Reports from the Knowledge Labs about our recent findings, research topics, and interviews with lifestyle leaders who are creating their own futures.
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How to stimulate your own powers of foresight. Consider the following thought provokers. Ask yourself, in these categories what are the brand new trends and forces? Which are the ones growing in importance? Which current forces are loosing their steam? Which have peaked or are reversing themselves? Which are the "wildcards" about to disrupt us in the future? POLITICAL AND TECHNICAL thought for food: Electronics, Materials, Energy, Fossil, Nuclear, Alternative, Other, Manufacturing (techniques), Agriculture, Machinery and Equipment, Distribution, Transportation (Urban, Mass, Personal, Surface, Sea, Subsurface, Space), Communication (Printed, Spoken, Interactive, Media), Computers (Information, Knowledge, Storage & Retrieval, Design, Network Resources), Post-Cold War, Third World, Conflict (Local, Regional, Global), Arms Limitation, Undeclared Wars, Terrorism, Nuclear Proliferation, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Governments (More/Less Power and Larger or Smaller Scale), Taxes, Isms: Nationalism, Regionalism, Protectionism, Populism, Cartels, Multinational Corporations, Balance of Trade, Third Party Payments, Regulations (OSHA, etc.) Environmental Impact, U.S. Prestige Abroad. SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC Food for thought:
Labor Movements, Unemployment / Employment Cycles, Recession, Employment Patterns, Work Hours / Schedules, Fringe Benefits, Management Approaches, Accounting Policies, Productivity, Energy Costs, Balance of Payments, Inflation, Taxes, Rates of Real Growth, Distribution of Wealth, Capital Availability and Costs, Reliability of Forecasts, Raw Materials, Availability and Costs, Global versus National Economy, Market versus Planned Economies, Generations: Y, X, Boomers, Elderly, Urban vs. Rural Lifestyles, Affluent vs. Poor, Neighborhoods and Communities, Planned or Organic Growth.
Got Knowledge?
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The Journal of 2020 Foresight
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Wednesday, August 28, 2002
Oil Shocks, Japanese Invasion, Revenge of the ‘70s
Chapter One
By Steve Howard, CKO
The Knowledge Labs
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Basecamp
Chapter Two: The Ridge
Chapter Three: The Outpost
Chapter Four: The Tribal Territories
“By the end of the decade (1970s), American television manufacturing was effectively dead, the US steel industry had been eclipsed, and everyone wanted to know how the Toyota Production System worked.”
Harry Dent
Journal of 2020 Foresight: Coming into the early ‘70s, US companies faced little foreign competition at home. The industrial revolution hit on all cylinders producing great quantities of products destined for the mass market. But supply outstripped demand, so prices fell with increasing competition.
Pathfinder: The recession in 1970 didn’t help. It was a classic over-reaction to the over valuation of stocks. Similar to the boom ending during the millennium passage from the 1990s, the stock market figured out it couldn’t sustain growth forever and corrected itself in a sharp downturn.
Lone Eagle: Not too long after the US encountered the first oil shocks when OPEC decided to control the flow of oil to the West.
J2020F: And that period was followed by a long downturn--from 1973 to roughly the mid-1990s--in profit and productivity in the US.
Lost Explorer: Joel Kotkin and Susanne Trimbath wrote, “The most important change was wrought by the arrival of Japanese corporations as major players in the world economy. In 1973-74 alone, the New York Stock Exchange composite fell by 44%. Equities did not recover until the early 1980s.”
Trail Blazer: While investors left the stock market in droves, the stock market's prolonged stagnation in the 1970s did not signify the end of prosperity.
J2020F: So, pinched on the one side by Japanese competition and, on the other, by dependence on Middle East oil, the US economy had to reinvent itself.
LoEx: And, remember like today, corporate scandals were undermining confidence in Wall Street. Kotkin and Trimbath recall, “There was even widespread criticism of the accounting profession, which was accused of financial shenanigans to justify the wild ambitions of irresponsible corporate managers.”
PF: And like today, some U.S. companies disappeared, but others cleaned up their accounting, restructured and met the next decade head on.
TB: People forget that the 1970s also permanently altered the balance of power among the country's regions. The old industrial bastions of smokestack power in the Midwest and East coast yielded to the more entrepreneurial, flexible and individualistic economies of the West.
