What’s Driving the Future?
By: Zachery Tyson Brown
Tags: Thinking, Future, Strategy, Analysis, Futurism

“The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed. ― William Gibson

In the introduction to this series, I described how the future is created by a continuous interplay between forces of continuity and forces of change. ‘Forces’ may sound mysterious, but that’s really just a word I use as a catchall for the underlying factors — whether social, economic, technological, or ecological — that encourage or discourage behavior in people — that is, in us.

Although the world is changing constantly, the status quo has its own inertia. That inertia is sufficient, usually, to prevent all that ongoing change from spreading quickly or evenly — or sometimes from even catching on at all. The future, it turns out, has a strong status quo bias.

For example, consider how 2020 played out. Advances in digital communications technologies had provided the ability to collaborate remotely from almost anywhere on earth well before the pandemic struck. But this particular force of change was held in check by more powerful forces of continuity that preferred to keep things the way they were. Before the onset of the coronavirus crisis in March, both the private sector and the public had soured on the notion of remote work.

It took an exogenous shock like the pandemic to loosen continuity's grip, presenting government agencies and corporate boards around the world with little choice but to embrace the change they had only just recently shunned. But in a telling example of continuity’s reluctance to give in even when forced to accept the necessity of change, many organizations this past spring tried to simply replicate their normal, in-person work practices remotely — with uniformly frustrating results. It took months for more traditional office cultures to adapt to the distributed, asynchronous, and necessarily more informal nature of remote work. Some offices never managed to adapt at all. For those that did, telepresence and remote collaboration quickly became indispensable, so much so that some now go as far as to project that we might never return to the office.

Too many would-be futurists fixate on one particular piece of emerging technology, a hot new startup company, or a disturbing geopolitical trend, and are then frustrated when their maximalist projections based on those things are wrong. Others falsely exaggerate the strength of the status quo, thinking that what exists now is more permanent than it is.

To exercise practical analytic foresight, you must account for both the forces of change and continuity.

Identifying Key Drivers

“Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Photo by Patrick Perkins on Unsplash

Another word for forces is ‘drivers,’ and they’re what this installment is all about. I look at drivers a bit differently than others. Where some use the term almost synonymously with ‘trends,’ I prefer to think of drivers as those forces exerting influence on the behavior of individual actors within complex systems. In this sense, it is the drivers that actually create the trends.

U.S. President Donald Trump, for example, is not a driver — though the sort of bomb-throwing, paradigm-breaking disruption he personifies is certainly a trend. The key drivers that encouraged Americans to elect Trump by a slim margin in 2016 will remain in effect once he departs the White House on January 20th, 2021, which is one reason why U.S. President-Elect Joe Biden’s appeals for a return to normalcy after four turbulent years are unlikely to succeed.

Key Drivers are those that stand out by the degree of influence they exert on the larger structure of the situation or problem being analyzed. Depending on the level of analysis you’re working at a Key Driver might be as generic as “climate change” or “artificial intelligence” or as specific as “the rate of sea-level rise” or “the capability of computer vision to identify cats.” No matter what the scope of your analysis is, though, identifying the Key Drivers is foundational to any exercise in analytic foresight.

As with the Key Assumptions Check, we do so by first gathering a group familiar with the issues being discussed, along with some select outsiders who can bring invaluable fresh perspectives.

What are the factors that we think are driving change? What about those driving continuities? Each participant gives an answer or writes it on a sticky note or on the whiteboard. It doesn’t matter exactly how you do it, as long as everyone’s answers are heard on an equal footing. It’s often helpful to use a facilitator who will read each answer aloud, prompting questions and sparking conversation within the group. Participants are encouraged to critique and build upon one another’s ideas.

Next, group the individual drivers that have been identified into affinity groups. Pick a word that describes each grouping. Discuss which groups are the best candidates for Key Drivers — those that represent or suggest a critical variable that’s certain to influence how the situation under consideration will evolve.

You don’t need an exhaustive list of drivers; a handful is more useful and much easier to work with. Once you’ve identified a good number of them, you can monitor them over time as they interact to create the future. You can also ask the question, how might we disrupt negative drivers or encourage positive ones?

Divergent Options

“The future is plural.” — Peter Schwartz

Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash

Perhaps the most helpful thing we can use drivers for is generating scenarios. Scenarios are one of the most effective means we have of thinking about plausible futures because they simultaneously expand our thinking and sensitize us to the importance of uncertainty. Many participants in scenario-generation exercises find a good scenario exercise to be far more helpful than being presented with a slide deck or a lengthy white paper that they don’t have time to read.

Scenario-building will serve to challenge inherited assumptions and break the worn conceptual pathways we’re used to, allowing us to consider scenarios that may otherwise be thought unlikely as plausible under certain driver-influenced conditions. When building scenarios, you may identify discover that your drivers aren’t drivers at all, or are themselves being driven by other, even more foundational drivers.

Scenarios aren’t predictions, they’re merely potentials. Instead of trying to estimate the most likely future — and always getting it wrong — scenario development allows us to construct a framework of various plausible futures, within which the most likely one can be found. The more plausible scenarios that you develop, the better your sense for outlier scenarios that involve both high risk and great opportunities will become.

Ok, that’s about it for drivers. Next time, I’ll talk more about how we use drivers to generate scenarios through which to analyze alternative futures throughs simple 2x2 matrices. Don’t forget to like, clap, share, and subscribe if you’re enjoying this series and want to see more.