MISC: Re: Issue by MISC

a journal of strategic insight and foresight WINTER 2016 $12 USD $12 CAD ÂŁ7.50 GBP DISPLAY UNTIL 03/31/2016

Redefining Customer Experience P.34

Reimagining Capitalism P.38

Reification and Research in the Real World P.86

the re: issue

Rethinking Indulgence P.100

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the re: issue

Contents Theory, So What? 8 Signal, So What? 10 Insight, So What? 12 More Human than Human 24 Redefining Customer Experience 34 Reimagining Capitalism 38 Developing a Killer Foresight Strategy 54 Rethinking Design: A Perspective from the Lululemon Whitespace Team 58 Reification and Research in the Real World 86 Create 96 Rethinking Indulgence 100

Publisher / Editor-in-Chief Idris Mootee Publishing Advisory Council Andy Hines Michael Novak Christer Windeløv-Lidzélius Co-Editor-in-Chief Dr. Morgan Gerard Head of Media & Publications Ashley Perez Karp Managing Editor Esther Rogers Editor Mira Blumenthal Art Director / Design Sali Tabacchi, Inc. Additional Design Julie Do Illustration Jennifer Backman Contributing Writers Dr. Emma Aiken-Klar Robert Bolton Dr. Eitan Buchalter Dr. Tom Chatfield Cheesan Chew Jim Dator Emily Empel Jamie Ferguson Dylan Gordon Nadina Hare Paul Hartley Andrea Hirsch Valerie Ann Higgins Christopher Ho Maria Jeansson Rachel Kwan Dr. Marc Lafleur Jayar La Fontaine Courtney Lawrence Mathew Lincez Will Novosedlik Nathan Samsonoff Shane Saunderson Maya Shapiro Dr. Vurain Tabvuma Jax Wechsler Dr. Ted Witek

Distribution (US/Canada) Disticor International Distribution Pineapple Media Subscription Enquiries subscription@miscmagazine.com Letters to the Editor letters@miscmagazine.com Contribution Enquiries contribution@miscmagazine.com Advertising Enquires advertising@miscmagazine.com MISC (ISSN 1925-2129) is published by Idea Couture Inc. Canada 241 Spadina Avenue, Suite 500 Toronto, ON M5T 2E2 United States 649 Front Street, Suite 300 San Francisco, CA 94111 United Kingdom 85 Great Eastern Street London, EC2A 3HY United Kingdom All Rights Reserved 2016. Email misc@miscmagazine.com The advertising and articles appearing within this publication reflect the opinions and attitudes of their respective authors and not necessarily those of the publisher or editors. We are not to be held accountable for unsolicited manuscripts, artworks or photographs. All material within this magazine is © 2016 Idea Couture Inc.

Publisher

Co-Publishers

Idea Couture

The University of Houston Foresight Program

As publishers of MISC, our aim is to provide a new level of understanding in the fields of insight and foresight. We navigate the blurred boundaries of business, design, and innovation through in-depth articles from some of the preeminent voices of design thinking, technology, customer experience, and strategy. Idea Couture helps organizations navigate and innovate in complex and uncertain environments. We use design thinking methodologies to solve problems and exploit business opportunities – generating new growth, meaningful differentiation, and economic value. By taking an insight and foresight lens to our explorations in MISC, we can thoroughly examine the impacts and opportunities of change in a vast range of industries, allowing businesses to plan for the present and the future.

Kaospilot

CEDIM

The University of Houston’s Foresight Program offers a Masters in Foresight, a four-course Graduate Certificate, and a week-long intensive bootcamp overview, each of which prepares students to work with businesses, governments, nonprofits, and others to anticipate and prepare for the future. Established in 1974, it is the world’s longest-running degree program exclusively devoted to foresight. Some students enrol to become professional futurists, while others seek to bring a foresight perspective to their current careers. Students have three major areas of focus: understanding the future, mapping the future, and influencing the future, blending theory and practice to prepare graduates to make a difference in the world.

Kaospilot is an international school of entrepreneurship, creativity, and leadership. It was founded in 1991 as a response to the emerging need for a new type of education – one that could help young people navigate the changing reality of the late 20th century. The program’s main areas of focus are leadership, project management, and creative business and process design. Promoting a hands-on approach, case studies are replaced by immersing students in real projects with real clients. Out of more than 600 graduates, one third have started their own company, NGO, or other similar initiative, the remaining hold management positions. Kaospilot also offers a wide range of courses for professionals in creative leadership and educational design.

Based in Monterrey, Mexico, CEDIM takes a design, innovation, and business comprehensive approach to education. Design is promoted as a core philosophy, and the faculty consists of active, young, and experienced professionals who have expertise in a broad range of fields. Students are engaged with real and dynamic work projects, and are encouraged to immerse themselves in these active projects in order to participate in the realities of the workforce long before graduation. As a result, students at CEDIM develop an extensive sensitivity of their social, economic, and cultural environment, and go on to make real, pragmatic change in the world of design and innovation.

uh.edu

kaospilot.dk

cedim.edu.mx

Welcome to the new, new issue of MISC.

As you’ve probably noticed from our cover, we’ve made a change. No longer billing ourselves as the world’s leading magazine on design thinking and innovation as we have for the past five years, MISC is now a journal of strategic insight and foresight. Why the change? In part, I was motivated by the focus of the September 2015 issue of the Harvard Business Review, titled The Evolution of Design Thinking. I have been practicing design thinking for a very long time; I’ve promoted it to C-suites around the globe in presentation after presentation. Everyone in my firm practices it. And I truly believe that when teams wholeheartedly adopt the core principles and practices of design thinking, they become smarter, faster, and better at creating products, services, and experiences that align with the true needs and behaviors of people. But I have to say that I was a little taken aback by this issue of HBR, particularly with the tone it took in promoting design thinking as an innovation cure-all for large organizations. If such organizations are discovering that they have found a remedy to their innovation woes by becoming faster, more efficient, and more creative through design thinking, that’s great. But I doubt that the cure has been found. Whether such organizations are self-taught or have contracted out consultants to teach and train them, design thinking as it is practiced by most true leaders in the field cannot be an organizational cure-all for one simple reason: it has a gaping deficit. That’s right. I said it: design thinking as it is practiced by most organizations on the client or consultant side is flawed, and the flaw exists at the very front-end of the process. Whether you call it research, insights, or inspiration, the design thinking approach to innovation has traditionally been light on the front-end. Typically, you’ll find organizations that do no research and jump right into iterative design, organizations that task designers to conduct research lite, organizations that rely on traditional market research methods, or organizations that put unqualified people in charge of laying a project’s foundation. All of these approaches are, at best, ineffective and, at worst, a total disaster. They disrespect the importance of insights. They erode the value insights play in any innovation process. And they almost guarantee that your organization will begin tackling challenges without a clear understanding of and appreciation for what is and what might be. Which brings me to the other deficit in design thinking: what might be. Given the continually shortening product lifecycles and breakneck pace of technology advancement, innovation is ultimately about the future. Whether it’s a short future or a longer one, design thinking has never really put forward a way of grappling with changing social norms and human behaviors. To make up for this deficit, many organizations have turned to trend watching as a way to consider what might be in near or far futures. Lacking methodology or method, trend watching is a hobby. It lacks rigor, process, and a clearly defined way to articulate how what is occurring today might shape the acceptance of an innovation or blow open an opportunity space. The answer to this deficit is strategic foresight. Strategic foresight is the process of establishing well-informed future oriented perspectives that help to fuel, guide, and