LoEa: Economic restructuring laid the foundation for the US reemergence in the mid-‘80s, after a period of rampant inflation in the '70s and '80s.
TB: Like today, the pension funds' need for higher returns on investment were then a major factor pushing corporations in the 1980s to "restructure" and earn higher profits.
PF: Measured from 1972 to 1981, the net gain in the blue-chip Standard & Poor's 500 index was a minuscule 3.8% as investors stayed away.
LoEx. And, inflation peaked in 1980, followed by a period of deflation between 1980 and 1986.
LoEa: Harry Dent, arguing to support the tie between workforce entry by the boomers as a cause of inflation, wrote, “Inflation came down from over 20 percent in 1980 to as low as 3 percent in 1986.” The corporations had assimilated the generation and by the mid-‘80s, instead of causing inefficiencies, the boomers began contributing to the bottom line.
J020F: So, the moral to the story is that the economy endured recession, inflation, deflation, low productivity and severe investor lack of confidence. So much for the past, what about the future?
Trailblazer: It must be time to review our top 100 trends!
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Copyright ©2002 - 2006 Aarnaes Howard Associates. All rights reserved worldwide.
6:53 AM
Monday, August 26, 2002
From Bob Hope to David Letterman: Innovation and Inflation
Chapter One: Basecamp
By Steve Howard, CKO
The Knowledge Labs
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Basecamp
Chapter Two: The Ridge
Chapter Three: The Outpost
Chapter Four: The Tribal Territories
“Technological innovation and transition periods occur when a generation is moving out of the school system into the work force in their late teens and early 20s. The single factor driving inflation (was) the baby boom generation's rate of entry into the labor force. Labor force growth correlates with inflation better than any other factor. The lower productivity and high investments required employers to accommodate such a generation peak about three years after entry into the work force. So periods of inflation most commonly occur during transitions between old and new technologies when we see low productivity from the peaking of the old technologies and industries. We also see the need for investment to retool old industries and to launch new ones.”
Harry Dent
Journal of 2020 Foresight: You’ve described the rise in dominance of a scientific mindset swallowing up the world. How technology and media shape the very fabric of culture with unintended consequences – shaping the way we view the world and how we see ourselves in it.
One learning expedition connected reductionistic thinking with the impact of the industrial revolution that shaped the first half of the twentieth century.
Pathfinder: That’s right. We covered the high points in terms of social and technological forces.
J2020F: What about past economic trends and political overtones? Productivity, inflation, deflation, recessions, depressions, government surpluses and deficits?
PF: One of our learning expeditions focuses on the first half of the twentieth century – actually all the way up to the early 1970s. Another traces the reinvention period beginning in the mid-70s well into the high inflation ‘80s.
Trailblazer: They first started out to discover any patterns connecting post “bubble” recoveries in the past -- ending in 1901, 1929, and 1966 -- to the most recent bubble at the end of 1990s.
J2020F: Earlier you told us about the economic significance of the baby boom generation creating havoc from the 1970s on into the inflationary ‘80s.
TB: Right. We’ll get to their impact in the late ‘70s and ‘80s in a little bit.
Lost Explorer: But let’s pick up with their grand parents and parents first. The turn of the century bust laid the groundwork for the marvels of the early industrial revolution.
PF: Peter Gosselin documents how “the price of industrial dyes fell more than 90 percent in just a few years at the end of the last century, transforming the chemical and clothing industries. Automobiles were much cheaper and better in 1920 than they had been in 1905.”
Explorer: The boom in 1929 gave way to very high government deficits, deflation and the great depression period of the 1930s. Against that backdrop, the Bob Hope generation formed their values and adult perspectives.
J2020F: They fought and won World War II and birthed a generation beginning in the mid- 1940s and lasting until the 1960s.
PF: After a depression that lasted a decade and a five-year war, the US economy enjoyed significant productivity gains from the late 1940s through the early 1970s.
J2020F: While President Eisenhower warned against the perils of the military industrial complex, military technology required to arm the US in the Cold War changed the world and America’s role in it.
Eagle: Defense R&D in the late 1950s led to the development of the integrated circuit. Factories in the US and around the world capitalized on the use of smarter machines in the manufacturing process as a result.
J2020F: Didn’t the boom in the 1950s lead to industrial overcapacity?
