Beware the Head Nod

Our biggest fear in writing the Activating the Future book and teaching the class is the head nod. The head nod is when something makes immediate sense. It seems and perhaps is obvious. It immediately registers an “I agree” reaction. Much of the content of the book and class will likely elicit such a reaction. The challenge is that just because we head nod, doesn’t mean we are going to do it. We have all heard for most of our lives that eating our vegetables or eating a balanced diet is really good for us. But how many do it? We have a massive obesity problem and a burgeoning bazillion dollar pharma sector based on giving people pharma solutions because they can’t eat their vegetables or a balanced diet. Yet, if we explained this to most people, their heads would nod.

I’ve noticed this myself. I’ll be listening to a speaker and my head is nodding, such that I am not writing anything down. And afterwards, when asked, I might say, that was a great session. When asked what it was about, I might strain to remember anything …  but it was great. It reminded me of how colleagues used to joke about me in my younger days in that I was always making notes. I may not have told them that I would take those handwritten notes and transcribe them later on, and find a place for them in my taxonomy of information collection. One day I might need to retrieve the insight, and it was in the most logical place for me to look. Several things happened here.

• I wrote it down, which in my non-technical view is I etched it in my brain.
• I brought it home, thought about it, synthesized it, and placed it in a structure, which is further etching.
• I had just enough of a system such that, weeks, months, or even years later, I could find this insight (with some effort) when needed.

Today, when I’m teaching or talking and see the head nods but no capture, I get nervous. I also worry about “my AI is capturing, synthesizing, and cataloging it” because none of that is taking place in their brain … no etchings.

The Activating the Future work is not the kind of work that is readily formulaic. There are guidelines, which we’ve captured, but the heart of activation work is getting into the details of the particular situation. We are constantly looking for clues. We need to know what we are seeing. Reviewing the guidelines will certainly help, but we are also dependent on what we’ve etched into our brain. The more we internalize the guidelines, the easier it is for us to see the clues.

We tried to deal with this by creating lots of tables and figures to call out “remember this.” But that only goes so far. The old-timers might remember the books with underlines, margin notes, and stickies in a particularly useful book … that’s what we looking for, or the contemporary equivalent.

This is fresh in my mind since we’re teaching the Activating the future course at Houston Foresight this summer. But it applies everywhere. I wonder how many readers of After Capitalism are head-nodding as they go through it. While this work doesn’t have that immediate application imperative that activating the future does, it is of course ultimately designed to influence people to change their thinking and behavior. Some of the contradictions of capitalism and the potential remedies in the Circular Commons, Non-Workers Paradise, or Tech-Led Abundance will seem obvious and intuitive. Yet we know how amazingly challenging it will be to make the changes happen.

The key here is making sure we have a system for incorporating, synthesizing, and applying what we learn. The unique circumstance in activating is that a great deal of it appears to be common sense, so it doesn’t necessarily make it’s way into our system  — it doesn’t get etched, and we miss opportunities! — Andy Hines