inspire innovation, strategic planning, and decision-making. It helps organizations better understand, imagine, anticipate, and prepare for change by equipping teams with the tools and resources needed to ask provocative questions, develop new hypotheses, challenge dominant logics, test assumptions, rethink opportunities, reset goals, and explore alternatives. Having evolved over the past 10 to 15 years from a military or policy undertaking to an innovation undertaking, foresight now has several schools around the world training a new generation of practitioners in business and arming them with specialized graduate degrees in the field. What I really want to see is strategic foresight as a core curriculum in an MBA. What’s business without seeing the future? And the future doesn’t live on a spreadsheet. So, welcome to the new MISC, where I hope to remedy the deficit in design thinking with some real rigor. Our focus is insight and foresight: their methods, methodologies, epistemologies, tools, techniques, and how they can be applied to innovation challenges. To that end, I invite everybody to contribute. We all have insights. We all practice foresight. In business and design thinking, however, it’s time to practice some discipline in our work – particularly at the front-end of innovation – by applying the same expectations and standards to insights and futures that we do to design. To help us achieve this, we are partnering with three academic institutions who are at the forefront of these practices to further evolve MISC. We are pleased to announce our new co-publishers for the upcoming spring issue: Kaospilot, CEDIM, and the University of Houston Foresight Program. By providing insightful articles and expertise from their faculty and students, these partnerships will help foster and develop our editorial vision. Finally, I also wish to welcome back our head of media and publications, Ashley Perez Karp, who has been away on maternity leave, and my new co-editor-in-chief, Dr. Morgan Gerard. Together, we will continue to develop a number of partnerships with institutions who will be advancing this domain to help us fulfill our goals. Enjoy this special re: issue.

Idris Mootee Publisher / Editor-in-Chief

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Theory, so what?

In every issue, we pick a social theory, explain its relevance, and explore its implications on the future of your business, industry, or category.

Users of the World, Unite!

So what? Karl Marx and the idea of alienation Part of Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism was the idea of alienation. Marx argued that within the capitalist mode of production, workers no longer work to create things they need, use, or sell. Instead, within industrial capitalism, workers must sell their labor power for wages, by creating commodities that capitalists then sell on the market for profit. Marx believed that this situation meant that workers were separated, or alienated, from the outcomes of their labor. Fast forward to the proletariat revolution: workers of the world united, and socialism was born. And while capitalism is still very much alive and well, socialism has left an indelible mark on global politics and economies. It’s interesting to consider what might happen in a future where users of social media, mobile apps, and connected and wearable devices rise up and reclaim the value of their data.

What Marx’s theory of alienation tells us about our relationship with big data.

Human beings have become living, breathing, data-making machines. When we wake up in the morning, before our feet even hit the floor, we check our email, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Our quantified selves move through the day, captured and counted by our wearable devices, every

connected move we make tracked and traced by our very smart Things. Our existence as sentient sacks of flesh, blood, and bone, transformed through a tsunami of zeros and ones, becomes a source of tremendous value for the people who make the products, services, and internet that we consume. According to a recent global Capgemini study of over 1,000 C-suite and senior decision makers, 63% believe that the monetization

of data is becoming as big a source of value as their existing products and services. Boston Consulting Group has forecast that, by the year 2020, personal data could be worth as much as $1 trillion euros a year in Europe alone. How do we make sense of this chasm – the fact that our personal data is contributing to a trillion dollar economy, yet we, the users of Things who give life to this coveted commodity, have no way to realize the value of the data we create?

PHOTO: PRODUNCAN C

by dr. emma aiken-klar

Weak signals of a data proletariat revolution: Handshake An app and website that allows users to negotiate directly with companies that want access to their personal data. DataCoup A personal data marketplace that links to individual social media and payment accounts; it allows users to broker deals with parties interested in their data. Raptr An app that allows its 26 million users to trade their gaming habits for rewards such as free hardware, discounts, and games. Safe Harbour Legal Battle In October 2015, The European Court of Justice (ECJ) made a landmark ruling with far reaching implications for tech giants, like Facebook and Google, looking to process data in Europe. This, along with the EU’s General Data Protection Legislation (GDPL), signal a possible future where access to personal data becomes highly regulated and potentially more difficult to profit from.

What if… How would your business, industry, or category fare in a future where users demand the value of their personal data? Are you prepared for citizens who get smart and want a piece of the action? / As entire economies emerge around the buying and selling of big data insights, how will revenues and valuations be impacted if the data market is disrupted by heavy regulation or grassroots movements to reclaim personal data? / What happens if privacy becomes a social norm, and data blocking becomes a regular part of how younger generations engage with the information they produce? / What role might loyalty play in delivering the value of data back to the users who create it? / What would a personal data bank look like, and how might traditional financial service players operate in that space? / For highly commoditized industries like pharmaceuticals, how might personal data banking be used to deliver better health outcomes and create competitive differentiation? What partnerships make sense in that ecosystem? / What kinds of hardware or software solutions could be used to provide users with visual access to the breakdowns of their data ecosystems? What would a personal data dashboard look like, and how could it be used to empower users? ////

Dr. Emma Aiken-Klar is AVP, senior resident anthropologist at Idea Couture. She is based in Toronto, Canada.

Signal, so what?

In every issue, we highlight a weak signal and explore its possibilities and ramifications on the future of your business, and how to better prepare for it.

The Industry of Immortality Rising

Overview

Relevance

ETER9 / Eternity Within Reach

ETER9 is not the first platform to explore how to preserve your online self. The platform is one of a growing list of AI-driven services that are seeking to address, in one way or another, the question of: When I’m gone, what will become of my social media profiles, my legacy, and my content online? The expectations surrounding social networks, digital media, and our ability to interact autonomously within them is changing. As we grow more aware of a long-term, post-life presence online, we must navigate these new tools that manage the balance of real vs. digital relationships. They enhance our ability to be present and to participate in multiple conversations, interactions, and exchanges simultaneously across context and time; they maximize our presence and our “being” by training and nurturing one or more virtual semi-autonomous or fully autonomous versions of ourselves. So who gets the real version of you? Which is better and why? Transhumanists, among others, may delight in this disruption to the natural order of self-replication and reproduction; aging boomer populations, who are increasingly aware of their own mortality, and are becoming comfortable with technology and the use of tech to capture and share their memories, may find themselves learning to build a more resolved legacy; empty nesters might find comfort in the nurturing of future selves; digital natives and the following generations are growing up with this type of legacy as the norm. Technologies such as ETER9 undoubtedly have an influence on our behaviors, and re-shape our ideas about content, privacy, and ownership.