Explorer: The industrial revolution hit on all cylinders producing great quantities of products destined for the mass market. But supply outstripped demand, so prices fell with increasing competition.
J2020F: So, while Ma and Pa Hope enjoyed commodity prices, their children in the universities and high schools rebelled, creating the media-hyped counter culture.
TB: In the ‘60s and ‘70s baby boomers made the loss of respect for institutions (Supreme Court, Police, Federal Government, Congress) fashionable while fueling the growth of civil rights and the women's movement.
J2020F: The television, a high-priced luxury when it first appeared, by 1970 became household necessity.
Eagle: Good point. Mass-produced TVs delivered mass communications to mass markets. A phenomenon the protesting boomers capitalized on. The news networks broadcast the student revolution and the Vietnam War into everyone’s living room.
J2020F: So, up to the ‘70s when the boomers returned as veterans from Viet Nam, graduated from college and entered the workforce, the mass market enjoyed a saturation of a new variety of products.
PF: And, as we discussed earlier, the shear number created strains on our natural resource base and on the distribution infrastructure.
TB: Scarcities weren’t triggered so much by the growing federal budget deficit, but as they were by the demand for more and bigger cars, more houses and home furnishings.
Explorer: OPEC jumped in to take advantage. They raised their prices holding us hostage in the ‘70s. Overall, as raw materials became scarce, their prices increased.
Eagle: And, to your observation about the boomer’s school-to-work transition during this timeframe, Harry Dent argues, “along with technological innovation, the actual entry of a generation into a work force similarly causes both a high requirement for investment and a period of low productivity.”
J2020F: Eventually technology advances and the accommodation of the generation into the workforce push inflationary forces lower. The amount of energy and raw materials required for growth drops.
Eagle: And that’s what our learning expedition found. The great scarcities of the '60s and '70s developed into increasing surpluses in the '80s and '90s.
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Copyright ©2002 - 2006 Aarnaes Howard Associates. All rights reserved worldwide
7:23 AM
Sunday, August 25, 2002
The Mind Swallowing Up the World
Chapter One: Basecamp
By Steve Howard, CKO
The Knowledge Labs
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Basecamp
Chapter Two: The Ridge
Chapter Three: The Outpost
Chapter Four: The Tribal Territories
"The science of the late twentieth century asks man to understand himself in the light of his own reason detached from history, geography, and nature, and also from myth, religion, tradition, the idols of the tribe, and the dogmas of the fathers. It offers likenesses of nature, not nature, and it suggests further that nature is a project created in part by man. Culture is an artifact and probably a game, and what happens in it is the result of human rather than divine will. If reality is a game, a similar spirit in modern science is reflected in the naming of quarks and super-strings and self-squared dragons. The names are playful because play is an essential part of the activity that gives rise to them. If science is a human creation, we have caught the mind in the very act of swallowing up the world ... we have witnessed nature in the process of disappearing."
OB Hardison, “Disappearing Through the Skylight”
Journal of 2020 Foresight: We already talked about how the way we think about and even perceive our world today has been greatly influenced by our past. But, you also said teams have broken down the past into time periods, as well. Tell us about that.
Trailblazer: Well, let’s start with the observation, by Charles Piller, “that for centuries, scientists have sought to explain the natural world—from the rotations of galaxies to the spin of subatomic particles—with mathematical equations.
From Isaac Newton's epiphany about gravity and a falling apple to the building of the atomic bomb, the arcane abstractions of calculus have been the key to the universe. ”
J2020F: So math has been the reductionist’s universal language.
TB: But that language has its limitations. Its methodology is to take something complex or whole – like a rock – and break it down into fragmented little pieces. Then, you reassemble the pieces in a neat equation that explains the whole.
Lost Eagle: If you could model how something worked through mathematics, then you were well on your way to understanding it.
TB: Piller says, “But math falls short when it comes to describing the soft-edged diversity of the natural world.
Scientists could fill all the chalkboards in all the universities in the world with equations and still fail to explain the brilliant spots on tropical fish, the contours of wind-blown sand or the shifting shape of a plume of cigar smoke.
Mathematics is even more inadequate when it comes to simulating intangibles such as the economy, let alone the vagaries of human thought.”
J2020F: Through the centuries, then, the theoretical scientific mind has swallowed up the world with each new discovery.
