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Polycrisis Analysis

I’m usually not very timely here in terms of commenting on hot-off-the-press type of events, but I’m going to do it today! Canadian futurist Ruben Nelson shared a piece from the Cascade Institute called “Introduction to Polycrisis Analysis.” I have not reviewed it yet in the appropriate detail it deserves, but my initial reaction is — get this piece immediately!

I’m not sure what it says about me that I got goosebumps of excitement in reading through a paper that explains polycrisis. But do we not need more effective ways of thinking about just this thing? Yes! Right? We are seeing more attention to risks. In fact, the paper does a nice comparison of the various prominent publications covering risks and relates them to the framework they have developed. But it is the frameworks that we are in dire need of. As regular readers know, I’m a sucker for a good framework. And we have one here! Let me pull out a quote that is just beautiful:

At the core of our framework is the stress-trigger-crisis (STC) model, which depicts crises as the product of slow-moving stresses that interact with fast-moving trigger events to push a global system out of its established equilibrium and into a state of disequilibrium (systemic crisis) that causes major human harm.

The paper goes on to explain how to do polycrisis mapping. The explanation is simple and elegant, which suggests to me that they really, really put a lot of time into thinking it through. Such a handy approach — it immediately went into my folder for the next time time I teach World Futures class. And for fans of After Capitalism, this surely aids our understanding of how the baseline is crumbling and how the transformation may unfold.

I didn”t know about the Cascade Institute, but I am a big fan of one of the author’s previous works, Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down, which I blogged about way back in 2012. In other words, the authors are not new to this game. It is clear they have been thinking long and hard about what they call the polycrisis. Bravo, well done, and thank you for this wonderful contribution. — Andy Hines

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Sources of Resistance to Information about Change

Last night we had a class in World Futures on wildcards in which we reviewed Oliver Markley’s wonderful piece that includes sources of resistance to information about wildcards. As I reviewed this list, I couldn’t help but think that these sources of resistance seem pretty applicable as sources of resistance to information about change in general. In short, why do we resist information about the possibility of change? Markley (2011) suggests six sources:

  • Passive Disbelief /Ignorance)—wherein a given wild card isn’t seen as credible more or less simply due to a lack of  knowledge, rather than from some competing point of view.
  • Discounting—where the relevant knowledge is simply ignored.
  • Active Disbelief—where the occurrence of the given wild card is asserted to be impossible, due to it contradicting other beliefs held dear (which, in turn, can result from establishment positions that involve disinformation and/or censorship).
  • Disinformation—where the relevant knowledge about the wild card has been convincingly camouflaged by propagandistic distortion.
  • Taboo—where there is an “Elephant in the Living Room” that will severely undermine your legitimacy as a credible actor if you even talk publicly about the given wild card being credible.
  • Censorship—where the relevant knowledge is suppressed by prevailing authorities in power over public policy and/or the mass media.
  • Disrepute—where the dubious reputation of the “prophet” prevents a credible hearing.

In the figure I show you how I would rank them in terms of what I’ve seen in my experience working with clients and audiences over the years. How would you rank them? – Andy Hines

Source: Markley, Oliver, 2011. “A new methodology for anticipating STEEP surprises.” Technological Forecasting & Social Change 78, 1079–1097.

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Stretching our Scanning: Snowball Scanning

I’ve been getting a lot of requests lately to “help us stretch our scanning.”

Snowball Scanning A. Hines

It’s something we’ve been thinking about for a while. In Spring 2018, we dedicated our annual Spring Gathering to “scanning the fringe.” We started playing with the idea of snowball scanning a few years ago. “Snowball Scanning?” I owe the thought to Dr. Oliver Markley who taught us snowball surveying…why not apply it to scanning. As we’ve been looking for ways to stretch our scanning, we’re using it more regularly now.

It can start with a simple search engine search: domain map category + futures-oriented search term. [We’re also playing with our terms and our sources, but we’ll save that for another time].