Currently in the BETA stage, ETER9 is a social network that relies on artificial intelligence to communicate with and through your Counterpart – a virtual self that lives, learns, interacts, and posts content online, even when you’re not around. A more autonomous bot-like version of yourself, if you will. Users can also adopt existing or abandoned bots, otherwise known as Niners, and nurture them into being. Beyond helping you manage your increasingly demanding social networking, ETER9’s eternizing feature is a way of keeping your thoughts, posts, and personality interacting with others for all time. Assuming your AI Counterpart becomes more like you – more nuanced and effective as it learns over time – you will be present for others to enjoy long after your organic self has departed from this earth.

by mathew lincez

Potential

PHOTO: ETER9

Personal Technologies that allow for this sort of preservation encourage individuals to establish a lasting connection with their loved ones and future descendants after their organic selves have gone. We should consider their impact on existing and forthcoming personal and family relationships that will take place. Who are you now? Who will you become once you’re gone? How will your great-greatgreat grandchildren come to know you? How will the family dinner, birthday party, and graduation ceremony of the future change?

How will your content and online actions today preserve and recreate a better you tomorrow?

Brand This autonomous and eternal space opens up the potential for brands to establish and maintain an engaging presence amongst the conversations between real and virtual customers. We should consider how, over time, brands and their representatives may evolve and simultaneously continue to exist within this complexity.

In what ways will future brands extend themselves into eternal dialogues?

Organizational The rise of immortal agents may signify a brighter future for the sharing and preservation of knowledge between generations within the organization. We should consider how the individual’s repertoire, perspective, organizational story, and narrative could be better preserved and passed along to future generations. How can the interactions between new, old, and older employees be improved to enhance future potential and performance?

How might we better capture and preserve crossgenerational organizational knowledge? //// Mathew Lincez is co-head of foresight at Idea Couture. He is based in Toronto, Canada.

Insight, so what?

In every issue, we explore a topic through an anthropological lens in order to better understand its impacts on a wide range of industries.

The Impossible Question of Motivation and Compliance

PHOTO: E-MAGINE ART

When working with pharmaceutical clients, I am often asked to distinguish between “motivated-compliant” patients and “noncompliant” patients who lack motivation. It seems that being an anthropologist in the pharmaceutical consulting world means offering explanations for why patients “won’t adhere to medical regimes” and what “would motivate them to take medication.” Yet, despite how straightforward the concepts “motivation” and “compliance” may be for pharmaceutical clients, they are fundamentally fraught questions.

PHOTO: E-MAGINE ART

by nadine hare

Anthropology invites us to rethink these notions. Instead of “motivation” and “compliance,” it offers concepts like “structure” and “agency.” Instead of spending our time and energy on determining which patients are motivated, it asks us to consider the social, economical, political, racialized, and gendered contexts in which we move, while paying attention to the ways in which we respond to those very contexts. The analytical concept of structure offers a point of entry into understanding the ways in which people act. Structure helps us understand that we are not free to act in the way that we want all the time. In fact, our lives are (unequally) governed by structures at multiple scales: when a poor man is unable to financially access treatment due to his constrictive insurance plan; when a First Nations woman’s pain is delegitimized by her doctor who refuses to provide access to the right medication; or when a single mother is unable to take her medication on time as she juggles two full-time jobs and the care of her three children. Saying that these situations stem from a lack of motivation or simple noncompliance blatantly ignores the context in which people live. With the concept of structure comes that of agency. Agency helps us reflect on the fact that people often choose not to live within what has been designed for them – for example, by their doctors, by pharmaceutical treatment regimens, by the state, by popular norms, etc. Instead, they will bend, twist and shape what is available to suit their needs. Agency is a person’s ability to stop taking medication so that she can once again see how her body feels when void of pharmaceutical treatments. Agency is a person’s ability to take an extra antidepressant as a source of energy in order to face the difficulties of long work hours. Agency is a person’s ability to act in the face of the structures (medication regimes, persistent side effects, crushing medical bills) that govern their lives to make things a little more bearable. Evaluating individual levels of compliance and motivation flagrantly misses the point. Lastly, anthropology invites us to blur the boundaries between the researcher and the researched, and to critically reflect on our own insistence on motivation and compliance as seemingly crucial concepts through which we can understand the world. When we situate the pharmaceutical

industry’s questions within the social, political, and economic contexts in which we live, we can begin to make sense of how measuring levels of motivation has become a natural way to make sense of the world. In a neoliberal world economy, we are consistently prompted to measure it and imagine people as decision-makers who determine their own futures based on their level of motivation to work and to make their lives better. Yet, when problematizing these concepts falls on deaf ears, and when the questions of motivation and compliance stubbornly remain on the (boardroom) table, how do we respond to them? One way may be to directly engage with them while attempting to destabilize their violence. What if we suggest that everyone is motivated? Motivated to find ways to alleviate their bodily pain, to live a slightly less precarious life, to stay afloat economically, and to

lessen the effects of social and racial violence on their daily lives? In using the concept of motivation in new and creative ways, we can attempt to shift the focus away from determining who is motivated, and instead focus on the structures in place (racial, gendered, economic, political) that allow some people to act on their motivation – while hindering others. When pharmaceutical companies recognize the complexity and humanity of this issue, they will be well on their way to becoming patient-centric. Until then, they will continue to tout a phrase with no meaning or empathy behind it. ////

Nadine Hare is a resident anthropologist at Idea Couture. She is based in Toronto, Canada.

// Instead of spending our time and energy on determining which patients are motivated, it asks us to consider the social, economical, political, racialized, and gendered contexts in which we move. //

// If we’re declining, it is because of what we’ve done, not the new things we’ll try. //

We broke the world. We need strategies for real change. by idris mootee and robert bolton The prefix “re,” to anew again, suggests the motion of “undoing.” In this single unit of language lies the most important approach that we – as leaders, as organizations, as nations, as humans – can employ as we determine strategies

for the distant and immediate future. “Re” is the only sound approach when, despite loud evidence and urgent calls for attention, our wickedest challenges are not being adequately addressed. Our systems have proven durable but not effectual or adaptable. Traditional management thinking has left organizations ill-equipped for a world where innovation is required for survival. Governments are dysfunctional and policy can’t keep pace with change – technological, social, or climate. We need to rethink, reimagine, reset. As a species, we have all but done ourselves in. Can we undo? Many

intelligent people will tell you it’s too late, that we are heading for a world beyond recognition or repair, and we should learn to live with the idea that human civilization is as mortal as the humans that comprise it. There are other intelligent people who recognize all the same risks and vulnerabilities as the first camp, but who believe that through aggressive innovation, humanity can transcend. A balance of the two schools, a measured mode of somber optimism, paradoxical as it may be, is the tone of “re.” Accept that we’re drawing the arch to our own conclusion, but stay ambitious; keep hope that we’ll reorient.