Eagle: From the 1500s when Copernicus proved the Sun and not the Earth was at center of the universe through the mid-1800s when Darwin upset the creationists with his theory of evolution.
TB: It takes a different perspective to realize how hidden the technology mindset has become – to view it from out of right field, as it were.
Eagle: I know where you are going. To the basic premise of “The Absence of the Sacred”, right?
J2020F: Oh?
Eagle: A learning expedition is exploring the seemingly unrelated connections between the “technology juggernaut,” the subjugating of indigenous peoples and discounting their stewardship relationship with nature.
TB: Jerry Mander wrote in 1991, that he set out to publish two separate books – one on the technological revolution and one on native oral cultures. As he investigated both, he discovered the connection.
Eagle: He provided the provocative premise that tantalized our learning expedition. Briefly he called into question the hidden assumption that a technological society is something higher than what came before.
J2020F: So, I can see a connection with Hardison and McLuhan’s position that how the technology culture operates is largely out of view. If it’s out of view, then how can it be challenged?
TB: Mander pulls no punches. “The Industrial Revolution is about a century old, and we have had ample time to draw a few conclusions about how it is going. It is not too soon to observe that this revolution may not be living up to its advertising, at least in terms of human contentment, fulfillment, health, sanity, and peace.”
J2020F: So Mander is basically a Luddite?
TB: Not quite. He managed to use the two different mindsets to view the other. From a native, natural perspective technology and innovation-driven cultures don’t have a great track record.
Eagle: It is surely creating terrible and possibly catastrophic impacts on the earth. Technotopia seems already to have failed, but meanwhile it continues to lurch forward, expanding its reach and becoming more arrogant and dangerous.”
J2020F: Is he saying that in the name of the industrial revolution, and Western progress, I guess from as far back as in the 1800’s with Westward expansion from the US East Coast – with Manifest Destiny at the heart of the American Dream -- native peoples have had to lose in order for us to win?
PF: It operates at a very basic level, outside of our awareness.
Eagle: Mander described it this way, "It is this attitude, and its corresponding belief that native societies represent an earlier, lower form on the evolutionary ladder, upon which we occupy the highest rung, that seem to unify all modern political perspectives:
Right,
Left,
Capitalism, and
Marxist.
TB: It is such a rooted assumption that except for political movements as bioregionalism and Green politics, which have at least questioned the assumptions underlying this attitude, Mander says, “most people in Western society are in agreement about our common superiority.”
J2020F: So it becomes okay to humiliate -- to find insignificant and thus subject to sacrifice -- any way of life or way of thinking that stands in the way of a kind of 'progress' we have invented, which is scarcely a century old.
PF: In fact, having assumed such superiority, it becomes more than acceptable for us to bulldoze nature and native societies. To do so actually becomes desirable, inevitable, and, if you believe Mander, “possibly 'divine.'"
J2020F: So what you describe operates almost on a “DNA” level in our Western society
Eagle: Our learning expedition unearthed the Western archetype formulated within the context of this history.
J2020F: And how does that play out?
Eagle: We want to make the big leap.
TB: To achieve the big breakthrough.
PF: To chase the impossible dream.
Eagle: The stuff of heroes. You know – shoot-first-ask-questions-later.
J2020F: Which squares with Joseph Campbell’s myth of the hero.
Explorer: Bill Moyers interviewed Campbell and in the course of the discussion describes how the “knights of the Round Table are about to enter the search for the Grail in the Dark Forest, and the narrator says, 'They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group.
J2020F: I recall the interview. Moyer emphasized the fact that each entered the forest at a separate point of by choice – oh, so right-brained.
Explorer: Campbell had interpreted that to express the Western emphasis upon the unique phenomenon of a single human life -- the individual confronting darkness."
TB: Right. And you’ll remember how Campbell adds, “it epitomizes an especially Western spiritual aim and idea, which is, of living the life that is potential in you and was never in anyone else as a possibility.”
Explorer: Campbell elaborated, “This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else's.”
TB: Contrast that with the traditional Orient and in most grounded societies, where the individual is cookie-molded.
J2020F: By that you mean?
TB: Campbell said, “His duties are put upon him in exact and precise terms, and there's no way of breaking out from them. When you go to the guru to be guided on the spiritual way, he knows just where you are on the traditional path...”
