ISSS 2006 at Sonoma State University

Peter Bishop, "Futures", ISSS 2006 at Sonoma State University, Thursday, July 13, 2006, 10:45 a.m.

Social systems design

These participant's notes were created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. These should not be viewed as official transcripts of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. These notes have been contributed by David Ing (daviding@systemicbusiness.org) at the Systemic Business Community ( http://systemicbusiness.org ).

[Intro by Debora]

[Peter Bishop]

So many ideas that have come through this week, haven't been able to create a formal presentation

Voice and language

Come from a similar planet: future thinkers

Hear stories that are familiar and some that are new

University of Houston

Graduates professional futurists
Professional futurists: consideration of the long term future

How we deal with the future:

Normal science, business as usual, inside the box: economists, market researcher, political commenty

Futurist take up where these people leave off, because they understand that they only look a year out

Thus, there are three words: wider, deeper, and longer
Wider: there's nothing isolated, everything connects to everything else
Deeper: limits by what people believe reality to be, and futurist says "maybe not", and then someone says "I've never thought of it that way before"
Longer: what's the second and third implications of that future

Some of the map of what I use, representative of the field

Distinctions are obvious
None of us are trained to work on the future, yet all of us are involved in it

Simple concepts:

(1) Where does change come from?

Sociologist, a 2x2 table
(a) Out there, and in here

The hand we are dealt, and what we can do
Influence within limits

Systems scientists are aspirational
Inbound change versus outbound change

(b) Speed of change: incremental change within eras, and the punctuations

Can't predict punctuations

(2) Preparing for the future: prediction

A card-carrying futurist eschews predictions
Are masters of uncertainty, and are humble about what we can know about the future
Three major forces create the future:
(a) Trends

The expected future, with a probability of a single point being miniscule

(b) The forces of uncertainty

Standard science doesn't know how to do this
We use logic and mathematics, but also need to use imagination and speculation
Can't prove it
Thus, an expected future, and a swarm of alternative futures
No a future, but multiple futures

System scientists are well prepared for the expected future, and the visionary future, aspirational after a catastrophe
Haven't heard the form of the future: scenario
Distinguish vision as a particular type of scenario, but there are other scenarios
Need a story line, not just an end state
Can't be just some drama, some element of risk, parties
Needs to be a balance of good and bad: the future is not utopian, and not catastrophic

At Houston, teach some other classes

The systems thinking course is a metanoia class, thinking-changing
Also have a course on social change, a stepchild of sociology, because it's hard to do quick research on this in a tenure track

No one wants to study history in sociology
Complementarity, first introduced by Niels Bohr
Have to use metaphors and facets
Go through 9 theories of social change, each with a set of assumptions about how the world is, and how it changes
Theory most prominent: theory or progress, or theory of development
All of human evolution of history that puts humans at the top of the tree
Ask students if they would like to change, to be in a time in the past, and they say no; and they also say that they don't want to be in the future that is uncertain
Afraid to go back and to go forward

(A) Progressives: look at three drivers:

(a) Intellectual and capital development of history, as ideas
(b) Technology: Joseph Schumpeter, Carola Perez:, creative destruction

Should be called destructive creativity, because destructive first
Almost always need to have a crisis first
Can destroy that which is harmful, but don't know that the best will come back
Alternative inherent progressive futurist: only civilization where we believe that change is a good thing
Compared to China, where change was considered bad, and Greeks, that started in a golden age
Greeks were not progressives, they were declinists

People look to educatoin, but it's a preserving institution, not an innovating institution
Commercial interests, in a competitive environment
Wasn't the mechanism before the enlightenment, and may not be the mechanism in the future.

Each of three has a common assumption, that like to reverse: moving forward

(B) Toynbee alternative: cycles

Our civilization will die
Hope that we're not that
Combined with progressives is helical change

Higher change, and then deeper troughs

Conflict theories: Marx says that we aren't all together
Unity is an illusion that those in charge would like us to believe, when we are in fundamental odds with each other
Conflict is at the basis of democracy: the balance of power
No belief that leaders will always be benevolent
Thus, creation of weaker systems, not stronger

(D) Evolutionary change:

Reverses an assumption: the environment doesn't matter
Mutation and selection
Commercial evolution lets markets selet
Ideas proposed, and a few get selected
Most satisfying theoretically, but the least useful: totally unpredicatable
Not within the job of futurists

Scenarios are intellectual calesthetics

Jogging doesn't get you anywhere
Scenario thinking is appreciation of the future, so we're less surprised than the future
Can't expect people to go from zero to 60 in one conversation: maybe you should think this way small
Future studies is trafficking in assumptions

We can live in any culture that we conceive

Questions

Future throught the five stages of grief: denial, anger, and then bargaining. Bargaining as a safety valve.

Use five stages when thinking about creating change
Creating change is another thing that futurists do, e.g. planning
Change means taking our world away
The generation of the bifurcation will be angry, and will curse us
They will think that they have progressed beyond where we are now, because they don't want to come back and relive this now
Want to prevent catastrophe, but we also can't hang onto our world
We don't have to have a miserable life, because it's sustainable
The destruction has to happen before the creation

Similar to economic models. Making a story about how agents interact with each other. What differences?

First text in systems course is System One, System Two
No free lunch
You can't just do one thing, will create some things we like and some we don't
Working towards a preferable future, consequences
Tradeoffs
Can't do just one thing

Appreciate, but confused. What are developmental studies, conflict studies, .... See a common set of concerns. When we apply General Evolution Theory, and understand laminar periods of change and bifurcations .... we can still influence the future, not by engineering, but by creating scenarios, to shift our probabilities into possibilities. False dichotomy

Emphasizing the similarities, and in this talk, only emphasizing the differences
A differentiated family of two branches, and you're talking about an integrated family

[Debora Hammond]

Creativity, imagination

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