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re: Everything rethink

reimagine

reset

The “re” approach to strategy definition involves reflecting inwardly and telescoping outwardly – locating our senses of place and space amidst the changing contours of our environment – illuminating our core, examining the systems we operate within, reading the signals, and speculating on the shapes that lie ahead. Today, living on the legacies of outdated social and economic systems, we fail to adequately distribute resources. We distrust our institutions, including automotive, internet, food, energy, and financial companies; the same organizations we entrust with our safety, privacy, health, security, and wealth. We fall short in our efforts to achieve, to uphold, to even grasp at the idea of a fair and equitable society. Critical infrastructures – bridges, dams, and electrical grids – are aging and growing increasingly frail. We’ve lost control of any handle we might have had on the environment; now we question our ability to sustain the species. It’s time to seriously contemplate our beliefs, dispose of our dogmas, examine the origins of our assumptions, and test them across a wide range of possible futures. That radical renewal is necessary should not be up for debate. If we’re declining, it is because of what we’ve done, not the new things we’ll try. Honesty can be difficult. Rigorous reflection may expose our fragilities. Acknowledging our shortcomings is uncomfortable. Plunging in and taking stock of uncertainty might make us feel vulnerable. But, when we come to terms with the nature of our challenges and the realities of our weaknesses, we emerge better prepared and more resilient.

“Re” is the space between what is done and what could be. How did we get here? What materials are we working with? What do we have in our war chest (or survival kit)? Now – where are we going? What got us here was in large part the perilous shortsightedness of quarterly capitalism. We’ve been sensing the world on limited time horizons. Despite their early signals being readily perceptible, many of the impending threats we’re now faced with were simply not on our strategic radars. Building a better capacity for anticipation entails imagining many research-based scenarios looking 30, 50, 100, 1,000 years forward. These exercises enable us to contemplate the long-term consequences of our actions, and ultimately make better decisions. As we draft and redraft, we begin to understand our roles and our actions across a variety of possible scenarios. It’s a process that enables us to plan preferable futures, and plan for unfavorable ones. The “re” approach to strategy determination involves employing methods that put purpose to art, practice creativity strategically, support imagination with research, and match realism with ambition. Tomorrow is going to look nothing like today. “Re” affords us the privilege of being deliberate about how we enter into a volatile and uncertain world.

What do you do when you recognize that you’re irrelevant? Deep unlearning. Un-commit and open up – courageously break from convention. It’s time to shed ideas that no longer serve us and admit that big shifts are taking place. Incrementalism is over. Now it’s about fundamentally restructuring our systems. Transformation is going to happen on a scale and at a pace far beyond what we’re accustomed to. Efforts to successfully attain our lofty new objective will be mass and concerted. As in a concert, success depends on the orchestration of many independent players working in step, each responsible for handling their unique instrument, performing separate yet harmonious parts. Like conductors, leaders will have to prioritize the desired aggregate effect – the music – over any individual, to say nothing of their own egos. Mobilization at this scale and complexity will require precise clarity of purpose and elegantly communicative gestures. Entire organizations will need to be rewired; our stories will have to be more inspiring. More attention will need to go to contemplating our ethics and morals as we move through unfamiliar territories. If we have found ourselves in a race between extinction due to humaninduced climate change and survival endowed by technological innovation, then who are you? What’s your purpose? Are you doing the right thing? Should you exist? Do you have long-term vision? Think about this: What is your strategy for 2020? Why isn’t it your strategy today?

A List of 2020 Strategic Priorities For Your Consideration / Fight extinction / Launch battery tower, grid-level energy storage skyscraper / Quintuple investment in carbon-free energy R&D / Crystallize strategy for human evolution / Develop the Microsoft Office of synthetic biology / Redefine â&#x20AC;&#x153;workâ&#x20AC;? in response to economic growth without job creation / Create wearable bacteria cultures for survival in hostile environments / Develop products for zero gravity sex, enabling reproduction in outer space / Strengthen security systems to defend against unfriendly AI / Launch research exploring spiritual accompaniment to transhumanist evolution strategy / Implement cheap alternative healthcare solutions / Back up DNA sequences of all known life on Earth to orbital satellite hard drive, otherwise known as â&#x20AC;&#x153;Project Noahâ&#x20AC;? / Increase human resilience to bioengineered pandemics / Define our new sense of humanism / Idris Mootee is the publisher and editor-in-chief of MISC and CEO of Idea Couture. He spends his time between London, New York, San Francisco, and Shanghai. Robert Bolton is a senior creative strategist at Idea Couture. He is based in Toronto, Canada.

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Painful Memories

On July 19, 1982, Marvin Anderson thought he was helping out with an investigation when he voluntarily presented himself to the authorities. Later that day, he was placed in a lineup – even though he had an alibi – and was convicted. He served 15 years in prison before being freed after DNA testing proved his innocence. By all accounts, the victim was sincere. Looking back, we can’t help but wonder, how can someone be so wrongfully charged? Most people believe they have a good and reliable memory, but what we remember is often very different from what we actually experienced. It turns out, that the nature of the experience has a great influence on how we remember it. Fascinated? Intrigued? Just remember to read on.

We can learn a lot about how our memories work from pain. In a ground-breaking experiment, Nobel Prize winning behavioral scientist Daniel Kahneman discovered that there is a difference between what we remember and what we experience. He found that people’s evaluation of a painful experience (a proctology examination in his case) was based on two things: the most painful part of the experience, and the pain experienced at the end. Having a generally more (or less) painful experience throughout did not matter. One agonizingly painful jolt in a relatively painless examination was enough to paint the whole experience as excruciatingly painful. Kahneman calls such moments “peak events,” which can turn our perception of a generally positive experience into one that is considered negative. Think of The Bill Cosby Show. Fans had fond memories of this series until Bill Cosby’s past sins came to light, and now most people cannot evaluate the show as they did previously. This research also shows the importance of the last experience of an event. Let’s consider a fishing trip. How we remember a trip where we

caught a fish right at the end of an otherwise unsuccessful day will be very different to how we remember a trip where we caught a fish at the beginning of the day, and then nothing else for the rest. In the former, our memories are more likely to be associated with feelings of resilience, thoughts of how we never give up until we achieve our goal. In the latter, the higher expectations set at the beginning of the day may lead us to feel disappointment when our expectations are not met later on. This may result in our memory of the event being associated with negative feelings and attitudes. Clearly, the final experience of an event makes a lasting impression on our memory when compared to earlier experiences. As such, memories and the emotions we associate with them are central to our purchase decisions and brand loyalties, as well as other areas of inter- and intraorganizational life. To have brand loyalty and trust, consumers have to remember their experience with products in a positive light. It is impossible for consumers to have an affinity for a product if they have negative memories associated with its use. So, how can a better understanding of memory be used to sell more products and services?

