Future Stewards is a small organisation dedicated to training people in using systems thinking to help us get to a regenerative future. The usual disclosure: SOIF, where I mostly work, is a partner organisation in their Three Horizons Practice Network.

One of the tools they’ve produced to help in this, as part of some work with the High Level Climate Action Champtions for COP26, is a set of 10 cards about tools that people can use to think about systems change. These have now been published online as a pdf.

A set of prompts

It’s not a user manual—you’d have to familiarise yourself with the underlying methods—but it’s certainly a useful set of prompts. They’re built around three ‘simple rules’ or guiding principles that can accelerate change:

• Harness ambition loops
• Set exponential goals (which is about looking for ways to move technologies and applications rapidly along an S-curve)
• Follow shared action pathways.

A quick tour

A quick tour of the 10 cards, with links where I have them.

The first one, Working with the future, has a useful 2×2 schematic of the type of approaches you need to thinking about the future for different combinations of agency and uncertainty.

The second one is Three Horizons, which I was involved in developing, and is, in effect, a visual mapping tool to understand patterns of systems change against preferable or possible futures.

The third one, A Regenerative Worldview, draws on Bill Reed’s spiral that maps more or less effective uses of energy against collaborating with natural systems or fragmenting them. The first of pair is good; the second of each is bad.

Models of change

Fourth is systems mapping—just making sure you can represent the system you’re dealing with; fifth is ‘Accelerating Transitions Framework, effectively looking for ways to accelerate positive change up an S-curve. This proposes a three part model of change:

emergence, diffusion and reconfiguration. At each stage, different policies, and different kinds of international co-operation, are likely to be effective and accelerating the transition.

Related to this are causal loops (six), specifically looking for interventions that are ‘self-propelling’ or ‘self-amplifying’, and ‘Exponential goals’ (seven) where increasing take-up of a climate friendly technology can create rapid diffusion, through economies of scale and economies of scope, which combine to reduce costs rapidly.

Tipping points and cascades

Eight is about looking for tipping points and cascades:

A tipping point is a place where a small intervention can trigger a large response, sending a system into a qualitatively different future state. In transitions, tipping points can exist where a new solution becomes more affordable, accessible, profitable, attractive, socially acceptable, or higher performing than old solutions.

Cascades follow when a critical mass of actors has adopted a new approach or a new practice.

Nine is about building ‘ambition loops’. Effectively these are models of change that contain within them a virtuous circle that reinforces change.

Flywheels and positive change

Some readers, incidentally, might recognise this as a version of Jim Collins’ ‘flywheel’. Although this tends to be associated with Amazon, definitely a business that is at the wrong end of the regenerative worldview, there’s no reason why the concept can’t serve progressive change. I used it for a model of change to improve urban food environments (pdf, page 31) in some client work last year.

And the last one is about the power of convening: the need to bring stakeholders together around change to understand their objectives and their sticking points, and to look for solutions that get beyond mere trade-offs. This reminds me of the Future Search injunction to ‘get the whole system in the room’.

Each card comes with the model on one side and a zero climate example on the other side. They were compiled by my sometime colleague Bill Sharpe, who uses much of this thinking in his day-to-day thinking.

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Why do some technologies succeed and other ones fail, or occupy small specialist niches? Charles Arthur’s excellent daily blog pointed me to a piece at OneZero where Clive Thompson has a go at answering this $64 million question.

TL:DR: ‘it can be tricky’. And—spoilers—he admits at the end of the article that he doesn’t really have an answer yet. He’s more thinking out loud.

Segways

Anyway, Thompson starts out by contrasting the mobile phone—whose initial bulky versions were ridiculed—and the Segway, hailed by people who apparently knew about such things as being transformative.

(T)he early mobile phone was mocked as something so wildly expensive that only self-important finance blowhards would ever find it useful… In contrast, the Segway was heavily touted — by some of the biggest innovators in technology, with actual sales records, like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos — as an invention so catalytic that cities would be re-engineered around it. Whoops.

To try to answer the question, he proposes two more questions:

a) Could this new prototype ever work well enough and affordably enough that it could be in wide(r) use? And more alchemically, b) does it offer enough people a sufficiently interesting and useful new ability that they’d change their behavior around it? Do we desire this new thing?

