concerted effort to show the value. Measure the impacts of these programs through employee interviews, such as a 360-degree assessment specifically on how the key areas of the business are being improved by this.

Benefits

Encouraging receptiveness to the new is a good practice in general, but will likely “stick” better in an organization when change is imminent or taking place. Many organizations recognize the value of strategic programs, which aim to sensitize their people and approaches to the shifts in markets and industries and to better understand the meaning of those shifts. In periods of growth, organizations may try to build innovation programs, strategic foresight programs, or ideation programs, or at minimum try scenario planning. Often the early attempts are sub-optimal in that they lack a programmatic follow-through activity, and thus fall short of the broad impact they could have.

Also, many organizations have established some means to track trends in their environment. If these rely on classical market-research methods alone, the foresight generated tends to be a linear extrapolation of today’s impacts–and hence will most likely miss the opportunities and risks that a strategic foresight program would be able to identify.

Example

Adam Kahane (2002) tells a remarkable story of transformation in Guatemala. The country has the dubious distinction of having had one of the longest-running and most brutal civil wars in Latin America, from 1992 – 1996. More than 200,000 people were killed or “disappeared.” After a truce, the Vision Guatemala project was formed to help vision a new future for the country. A team of forty-four–including political leaders, academics, business and community leaders, former guerillas and military officers, government officials, human rights activists, journalists, indigenous people, national and local politicians, clergy, trade unionists, and young people–were led through a scenario process by Kahane. The key attraction of the exercise was the process of deep dialogue among people who had previously never spoken with each other. It led to the team enrolling sixty “multipliers,” or grassroots leaders, who worked not to disseminate the scenarios but to replicate the dialogue process in local initiatives. This process of dialogue was instrumental in producing the visioning effort’s successful results.

Further reading

De Geus, A. (1997). The Living Company: Habits for Survival in a Turbulent Business Environment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Kahane, A. (2002). Changing the World by How We Talk and Listen. Unpublished manuscript. Beverly, MA: Generon Consulting.
Kleiner, A. (1996). The Age of Heretics. New York: Currency Doubleday.
Marsh, N., McAllum, M., and Purcell, D. (2002). Strategic Foresight: The Power of Standing in the Future. Melbourne: Crown Content.
Ohmae, K. (1982). The Mind of the Strategist: The Art of Japanese Business. New York: McGraw-Hill.

This vignette first appeared in “Thinking About the Future: Guidelines for Strategic Foresight”, edited by Andy Hines and Peter Bishop, published in 2006

Enterprise 2.0 is about changing behaviours

At the Enterprise 2.0 Future Exploration…..

One fundamental change will be in the day to day way in which people in the company work.

Euan Semple a former leader in BBC on knowledge management spoke of the difficulty to counter some of the arguments against leveraging the social networking and collaboration tools like wikis, blogs and RSS in the Enterprise. The fear is that people will be wasting time roaming around other people’s blogs or reading feeds or taking part in meandering conversations.

One approach Euan took was examining the old ways if the new ways were so frightening.

One of my favorite quotes by a systems scientist Marilyn Ferguson, a system theorist, is around change and the difficulty with it…..”it is not so much that we’re so in love with the old ways but change is like being in between trapezes…..”. Part of the solution is taking those for whom letting go is too hard by the hand and giving them a sample of the experience.

Those who are already in flat and less hierarchical organisations are likely to have embraced these technologies as they fit neatly to the behaviours already. The transparency and level setting technologies bring about visibility to the dead wood and the meetings which do not advance the organisations agendas.

It is fundamentally about how we all change our behaviours and our role in the organisation. Us vulnerable people need to deal with our fears.

AusForesight2007

Three days in the lives of futurists – together

AusForesight2007 is now part of history and memories. We came together in a national event with one tireless international guest Peter Bishop to reflect, react and respond.

• We reflected on the meaning of futures in our lives and in the world.
• We reacted to what we have learned and sensed and felt as futurists.
• We responded on the society we form a part of.

The setting was Sydney, surrounded by views of the harbour and the Opera House, the bridge, the parks and mostly wonderful weather.

Context

Two of the organising committee members Peter Hayward and Serafino de Simone welcomed the attendees and reflected on the origins of this year’s event in years of tireless work by Jan Lee Martin and the leading names in foresight from Australia: Richard Slaughter, Sohail Inayatullah and a number of others and also the importance of the previous year’s event in reforming the Australian foresight community.

