Uncharted: How To Map The Future Together

I’ve come to my last book read of this year, my 36th book, that mark my achievement of my 3 books read a month target. From all of my personal targets, this is only the one that I managed to accomplish according to my plan. It might be one of the most insightful reading, yet this book definitely the most relevant one to close the year. This book titled above, by Margaret Heffernan, provide meaningful insight on how we can, and should, manage the ever increasing uncertainties around us in order to map the future, at least the near future of 2021 that will be coming in a few days. Actually, we we think about the future all day, every day. What time do I need to leave the house? What’s for lunch? What should I watch next? and so many others. Although we have come to expect that kind of future to be minutely and perfectly predictable, sometime if not most of the time things will happen not the way we predicted.

We have moved from a complicated world to a complex one. The two aren’t the same—and complexity isn’t just complicated on steroids. Complicated environments are linear, follow rules and predictable; like an assembly line, they can be planned, managed repeated and controlled. They’re maximized by routine and efficiency. But the advent of globalization, coupled with pervasive communications, has made much of life complex; non-linear and fluid, where very small effects may produce disproportionate impacts. In the short summary afterward, I will share some of the insights from this book on how to manage the complexities in order to get the most out of it. I do recommend you to read the whole book by yourself as I’m sure it would be worth of your time in this end of year holiday time.

First thing first is to look at how all of our models for knowing the future let us down. It isn’t an argument for apathy or resignation. But it is only rejecting pundits and propagandists of determinism that we free ourselves to explore the contours and landscape of possibility. Our choice is not between false certainty or ignorance; it is between surrender or participation. So we need to be bolder in our search, more penetrating in our enquiry, more energetic in our quest for discovery. 

You can start to do this doing, or at least learn from others’, one or some of:

• Experiments are what you do when you don’t know what you can do; they’re ideal for complex environments because they yield clues about the systems we inhabit. Real experimentation can’t get started without a frank acknowledgment of just how much isn’t understood, it needs a great deal of open minds and humility here. Jos De Blok’s Buurtzorg well known successful experimentation in home care-nursing is one of the most often cited example (I’ve read about this in several books). His proposal was simple as he made an important distinction on the two parts of home-care nursing: first, getting the nurse to the patient. That was simple and should stay simple; it didn’t need an ornate bureaucracy (and he radically demolish the common bureaucracy by giving the nurse way more authorities in managing their own schedules and resources than their peers in the industry). The second part is helping the patient to recover. That’s complex, because no two patients are identical and the work cannot be predicted and prescribed. That part should left to human beings. Buurtzorg’s nurses can decide the patient care or new treatments as long as no principled objection to the proposals which aren’t aiming both perfection and consensus. As it started with an experiment, De Blok’s guiding principles—separating the simple from the complex, acknowledging humanity in work and focus on outcomes before cost—have inspired healthcare systems around the world. 
• Transformative scenarios that reveal and develop unseen possibilities, changing both people and problems through radical diversity and confrontation. Scenario planning was pioneered after the Second World War by the rand Corporation and the American Military. As a process, it grew out of an understanding of complexity and the recognition that is never possible to identify all the forces at work that will define the future. This makes traditional planning dangerous: it will always contain too many assumptions to be reliable and risks offering certainty where none exists. The best one can do is to identify a plausible variety of futures and interrogate them for implications and scenarios. Scenario plans must separate predetermined certainties from uncertainties. The goal is both to protect what’s critical now and to identify early what might bestow advantage in the future. Scenario bridge inside and out, immediate and future. Scenario planning demands a diverse range of people who are open-minded with deep intellectual curiosity, expertise and a capacity to think freely. At its most effective, this kind of thinking requires that everyone involved has to be able to ask anything, to make space for conflict and have the emotional and intellectual capacity to endure disagreement. Scenario planning changes the people who do it. Seeing ideas, people, trends and the immense non-linearity of life is chastening. 
• Cathedral projects—conceived and built over centuries—show how individuals and institutions have explored without maps to achieve what looked impossible. The example of this protoDUNE, a neutrino detector that represents the next generation of machine at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Researc. The mindset at CERN is both tight and loos: rigorously committed to doing physics that matters at a level of acknowledged excellence, but loose in its responsiveness to new ideas and technologies. Plans aren’t sacrosanct, but accuracy is. This paradoxical combination super-human scientific detail with human improvisation requires a mindset that is both open to change, to disconfirmation and correction, but which can function in a discipline that demands absolute precision. The longevity of the work is central to the motivation of those who take part in it. It creates meaning, because it’s audacious and because it connects this generation with all the generations of scientists on whom the research builds. Another example of a cathedral project, is areal cathedral, the Sagrada Familia. From both CERN and the Sagrada Familia, what keep the people working there on course is a shared, passionate commitment to a purpose, guiding principles that demand that the best be allowed to emerge and be improved, by anyone, from anywhere. Starting with purpose and principles, they regard outcomes only as landmarks showing where they are. They map the future not by trying to pre-empt or co-opt it, but by believing in it, being ready to explore and map whatever awaits finding. With aspirations too great for an end date, they sustain people by making them feel big, important and giving them the opportunity to do work that lasts. 
• Artists spend their lives in exploration, seeking change before they have to and embracing ambiguity for its richness and nuance. Learning from them, when it comes to the future, what matters is to invigorate the search, not to determine the outcome. Companies famous for their ethos of self-management—W.L. Gore, Morning Star, Arup, Patagonia—have found that letting people choose what to work on energizes the imagination and intelligence of each employee, not just the few at the top. They flourish in large part because, where people grow and change, organizations do too. 
• The survivors of existential crises have huge wisdom, won at high cost, about what we need in order to endure when the unexpected arrives. Crises are always personal. Companies are saved by individuals who care about each other. Adults change their minds about the climate crisis when the arguments come from their children. It can be tempting to sentimentalize crisis, looking back with nostalgia to the sense of solidarity and meaning that they provoked. The deeper, harder truth is that going into a crisis with years of generosity, reciprocity and trust already deeply embedded provides resilience and stamina. The efficiency of the gig economy, the splinteriong of communities into competitive individuals, our dependence of technology all undermined this, eroding the lifesaving power of loyalty and friendship that these crises demand. Staying human, not just a suer or a consumer, is the first way to prepare for an unpredictable future. 
• Be prepare. Preparedness has come to comprise four components. Just-in-case thinking means making significant, informed bets within a context of uncertainty. As an example is that this produces vaccines to prepare for an epidemic. Just-in-time thinking maximizes the efficiency of any aspect of the work that can be standardized, measured and predicted, such as manufacturing. becoming a trusted participants and investing in in a dynamic ecosystem accelerates the effectiveness of vaccines within stricken communities, for example. Cultural translation articulates, reinforces and adapts insight and experiences. Being prepared means developing a very practical form of resilience. It also helps us kick our addiction to planning, making more time to pay attention to the details, contradictions and paradoxes all around us. This calls for a new kind of leadership. Those who will rise to the challenge will be outstanding convenors, better chosen for their scepticism than their confidence. Collecting voices, structuring exploration, keen listening and synthesizing success and failure will be the focus of their work. They will need to be excellent interrogators of the ecosystems in which they reside, aware of where they fit and the impact of their decisions on others. Being able to reconcile opposites (managing paradox)—efficiency and robustness, just-in-time and just-in-case—will prove a hallmark of their adaptive minds. They are able to hold the tension between urgency and integrity, to stiffen the resolve for what is confusing, frustrating and frightening and to resist simplifying what is innately complex. An effective leader’s principal asset isn’t power but the ability to make a better future feel possible, practical and meaningful. They need the moral authority to be honest about sacrifizes and they will have to resist the rethorical allure of ever-simplified fantasies. Such leaders are characterized by rational optimism, a grounded belief in human capacity.       

Just because we don’t know the future doesn’t mean we’re left helpless; there’s genius and creativity in preparation. Start wherever you are; in a complex, non-linear world, there can be no step-by-step rule book, only an infinite mandate to explore. Approach the future with fervent curiosity, not with an ideology or itinerary but with methodology that progresses with questions: what do we need to do now? What do we need to be now? What must we preserve at all cost Rich futures are mapped by those with the energy to convene, the passion to learn from the widest variety of human imagination, paying attention, changing course, discovering and inventing what the world demands of us all. 

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