Institute For The Future

Superstructing Ourselves: Finding Opportunity in Turmoil

If anyone doubted that we are living in a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, the events of the recent past have surely erased those doubts. The other day a friend was telling me about a job interview she went on. It started with the interviewer telling her: "I am interviewing you but there is no job any more, so we won’t be hiring." The story can be told by many people and in many domains—things that looked stable and predictable just a short time ago are no longer so, deeply held assumptions are being questioned and reconsidered, previously unthinkable ideas beginning to look like new navigation points.

 

But as much as the turmoil and uncertainly bring pain, they also jolt us out of complacency. Most organizations—whether they are private corporations, socially oriented non-profits, or large government institutions—realize that they can’t just wait out this economic downturn. This is more than a downturn after which things will return to normal. We are entering a period of unprecedented reorganization on a global scale that will involve everyone. Climate change will be landscape clearing, paving the way for a new global infrastructure. A more coordinated Global South is developing its own vision of the economy to come. New technologies are connecting people and places, amplifying their abilities to organize and act outside of traditional structures. And research into the biology and neuroscience of being human will yield startling surprises about what we can do, individually and collectively.

 

In this environment, we believe we need a new way of organizing for the future—a process that we at IFTF call superstructing. “Superstruct” means to create structures that go beyond the basic forms and processes with which we’re familiar. It means to collaborate at extreme scales, from the micro to the massive. Learning to work and play, to invent and govern at these scales is what the next few decades are all about. For individuals and large institutions alike, superstructing, whether we call it that or not, is the new core competency.

 

For IFTF, superstructing means going beyond the traditional forecasting and strategic processes to turn our institutions from planning organizations into sensing and sense-making organizations. And the platforms, tools, and processes we have been developing over the past few years are ideally suited for the task. Think of this transformation as equivalent to the transformation in oceanographic research over the past few decades. Not too long ago, researchers periodically went out to take samples and measurements of the ocean. They collected data sporadically in certain places and at certain times. They then made big inferences about what was happening in the oceans based on little amount of data—big leaps of faith based on relatively little data.

 

Compare this to how oceanographic research is increasingly done today. Take for example, the Ocean Observatories Initiative based at Calit2. As a part of the project, which involves instrumenting the ocean floor with tiny wireless interactive sensors and cameras, scientists and laypeople are able to see what is happening on the ocean floor 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Along with the streaming video, the observatory is providing a constant stream of related physical, chemical, geological and biological data, giving experts rich, real time information about the behavior of oceans. Computer scientists take the data and, using predictive modeling techniques, create a visual representation of what the ocean will likely look like in the future, projecting it on the video display wall. Wearing a special headset and using a joystick, researchers are then able to navigate the future they have created.

 

Traditional strategic planning approaches are perhaps as outdated today as old-fashioned ocean floor observation techniques. The transition to a world of 24/7 streaming data is not unique to science. Increasingly, individuals and institutions alike operate in a “sentient” world instrumented with sensing, computing, and communications capabilities. Every object, every interaction is loaded with signals about the future. If we care to listen, we can get valuable perspectives to guide our organizations and our lives.

 

The tools IFTF has been creating over the past few years are uniquely suited to helping organizations create sensing capabilities and to superstruct themselves for the future. We believe the key components of this approach include:

 

• Sensing platforms: We need platforms for continuously aggregating diverse signals, weak and strong, from thousands of sources about possible future innovations and disruptions. These platforms can be public or private, centralized or distributed. They can tap the knowledge of experts or the wisdom of crowds. But they need to build on the leading edge of social media that capture and integrate information streams quickly and steadily. These are precisely the kinds of platforms IFTF has been creating in the past few years, from Signtific.org, which aggregates signals related to potentially disruptive developments in science and technology, to Superstruct, After Shock, and Ruby’s Bequest that help communities navigate disruptive changes in their lives.
  


• Filtering and patterning tools: From tag clouds to data maps and visual simulations, we need to build capabilities into our platforms for picking out what’s important and for crafting larger stories out of multitude of signals. At IFTF, some of these processes are automated; others include human judgment and interpretation. We firmly believe that the best in the next generation of forecasting and strategy tools will take the advantage of both, weaving together human and machine intelligence that allows for amplification of each.
  


• Storytelling tools: As humans, we are wired for stories. We look for and respond to stories in data. At IFTF, our storytelling tools take many forms, including signal maps, artifacts from the future, digital stories, online games and gamelets. More and more, we are integrating our maps and games into the sensing platforms as a means of engaging groups with our foresights and making them meaningful and actionable.
  


• Mechanisms for resilience: In our daily lives and in our organizations, we need to develop a more keen awareness of our contexts and our ability to interact with them and to change them. This is the foundation for resilience in a complex, dynamic world. Foresight is a particular kind of context awareness, and at IFTF, we are striving to create ways for people to interact with the present and the future in new ways, not only in isolated strategic visioning sessions but also in ongoing interaction with platforms for exploring the “Future Here.”
  


• New leadership practices: A truly sensing organization relies less on hierarchical “visioning” and more on harnessing the intelligence of bottom-up processes, while at the same time providing infrastructure and guidance to the larger system. At IFTF, we are learning about new leadership principles from commons-based organizations such as Wikipedia and Sunlight Foundation, among many others.
  

 

Superstructing is an evolving process, and we’re learning new lessons daily. But amid the uncertainty, we’re very certain that this kind of reorganization from planning to sensing and sensemaking is essential for the future. With its suite of tools, platforms, and processes for sensing and sensemaking, IFTF is an ideal partner in the transformation. And this is what gives me great optimism about our future.