Donna Fitzgerald

I’ve just been through about 100 plus views of the future.  The really important thing I learned reading all these comments is that 95% of individuals commenting indulged in blatant wishful thinking.  My comment here isn’t intended to be critical.  It was just eye opening to me to see how littel ability we have to separate our more rational thought processes from our hopes.  I believe that most of the individuals commenting also live their lives committed to making many of the changes they prognosticated which made their views much more understandable (after all you can’t get up everyday and work to change things if you have predetermined that you are going to fail).

The problem with these perspectives is they make for very bad decision making.  I can wish with all my heart that things will be sweetness and light in the future but I’m not going to build my company’s 5 your plan on those assumptions.  Of course I say that but the other learning I got from reading all these perspectives is how hard it is to be completely objective and rational.  Robert Handler has some forth-coming  reasearch called “Why People Make Irrational Decisions, and How PPM Leaders Can Deal With It” that I think pertains to some of the issues here.  We often think we’re being rational and we’re not.

Of the 5% that seemed to have any grasp of the subject of future trends largely devoid of wishful thinking I noticed that they all kept their views very close to the near term and essentially said  “here are the problems we need to deal with somehow.  The way we deal with them (the problems) will drive the future”. 

 So at the risk of finding myself indulging in the same unconscious errors I pointed out with others here is what seemed to make sense from what I read  (as filtered through my possibly equally biased viewpoint)

• Health care costs driven by an aging population and the increased demand for expensive treatment at all ages, further exacerbated by diet and lack of exercise- which is exacerbated by what we do for a living (driving and sitting at desks) and the rate of stress all conspire to create a vicious feedback loop of increasing cost that we can’t afford in the progressively nearer term future.
• Debt everywhere which will have to be paid somehow
• A small number believe that the US is now under educated and over confident which will lead to a further economic downturn in the US as “creative jobs” are moved to other economic zones.  This problem will be further exacerbated by the increase in the cost of education which may in turn be the “next crises” in the US. 
• One or two individuals mentioned a possible increased cost of energy as a significant future driver.

Obviously there are no solutions here and I’m certainly not going to posit any.  From a perspective of scenario planning it’s critical to remember that solutions do NOT need to be either positive or socially desirable.  Society can chose to solve problems though wars and repressive social policies just as easily as it can though trade and collaboration.  My interest at the moment is just in suggesting as a baseline that future planning is just a tad harder than it may look from the outside.

Comments?  Suggestions for what the future might hold?

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Category: Organizational Development Strategic Planning     Tags: Future Trends, Scenario Planning

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