PHOTO: SHAREALIKE

Re-membering

Create the Highest of Peaks

Avoid the Lowest of Lows

Always Finish on a Positive Note

We all know love is blind. One strategy to ensure consumers have positive evaluations of your brand is to ensure they have at least one overwhelmingly positive emotional experience with your product. This will act as an anchor around which future evaluations of the product, and the brand as a whole, will be set – ideally making them forget all the faults they may have found with the product. Ever wondered why Apple iPhone sales remain astronomically high even when critics identify numerous defects and limitations? Remember the iPhone 6 and “Bendgate”? Or the faulty iPhone 5 battery that drained too quickly? Such defects would normally have been enough to ruin the reputation of an innovative product. However, the extraordinarily positive user experience that consumers associate with the iPhone is how most phone buyers evaluate their experience. In addition to the positive brand associations with Apple, this intellectual and emotional association with the UX of an iPhone ensures that users continue to buy future iterations and recommend them to others.

Think about a product you use on a daily basis but never put much thought into, such as toilet paper. You may return to the same brand time and again because, although nothing exceptional ever happens, the brand never let you down either. It had simply consistently performed its job. It is difficult to achieve high emotional peaks and bonds with certain products, especially if they are more functional than fun. In such cases, it is more important to ensure consumers do not have any negative experiences with the product, rather than focusing on the exceptionally positive. Any bad moments a consumer has will mean that they are likely to consider the brand as a whole in a negative light, making it far less likely that they will buy your product again.

A plethora of studies in behavioral science show that the last impression made by an event directly influences consumer evaluations. It is, therefore, important that the last experience of a product is a positive one for the consumer, as this will be an important factor in the lasting impression that the consumer has of that product, and will inform future purchasing decisions. For example, one of the reasons Uber has proved so popular, is because customers do not waste time at the conclusion of a ride paying and waiting for their change. Customer evaluations of their Uber experience is therefore dominated by this seamless experience at the end of the ride. Similarly, one of the last impressions made when buying coffee from Starbucks is receiving your beverage with your name on it. That personalization is one of the main takeaways from the overall experience. These types of flawless and consistent actions are the most important aspects for a brand to cultivate.

// The distinction between what our actual experience of an event is and how we remember it is largely ignored in market research. //

Better Experience Design The distinction between what our actual experience of an event is and how we remember it is largely ignored in market research. This means we can never be sure of the actual drivers of marketing metrics, such as consumer satisfaction. Is consumer satisfaction with a product high because it contains no faults and made a good final impression? Or is it because there is a high peak in an otherwise unsatisfactory experience? These lessons from behavioral science research will help us answer such questions. These are lessons we hope to remember. //// Dr. Vurain Tabvuma is head of quantitative analysis at Idea Couture. He is based in Toronto, Canada.

The Future Isn’t Your Friend

by jayar la fontaine illustrations by jennifer backman

Future thinking needs a dose of cosmic pessimism if it’s to have any utility at all

I recently spent a week at Ohio University in the verdant college town of Athens, lecturing at a NASA-sponsored summer program that trains students from around the world for careers in the space industry. Over several intense and lengthy sessions, my co-lecturer and I led a group of gridlocked students in an extended discussion of how the program might positively impact space exploration over the next 30 years.

Amidst talk of the economic and technical feasibility of asteroid mining operations and permanent moon settlements, the conversation would frequently circle back to a core issue: political and public engagement with space exploration has steadily been on the wane since the Space Age drew to a close in the early 70s. NASA’s funding, as a percentage of the US federal budget, peaked at 4.4% in 1966. Three years later, even as Walter Cronkite reported in a state of wonder that the crew of Apollo 11 had planted their feet and flag on the lunar surface, NASA’s share had already been halved. It’s been in slow decline ever since; today, it wavers around half a percent. Even this meager allocation – amounting to some $18 billion in 2015 – dwarfs the $5 billion current budget of the European Space Agency. These facts lurked in the shadows of every discussion; boundless optimism for the future of space exploration – a central theme in the oeuvre of futurism – could only be maintained, it seemed, in spite of this inconvenient reality. The economic facts suggested that humanity’s tremulous attempts to reach into space had lost their visceral appeal among all but a tight-knit cadre of inveterate dreamers and industry insiders. As a supposed representative of the futurist community, I felt a kind of queasiness at my inability to muster a plausible story unfolding over the next thirty years that included anything like the milestones that appear on a space aficionado’s earnest wish list: established lunar colonies, an emergent asteroid mining industry, and consistent traffic between Earth and our closest planetary neighbor, Mars. As part of the program’s itinerary, students and faculty had been invited to tour NASA’s Glenn Research Center facilities, located just outside Cleveland, a four-hour bus ride from our host institution. The bus ride was an opportunity for the students to set aside the animus that often builds in high pressure group projects and simply enjoy each other’s company. As for myself, I took some time to reflect on the disquiet about humanity’s relationship with the territories beyond our home planet that was settling in my mind. Why should it be that at the very moment the drama of human space exploration was reaching a crescendo in the 60s, we would begin, quietly and almost imperceptibly, to withdraw from the frontier? The answer was so disheartening it was almost embarrassing to admit: space exploration – or, more precisely, its funding, administration, and agenda setting – has never had much to do with the spiritual and existential ambitions of humankind for freedom and adventure. The case for space exploration being driven by simple scientific

curiosity fares little better. These motivations were froth on the wave compared to the forces that actually powered the Space Age. For the Kennedy administration, the Apollo missions were a straightforward retort to the perceived technological superiority and increasingly bellicose military posturing of the Soviet Union. Kennedy’s hand had been forced; in the span of four years, the Soviets had launched the first orbital satellite and put the first human, Yuri Gagarin, in space, ominously signaling their ambitions by dubbing him cosmonaut: an explorer of the universe. On the ground, the US was still reeling from their humiliating defeat during the Bay of Pigs invasion at the hands of Castro’s Soviet-backed communist regime. Kennedy’s administration was less than four months old, and off to a shaky start. In his Special Message to Congress on Urgent National Needs weeks after Gagarin’s history-making flight, Kennedy implored them to provide additional funds to the US Space Program so that they might meet the challenge set forth by what he routinely called “the adversaries of freedom” for supremacy in space. Kennedy endeavored to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade, a recommendation that the Administrator of NASA, James E. Webb, had made to the President as recently as a month before Gagarin’s flight, and which was initially refused on the basis of cost. It is disquieting to consider that the lofty and poetic ambitions of our species play second fiddle to the petty emotions and hubris that color the decisions of the powerful few, but there it is. Progress and innovation as the ephemeral and omnipresent drivers of history are among the great myths of our time. Like all myths, they protect us from the most uncomfortable of truths.