  1. Review the results
  2. Pull out:
    1. an interesting “signal” of change.
    1. an interesting source or link. Review the links and references from the initial results and pull out an interesting source
  3. Launch a new search
    1. Use a keyword from that signal to launch a new search
    1. Use the search terms on the interesting source/link
  4. Pull out (Repeat step 2 above)
    1. an interesting “signal” of change.
    1. an interesting source or link. Review the links and references from the initial results and pull out an interesting source
  5.  Launch (repeat step 3 above)
  6. Continue as long as practical and/or useful

An observation I have from doing Snowball Scanning in particular and scanning in general is that it takes time to do it well. The approach here is more aimed at an ongoing scanning system than a project-based scan. There is a point in ongoing scanning where the so-called low-hanging fruit has been picked and it gets tougher to find useful weak signals. I suspect many readers/scanners are already doing some form or this. Be glad to hear you experience (please save the “my automated scanning system can pull up a million hits in two seconds” – different topic). – Andy Hines

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Work ain’t Workin’: Is Stinkbombing Next?

The way we work ain’t workin’, right? So far workforce resistance has been mostly passive. But what if it turns active … thus stinkbombing.

Let’s do a quick review.

Great Resignation

  • I can day trade, speculate on crypto, gaming, drive an uber;  I can downsize my lifestyle; I can retire or retire early; I can work somewhere else; I can consume less and work less (and crash at my parent’s house); My job is a bullshit job, etc.

Quiet Quitting

  • “Quiet quitters” make up at least 50% of the U.S. workforce — probably more, Gallup finds.

Lazy Girl Jobs

  •  Meet The Latest Version Of Quiet Quitting: Lazy Girl Jobs (Forbes via TikTok ) [Note: this is not gender-specific, as men can have lazygirl jobs too.]

Lying Flat

  • Not just the US. This is the Chinese version of opting out. ”Lying Flat: The Demise of the Chinese Workforce and Its Impact on the Chinese Economy” (Berkeley Economic Review ) opting out of the pursuit of traditional economic success  and unrelenting hours.

I think workers are trying to tell us something, namely, the current approach to work is not working. A common element of all these forms is they are passive. It certainly isn’t unthinkable that this resistance moves from passive to active – to actively putting monkey wrenches in the works. My sense is that it hasn’t happened yet because we’re too afraid. In the US at least, the system is too cutthroat and losing your job, despite all its faults, is a really big problem. The different context of the pandemic showed us, in a strange way, that jobs are not the end-all, be-all. Work went to the backburner. Sure, there was a cost, but we managed to last for two years without our rise-n-grind work ethic in full force. Maybe there was some hope that things would be different, and then disappointment when they went right back to normal. One might argue that more is being asked of workers than ever.  So, we have become increasingly irritated. Again, so far, mostly passive, but …

I thought of stinkbombing as the opening salvo or more active resistance. I’ve noticed the practice of workers lobbing complaints into conversations, meetings, or any work activity, but then being “too busy” to work on solutions. Show up at the endless zoom meeting, drop your stinkbomb, and then log off when it comes time to do the work. It deflates the group and effectively stalls any progress – that’s success in terms of resistance. I’m curious. What are ya’ll seeing in terms of more active workforce resistance? – Andy Hines.

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Automation driving towards After Capitalism

The fourth in our series of seven key drivers influencing the move to After Capitalism is technology acceleration.

Automation could drive towards After Capitalism from two distinctly different paths.

  • The first path, the negative one, is that automation is applied indiscriminately and causes massive job loss and capitalism takes the blame.
  • The second path, the positive one, is that automation is applied strategically and improves productivity and enables people to work less and eventually facilitates a post-work future.
Automation Pathways (A. Hines)

Automation is defined here as the use of various technologies for operating equipment or for performing tasks, physical or digital, with minimal or reduced human intervention. Another way to frame the issue is whether “this time is different.” Waves of automation are not new and each time ways have been found to create more new jobs. The Shift Commission raised this question, in particular noting the contribution of AI: “We believe today’s progress in AI is consequential enough to prompt careful consideration of whether this time is different.” Slightly more than half their members (58%) agree that this time is different.Harari suggests that “the most important question in twenty-first-century economics … [that is] what to do with all the superfluous people …” made obsolete by automation.