Explorer: What we’ve discovered about the archetype then, for good or for worse, is the preferred American approach to solving a problem or making improvements, or changing the process requires creativity, innovation, and a new approach. It allows us to reach a goal by totally unpredictable means.
TB: So, we’re hardwired – or at least unconsciously driven towards the big breakthrough. We’re attracted like moths to a flame to what is new, progressive, open-ended, revolutionary, risky, and even dangerous.
J2020F: A kind of attitude that thumbs its nose at the established order and the naysayers.
TB: And for good or for worse, it lets us prove how good we are -- especially, at swallowing up the world.
J2020F: How does this mindset play out in economics?
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Copyright ©2002 - 2006 Aarnaes Howard Associates. All rights reserved worldwide.
3:38 PM
Saturday, August 17, 2002
Where’s the Real Rock When A River Runs Through It?
Chapter One: Basecamp
By Steve Howard, CKO
The Knowledge Labs
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Basecamp
Chapter Two: The Ridge
Chapter Three: The Outpost
Chapter Four: The Tribal Territories
“Think of a river: smooth, crystalline, sand-bottomed, sandy-shored, slow, steady-flowing. If someone said to you, 'Look, I want you to get from this side of the river to the other side,' it wouldn't be much of a challenge. All you would need to do is find a boat and a way to power the boat. The point is to cross a river like that doesn't take much anticipation, because all the information you need is unambiguously in front of you. Now, let's think about a different river, a highly turbulent one. It is filled with whirlpools and eddies and changes in the current. Because of its turbulence, it has churned up a lot of dirt from the bottom so that the water is opaque. It is filled with boulders that can't be seen. The shores on both sides have been erode by the turbulence and are rocky and irregular. If someone asks you to cross this river, it is fundamentally a different proposition. Here, in fact, anticipation will make a big difference in your success. If you can anticipate the rocks below the water, if you can anticipate the whirlpools and the changes in the current, if you can anticipate the landing on the other shore, you have a much better chance of getting across that river successfully.”
Joel Barker, “Future Edge”
Journal of 2020 Foresight: Over the past few years you’ve been able to collect a wealth of experience – and knowledge – as individuals, teams, and leaders journey from Basecamp to the Ridge, to the Outpost, and, finally into the Tribal Territories.
You list a learning expedition comparing The David Letterman generation to the Bob Hope generation. And, other expeditions investigating shifts in technologies, economics, social trends and political forces.
Pathfinder: Right, we talked a little about identifying transitions between old rules and new rules, old games and new games, old playing fields and new playing fields.
J2020F: Can you give us some examples?
PF: In the summer of 2002, what started out as pockets of thunderstorms across the US and, perhaps across the planet, morphed into a sequel to that blockbuster movie, “The Perfect Storm.”
A turning point here.
A turning point there.
And, then a swirling weather pattern pulling them all together into one massive breakpoint – one big vicious cycle feeding on itself.
J2020F: Go on.
Trailblazer: You don’t have to look too far. As Reed Johnson
asked: “Wasn't this supposed to be the season the American economy threw off its lingering 9/11 jitters and high-tech blues, so we could all get back to making money hand over fist?”
Explorer: It’s the economy, stupid!
The S&P 500 has dropped 35% from its record high in March 2000. For a drop of that magnitude, you have to go back to the ‘70s -- it dived 48% in 1973-74.
Eagle: Right. Back when we suffered through the Arab oil embargo, runaway inflation. It culminated in Nixon's resignation.
J2020F: We’ve been monitoring the pundits and the ‘70s keep coming up as a comparison to this economy’s performance. Many question whether we’ve lost a generation of individual investors as in “Great Crash of 1929” or en masse as in the 1970s.
PF: The patterns we see break the past periods, for comparison purposes, into ’99 to 2002 – the millennium passage; ’95 to ’99 – the IT productivity push; the mid-80s to early ‘90s – the quality revolution; and the late-‘70s to mid-‘80s – boomer innovation.
TB: For general comparison purposes we’ve been segmenting by generations, as well.
J2020F: By generations?
TB: Right. Some expeditions have been using the boomers and their family generations as a touch point.
Their parents – the Bob Hope generation -- have been moving into the latest stage of “elderly.”
Their brothers and sisters represent the three waves of birth from 1946 to 1964 moving through their 40s and 50s.
Their children range in age somewhere between 30 and mid-teens.