Dominique, Serafino and Peter: three organising committee members

Last year many of Australia’s futurists had never met each other face to face or any other way.

This year the idea was to get us all to talk to each other more in depth. And talk we did. The first day we covered lots of ground through an intense dynamic conversation on what we had encountered as pressing issues and then what we faced as practitioners personally.

Chatty futurists

The lively conversation confirmed, raised eye brows, challenged views, winged, got real, despaired and got hopeful.

Group photo

Some topics which got attention were:

• What is it that makes people change their habits.
• Why do people carry on the old tracks even when their lives are at risk.
• We see behaviors which suggest that us humans are milking the current model before it collapses.
• With so much negativity in the media on change, we felt that futures work needs to be offering potential for hope or ways to initiate positive ripple effects from positive personal actions and then help bring about the wider outcomes.

One fitting quote here on the impact of the negativity was, “When you’re on the Titanic you might as well get drunk”.

Futurists@work

Futurists often work in small entities, one man/woman bands, and this causes a lack of leverage regionally and globally. We spoke about the numbers of ways in which we need to balance between the potential in the alternatives we see and the receptivity of our audience. Our client is often a corporation [government, education system] whose attention is firmly – all or nothing bet – on delivering on the short term numbers regardless of the chance that it is that ‘all chips on the same square bet’ which is terminal when carried forward with blinkers on.

Beware the taboos

One issue which was raised was the fact that it does not matter what group of ‘aficionados’ we talk to there are always the taboo views which are tricky to deal with. It is hard to say anything controversial and not face the smile that says, “Where have you been to bring that one up?’”. And futurists fall into the same trap. Mention the word growth and somehow it seems to bring up that smile on many a futurist’s face – it is somehow counter agenda.

Holism is hard work. It requires re-examination and redefinition of words and concepts we throw around, we cannot play this forward as if the words meant one thing to all people.

Ready for change?

A fundamental question to ponder is, “What are we prepared to give up to get somewhere different?”. This goes for individuals as much as for corporations. If the old way isn’t so hot and is going to run out of steam, what’s it going to be, what is a keeper and what is a giver upper?

We react differently to radical change – we have three prime flavours: Party, pray or pioneer. Futurists may be in all three while pioneering was considered to be part of our professional make-up. I know a few who are definite troopers in the party camp but equally present in the pioneering troupes.

There was one impassioned speech from a lady with a dream which reminded me of something I heard in my latest visit to the US in Camden Maine, which was “Martin Luther King did not get to his achievements by saying – “I have a problem”". Dreams, passion and persistent actions towards those dreams is what miracles are made of.

On what are the ways in which to get oneself into the zone of those passions, one key point was “Identifying your unique strengths and using those in the service of others”. It is what vocations are made of where the goals are bigger than the individual often petty concerns.

Voices for the future

As we roamed from table to table and room to room and from inside to outside event elements there was one conversation that kept on emerging in various guises. It could be called ‘voices’.

• Futurists as a group do not speak up strongly enough about the areas of concern, futurists have not supported minority voices or even understood them.
• Futurists have various voices depending on what the futurists backgrounds are.
• Should we consider segmenting the field more clearly like engineering or marketing has for the flavours to be understood better and heard?
• Are the young heard in a meaningful manner?

…but what about me?

Foresight involves pattern recognition. Sometimes us futurists need to take good care of recognising our own patterns and where those are leading us. The elements of our life so far are landmarks of our evolution and our path into our own future. Remember the moments of delight and passion, remember the moments of drudgery. It is wonderful when those moments of delight come together into one bigger whole of a happy you.

In one of the discussions we were trying to get to the essence of human competitiveness and lack of negotiation in the bigger picture engagement and it led to a discussion on the need to shift from competitive intelligence to connective intelligence and collaborative intelligence. Naomi Klein‘s book The Shock Doctrine was mentioned for its qualities for re-energising. One tenet in it being that clarity increases energy. Clarity of where we are and what we are doing.