// I was there mainly because of the Cold War – the Apollo program was a battle in the Cold War… I didn’t go into the NASA program to pick up rocks or go to the moon or anything else. I went in there because I was a military officer and that was the next notch in my profession. //

Jim Lovell, Commander of Apollo 13

The morning after the bus ride, over a cold breakfast in a Cleveland hotel and still very much under the pall of my desultory thoughts, I fell into conversation with another of the instructors about humanity’s future in space. She was deeply involved in the commercial space tourism industry, and believed that experiencing Earth from space held the key to transforming humanity’s perspective of life on our planet and our place in the cosmos. Astronauts called it the Overview Effect: a sea change in personal awareness of the fragility and finitude of Earth’s existence against the backdrop of cold, unfeeling space, and an immediate need to preserve what we have through a united planetary will and effort. She had heard that I was a futurist by trade, and seemed eager to pick my brain about the wonders that awaited us in space. Much to both her surprise and mine, I found myself telling her that, despite the transformative effects of spaceflight on an individual’s psyche, I expected our foreseeable future – collectively speaking – might be rather terrestrial in nature. My comments were colored by the news that had been unfolding over the summer which signaled a resurgence of humankind’s most time-honored and innervating instincts: the marks of ethnic, religious, tribal, and nationalistic conflict were being scratched across the globe, upon the deserts of Syria, into the green countryside of Crimea, and throughout the streets of American cities great and small. Our starry ambitions would always compete with these indefatigable, parochial concerns. And they wouldn’t always fare well. There was no reason to think that we would someday, as one, look up to the stars and awaken in simultaneity to another, greater destiny. We would explore space, surely. But we shouldn’t allow ourselves the perverse thought that this could ever be anything like a universal ambition, made possible by the final ascendancy of the better angels of our nature. Humans just weren’t made of that kind of stuff. The facts of our nature are every bit as much against us as is the cold, unfeeling void. Her reaction mixed bemusement with disappointment. Clearly, she had expected that a conversation with a futurist would be an opportunity to engage in speculation about just how far humans could venture into the cosmos with our raw ambitions. Perhaps we could use long-term cryogenic chambers to hypersleep astronauts until they reached their destination decades from now. Better still: if we digitized the human brain, we could use lasers to transmit data, encoding our mind’s patterns to distant star systems to be reborn in silicon by self-assembling nanobots. Today, these sorts of scenarios are the standard currency of future thinking, or at least

what passes for it. Any futurist who has spent even a little bit of time steeped in the literature and conferences of techno-optimists can rattle off half a dozen of these technological solutions to human interstellar exploration that are so impressive sounding as to disguise their complete superficiality. Breathlessly repeated, they breeze over distinction between logical possibility and actual plausibility as mere semantics, and barely steal a glance at the broader implications such technologies might have on human life, culture, and civilization. Too many futurists confuse thought experiments with future thinking. With the former, the task is to build a logical contraption that attempts to demonstrate some belief about the world: that the mind and body are the same, or separate; that computers might someday be conscious, or always remain unconscious; and so on. With the latter, the task is to responsibly articulate some possible future state of the world in which we all live, replete with its fits and starts, disappointments and unforeseen consequences, displacements and usurpations. This confusion does a great disservice to everyone who wonders about what the future might hold. Futurists ask us to imagine that the road to the future is a smooth and even ride, when history tells us at every instance it is unpaved, full of holes, and, at times, dauntingly steep. For the ultra-optimists that dominate the landscape of future thinking today, this means that the future is almost always less rosy than they expect it to be. Not flying cars, but open, violent warfare between old world cab companies and new world car sharing services. Not pleasant and

// When you’re finally up on the moon, looking back at the earth, all these differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend and you’re going to get a concept that maybe this is really one world and why the hell can’t we learn to live together like decent people? //

Frank Borman, Commander of Apollo 8

servile robots, but semi-functional, hardof-hearing digital assistants and highfrequency trading algorithms that jolt markets in ways that flesh and blood humans find difficult to comprehend. Not one world united in a grand project of stellar exploration, but a steady pulse of consolidation and Balkanization that stirs distrust and hatred, broken up here and there by fleeting glimpses of human greatness. Neither can futurists simply anchor their visions to the sciences in order to be carried along by a relentless sense of progress and improvement. Scientific knowledge comes with its own cost. It unearths dizzying new truths that threaten to unseat us from our selfappointed place of privilege in the universe. The greatest truths, uncovered, reveal the wretchedness of our species’ lot: Copernicus consigned humans to a celestial backwater, Freud determined that we would misapprehend even the merest contents of our own minds, and Darwin fitted us with a shackle made from the troublesome inheritance of the untold numbers of merciless and savage creatures that came before us. Science, technology, progress: each beacon of hope creates a miasma of horror forever beyond its reach. The horror writer H.P. Lovecraft keenly understood this; futurists today would do well to imbibe some of his cosmic pessimism. For Lovecraft, the more we learn, the more likely that “the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” Maybe. But there is at least a small chance that we might persevere. Understanding Lovecraft’s vision shouldn’t diminish our fascination with, and hope for, the future. If anything, cosmic pessimism makes our species’ modest accomplishments to date that much more remarkable. The future becomes more, not less, exhilarating when we understand that every battle we win against ourselves and nature is a small miracle to be celebrated. This truth impressed itself upon my mind later on that same trip. I was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a hundred or so space enthusiasts, staring into the immense thermal vacuum chamber at NASA’s Space Power Facility, the largest of its kind in the world. Its domed ceiling soared eleven stories above us, enclosing a circular chamber the width of a basketball court in which spacebound components like the Curiosity Rover’s airbag system and coupling systems for SpaceX’s rockets were stress tested under conditions that could simulate the emptiness of space and the unfiltered radiation of the sun.

// The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. //

H.P. Lovecraft

It wasn’t the size of the chamber that made the hairs on my arms stand up. It was the walls. Eight feet thick and made entirely of concrete, they were the only thing that kept the whole building from crumpling like a hunk of tin foil during extremely high vacuum conditions. Even so, when the vacuum chamber was operational, the pressure weighing on the chamber from the outside would cause the walls to bow inward under the strain. What an awe-inspiring technology it was that could create a state so utterly alien to the earth that our atmosphere would displace millions of tons of concrete in an attempt to rebalance the scales. Looking at those chamber walls, I thought of Aristotle’s dictum. Horror vacui: Nature abhors a vacuum. I mean, she really, really hates them. And yet, here it was: a quaint little machine for summoning a vacuum. And here we stood. //// Jayar La Fontaine is a senior foresight strategist at Idea Couture. He is based in Toronto, Canada.