There is plenty of potential for the first “massive job loss” path:

  • Graeber supports the other extreme and suggests that not only will automation lead to net unemployment, but that it already has. He suggests that dummy jobs are effectively made up to mask the difference. His popular Bullshit Jobs suggests that if one eliminates bullshit jobs, and the real jobs that only exist to support them, from the picture, one could say that the catastrophe predicted in the 1930s has actually happened. “Upward of 50 to 60 percent of the population has, in fact, been thrown out of work.”
  • Australia has a fully automated farm using robots and artificial intelligence.
  • Xiang suggests that if AI remains under the control of market forces, it will inexorably result in a super-rich oligopoly of data billionaires who reap the wealth created by robots that displace human labor, leaving massive unemployment in their wake.
  • Once established as successful, Uber announced plans to automate its fleet and put all its workforce out of work. Due to business problems, however, it has abandoned that approach for now.
  • The high-profile story of a CEO firing 90% of his staff and replacing them with AI took place in India.

One might argue that the only reason automation has not taken off faster is that people are still cheaper than machines.

There is less current evidence for the “strategic” path leading toward post-work. This is not surprising since post-work has not yet emerged as a large-scale desirable concept. Several AC concept authors talked about the potential for technology acceleration as an enabler of post-work.

  • Bastani’s suggests a key role for automation and technology as enablers of his “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” vision.
  • Srnicek & Williams in their post-capitalism vision suggest automation can eliminate “huge swathes of boring and demeaning work.”
  • Bregman in his vision of a post-work future, cites a RAND study suggesting a future in which only 2% of the population would be able to produce everything society needed.

A third potential path was identified in the research. Most projections identified by the research for this work suggested that automation would lead to net job loss. But not all. Reese is representative of a school of thought that AI will create more jobs than it destroys. He uses the example of the ATM, which for some time counter-intuitively led to more tellers, because it became cheaper to open a branch bank. However, the Bureau of Labor Statistics now projects a 15% decline in teller jobs in the US over the next 10 years. The view here is that this path is less plausible, and even if it were to be true, it would reinforce the Neoliberal Capitalism baselines and not drive towards After Capitalism.

My own study of the future of work aligned with the first path. We identified a baseline scenario in which automation is applied in purely economic terms with little regard for social costs. As the projections above suggest, the full impact of automation is yet to come. But when it does, it is likely to be quite disruptive, and little is being done to prepare for it. Thus, it seems most likely that automation will largely be applied with “full steam ahead.” There is still time for the strategic path to be taken. The work being done here supports that path.

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Inequality driving towards After Capitalism

The third in our series of seven key drivers influencing the move to After Capitalism is technology acceleration.

Growing economic inequality is threatening the social order.

Inequality has long been an issue, but awareness of it has been growing and it is becoming increasingly intolerable. I previously shared how Piketty’s popular Capital in 2014 makes a strong case that since the 1970s, income inequality has increased significantly in the rich countries and that it is a structural feature of capitalism. A few years later in 2016 the leader of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, while promoting his Fourth Industrial Revolution concept, acknowledged that inequality represents his greatest societal concern. Many other researchers and world leaders have been publicly acknowledging that inequality is approaching crisis mode. Even celebrity CEOs have joined the chorus — Salesforce’s billionaire CEO Marc Benioff has criticized the “horrifying inequality” of America’s economic system.

The behavior of a system is a function of its structure.

UH Foresight alums will recognize this quote from Systems Thinking class. The key implication here is that inequality is a feature of capitalism, not a side effect. It’s not something broken that can be fixed. The capitalist system produces inequality. We might be able to reduce it a bit, but it won’t go away. Historically, we have more or less accepted inequality because capitalism also produces growth. What’s different is that inequality is worsening and because of values shifts, people are no longer as willing to accept this bargain.  