We all have to do many things we don’t like, living in rather tyrannical situations. How do we deal with it? We shared our various ways to find a spiritual stillness. How do we divorce ourselves from the situation and find the distance and peace? For me, as I have found out lately, it is blogging [still practicing]. Mowing the lawn I think was the most likely activity to gain ground globally. My lawns are in constant need of mowing the lawn, you are welcome anytime

Integral foresight foreplay…letting lose on the second day

I could not attend all the events during the second day but the two that I did were very good sessions of sharing practitioner experiences.

They were led by insightful approaches to setting the scene for a good conversation. The first one I attended was on the applying integral foresight in our work. As Richard Slaughter has said now in a number ways and said it again, ‘integral’ is not an ideology, it is a model or a framework and helps us be more inclusive of the dimensions of influence in any situation. Chris, Josh and Gretchen outlined their experiences and here are some key dimensions which I took away as important things for all to remember.

Gretchen, Josh, Richard, Chris

It is not very useful to use the model explicitly to try and explain the state of the world with it. Rather it is more important to use it to cover the ground but leave it at the back of the mind as a frame of reference. This way the focus is on the area requiring futures thinking rather than on the method to get to the solutions and opportunities. Some readings suggested were naturally google.com.au/books?as_auth=Ken+Wilber&ots=6DEbT4AkIf&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=author-navigational">Ken Wilber‘s books but also Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson on people as autonomous beings and as meaning making individuals.

One danger with the model is that a practitioner compartmentalises people into different stages and people are really at many stages all at once for various situations and contexts of their lives. One way the integral method makes a difference is that it pushes for re-examining other methods and improves their comprehensiveness when taken from an integral perspective.

The second session I attended was aptly called “From foresight foreplay to corporate consummation”. The room was full. Sex sells. Marcus and Steve did a great job weaving a human interest story into the progress with a client.

We took a journey through key works of foresight and strategy which gave us part of the puzzle and the focal questions which we in the room were going to explore through discussion from our own experience on what works and what does not. Some of the questions were: What is foresight effectiveness? Is the field’s value understood? What to do about it?

Other fields which the group found to be equally difficult to put a direct dollar value to the results are public relations and design. With the cooperation of the participants we ended up in a warm embrace with our client(s) but we were wondering about what it made us futurists as we did end up in that warm embrace and we did a paying gig …….

Thanks it was fun!

Oliver coined a nice sentence for how he saw the consequence and thrill of our field, “The unbearable lightness of seeing”.

Further building the community

We wrapped the event by discussing our future as a community, the ways in which we’d like to engage for an improved future of the field.

After some months of deliberation on the ways in which the community can help itself we are now well on the way to forming an Australian professional foresight association.

A youth event in the park

Sunday we had a treat by Janine and Liz Cahill at Victoria Park. It was time to launch www.globalyouthfutures.org. We had a number of activities around rethinking and re-perceiving future and providing youth a voice.

A crowd scene – people listening to stories about the future and rap

Sustainable Sydney and some alternatives being envisioned – through art

Re-expression through recycled computers and toys

Thank you: Peter, Richard, Dianne, Wendy, Marie, Peter, Luke, Stephen, Steve, Marcus, Nicola, Terri, Jan, Peter, Brian, Brendan, Pat, Ian, Julien, Ian, Anita, Adam, Charles, Matthew, Liz, Janine, Roslyn, Chris, Barbara, Hugh, Robert, Maree, Gretchen, Josh, Oliver, Steven, Amy ……and the many others apologies if name isn’t here I am mainly listing those I paraphrase here in some way shape or form, apart my own thoughts and reflections on it all.

Here you can find more on the event.

Human sillyness

Nothing changes while the way in which we express humanity changes

In French there is a saying: “Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose”. The more things change the more they are the same.

We can sometimes be extremely contradictory between our stated intent and our behavior.

I’ve got two examples about this human sillyness. One is in the real world and the other one is ‘in-world’, in Second Life.

In Second Life there is a Second Life Liberation Army. Here is what SLLA stands for:

The SLLA’s demands are simple:

The establishment of basic political ‘rights’ for avatars within Second Life
Campaign:

The SLLA will not seek to harm the normal operation of the world.

Here is a video on what they did to Reebok’s store through a script attack [thanks Martin for links and explanation].

In the name of protecting the rights of Avatars they just wiped out a number!

Sounds familiar as human sillyness goes, doesn’t it.

“Prolife: Helping moms, saving babies, ending abortion”

and here is how it is done.

We are a strange bunch.