Roadmaps

The second question, of course, is harder to answer. But often, answering (a) in a reliable fashion can get you quite a long way. Thompson discusses the early aeroplane, borrowing on an article by the technology VC Benedict Evans. Evans focussed on barriers, and on technology roadmaps, comparing the early plane to the early jetpacks:

The Wright Flier could only fly 200 metres, and the Rocket Belt could only fly for 21 seconds. But the Flier was a breakthrough of principle. There was no reason why it couldn’t get much better, very quickly, and Blériot flew across the English Channel just six years later…. Conversely, the Rocket Belt flew for 21 seconds because it used almost a litre of fuel per second — to fly like this for half a hour you’d need almost two tonnes of fuel, and you can’t carry that on your back. There was no roadmap to make it better without changing the laws of physics.

But: sometimes we can’t see the map because all the pieces aren’t available to us. Evans, again, looked at a 19th century inventor who had worked out all of the principles of powered aviation—but only had a (too heavy) steam engine to work with. In other words, a bit of a jetpack problem.

Adjacent markets

But once the nascent car industry had created an internal combustion engine, the laws of physics can be brought back into line. So one of the clues might be in adjacent markets. When jetpacks start looking more like drones, with lots of small rotors, the fuel problem fixes itself and the flier isn’t at risk from a hot exhaust pipe.

Thompson suggests that something similar happened with Deep Learning—that a whole lot of inventions in adjacent markets were suddenly ported across and made it feasible.

So this model is drawing on some well known bits of the literature, notably on learning from adjacent markets, on constraint theory (if you know the engine is a constraint, you also know where to go and look for a substitute).

Cost curves

As it happens, I’ve done a certain amount of this work down the years, and there are some models, and some clues.

The first is following cost-curves. Even at an early stage a technology that is likely to succeed is dropping rapidly in cost, as a result of economies of scope and scale (i.e. through volumes of production and also learning). It was possible to see in 2008 that solar power was going to be transformational, because although it was it was only a matter of time before its cost curve was competitive with other energy sources.

Social contexts

The second is by looking at the technology in its wider socio-technical context. Bill Sharpe hasn’t written up his ‘Technology Axis’ model, but it is valuable for doing this.

The bottom right is the technologies; the bottom left is the current set of relevant social norms and values (which can be both positive and negative); the top left (Applications) is what entrepreneurs are doing with the technologies, in terms of putting products or services out (which may be non-profit or public sector); the last one is about the infrastructure and systems that sit around the technology—and the applications. The model is an invitation to explore, rather than being deterministic. You can start anywhere.

Social desire

In terms of the examples in Thompson’s article, the Wright brothers plane could be built in a garage by a mechanic with inexpensive parts, and take-off and land in a field. The history of the 19th century is full of examples—real and fictional—of the desire to fly, as we see from Robida’s famous futuristic illustration of ‘going to the opera in the year 2000’, drawn in 1882. At the time, the only successful aircraft were hot air balloons; you can imagine something before you can build it.

Indeed, cultural narratives are an important indicator of underlying social desire. We see something similar in the early history of the moving image, where—long before the Lumiere brothers—the 19th century is littered with attempts to understand movement and create the illusion of it.

Regulations

The Segway, on the other hand, was launched into a regulatory and systems minefield: urban transport management is among the most complex set of rules and systems in the world. Apart from evident safety issues for users, it didn’t fit on the pavement, and in most jurisdictions it wasn’t allowed on the road as a vehicle.

There was a desire for this type of vehicle—there’s been a boom in urban lightweight transport in the past 20 years—but the Segway, like the C5 before it, didn’t have the right form factor to exploit it.

Niches

One of the things that’s helpful about Bill’s diagram is that it explains why technology ‘niches’ are important to the development of a new technology. They give a safe or protected space where the technology doesn’t have to fight against the whole system. One example of this is the emergence of hydrogen buses in certain routes in cities, where the daily travel distance is predictable and the relevant bus garages can be equipped to manage them.

The third—also a way of assessing that difficult question (b)—is Everett Rogers work on diffusion. Looking at scores of technology, he concluded that five questions assessed the likely take-up.

