Not everything is a trend

For a foresighter or a futurist, trends are properly historical phenomena. We perceive certain patterns and regularities in the data, we are able to describe them, perhaps also to model them and, consequently, to hypothesise about their continuation or, conversely, we can try to undermine them. If we accept the thesis of their continuation, then they can be understood in the common sense. This means that by dragging the trend line further, we will get answers about what will happen in the shorter or longer term, rather shorter term. I must admit, however, that it is their undermining that seems to be the most productive and interesting activity of all that makes up strategic foresight and of all the many ways of using the future.

Let’s also remember that there are many ways of using the future. One of them is, for example, statistics or semiotics, or whatever analytical methods which the researchers from other domains do when trying to read some predictions. There are also the various design methods that urban planners, architects or industrial designers practise. They all also ‘use the future’.

Studying trends is a more recognisable and more understandable activity than foresight, because it fits into our natural cognitive attitudes, into how we are neurologically built. Pattern recognition is a very important part of our decision-making and is even a condition for our survival. 40-50,000 years ago, the rustling of scrub or movement in tall grasses was associated with a predator creeping up to devour our ancestors. Recognising such a pattern and deciding to flee, or more precisely activating the fight or flight response, was their chance of survival. Failure to recognise this pattern would end badly.

In the 20th century and yet today, many publications reports and many opinion leaders still believe that trends are able to give us some warnings about tomorrow, including existential ones, thanks to extrapolation, by simply dragging the trends into the future. Maybe not as to the tiger that might eat us, but as to the consequences of, for example, our own actions, which could be tragic. The Limits to Growth report, which came out 51 years ago, was such a warning. It was developed by four researchers associated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who, using a computer model of the CGE (Computable General Equilibrium) type, presented the future of the world resulting from projections of the relationship between population growth, productivity growth and the consequences of these for resource consumption, for pollution levels, for industrial production and for many other factors which were modelled and explained by this model.

Are we really heading for extinction?

This vision is not very optimistic for us. The World3 model, fed not only with data from 50 years ago but also with current data, seems to confirm in most of the scenarios it analyses that we are indeed heading for extinction. Moreover, if we do not drastically raise productivity levels or otherwise reduce consumption or the rate at which we consume the earth’s resources, then we have to reckon with a so-called polycrisis that will bring humanity to its knees and perhaps translate into a drastic, much faster than expected, decline in the world’s population somewhere in the middle of this century or thereabouts. This approach to trends – for it was population trends, trends in the development of productivity, trends in the development of natural resource consumption that the authors of the model were studying – was not new. Already Thomas Malthus in the 18th century and Condorcet 100 years earlier warned of more or less the same thing, although they had less acceptable advice from today’s perspective. Thomas Malthus advised simply not to help the unemployed and let them starve to death. Condorcet, on the other hand, said that one simply had to consciously limit population growth in order to prevent overpopulation, worse still, overpopulation of near-immortal people. Today, the same ways of thinking lead us to more humane goals, based on other values, when it comes to sustainable development. But are they good enough? Are they a good enough guide to the future?

In roughly the same years, Stanislaw Lem and various others of his ilk prided themselves on being futurologists. They were collectively excited by the fact that with the help of extrapolation of trends, thanks to the development of science and technology, it was possible to make interesting hypotheses about the future and even, in their view, forecast it.  However, at the end of his life Lem seemed bitter about the fact that the future did not turn out to be at all what the forecasts of the development of science and technology indicated. Nor did it turn out to be any worse or any better, just somehow strange, and this strangeness of it causes confusion. This awesomeness of it makes the future fearful.

Trends that point to uncertainty, risks, the impossibility of predicting the future and, at the same time, if one already believes in the possibility of forecasts, show pessimistic images of what lies ahead make an increasing number of people around the world, not only in the developed world but also in China and South America, experience disillusionment with the future. In a sense, they would be ready to sing Pink Floyd’s ‘How I Wish You Were Now’ to their descendants, because it seems that there will be no better world, that it will only get worse. To illustrate this attitude, the example of the participants in the recent middle-class protests in China, mainly in Shanghai, can be used. They expressed their attitude: “we are the last generation, thank you”, we cannot be blackmailed by the authorities with our future, because we are not going to extend our genealogical lines, we are the last generation and we will not give birth to any more children.

