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FutureThink: How to Think Clearly in a Time of ChangeEdie Weiner and Arnold Brown
 Excerpt from FutureThink: How to Think Clearly in a Time of Change Introduction The future, obviously, is about change. Our look at change begins with Cassandra. That beautiful daughter of King Priam of Troy caught the eye of Apollo, who wooed her by giving her the power to see the future. (Apparently he never heard of jewelry.) But when she spurned him, Apollo made sure the other Trojans wouldn't believe Cassandra's prophecies. The Cassandra metaphor tells us that having good information about the future—being right—is not enough. You must see what the prophet sees, believe it, and, most importantly, know how to respond to it. The prevalence in business literature today of knee-jerk clichés and management fads has caused many people to overlook the basics of good thinking. After more than 35 years of studying constant and confusing change, we have learned that the future can be grasped only when you combine objective information about change with clear-eyed thinking. We do this using thinking techniques that we have crafted over the years. These are aids you can use to prepare (and train) your mind to accept the signals of change, much as a farmer must prepare the ground to accept seeds for crops. They are ways to liberate your mind from the assumptions, prejudices, prejudgments, and yearnings that hold it prisoner. Some extraordinary experiments have revealed what psychologists call inattentional blindness. Subjects in one experiment, as reported in Scientific American in March 2004, were told to focus on how many passes a basketball team made in a one-minute video. About halfway through the video, a gorilla emerged and walked across the basketball court. Half the participants in the experiment did not see the gorilla. The more you focus on something, the less able you become to see unexpected or unanticipated happenings. Just as when you drive you have to frequently use the rear- and side-view mirrors while focusing on the road ahead, so do you have to make yourself aware, even if only peripherally, of what may be coming up alongside or behind you. The techniques we describe in this book are timeless because they are rooted in physical principles, diversity of thinking, long-wave observations, and good old-fashioned common sense. This book, therefore, defines the ABCs of clearly seeing patterns, weighing choices, understanding trends, getting the future right, making good and innovative decisions about the future, and, indeed, influencing what that future will be. Many people believe that if they win the lottery, they will be set for life. Statistics show, however, that a large percentage of those who hit it big are bankrupt a few years later. Why? Because it's not about the money. It's about having your head screwed on right. After more than three decades of working with Fortune 500 companies, trade and professional associations, start-up ventures, government agencies, academic institutions, and everyday people, we have learned (often the hard way) that there are good and bad ways of understanding what may come. Seeming contradictions make seeing the future difficult. But in the physical world, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The same holds true in the world of social, economic, and political affairs. For those who cannot understand trend/countertrend (Chapter 2), the world moves in one direction only, and they are constantly surprised by events and forces they did not see coming. This is one example of the thinking techniques we have articulated during our many years of analysis, consulting, and speaking. Techniques for Effective Thinking The Cassandra myth is a compelling metaphor. Such metaphors help create perception and understanding, as you will see in this book, because they can help you grasp contexts. For example, a football game can clarify priorities in competitive retailing and customer attraction and retention (Chapter 14). Or understanding the history of the railroads can put the Internet into perspective, and, more importantly, make powerfully clear the too-often neglected and extremely valuable asset that is the right-of-way (Chapter 13). We turn to the principles of mathematics, such as the Law of Large Numbers, to help you see the inevitability (and the drivers) of such powerful forces as deviancy and terrorism (Chapter 9). And in physics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics—Entropy—explains why benchmarking often fails and why you should thoroughly analyze any formula in terms of whether it is factual or merely a cliché (Chapter 7). These ways of observing are simple, illuminating, and, now more than ever, essential. There are plenty of sources of information about what's going on in the external environment. Organizations pay a lot of money for such information. But the money spent, and the time and resources spent, can be wasted if organizations neglect to focus on how best to think about the new information. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in commenting about the criticism of the U.S. intelligence apparatus after 9/11, wrote that what occurred was a failure not of intelligence but of imagination. The U.S. government had information—good information. It just couldn't see how to think about it in the most effective way. As novelist John le Carré wrote, "The greatest spies are worth nothing if their intelligence is not wisely used." It's Not Just About Information The first thing the two of us learned when we began tracking change in the 1960s was that how people respond to information is as important as—if not more important than—the information itself. We found, for example, that often people's fear of change led them to reject or deny information about change, even in the face of enormous competitive and technological forces. So we had to find ways to help them see the positive possibilities, to remove or diminish what they saw as threatening, without in any way changing the truth of the information. This meant encouraging them to look for positive implications. Similarly, wherever we saw roadblocks to the effective use of information about change, we searched for and tested techniques that could help all of us become more open to the information—and better able to use it the way it should be used. "The real voyage of discovery," wrote Marcel Proust, "consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes," or, as you will see in Chapter 1, seeing with "alien eyes." A client once told us that meeting with us was like "a spa for the brain." Our thinking techniques wake up minds. Listeners are jolted out of the rut of stereotypical and lazy thinking, out of the knee-jerk responses that all of us fall into because they require so little effort. A cliché has it that most of us use only 10 percent of our brain's capacity. These thinking techniques can enable you to go beyond that low level—and to enjoy that exercise as well as profit from it. These are time-tested thinking processes. We have used them to acclaim with all kinds of audiences, from the most senior business, association, and government leaders to groups of practicing professionals and middle managers, from entrepreneurs to teenagers. Without exception, the response has been overwhelmingly favorable. We find ourselves being quoted frequently in our clients' offices, in articles written by people who hear our speeches, or by experts ranging from anthropologists to business-school professors. And we are constantly asked if we can provide all our thinking techniques in written form. It is as if people have been waiting for a believable, useful guide to navigating a new and unfamiliar world. When asked for a one-sentence definition of what we do, our answer is that we give hope. We can help you see that you do not have to be a passive victim of change, that you can instead control the consequences of change. Hope is important. We live in a time of rapid and massive change, a time that can, as Thomas Paine said, "try men's souls." It is a fearful time because change is frightening. And, to again quote le Carré, "Frightened people never learn." As you read this book, we ask that you discard the accumulation of things that prevent you from seeing clearly. Remind yourself that, in today's (and tomorrow's) rapidly changing world, what matters is not what you know, but what you are capable of learning. And what you are capable of putting to good use. For as Aristotle wrote, "In practical matters, the end is not mere speculative knowledge of what is to be done, but rather the doing of it." Our hope is that this book will help you in the doing of it. © Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved. Find Items On Similar Subjects  Powerful Times: Rising to the Challenge of Our Uncertain World
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