Uptake

I’ve adapted this image from the website Legal Evolution where there is a discussion of speed of uptake of innovation.

‘Relative advantage’ is about whether the new thing is better than what you’re doing at the moment; ‘Compatibility’ is whether it fits into the way you do things at the moment; ‘Complexity’—better understood as ‘simplicity’ is how straightforward it is to use; ‘Trialability’ is whether you can try out the new thing; and ‘Observability’ is whether you can see the new thing in action. No-one likes to think they’re the only person doing something.

Helpfully, the diagram includes the explanatory power of these factors, as per Rogers’ research, of around half to five-sixths of uptake. One of the reasons that the mobile phone succeeded was that once the size started to come down, the early phones were just like phones, and were more convenient than having to find a call box.

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A version of this article is also published on my Just Two Things Newsletter.

Reposted from the Tools for Hope blog.

Here’s the second of the interviews I recorded with the presenters at the Tools for Hope event in London in November. (The first one, with Wendy Schultz on visioning, is here).

At the event Bill Sharpe, the author of Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope, co-presented the Three Horizons model with Graham Leicester, the Director of the International Futures Forum.  The IFF has been the leader, in terms of both practice and theory, in developing the application of Three Horizons thinking, and has also published some valuable resources.

In this interview they talk about some of the principles that sit behind the Three Horizons model, its use as a dialogue tool to negotiate change between different members of a system, and the health and social care project SHINE, in Fife, that has been something of a poster child for the application of 3H to create transformative futures. Golf gets a look-in too.

(Nine minutes).

I’m involved in organising an APF event in London next month called “Tools for Hope”. It’s a practical hands-on event designed to help people who’re interested in using futures work to create change. It’s being held in Bloomsbury on Tuesday 7th November.

The thinking behind the event is that futures work can create an overdose of pessimism as we stare at the overlapping crises of the “grandes problematiques“. But there’s a long if sometimes neglected history of futures methods that are designed to give people a sense of agency and purpose. So “Tools for Hope” is about futures tools that help people make change happen.

Speakers on the day include Wendy Schultz (on visioning), Bill Sharpe (on Three Horizons), Tricia Lustig (on appreciative enquiry), and Tanja Hichert (on Seeds of a Good Anthropocene).

• Wendy Schultz: “Preferred futures—visions—are a foundation of futures thinking, research, and practice. Starting with Polak’s Image of the Future, through organizational visions and transformational leadership as vision articulation, to the philosophical and artistic explorations of the possible preferred, visions and visioning are core to futures studies and foresight. How do we identify, collect, and compare ambient visions? What are all the approaches to creating fresh transformative visions? How can they act as nudges to emergence?”
• Bill Sharpe: “The Three Horizons framework is a simple tool for ordering our thoughts about the future. It works with an intuitive grasp of how the future occurs to us: a landscape of uncertainty in which we too are actors. If we can bring that intuitive appreciation to consciousness it is possible to work with the emerging future much more skilfully. In particular we can set about realising our own aspirations in a fast-changing and complex world.” In an interactive session Bill will introduce the framework and lead a Three Horizon mapping exercise.
• Tricia Lustig: “Foresight isn’t foresight until action occurs. Appreciative Inquiry is a tool you can use to make action happen. We will explore Appreciative Inquiry, an engagement and implementation tool which finds and captures the energy for change. We will talk about when to use it, and when not, share some case studies and experience an appreciative interview.”
• Tanja Hichert: “Seeds of a Good Anthropocene is an ongoing project with the aim to collect and develop a suite of alternative visions for “Good Anthropocenes” – positive futures that are socially and ecologically desirable, just, and sustainable. The objective is to counterbalance prevailing dystopic visions of the future that may be inhibiting our collective ability to move creatively towards a better trajectory for the Earth and humanity. This initiative is a collaboration between the Stockholm Resilience Centre, McGill University in Canada, and the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition (CST) at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.”

It’s a lovely venue and I think the event will generate a lot of energy. It’s being held on the day before the Anticipation conference opens in London.

You can register here. And the brochure can be downloaded from here: ProDev Brochure London17_Final1