No Future - Part 1

You Can Only See As Far As Your Next Pay Check

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

About a decade ago, I was part of a Futures project at a Big Four Professional Services firm. The Financial Services group in the firm had decided that they were sick of primarily being known as special guest auditing stars on the 10Ks of banks and they wanted something more. Added to which, the global banking sector was recovering from a recent self-inflicted near-death experience and so was in an unusually thoughtful mood. Bankers required more than a glass of Petrus / line of cocaine / BDSM dungeon visit to perk them up.

So the firm of whom I was an employee (lets call them PKED) decided to gather a massive amount data and create a 600-slide megatrends powerpoint deck. Large powerpoint decks do allow you to predict the future - the future being a catatonic state in your audience. However some effort was made to make this more than just a talk-fest. PKED partners would chop lines out of the deck (like an investment banker might chop out lines of… whatever) for conversations with customers. Most of these conversations led to sweet FA although some of the more enterprising strategy partners got some work out of it. The mastermind behind it left because it just didn’t yield enough billable hours to warrant them being promoted beyond senior manager (which in PKED was not the equivalent of the toiler cleaner but still only slightly above someone who leads a crack team of toiler cleaners).

Doing this work (mostly as a data drone / toilet cleaner), a few things became clear:

• All megatrends decks are essentially the same. There’s generally 4-8 megatrends and in there will be “Environment”, “Technology”, “Demography”, “Geopolitics”, etc. There will be charts to the right and up (yay!) and to the right and down (boo!) There will be pages and spreadsheets of data to support all this.

• Megatrends decks are useless. Nearly everyone believes the earth is warming - apart from a few extremely powerful holdouts in the fossil fuel industry and their “conservative” supporters in politics. No one knows exactly how this temperature rise will play out climatically. There are mighty big error bars on those IPCC report trend lines. Most managers care about the specifics of their situation. Most megatrends are too gross to actually apply to an immediate business problem.

• Most executives do not care about the future in any meaningful sense.

That last point requires some explanation. I’m sure that executives care about their children (why else would they send them to boarding schools far away?) and their friends. I’m sure investment bankers are concerned about the viability of the cocaine supply chain. However they are not occupationally obliged to care. The lifespan of companies is declining:

And the tenure of CEOs is also declining. In Australia, ASX50 CEO tenure has fallen from 8.5 years in 2003 to 3.7 in 2020.

Meanwhile on the S&P500, CEO tenure has dropped over the last 10 years and now stands at a median of 4.8.

Now of course a CEO would only ever act in the best fiduciary interests of investors but they are around for a good time, not a long time. Succession ran for longer on HBO than the average CEO is in their job. The future is, in a very real sense, someone else’s problem.

There are two kinds of futurism. The first is the Futurism of Marinetti and Andreessen that we discussed here. Born in the First World War, this futurism seeks to control, make and become the future. It is an intoxicating religion.

The second emerged in the Cold War. Part of the intellectual arms race with the Soviet Union that simultaneously forged the creation of Silicon Valley. This futures / foresight movement mostly sought to bring a cool analytical, scientific approach to the future. To study it rather than to have sex commune with it. It spread into business mostly through the Scenario Planning work at Shell in the 70s - although as this article indicates: “scenario planning has not always been influential within the companies that use it, including Shell itself”.

The turbulent organizational environment is hostile to Type II Futurism. Who cares? Chop out another line. But Type I Futurism is far more attractive as a legitimation narrative for the Technological Elite. Chop out another line.

Amy Webb says that corporate strategy is stuffed. I (for reasons best outlined by Roger Martin) agree with her. I don’t hate her 10 step process*. But I don’t see foresight as saving strategy. I think we just need to do strategy properly and part of that is understanding how our context is changing. Our strategies should last as long as the assumptions that underpin them remain valid. Then we need to change them. Understanding that rate of change (that dy/dx** if you will) is important and this is where foresight can come in.

Do we need to do foresight? Well, it’s certainly preferable to worshipping the Singularity. It might even be helpful if we can pay attention for more than 5 minutes.

Theo Priestley mourns the current state of futurism. The torrent of babblers on social media who have predicted 27 of the last 3 technological paradigm shifts and who spent 2023 doing a Find and Replace from “Blockchain” to “ChatGPT” on their TEDx talks. Perhaps these “cool hunters”, “thought leaders” wankers are Type III Futurists. He is right to loathe them although they are less actively malevolent than Andreessen-Marinetti Type Is and less extinct than the Type IIs.

What we need is a Type IV Futurism. I think Priestley has some good starting points: a concern with history, the Hauntological inspiration of the late Mark Fisher, the non-Thermian deployment of science fiction (props for Okorafor reference). The tension is between the lived present that is with us now and the impossible futures that might be. This cannot be collapsed into technofascism, analysisparalysis, or trendhopping. It is like a string being plucked. Sounding a clarion note. Launching a wad of used chewing gum onto the arse of the oblivious substitute teacher of annual corporate strategy awaydays***.

We need to sit with these futures. Uncomfortably. Until something changes.

*For obvious reasons, I think it should be 12 and it should start with admitting that we are powerless - that our lives have become unmanageable.

**Sydneysiders, this is a reference to calculus not a beach to the north of your city. I still find that triggering, James Meehan.

***I may have actually sprained that metaphor.