More Human Than Human

Cyborgs, embeddables, and androids, oh my. Never has the question, “what does it mean to be human?” been more relevant than right now. Granted, in five or ten years, that question will surround an even more thought-provoking, conflicted world. However, for the time being, it forces us to confront the reality of our evolving technology and potentially devolving humanity. The wearables movement hit business and society with the promise of heralding a change in the very way we live and, while it yet may, wearables are really nothing new; they are more intricate and complex extensions of the technologies we as a species have been wearing for thousands of years. VR headset, running shoe, knife – a seemingly unrelated list, yet taken in the same breath, we can view them all as tools that are temporarily “worn” and help to augment and expand the limits of the human body. One could argue that the embeddables movement accomplishes the same thing: the ability to augment and expand the limits of the human

// We won’t simply have more money, more things, and greater access; we will literally have stronger bodies, smarter brains, and longer lifespans. //

PHOTO: COM SALUD

by shane saunderson

body. However, one stark difference stands between wearables and embeddables: permanence. This implicates not a temporary boost in human capability, but a fixed, unnatural evolution in our body’s design. In short, there’s no guarantee of being able to hit Ctrl-Z. By contrast to wearables, which we can view as external tools, embeddables have the potential to be seen not as independent objects, but as integrated extensions of ourselves. If we build off of this loose definition, an argument could easily be made that society has a long history of embeddables as well. The cardiac pacemaker was first conceptualized in the 20s and first implanted into a human subject in the 50s. Though if we look beyond active embeddables, we can view a long history of passive attachments to our bodies such as fake eyes, prosthetic limbs, intramedullary rods, and dentures dating back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Still, something is different about the emerging generation of body modifications. We are teetering on the edge of a time when embeddables and bodily-integrated technologies are being viewed not simply as restorative, but augmentative and enhancing. We are no longer simply thinking about how to replace a lost limb, faulty organ, or broken body part, but instead are now asking how we can improve upon nature’s design. And while this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, we need to at least acknowledge the implications of cracking ourselves open and tinkering with the fleshy bits. We need to realize that elective

PHOTO: JOACHIM ROTTEVEEL

Exploring the implications of the emerging cyborg movement on society and self

surgeries and hacks to ourselves will have consequences that are both immediate and long-term, personal and societal. The potential for bodily harm is an obvious risk, and one that will be taken at varying degrees by a range of people who opt to roll the dice on more unproven procedures all the way to the rigorously routine. And while a few will undoubtedly die on the operating table – or a cardboard mat in a dark back alley – there’s a much more frightening risk about the decade-plus implications of a population stuffing themselves with servos and circuits with no long-term testing. These could alter our physiology and cause massive issues with chronic pain or disablement. The use of chemicals or electromagnetic communication could lead to mutations and bring on new forms of cancer variants. The potential for harm is literally as diverse as the spectrum of things we choose to shove inside of ourselves. From a societal perspective, there are some pretty scary thought exercises to mull as well. While the augmentation of human ability will potentially do wonders for our efficiency as humans and push the limits of human achievement, outside of a socialist utopia, only a select group of individuals will benefit from these breakthroughs. The class divide will be as present within the embeddable movement as it is within any other facet of our world. However, unlike other aspects of our lives, this divide will manifest as – quite literally – making certain people better human beings than others. We won’t simply have more money, more things, and greater access; we will literally have stronger bodies, smarter brains, and longer lifespans. At an extreme, this divide could become less about classism and even start to be viewed as specist. While other “isms” may fade with time, concern over the color of our skin, sexual orientation, or faith could simply be replaced by judgment of the electromechanical contents of our body. Yet far from the organic-purist view often portrayed in popular science fiction of judging cybernetically-enhanced individuals as some form of digital-junkie, the reality is far more likely that it will be the enhanced who have the funds to augment themselves and who will hold power and judgment over technologically “lesser” individuals. This is a frightening world for both sides, as history has more than its fair share of examples of the downtrodden rising up

against extreme discrepancies of quality of life and redistributing the wealth of power – rather gruesome imagery in the case of body implants. And while this last point raises an alarming issue on a societal level, the same considerations must be brought down to the reality of the individual. Modifications to the body of such an extreme nature bring into focus the existential questions raised at the start of this article. Are androids and cyborgs human, or some other species entirely, and if so, where do we make that divide? Regardless, what are the implications of turning our historically sacred biological beings into commoditized vessels with swappable parts and quarterly upgrade modules? Well beyond phantom limb syndrome, the human brain may not be capable of adapting to such massive bodily modifications, and even if it is at a functional level, what of mental health? As we spiral further into this physical loss of self, how will we emotionally cope with the reality of not recognizing our own flesh and bone when it becomes silicone and steel? With our current hyperactive, digital existence already contributing to a host of issues around depression, identity crisis, and social isolation, it is easy to imagine how the further integration of technology – not only into our lives but our very beings – will only exacerbate these issues. We will mourn limbs actively chosen to be replaced or augmented. We will yearn to silence the digital voices being streamed into our minds. We will feel uncomfortable within our own skin, sensing the ticks, tocks, and buzzes of something unnatural underneath. In short, we could reject what we have become, even if it is of our own making. While anyone who reads this article would likely agree that this is far from being a sobering voice in the field of technoethics, we’re remiss not to ask the moral and ethical questions at hand. We must understand that for millennia we have held technology as a collection of tools to support and enhance our lives, and all of that is about to change. The looming singularity does not simply transform the nature of technology or our relationship to it, but the very essence of what it means to be human. Who among us is ready or worthy to shoulder that burden?

THE FUTURES OF HEALTHCARE

Cyborgs Among Us

Blade Runners

Far from being the stuff of freaky science fiction, countless examples exist of embeddable technology that people have already stuffed inside of themselves in order to become more human than human.

Popularized by Oscar Pistorius’ inspiring victories (and later, tragic arrest), many amputees are still able to compete athletically through the use of engineered carbon fiber prosthetics, or blades, that enhance sprinting. However, Pistorius’ success within able-bodied competition raised criticism over having a technologically unfair advantage that one would assume will be a source of even more contention as the technology improves and biological legs are viewed as inferior.

Wet Ware Though envisioned by William Gibson’s short story, Johnny Mnemonic, cybernetic neural implants may not be simply science fiction as DARPA has been developing a neuromodulatory device called ElectRx. As our understanding of the brain continues to progress, such devices use small electrical stimulations throughout the nervous system to achieve a variety of desired outcomes from removing joint pain to promoting healing.