What does the trend analysis reveal?

Is indeed such fatalism the right conclusion from trend analysis? If the future is strange, there is also room for some hope. However, it is difficult to cut through the thicket of megatrends that overwhelm us, although they show some room for manoeuvre, places for intervention, but prove difficult to reverse. Megatrends, starting with the most typical ones, such as the growth of the world population, or the demographic megatrend, or others, such as the ageing and migration of the world’s population, can be compared to ocean currents, i.e. phenomena that are relatively constant over time, not subject to seasonality, which, like ocean currents – as a result of the physics of the earth, the distribution of oceanic and land masses, the influence of the wind in constants, the relationship of the salinity of oceanic water in different regions of the world and the differences in its temperature – are phenomena that can be relied upon well.

I have pointed to three oft-mentioned megatrends – phenomena to which we seem to have no answer. We simply have to adapt to them and try to shape prosperity or economic success within them. But there are many more, if only those related to the economic situation. Take, for example, the growing social polarisation, eagerly discussed a few years ago with Piketty’s book Capital in the 21st Century, resulting from the rise in inequality. It is also the rise of a global middle class which, if it adopts the patterns of over-consumption dictated by the marketing communications and product promotion of the Western world, is bound to lead to a drastic increase in the price of foodstuffs and perhaps put the world economy in difficulty altogether. It is the over-consumption relative to minimum needs that tips the scales of our future towards the impossibility of achieving sustainable development.

There are also trends concerning social phenomena seen from other perspectives. Increased urbanisation, a trend that has largely bypassed Poland over the past 20 years, is giving rise to completely new trends, such as an increase in the threat to city dwellers from the emergence of urban heat islands, an increase in crime and many other negative phenomena associated with overcrowding. Migration is increasing. In turn, the material and consumption advances of the broad masses worldwide and the economic growth experienced by most countries of the world are influencing the continuation of the long megatrend – the growing demand for energy.

The answer to all this, also in the World3 model of the MIT experts, is supposed to be, in a broad sense, digitisation and automation of work, i.e. all new methods of increasing productivity. If the efficiency of the use of available resources increases, this would mean that we might be able to surpass the end, negate what Condorcet or Malthus said and simply transcend the trap of static resources, using them faster than the population grows. The megatrend of digitalisation and the automation of work, which includes all the new phenomena associated with the development of artificial intelligence, the development of organisational efficiency in companies and new ways of producing value, offer the hope that we may be able to get ahead of these phenomena. However, this is becoming more difficult with each passing year. This can be clearly seen from the economic indicators that each successive step on the innovation path is becoming more and more expensive, requiring more and more forces and resources. In some industries, this is the cause of stagnation.

It would not be a full set of megatrends that seem to determine our future if we did not say climate change, in other words, that ghastly roulette game we are playing as we try to find the optimal moment of energy transition and consumer transformation. It is a very difficult and complex phenomenon, the various simplifications of which are meant to draw our attention to the urgency of action. Working for the UN Environment Programme and the Secretariat of the UNFCCC, among others, I face these visions of the future on a daily basis, whether to bring clients closer to the future that the trends seem to herald to us, or to offer hope that it is somehow possible to turn the Titanic’s steering wheel against these trends and not affect the iceberg. However, climate is only one piece of a large jigsaw puzzle, which also includes the increase in pollution, also predicted by the authors of ‘Limits to Growth’, and the loss of biodiversity. Problems that are particularly prevalent in Poland, where contempt for the environment and anomie when it comes to environmental standards have unfortunately become a permanent feature of the new reality over the last 30 years, without even a link to what it was like before the economic transformation.

