One hundred and five deadly cognitive traps to avoid
by Eric Garland
Everybody wants a profitable, just, humane, creative, interesting, healthy future – it’s just that while we are working in groups to achieve it, a bunch of other stuff happens along the way. Such is life in a world defined by bureaucracy, and instead of complaining about it, we need to realize why we’re having so much trouble actually thinking about the future. Until we recognize our collective problems, all the trends and scenarios in the world won’t help us create organizations with a strong sense of foresight.
The above statement is the central thesis for my next book, which will be a detailed, rich manual on exactly how NOT to study the future. I have identified twenty-five common traps into which leaders fall when attempting to think about the future. Before you get flogged with any more reports about nanogenetics or the rise of the Ghanaian automobile industry or reports on cell phones implanted in your molars, we need to look back at the past fifty years of futurism and see why it didn’t necessarily result in a world full of visionary futurists.
Given my new mission, I was excited to find this beautifully-presented look at cognitive bias in groups. The authors outline for us all the ways our group dynamics can result in dangerously inaccurate thoughts about the future:
- The 19 social biases
- The 8 memory biases
- The 42 decision-making biases
- The 36 probability/belief biases
I love this presentation in the way in does not invite to blame or ridicule – these are natural phenomena that occur within groups of people. I may have committed 75 of these mistakes before breakfast myself – it’s that easy. When we come around to such self-analysis with a touch of humor and understanding, we may finally be in a position to move on to organizations that are more sophisticated and more effective.
Cognitive Biases – A Visual Study Guide by the Royal Society of Account Planning
Arik Johnson on the organizations of the future
by Eric Garland
The most important implications of any strategic trend is usually not that your organization must do something drastic, it is that your organization is obsolete and can’t respond effectively at all.
Case in point: newspapers and the Internet. It’s not so much that newspapers could have done something to maintain their business model of classified advertising, it’s that they need a brand new business model and structure to survive. If that is the major implication of the trends we track as strategic analysts, then we almost must develop skills to help organizations change quickly and painlessly.
On that note, check out this talk from Aurora WDC’s Arik Johnson on the future of organizations, recorded at last month’s Intelligence Collaborative meeting in Washington.
Douglas Rushkoff on the future of value creation- why the web broke everything (but it’s a good thing)
by Eric Garland
I am glad to see Douglas Ruskoff weigh in on our current situation. He’s a fantastic thinker, humanistic and often contrarian, the author of many books including the recent Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out, which is about the foolishness of senseless innovation. If I read Rushkoff correctly, he sees economics as a distinctly human, connected enterprise, and the absolute opposite of where our commercial leadership has taken us.
He presents some major, major ideas:
- The recent goal of business has been to make every company a holding company, one whose purpose is the acquisition and/or management of debt as opposed to a group of competent people who do things for other people
- People at all levels have become more interested in the perceived value of assets (homes, shares of companies, CDOs) than the actual value that they might ever produce
- Most of these ideas are supporting people who may not even be in the system – long-gone investors, maybe even dead guys
- The monetary system is not about encouraging trade, but often preventing trade
- The American Revolution came about because England forbid people from providing each other with services
- LOCAL CURRENCIES used to be very popular and could be again
- We were probably better off economically in the Late Middle Ages (the Black Death notwithstanding)
We need to revisit our total concept of value creation. It’s great that Rushkoff is lending a hand.
The high-resolution society: the future is in small companies
by Eric Garland
Stop everything you are doing, click here, and read this fantastically thought-out article from Paul Graham on why the future of economies will no longer depend on giant, hulking organizations, but small, nimble startups – and why this is socially disruptive.
Large organizations will start to do worse now, though, because for the first time in history they’re no longer getting the best people. An ambitious kid graduating from college now doesn’t want to work for a big company. They want to work for the hot startup that’s rapidly growing into one. If they’re really ambitious, they want to start it.
This doesn’t mean big companies will disappear. To say that startups will succeed implies that big companies will exist, because startups that succeed either become big companies or are acquired by them. But large organizations will probably never again play the leading role they did up till the last quarter of the twentieth century.
About Eric Garland
Eric is one of the world's pre-eminent thoughtleaders in forecasting and strategy. He helps leaders of business and government make critical decisions about their futures.About Dan Vecchi
Dan Vecchi is the director of economic risk analysis for Competitive Futures. He helps leaders examine their investments in countries around the world, exploring future options and ensuring profitability in the years to come. He speaks natively fluent English, Spanish, Italian and works regularly in South America as well as Europe.New project: Manufacturing 2020!
Competitive Futures is
proud to announce a new research project on the future of manufacturing in North America through 2020. Download a prospectus today and learn where to invest for the next decade.Connect with us
Read Future Inc.
Learn
a time-tested, profitable method of discovering business opportunities in the future with Eric Garland's groundbreaking Future Inc: How Businesses Can Anticipate and Profit from What's Next, available at Amazon and fine independent booksellers.