LoEa: Well, maybe it’s the boomer extended family, stupid!
J2020F: Instead of “what’s-good-for-General Motors-is-good-for the country,” maybe it’s “what’s-good-for-the-boomer tribe-is-good-for-the-economy, dummy?”
LoEx: As in Economics for Dummies?! Not bad.
TB: Well, you also frame the 20th Century with those generations. OB Hardison, one of my favorite authors described how in the last century the visibility of the real world had been altered.
PF: Wasn’t he the one who connected the dots by teasing out the dynamic relationships between technology and the American culture? He viewed cultural innovations through the lens of nature, history, language, art and human evolution, right?
TB: We have a learning expedition forming to explore his premise, as well as, McLuhan’s on technology and media.
J2020F: Can you give us an example?
TB: Hardison said fundamental changes in each of these areas since the beginning (of the 20th century) have altered the visibility of the real world.
J2020F: By that he meant, what?
TB: Hardison says, "If you begin with the ancient idea of art as imitation, it is clear that modern painting and sculpture are imitating several kinds of experience.
J2020F: As opposed to what, something “really real” -- like this rock? A rock by any other name … is still a rock.
TB: But is it? Not any more thanks to science in the 20th century.
J2020F: What?
TB. Hardison wrote, “A rock can be the object of geological, chemical, environmental, mineralogical, physical, mechanical, or climatological studies, and each of these modes of analysis has its more specialized subdivisions. Each of the modes is valid, and in each of them an image of the rock is produced that is different from the images produced by the others.
Where is the real rock?”
J2020F: So, this rock “disappears” through over specialization.
TB: And that happened in the 20th century by extending our senses through massive magnification – “microscopes-on-steroids” in one direction and “telescopes-on-steroids” in another direction.
J2020F: Which yields whole new schools of thought.
TB: For another example, in 1920 TV didn’t even exist. By 1980 television sets were out there in the world wherever you looked, he said. So the new concept, even the vocabularies and images framing the new innovation, no longer seem real to older culture.
J2020F: The car – the automobile – couldn’t be thought of as the horseless carriage.
PF: Or, as McLuhan wrote, each new technology or media extends one of our senses beyond what it had been used to. So the “common sense” – that sensory balance – is thrown out of wack.
Explorer: Which means a person growing up in a world without television sees and senses things differently than a person born after the 1980s.
TB: Exactly. Hardison used TV to illuminate a principle of cultural innovation. He said, “If an innovation is basic, simply because it is so, a generation after it has been introduced, it becomes part of the shape of consciousness, you might say, rather than the content of consciousness.
PF: That’s why TV seemed such an amazing phenomenon to the generation in the 1940s. What did he call it?
TB: He said it was seen as “an amazing triumph of human ingenuity and pregnant with social implications.”
Eagle: The boob tube, giving rise to cocooning couch potatoes. I guess you could say its influence has been as great as was predicted.
TB: Though not in the way they imagined. Why? The important lesson, of course, is that change is always subjective.
J2020F: But, when a new technology is being used to do something more easily or efficiently or better than what is already being done without it – how is that subjective?
TB: This can be called 'classic' use of the technology. The alternative is to use the capacities of the new technology to do previously impossible things, and this second use can be called 'expressive.'
Eagle: But, a truly new technology refuses to stay classic.
TB: That’s right. Even if it was first created for a classic function, it eventually becomes expressive and reshapes the function.
J2020F: So back to the car. The success of the automobile created so many new conditions that society had to be reshaped to accommodate them.
PF: In spite of the best of early intentions, within a few years after its commercial introduction the automobile ceased to be classic and became expressive.
TB: Back then it was seen as the center of modern life – the new rock. But, now that it has been assimilated and our culture transformed by it, Hardison says it moved to the periphery, “it is invisible at the same time.”
PF: Hence the title of his book, “Disappearing through the Skylight.”
Eagle: Marshal McLuhan observed that in our Western culture, in that reductionist 20st century Hardison examined, our left-brain dominated our view of the world.
J2020F: Let’s see, if I remember my left-brain versus right-brain functions correctly. The left hemisphere controls the right side of the body. It also controls language and logical activities -- things that happen in a specific order.
Eagle: Robert Ornstein says, “The right hemisphere controls the left side of the body. It directs spatial, simultaneous things -- which happen all at once -- and artistic activities. These differences probably appeared when our ancestors began to make and use symbols (both language and art)."
