The human factor

I had a discussion recently with futurist colleague Wendy Schultz about defining the change that happened in Europe and America in the late 18th century. It was the enlightenment, certainly, through which a whole host of new political views about public voice and the independent integrity of the individual emerged into the mainstream, even if took another 150 years, or even 200, to work themselves out. And at the same time it was the beginning of the age of extraction, when humankind started to use the stored resources of the planet at scale for their profit and endeavour. Both of these ideas are still the dominant frames of our public discourse, certainly in the richer world, and shape (almost completely) competing arguments about sustainability. So I was lucky – even privileged – this week to hear the Canadian landscape photographer Ed Burtynsky talk about his work at a private event organised by Arup in London.

From ownership to stewardship

Picture via IndyMedia

I find that I’ve written a lot over the last couple of years about ownership – and by extension, about land and property. Not enough, it turns out, as I read the news this week that the activists who had occupied an education and environment centre in the Forest of Dean, to try to prevent Gloucestershire Council from selling it off, have been evicted. Legally, of course, it is the Council’s to sell. The argument of this post is that it shouldn’t be.

Here’s my starting proposition: (a) public bodies should not be allowed to sell off capital assets.
(b) we need a new class of property – a stewardship category – which enables property to be held in the public good in perpetuity.

Spinning for Heathrow

There is no business itch too trivial for the British Chancellor George Osborne not to want to scratch it, no matter what the other consequences. So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the sustained lobbying by not one but two separate Heathrow expansion campaigns has got Osborne, or so it’s claimed, lobbying his Cabinet colleagues on a change of mind on Heathrow’s third runway. I’ve written here before – in a long two-part post, here and here – about the long-term trends influencing aviation in the rich world. My assessment then was that most of them pointed to a decline in demand for long-haul flight (and in Europe and the United States, probably short-haul as well). So it’s probably worth spending some time on the ‘studies’ which support the latest political mood music emanating from Number 11.

Talking energy blues

Smart Monkey TV is an interesting venture from Russell Southwood, whom I’ve known a long time – a You Tube channel on which Russell collects video interviews on a range of subjects he thinks people could be interested in. It’s just been soft-launched with a first set of interviews, and this is how it describes itself:

Interesting interviews with people who know what they’re talking about and have something to say for people who are curious.

I was interviewed on futures and on energy – here are the two clips on energy. First up, the complex timeline – and complex system – for the decline of oil (about 6 minutes):

And second, the impact the decline of oil will have on business (about 9 minutes):

‘Occupy’ as public innovation

I have been trying, fairly unsuccessfully, to write a long post on the politics of Occupy. This isn’t that post, but it seemed that the clearance this week of Occupy LSX, after four months outside St Paul’s, needed some sort of note. This shortish post is about Occupy as a form of public innovation.

Library futures

A version of this post, which I wrote with Victoria Ward and Sabine Jaccaud of the change consultancy Sparknow, is also on The Futures Company blog.

Recently Francine Houben of Mecanoo Architecten talked about their design of Birmingham’s future library as a “living room for the city”. More than just storage, a dynamic space for movement, openness and exchange. In a blog she calls libraries “the cathedrals of our millennia”, which seemed a useful precursor to last Saturday’s National Libraries Day

The future of the library is, in some ways, a paradox.The trends that are running against it are more obvious, especially when combined with the financial pressures facing the British libraries system. But there are a surpring number of trends running in its favour. When you look at them together, the library becomes an object which allows us to have a discussion about the notion of the ‘public’ in the digital age.

Copyright wars

Cross posted from The Futures Company blog

Watching the SOPA/PIPA saga unfold from the other side of the Atlantic, it was difficult not to see it as a ‘wave war’, in which companies which grew up in different technology waves compete to set the frame of economic and policy discussion. On the one side, the media companies, creatures of the mass production era that dominated much of the 20th century; on the other, the technology companies that have grown up in the digital wave that followed it. (I wrote about these waves in the Futures Company Futures Perspective report, Technology 2020).

The technology companies seem to be on the right side of the generational wave.

The values of work

I read The Death of a Salesman over the break because my son was doing it for his GCSE and was having some problems with it. I realised that – to my surprise – I’d not read it or seen it before, even though the Willy Loman character has become iconic; worse, I’d conflated it in my mind with Miller’s other epic family drama, All My Sons. Some of its insights about how work had changed resonate again, two generations on.

Best practice in strategic futures

Ten years ago, I co-authored a report which The Henley Centre produced for the British Government’s Cabinet Office, trying to identify what represented best practice in strategic futures. We started with a benchmarking project, then identified a further range of interviewees, whom we talked to at some length, before distilling it into a collection of principles about good practice. I re-read it earlier this year, and found that (perhaps because it was about principles rather than process) it had held up well. A summary of the principles can be found below the fold. The full report has just been republished by my employer, The Futures Company (free, but registration required).

The long view of technology

I’ve just finished working on a thought leadership paper, Technology 2020, for The Futures Company with my colleague Andy Stubbings, and we’ve published an extract in the company’s quarterly newsletter, FutureProof (free, but registration required). I’ve republished this as it appears in FutureProof below the fold. In a couple of lines, I draw on Carlota Perez’ view of technology change to argue that we need to understand the ICT revolution as a long wave – following the same pattern as previous dominant technologies – which is nearing the end of its period of dominance. And secondly, that looking at the previous technology waves, it is only now – close to the end of the wave – that we will start to see new business models which will stick.