This is the question I keep posing to my colleagues as we grapple with strategic planning for the university. I sometime get blank stares or statements about how no one has a crystal ball (implying it is a stupid question!) But a few colleagues do understand that we need to be attending to what the world might be like that far into the future. The reason is that higher education programmatic changes, not to mention deciding what buildings to build, take years to develop and then should be expected to operate for long time scales. Universities are not unlike giant oil tankers, which you have to start a turn long before the rudder starts to have an effect.
The problem for most people with such a question is that they think in terms of prediction, as in specifically what will be happening, what kinds of technology will exist, that sort of thing. But, of course, I don't mean prediction. For one thing prediction has a technical definition that says, in effect, something like: "Event X will occur with Y probability." Clearly anyone who tries to predict a future event, even if assigning a low probability value, is asking for a crow eating session.
That doesn't stop us from thinking about the future. As individuals and as organizations we are forever considering future possibilities. We anticipate what will happen in the future. This is a very different thing from prediction. Anticipation is oriented toward assessing possibilities of various scenarios based on our models of how the world (or our little corner of it anyway) works. We are literally running our mind models in fast forward mode to see what our understanding projects as possible outcomes. As often as not such anticipations can be based on what we want the future to be as much as what we think it might be. Anticipation of the future is our way of considering options out in time and then using judgment to guide the selection of behaviors we will employ to get the future we want.
This is really the same thing that organizations and governments do in deciding policies. They are seeking judgments on policy decisions that will produce a favorable future given anticipation of things that can happen, especially in the absence of a good policy. So sapient judgment and policy development are related at a deep level.
Anticipating the future really means considering several possible futures and constructing action plans for each such future. We can weight scenarios by something akin to a probability (called a likelihood) based on expectations for how the various scenarios are likely to play out. The future is full of uncertainties and ambiguities that defy computation as such. There is a lot we have to guess about. Intelligence alone will not suffice. Judgment is needed. But constructing a set of flexible plans prepares us to handle contingencies as they arise. The better our judgments the better and more flexible our plans. Then as the future unrolls we are ready to act according to the plan that best anticipated that realization.
In the next series of questions I want to explore anticipated scenarios for the future of the world. As alluded to in previous posts, there are looming challenges, possible catastrophes, that we need to prepare ourselves to meet. Where we can take action to get the kind of outcome we might desire, we should develop plans for doing so. Where it is not feasible for us to take any effective action, we should know not to waste time and effort trying to do something to no avail. What the future might look like may be very different from what we might have expected.
My approach to this is very different from that generally taken by others. Rather than take a single issue, e.g. climate change, and try to develop projections and possible mitigation actions, I will start with how these challenges interrelate with one another. I will take the systems approach in order to identify potential interactions that create non-linearities. It will be important to detect possible positive feedbacks that would defeat any attempts to mitigate on problem when another problem area will swamp those attempts. For example, efforts to mitigate CO2 emissions to battle climate change will be hampered by the peak oil problem driving people to burn more coal to compensate.
What I will be striving for is a set of scenarios that anticipate what the world will be like in about twenty years. Each will have its own implications for how we should act now and what provisions will be needed to minimize disaster. Let's see where this goes.
There will be a lot less oil to go around in 20 years - that's for sure. It will be interesting to see how the world adapts to that looming fact.
[Moderator edit: Removed commercial URL]
Posted by: fuel trailers | July 23, 2012 at 01:34 AM