J2020F: Didn’t he also say it is the evolution, less than 4 million years old, of the two sides of the brain that makes us “distinctively human, distinctively creative, and distinctly isolated from our mental processes.
Eagle: Yes. The left hemisphere brain’s advantage has been to focus our attention on the figure, while ignoring the much larger background – or the framework that provides the context for meaning.
PF: We have habitually conceptualized our world within proportional space while striving to conform to measurable facts.
Eagle: The downside, then, is dominant left-brain mode of thinking favors only one of our senses, excluding all others.
J2020F: And, that’s bad when society experiences new innovations?
PF: Why? Because, their impact goes unnoticed by the left-brain since it is the background that changes first.
J2020F: So, the shift in background, first noticed by the artists and creative people, feels like the turbulent river has churned up a lot of dirt from the bottom so that the water is opaque. It’s as if our common sense fails us and we lack the clarity we once had.
PF: That’s right. The extraordinary changes triggered in the pace, pattern, or scale of our lives slips in below the surface, hidden from view. When grasped by the creative minority, the entrepreneurs among them capitalize on the new rules, game and playing field before anyone else can.
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Copyright ©2002 - 2006 Aarnaes Howard Associates. All rights reserved worldwide.
8:37 AM
Thursday, August 08, 2002
Spending Waves, Turning Points, and Strategic Breakers
Chapter One
By Steve Howard, CKO
The Knowledge Labs
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Basecamp
Chapter Two: The Ridge
Chapter Three: The Outpost
Chapter Four: The Tribal Territories
"When the forces of change are weak but growing with relatively low resistance, look for a turning point in the industry; when the forces of change are strong and growing against strong resistance, look for a breakpoint. Many companies are not even aware of the established trends in their environment, not to mention the timing of potential turning points and cycles. Distinguish between new game strategies that will be relevant if the forces of change prevail, and turning point and breakpoint strategies appropriate for the transition between the old and new games."
Paul Strebel, "Breakpoints"
Pathfinder arranged a meeting with the original Dana Harbor crew. We sat around a bonfire steps from the beach looking out on the Pacific Ocean not far from the scene of their first voyage.
Journal of 2020 Foresight: Pathfinder described your sailing synchronicity experience in the beginning -- how you all found a way to set a future course for yourselves both individually and collectively. You've been running these learning expeditions as a way of making good on your last principle. Is that right?
Lost Explorer: Over the past few years we've been able to collect a wealth of experience and knowledge as individuals, teams, and leaders journey from Basecamp to the Ridge, the Outpost, and, finally into the Tribal Territories.
We make it all available to expedition members with the caveat that they to find a way to create a better opportunity for those who would follow them.
J2020F: So what patterns have you four noticed? And what value have expedition members reaped from their adventures?
Trailblazer: I normally guide learning expeditions at the Ridge, after they?ve analyzed past changes, turning points, trends, paradigms that have influenced their current situation.
Most tell me they are shocked to discover how much of their daily lives had been influenced by extraordinary changes.
J2020F: How do you mean?
TB: The old-not-seeing-the-forest-for-the-trees phenomenon. We have undergone extraordinary changes in the last thirty years in terms of the alteration of the old rules and regulations of our lives.
They wish they had anticipated some of those changes. They marvel at what might have happened if they had known, for sure, about just one of those major changes?
J2020F: Can you give us an example? What would you have been able to do with that information?
TB: For instance, what if you had anticipated the growth of PCs, say back in 1976 when it was still only a dream of two hackers? Think of the investment opportunities you could have had.
Lone Eagle: Or my personal favorite, how about the move toward healthy, less fattening foods like yogurt? Who would have guessed it would become so popular?
Pathfinder: No matter who you are or what you do, it would have made a big difference. At the very least you would have been subject to less surprise, less 'future shock.'"
TB: At the very most, you could have made millions of dollars, perhaps even billions of dollars -- if you had had the knowledge that Bill Gates had.
J2020F: I know I didn't make billions. But, c'mon, in 20/20 hindsight that's all perfectly obvious. In the late '70s nobody predicted the growth of PCs when mainframes in big glass houses dominated the information processing industry.