Piketty’s extensive research basically found that return on capital investments beats economic growth, which essentially translates into an advantage for previously accumulated wealth. Put bluntly, capitalism has a systemic, built-in advantage that favors those who already have wealth. In systems thinking terms, it’s the “success to the successful” archetype.

It’s getting worse. A simple but enlightening breakdown from Stewart in 2018 about the US class structure is shown in the figure. It suggests the “middle class” is already gone. The big winners since the 1970s have been the super-rich 0.1% at the top. The 9.9 percenters (think knowledge workers), doing well, have been hanging on. The big losers over this period of time have been the 90%. Think about that for a second — 90% have not been served well. Hmm.

It’s corroding societies. The challenges of inequality go beyond economics. Wilkinson and Pickett (2009) cite effects, such as undermining citizenship by eroding trust, solidarity, mutuality, and breeding cynicism. It’s also creating a new hereditary aristocracy — America now has less social mobility than some poorer countries. Guy Standing takes it a step further and identifies a new class structure emerging from the inequality, which he calls the precariat. The precariat consists of people whose work lives are characterized by insecure jobs interspersed with periods of unemployment, and dealing with related issues such as trouble finding insurance or affordable housing.

Can tech abundance come to the rescue? There are some suggestions that a great wealth bounty deriving from technology acceleration will solve inequality. But so far, technology has tended to exacerbate inequality. One need look no further than Musk, Bezos, and Branson, the entrepreneurial tech heroes, who have accumulated massive wealth and are mostly celebrated as heroes. But as futurists we must consider that this could change — 0ur Technology Acceleration driver covered last week explores this possibility.

Inequality is arguably the single biggest and most direct driver leading to the questioning of capitalism. It has grown to such an extreme that it is getting more and more difficult for supporters of capitalism to explain away. The historic case of a rising tide lifting all boats is becoming less clear as well; some boats are rising fantastically high, but most are now stagnant and taking on water, and many are sinking.  – Andy Hines

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The End of the World

is just the beginning according to former Stratfor analyst Peter Ziehan in his “Mapping the Collapse of Globalization.” It’s been a challenge to convey my reaction to this book. On the one hand, I had some negative reactions. On the other hand, I did end up reading the whole thing, and it has made me think. I’ve been talking to colleagues about it and fussing about this review. I feel that any book that can make you think that much has accomplished its mission, so kudos to the author for that. I’ll lay out the key arguments and respond. But let me state clearly that just because I have a different view, doesn’t mean I’m right! I respect the author’s views and simply offer another perspective. And then you be the judge!

The basic argument is that aging societies and the US withdrawal from its global protector role will create a cascade of reinforcing breakdowns that will decimate consumption, production, and trade that ultimately collapses globalization and lead to “decivilization.” Nations will turn hostile and inward and the US is in better position to survive on its own than most other nations.

Put a different way: the world of the past few decades “… has been the best it will ever be in our lifetime. Instead of cheap and better and faster, we’re rapidly transitioning into a world that’s pricier and worse and slower.” He foresees more than a billion people starving to death, and another 2 billion suffering from chronic malnutrition. Lest we get too morbid: “by 2040, the youngest Millennials will be in their forties, and their money will have made the system flush once more.” In fairness to the author my After Capitalism images are placed at 2040-2050 and I agree that the next 20 years could be quite rocky!

Let’s first look at the demographic collapse: we know about population stabilizing or slowly declining in most of the world, except for Africa. The problem he sees is that aging populations flip the support ratio to fewer workers supporting more retirees, reverses economic growth, and crashes economies. His most prominent example is China, which he notes is the fastest aging society in history. “It will have a complete demographic collapse certain to occur within a single generation – in the best-case scenario. He sees the Chinese population in the year 2070 will be less than half of what it was in 2020.” Now this seems over-stated, if not just plain wrong. It would likely take another generation to reach that number. But nonetheless it is pretty remarkable point to consider, so let’s not quibble on timing.

