To cope with future, image yourself in it

By VICKI JAYNE

If the city administrators of yesterday could look at the traffic chaos that is Auckland today, would they have been so keen to junk trams in 1956 and pour more tarseal before the wheels of the mighty motor car?

Would they have so happily acquiesced to the hasty destruction of historic central city buildings had they foreseen the carparks that now occupy those sites?

Today's reality is that the most livable and lovable of the world's cities are those which have maintained a good public transport infrastructure and a historic heart.

Eat your heart out, Auckland.

Okay, so hindsight is a wonderful thing, but it is not as inaccessible to present-day planning as it might seem. All you have to do is imagine yourself into the future.

That is a tactic business consultant, foresight trainer and author Nick Marsh is advocating for any business, or city, that wants to avoid being clobbered by the increasingly rapid pace of change.

He says there is a significant difference between the sort of strategic planning that starts with the present and works forward and what he describes in The Power of Standing in The Future, co-written with Mike McAllum and Dominique Purcell.

"It looks like the same thing but there's a psychological shift," says Marsh.

"If you're looking out from the perspective of your business today, then you tend to operate within the mental model of how it's done today: your present activities, customers, revenue sources, competitors ... and so on.

"With the best will in the world, it's hard to think outside those parameters because that's the way the mind works. So you need to almost artificially leave all that aside and start from a different place, perhaps five or 10 years in the future."

From that perspective, it is easier to take the imaginative leap necessary to rethink business fundamentals in the light of potential social, economic or technology changes.

Marsh and co identify seven major change drivers, or "tsunamis", ranging from the technological to the sociological and environmental.

"What we're saying in the book is that there's a blizzard of information about what's happening to affect your future. Meanwhile, the average manager is gazing at 80 emails a day, answering phone calls, attending meetings, dealing with all the drama of maintaining market share today.

"The future is something they might look at around the boardroom table once a year, or think about on the beach.

"It's hard to find a focus, which is why we designed the tsunamis to help provide a framework through which to view how change impacts on the way you might do business."

"Knowledge as value", for instance, refers to the growing awareness that business value is shifting away from bricks and mortar to the more ephemeral realms of ideas and knowledge networks.

Marsh notes that BP has recently redefined itself as being in the communications business. Maybe it is recognition of how much company value now lies in its global knowledge and distribution networks.

Other drivers include the impacts of digitalisation (chips in everything, total interconnectivity), biotech innovation, and the increasing gap between haves and have-nots.

Last is the impact of "paradox" - unexpected effects; solutions that need to take seeming opposites into consideration. A paradoxical world is one where there is increasing demand for individualised offerings at a mass-market level, for instance.

It is also a world in which conventional approaches to business may no longer work, which is why Marsh encourages a little loosening of the rational thinking reins.

"In business and management there is always this dichotomy that strategic planning has to do with linear thinking, analysis, problem solving. But there's another whole piece of that process which is intuition, creativity, having a gut feel.

"When you look into the future, you can't analyse it because you can't be certain what will happen. Foresight goes further than forecasting and it involves a more instinctive approach."

As a start, it is important to understand what business or sector your business is in and how that is shifting. Then you need to ask what the company is good at, and how that expertise could evolve into another service or even another industry.

A simple example: the corkscrew manufacturer whose business may be threatened by a wine industry that embraces screw-top bottles.

One option would be to stick with the corkscrews but target high-value novelty or collectible products. Another might be deciding to use existing engineering expertise to get into another market entirely.

Another hint: if you want to second-guess the future of your product, don't rely on consumer research. It only looks at present use. Instead, think lifestyle function. It is a notion critical to understanding why a huge part of today's cellphone market is teenage girls, says Marsh.

"When cellphones first came out, nobody envisaged that. But it's why texting ... has become such a huge thing. It is relatively low-cost and meets teenagers' massive need to communicate."

Which brings us back to cities and their lifestyle functions. Marsh reckons "livability" is a prime point of focus. And on that score, the Brazilian city of Curitiba is doing better than Auckland, he says.

"One of the good things they do there is that every Friday, the mayor and city managers meet to spend two hours talking only about the future. In the afternoon, they spend a further two hours dealing with today's urgent issues.

"That is an interesting model of how to treat the future properly."

* The Power of Standing in The Future is published by Crown Content and sells for about $50.

* vjayne@iconz.co.nz