LsEx: Exactly. The leverage that is gained by discovering these kinds of changes is profound, because these rule changes are not foreshadowed by trends.
PF: That is why, for many people, even (and, in some cases, especially) for the experts, they seem unpredictable.
J2020F: So the kinds of changes you monitor, then, are changes in the fundamental rules?
TB: Right, we?re monitoring what Joel Barker called paradigm shifts.
Eagle: Those breakpoints, strategic inflection points, perfect storms whatever you want to call them -- all have something in common. They create new trends or dramatically alter trends already in place. That makes them very special.
J2020F: So identifying trends isn't simply a matter of extrapolating historical curves.
TB: We may be getting a little ahead of ourselves, here. But, what I help expeditions focus on at the Ridge is the more difficult aspect of future trend analysis.
Explorer: A little, maybe, but the lesson I learned when I completed Basecamp and hiked up to the Ridge is how important it is to understand brand new forces, within the context of current forces that will cease to exist in the future.
Eagle: And, for me it was identifying major discontinuities in trends that might occur.
PF: Over the years we?ve helped learning expeditions investigate shifts in technologies, economics, social trends and political forces.
J2020F: And can you give an example of what they've found?
PF: Sure. You remember our 100 Predictions event about baby boomers?
J2020F: I believe you've listed a learning expedition comparing The David Letterman generation to the Bob Hope generation, right?
PF: David Letterman or Jay Leno even Bill Clinton or George W. The generation that gained notoriety in Time magazine when its cover story played up the first generation gap.
TB: And the beat goes on.
Eagle: Surf's up!
Explorer: Enough already.
Eagle: No, really the surf's up. Look at those waves.
J2020F: Right. Back to the topic. The David Letterman generational wave, is what, crashing?
PF: Well, the generation came of age in the '70s and '80s. They became the early adopters for PCs and defined and drove that technology market fueling it with their earning and spending power.
TB: Not only the impact on technology and the economy, but what about its major influence on social values.
Eagle: Which, as Alvin Toffler would extrapolate, equates to consumer segment buying power, fads, and tastes. We buy our identity.
LsEx: By the early '90s -- say prior to '94 or '95 their outlook cast a dark shadow over the economy. Not unlike a decade later.
J2020F: By that you mean, what?
LsEx: Lynn Smith wrote a piece for the LA Times Magazine entitled, "Oh, Grow Up," about boomer angst. Against the backdrop of a declining economy, with children going off to college and elderly parents the Bob Hope generation moving into their high medical cost years, the boomers felt squeezed for the first time.
LoEa: How did she describe it? As the "Loss of the Future".
TB: In the early '90s, then, boomer middle managers (earning middle incomes) entered midlife -- a significant developmental turning point. And, then for the first time they were the ones laid off during recessions.
PF: Earlier in their lives, they felt the future was always open to them. They felt anything was possible. But with the first signs of aging on top of a sluggish economy they felt a lot of their options had dissipated.
J2020F: You said early '90s as the time frame. What happened in '94 or '95?
LsEx: They earned and spent their way our of a lack luster economy to many economists surprise. The baby boomers began up a steep earning and spending curve that peaks some time around age 49 -- based on data from past generations.
LoEa: Marketers in the he last half of the '90s enjoyed the benefits of boomers in the economic mainstream adopting new technologies and products.
TB: Wasn't it Harry Dent who said something like, "When this happens, the new technologies experience a growth explosion, supplanting old technologies with the same vigor with which automobiles replaced railroads as the primary industry in the Roaring Twenties."
PF: And he also points out that the current stage for the boomers is the transition into the power structure of business and industry between ages 40 and 60. All the workplace rules and structure change to fit their tastes and values.
LoEx: So that's roughly a 20-year spread in age and a 20-year time frame for the last segment of the generation to exit the peak spending and earning stage.
J2020F: Then what happens?
PF: Dent predicts The United States and the rest of North America with Europe progressively moving into a close second position regain world economic dominance from the 1990s to 2010 and even beyond.
J2020F: That's good right?
PF: Should we tell him is second prediction?
J2020F: What do you mean?
PF: That period of prosperity is followed by the "mother-of-all-depressions" as Dent describes it. Starting sometime in 2010 and lasting until 2025.
TB: But, we're getting ahead of our story here. We explore future scenarios at The Ridge. For now, we'll continue to examine how past trends converged to define today.
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