He believes China will have to face its version of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, in which the other export-led model countries had to come to terms with massive debt. He suggests that China has generated the largest and most unsustainable credit boom in human history, and the declining population and de-globalization will pop the massive credit bubble. It’s a scenario worth considering.

On the other hand, one might argue population decline is a good thing. My work on After Capitalism concludes that degrowth is a sensible strategy for the future. Growth is literally overwhelming the climate and carrying capacity. I also believe the author underplays the potential role of automation in substituting for the shrinking workforce. And there is an unspoken and outdated assumption that retirees won’t work.

The second key argument is the collapse of the American-led global order – “the Americans have gone home.” He argues no one else has the military capacity to support global security, and from that, global trade. The breakdown of global supply chains and the unwinding of global trade is an extreme scenario, but not implausible, and worth considering. I do feel this point about American going home is not adequately backed up. The US still seems pretty involved globally to me, despite “reveling in our internal petty squabbles.” He suggests the US will do fairly well, or at least better than most in the deglobalized world. But here too, I think he might be assuming unity within the US will hold, which in this dire scenario is a big assumption.

There are a few cringey points from a futurist perspective that we are still seeing t0o frequently in popular works:

  • The author proclaims his thanks those who helped him be “able to read the future.”
  • He relies far too much on his “trusty tools of geopolitics and demography to forecast the future” and overlooks the rest of the STEEP (social, technological, economic, environmental, and political) context.
  • And a personal one for me: “everything is going to change.”  [see Change is slower than we think]

In conclusion, I reiterate my thanks to the author for making me think and rethink; for challenging some of my assumptions! I suspect some of the hyperbole about the greatness of the USA in the book derives from an author knowing his audience and doing a bit of pandering – it will appeal to some and likely alienate others, but the others probably won’t buy the book anyway. I’m glad I did.  – Andy Hines.

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Houston Foresight at the WFSF 50th Anniversary

I was fortunate to spend last week with my University of Houston Foresight friends in Paris at the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF) 50th anniversary conference. The main event for us was being awarded the world’s first accreditation of a Foresight graduate program. This is a very important milestone for the development of our field. We are slowly but surely doing what we can to build awareness and our credibility. The WFSF has been a mainstay on the academic side of foresight and was the ideal candidate to offer the accreditation service (NOTE: they were founded a year before us; we will celebrate our 50th in 2025 … ya, don’t check the math). The professional association, the APF, was founded 20 years ago, and about 7 years ago the Foresight Competency Model was developed. We’ve also had three editions of the Knowledge Base of Futures Studies published, in the 1990s, 200os and most recently in 2020. These are examples of important developments in the building of our field.

In terms of field-building, what was really exciting to me was the spirit of the Houston community. Eighteen students and alums self-organized and made the trip to Paris to support the program. A cadre — Juli Rush, Heather Benoit, Sarah Wheeler, and Jeremy Wilken — stepped in to volunteer and help manage the conference, which really reflected well on our program — thank you! Perhaps the most fun of all was the late night talks about the future in the group AirBNB flat organized by Juli.

I have to admit I was a little weepy when I accepted the award and got a raucous ovation. The spirit was just amazing. It’s that spirit, more than anything else, that will build our field and bring more high-quality foresight to the world. We are building a community of talented individuals who believe in academic rigor and producing high-quality futures work, and who also believe in sharing deep intimacy and community-building with one another. In closing. I would like to acknowledge the yeoman’s work of my predecessor and long-time Program Coordinator Peter Bishop — we would not be here without you!! — Andy Hines

For more LinkedIn posts from the UH Foresight Community attending the 2023 WFSF Conference:

Andy Hines, Mina McBride, Abdulrahman Alsulaimi, Heba Alhadyian, Mushfiqa Monica Jamaluddin, Rich Erwin, Hauson Le, Heather D. Benoit Kampa, Ingrid Furtado, Jeremy Wilken, Emily Mudge, JT Mudge, David Geye, Nicci Obert, Sarah Wheeler, Timothée CHANUSSOT, Adam Cowart, John Sweeney, Dr. Derek Woodgate.