When I spoke about the global middle class, one could guess that there would also be talk of declining food security. After all, increases in calories, but also changing food preferences, are making it increasingly difficult for largely strained ecosystems to cope with the relationship between arable land and livestock farming. Forecasts from developments in biotechnology, for example, show that the world could be fed, no one needs to starve. However, even seasonal crises can be tragic. Imagine if, instead of food price inflation of a dozen or twenty percent, we had to face a seasonal spike of 100 percent or more in the price of some products because they are not available on world markets. Such a shock would be difficult to bear for the Polish consumer.

I am almost coming to the end of my litany of grievances and a long list of 13 megatrends that seem to be determining our future. Rising international tensions is a megatrend that we did not experience just two or three years ago. Today, like a mirror, we face it head-on, and the crisis of democracy and new models of governance force us to ask ourselves: was this megatrend, like all the others, possible to read? Inferring from historical data and a relatively sustained period of peace over recent years: will this trend not lead us to a situation where there is a complete disconnect between democratic mechanisms of power and mechanisms of governance and control, which will be shaped either by algorithms or in other non-democratic ways?

“Hope in the Dark”.

It all seems rather macabre, I suppose, but I come back to the title: “the future begins where trends end”. So where the trends end is also where we find some hope of turning them around, if not on a macro scale, then at least on a micro scale – a chance of prosperity, a chance of success in the market we operate in, a chance to anticipate change and exploit it skilfully, or a chance to avoid risks, a promise to take advantage of the opportunities that will arise in these coming periods. In her book Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit describes this in an inspiring way, saying that hope is based on the assumption that we don’t know what will happen, despite the megatrends or market trends that determine it, and that in this space of uncertainty there is precisely room for action, and therefore we accept uncertainty that does not paralyse us. It does not take away our voice. I don’t know if Rebecca Solnit would be pleased, but if we replace the word hope in this quote with the word strategic management, we would in a sense have an expression of what strategic foresight offers in trying to face the future, an acceptance of what is unknown or impossible to know, but nevertheless also an alternative to fatalism and determinism.

The areas in which we look for this hope, especially when it comes to technological foresight, often touch the horizon of technology called deeptech. Every technological foresighter in the world and every manager in the company who is trying to use these methods is looking in synthetic biology, in artificial intelligence, in environmentally efficient technologies, for ways to get ahead of and, in a sense, position themselves against negative trends. It is extremely difficult and each time it resembles an expedition to the moon, within the framework of what I have said before about the bar rising, rising all the time, and the fact that each next step on the path of innovation is more expensive and more difficult to achieve.

Nicolas Colin, who inspired the outlining of the matrix below, points out that this deeptech, and therefore this space of technological uncertainty where there is opportunity for management, is where market risk and R&D risk intersect.

Źródło: Dealroom.co, Sifted, Financial Times. 2021: The year of Deep Tech

But is there an alternative? It seems that you have to reach for those moonshots. You have to look for new solutions at the edge of the possibilities of business models, new technologies and products or strategic product innovations. Otherwise, how do we realise our grand ambitions, which – to paraphrase Kennedy – set, order our efforts, which we have made to follow them and which we are not willing to give up? It is impossible to make such a masterpiece by painting by numbers, as Rembrandt did. When painting “The Night Watch”, he did not use a legend. He painted from a white primed canvas. All of this, of course, has its methods and methodologies, but I am getting to the point and the punch line of my statement. In order to try to compete for success from a strategic perspective today, it is necessary to do what we might psychologically call reframing, changing assumptions about the future, moving beyond the determinism and fatalism of trends. In order to make a shift in the thinking of corporate decision-makers, investors or innovators, new fields of action need to be identified – relying less on existing trends and more on predicting or hypothesising where they might accelerate, where they might slow down, and where they might collapse and be replaced by something completely different. That’s what foresight is about. In an ocean where there are constant currents, where there are seasonal or temporary winds – any kind of hype, fad or any other category, know how to sail, know how to set yourself a destination port and sail to it fairly consistently.