Peter Larson & Blue Design

Last Wednesday, Ashley McGraw CEO Ed McGraw and I led a workshop focused on sustainability and the future in Hartford, CT as part of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association’s “Leadership Dialogues” series. This workshop gave us an opportunity to better define Blue Design’s non-traditional view of the future, and also the relationship of problem-solving and visioning in realizing that future. True to the title, there was much good dialogue at the workshop (which I will outline here) and also a springboard for further exploration by all involved (which I will finish this post with).

We are accustomed to seeing literal predictions of the future. If we look at past predictions of the future, a clear connection to the present in which they were created is apparent. Think of the future conveyed in a Flash Gordon serial from the 1930’s. Here the future is populated with riveted space ships, vacuum tubes, oscilloscopes, (and strangely, guys running around in Roman soldier uniforms; never figured that one out). Or magazines like Popular Mechanics and Popular Science’s past predictions of the future (the covers of issues from the 1950’s are lots of fun to look at). These futures are firmly rooted in, and an extension of, the present in which they were created.

This way of imagining our future as an extension of our present was certainly never reliable. But now, we can base predictions of our future less and less on what is occurring in our present; uncertainty plays a larger role than it ever has. I believe much of this uncertainty revolves around two things: A need to move toward true sustainability (and no one knows the course our future will take to accomplish that), and the accelerating rate of change. Whereas we used to think of our future as an extension of our present with a small dose of uncertainty thrown in, now our future looks more and more to be very different than our present. And of course, the further out we imagine our future, the more uncertainty dominates it.

It is possible to do work on our future without trying to literally define it. This is one of the perceptual leaps contained in Blue Design. Blue Design is a future-centric philosophy, as working on sustainability pulls our thoughts from the past toward the future (see posts Centricity and The Path). But Blue Design does not rely on a literal prediction of what our future will be. Instead, it focuses on exploring the qualities our future will need to exhibit, as differentiated from specific solutions. Both its three performance requirements and its Five Qualities are non-prescriptive ways to imagine our future. This attitude toward the future has another very important characteristic: Recognizing the relationship of problem-solving and visioning.

Problem-solving defines a problem and applies a solution. If we apply problem solving to our future, an example would be “in the future, we will all travel via electric cars.” This is a concrete statement that leaves little room for interpretation. What happens when we make a statement like that? We immediately lose part of our audience. Some people may be thinking, “I’m not sure electric cars are the solution; aren’t we just moving the emissions from the tailpipe to the power plant?” And others may think, “Does it have to be electric cars? They’re small, I don’t like the way they look, and they can’t go very far. I guess I’ll do it if someone forces me to.” So, when we problem-solve for our future we have difficulty generating broad consensus as people disagree on the problem and solution. And this predictive mentality cannot account for the uncertainty that our future holds.

Visioning works very differently. Let’s make another statement regarding future transportation, instead focusing on a vision: “In the future, transportation will be clean and effortless.” This statement has a very different effect on our audience than the first, problem-solving statement. We can bring our entire audience with us, as we are visioning a future with qualities that can be universally motivating. We’ve given our audience the latitude to interpret the details of the vision according to their predispositions, and we’ve given them a statement that enables them to lend their unique energies to realize such a future.

We could interpret this distinction as one that discourages problem-solving, but this is not the intent. We cannot abandon problem-solving and solution-creating in the present for a sole focus on visioning our future. We need to engage in both problem-solving and visioning to best address what we can do today and what can bring us to a better and sustainable future. The message is that viewing our future through visioning, rather than problem-solving and literal prediction, needs to be given a greater space in our discussions of sustainability and in our business organizations. I have seen sustainability become greatly weighted with problem-solving, and am seeking to create a greater space for visioning, because I believe it is the key to creating broad-based motivation to create a sustainable future.

A vision without a plan is just a dream.
A plan without a vision is just drudgery.
But a vision with a plan can change the world.
                                                  -Old Proverb

Blue Design’s look at the future focuses on quality and vision, in complement to the solutions we are implementing today. The vision held by Blue Design can inform our activities in the present, as we search for ways to manifest this future’s qualities in our present activities. How can we bring this other end of the spectrum, centered around Blue Design, uncertainty, vision, and future-centricity, into our organizations? At the CBIA workshop, we presented a set of ideas that we believe give such thinking a place to grow with business organizations, as follows:       

• Need a seed; a person or people to carry the torch through thick and thin
• Recognize businesses’ (and especially management’s) predisposition to minimize uncertainty; create mechanisms that give it a space.
• Incorporate long-term thinking into business planning processes (30+ years). Let that thinking qualitatively inform current decisions and change perspectives, rather than focusing on step-by-step plans to realize it.
• Think in light of the ultimate requirements for sustainability. What are the opportunities?
• Widen your organization’s view beyond its field and its competition. Lengthen the yardstick by which you gauge your accomplishments.
• Encourage creativity within your organization.
• Be willing to invest in long-term R&D that is not always solutions-focused (think-tank mentality).
• Find employees that can shift your organization’s culture.
• Be willing to take a leap!

This is by no means a complete list. In fact, I am sure there are many more things we can do within our organizations to give Blue Design thinking a place. I welcome your ideas.

Resources:
The World Resources Institute has applied the distinction between problem solving and visioning to sustainable community development http://archive.wri.org/page.cfm?id=2257&z=?. We have adapted this distinction to broader thinking about the future.

Photo Credits:
Man and Robot Photo by Rich Mansburden, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
“Flying Saucers for Everyone” Photo by x-ray delta one, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License