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Foresight’s Last Mile Challenge

One of the biggest changes I’ve seen in foresight practice in more than three decades of work is the shift to more emphasis on implementation. At Houston Foresight, we call this the influencing phase, which follows the first phase of mapping the potentials. In short, once you’ve mapped the futures, how do you influence them – what might you do?

We’ve based our process on the six competencies of the APF Foresight Competency Model. Other futurists might call it something different, but most of us do some version of this. In my client work, we keep being asked to go deeper in terms of more specific and detailed recommendations on what to do. At first, and even today to some extent, it feels like we are encroaching on the client’s territory – we’re in the space where you might think they would be “taking it from here.” Nonetheless, since our goal is to make foresight more useful, we take the journey.

The very last step of adapting is where the final “translation” happens. We’re practically inside the organization now, metaphorically speaking. As external consultants, it’s difficult to sufficiently grasp the culture and politics. [An organizational futurist partner is ideal here.] Futurists typically have not built a deep tool kit here. The change managers are here. The Organizational Development (OD) people are here. But why not us? I’m doing research with colleague Mina McBride on this last mile challenge. How can we futurists help bridge this important gap? – Andy Hines

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Four challenges of working at the local level

Most of the ideas I’ve seen for an After Capitalism future put a heavy emphasis on the local level. Most of it comes from a view that local knows best in terms of local communities being most aware of what is needed and what works in their particular context. I think it is also to some degree an acknowledgement that governance at the national and state levels is not working well, so it is best to take matters into their own hands. I agree that more focus needs to be local, but I do sense there is a bit of romanticizing that localization is the fix. But there are some major challenges in working at the local:   

  1. The participation panacea: The postmoderns, with their love of inclusion, participation, and community engagement assume that everyone else shares their love of participation. But they don’t. The postmoderns believe that if only more participation is enabled (1) everyone will eagerly participate, and (2) the resulting influx of ideas will solve the problems. I question both – getting participation is very difficult and the resulting ideas are not always helpful. My point is not that these are not good things to do – they are very good things to do – rather, that they are not magic solutions.   
  2. Nearsightedness: Getting communities into the future is extraordinarily difficult. In my three decades of experience as a futurist, I’ve seen painfully little futures work at the local government level. It hasn’t been valued, or to be blunt, seen as worth being paid for. It has likely been perceived that long-term planning is more of a state or federal problem. I am happy to report that this has been changing over the last several years. For example, groups such as Strategic Government Resources, have built a foresight practice that focuses at the local government level.      
  3. Systemic weakness: Problems gravitate to the weak link in a system. The more powerful links in a system will tend to find ways to get rid of or shift the vexing problems so they can “focus on what they do best.” Problems will sometimes end up on the doorstep of agencies or groups that will take it on because they are good and caring people. But they may not be up to the task. We just finished a project with a major library system, and they have more or less had problems dumped on them, and because they really care about their community, they take them on. But it’s not what they are trained for.  
  4. Rethinking the Grants approach. Let’s be blunt for a second: Grants are an awful way to fund innovation, and a lot of innovation at the community level is funded this way. Another case where good and well-intentioned ideas are just not working. We have had to develop cadres of people responding to inanely complex RFPs that often do very little to address the “real” problems in a community. The movement toward strategic philanthropy, which looks for ways to be more focused and goal-oriented in pooling resources, is a very promising development. At the same time, the whole approach to innovation begs a rethink.

There is no doubt that we need to operate more effectively at the local as more responsibility and power shifts there. A first step in change, drawing on the great work of Jim Collins in Good to Great, is “confront the brutal facts.” There is lots of work to do at the local level, but the really good news is that promising developments are underway. — Andy Hines