OVER THE LAST TWO DECADES, OUR UNDERSTANDING AND EXPERIENCE OF THE SPACES AND PLACES OF CARE HAVE BEEN DISRUPTED, RECONFIGURED, AND FOREVER TRANSFORMED. THIS IS A SPECIAL COLLECTION OF INSIGHTS AND SCENARIOS ABOUT THE FUTURE OF HEALTHCARE. AS THE HEALTHCARE MARKET EVOLVES, PROVIDERS AND PAYERS NEED TO BE THINKING ABOUT NEW RELATIONSHIPS AND NEW BUSINESS MODELS.

Night Vision Eyes

A Nevada-based bodyhacker had small magnets implanted in his tragus (the cartilage just outside the ear) in 2013 to act as small, in-ear speakers activated by a magnetic coil worn around his neck. While initially crude, this type of experiment paves the way for humans to have a discreet, permanent audio link to others and the web for anytime access.

Artificially “Enhanced” While in many cases, artificially grown ears, heart valves, bladders, and other organs can be life altering or lifesaving procedures, recent work being done by an institute in North Carolina has shown promise for growing artificial penises and vaginas. Though the work is presently being promoted for individuals with congenital abnormalities or post-trauma, it doesn’t take much to envision another, much more lucrative elective application for such a breakthrough.

A team in California recently enhanced a man’s eyeballs with Chlorin E6, a substance found in deep-sea fish, in order to allow him to have more sensitive vision to better recognize objects in low-light. Though temporary, this type of experiment highlights our ability to alter our own body’s chemistry to enhance our senses.

AVA I L A B L E AT A M A ZO N .C O M

Shane Saunderson is head of health technology at Idea Couture. He is based in Toronto, Canada.

PHOTO: EUGENIA LOLI

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Returning to Nature: Food Culture Heads North

PHOTO: BÙI LINH NGÂN, ANDERS CARLSSON

I first visited Mugaritz in 2003, when the restaurant was on the run-up to its second Michelin star. At the time, northern Spain was a surging font of innovation in global haute cuisine, specializing in the highly technological sort of cooking that came to be called (over the howls of the chefs) “molecular gastronomy.” That season, an informal theme had emerged, and from their kitchens at El Bulli and Berasategui, Arzak and Sant Pau, each chef was presenting to diners their approach to a simple cooked egg. Each one transformed differently, through techniques like ultra-precision sous vide. Andoni Luis Aduriz, the influential head chef at Mugaritz, was no exception.

PHOTO: BRUNO CORDIOLI

by dylan gordon

What was exceptional, however, was what came to the table after the first, rather gelatinous amuse bouche: a progression of courses with their main elements set off by novel herbs and plants foraged in the wild garden that surrounded the rural estate. At the time, it was exhilarating. A riot of heretofore unknown tastes and textures that today’s avant garde diners might recognize as yarrow, and shiso, and oxalis. They formed a bright, unique counterpoint to highly scientific cooking, based on abstracting and refining raw ingredients and traditional cuisines to the point of being almost unrecognizable – which Mugaritz and its cohort were, and remain, best known for. But they were mere spices on a menu that has borne such inventions as foie gras with the texture of a sponge, or veal disguised as a lump of charcoal – a tiny spark of something different. And today, as the main attraction of “modernist cuisine” has entered the mainstream, at a time when even your local bistro’s plates might appear ringed with wasabi foam and punctuated by dots of experimental ice cream in flavors like tobacco or corn, the needle of the culinary compass continues to turn. Now it points away from the Mediterranean at true north: toward the Nordic climes of Copenhagen’s Noma, named the world’s best restaurant four times since the turn of the decade, and even beyond, into the Swedish wilderness, a scant 200 miles from The Arctic Circle. There, you’ll find chef Magnus Nilsson presiding over the restaurant Fäviken, described by Bon Appétit as the “world’s most daring restaurant,” and elsewhere as perhaps the most isolated. He is neither gardener nor

scientist, but “part Viking lumberjack and part Shaman,” as a Condé Nast Traveler reviewer put it. Rebelling against the highly technological cuisine of his forebears, his dishes sport names like “broth of decaying autumn leaves” and “wild trout roe in a warm crust of dried pigs’ blood”; one recipe in the restaurant’s eponymous cookbook requires “1 very fresh cow’s femur.” In another, titled “a tiny slice of top blade from a retired dairy cow, dry aged for nine months,” we’re told: “The pure flavor of meat becomes secondary to the aromas of controlled decay… rather like a cheese. It is meat, but yet like a cheese.” In other words, rather than take your breath away with something you’ve never heard of, Nilsson does it with something so organic you might have preferred to continue to ignore it – a return to nature that is deeply disturbing, yet somehow deeply irresistible. It might seem like an extreme example. It’s also one that cuts to the quick pace of the changes afoot in a global food culture that is rapidly reinventing itself. Much like earlier movements in art and politics that rejected the refinement, aestheticism, and decadence of a prosperous status quo (think Picasso’s proto-Cubist period, or the antimodernism of 1960’s American counterculture), food is taking a turn towards the primitive. As in those instances, it’s a turn informed by impulses both colonial and Romantic. This time around, the colonialism isn’t based on fascination with tribal art discovered in new overseas outposts, but on choices made out of necessity by the marginal and marginalized (where else but in the deep corners of backwater farms or unannounced in cans of the

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Arouse enjoyment but with horror… Tall oaks and lonely shadows are sublime; flower beds, low hedges and trees trimmed in figures are beautiful. Night is sublime, day is beautiful… The sublime moves, the beautiful charms. Today’s food trendsetters want to be moved, not charmed, and while it’s difficult to imagine their primitive sublime terrorizing the supermarket, it pushes long-building and rapidly mainstreaming culinary values to their utmost realization. More intimate than the local, and beyond the organic, we find the primal forces of decay and disgust, the inside of the organism, the untouched, unpolluted, untainted wilderness. We find the stuff of novel and challenging experiences that make one a legend among friends, family, and coworkers. As he trades with local hunters and fishers, and hunts, fishes, and forages himself – habits trumpeted by any chef worth his salt these days – Nilsson even imagines Fäviken as a model for the future of an international haute cuisine that is otherwise a slave to global supply, advanced technology, and manipulative obfuscation of its primary ingredients; a cuisine that is, if charming, left deeply uninteresting – not to mention unsustainable. How does this all look as it trickles down to the everyday and back toward the center? Early signals abound. Ethnic categories are one clear beneficiary: in New York, the fast Chinese casual chain Xi’an Famous Foods is rapidly multiplying its outlets, thanks in no small part to Yelpers hyping their Spicy & Tingly Lamb Face Salad, and unearthing parts concealed deeper in the beast than its nose or tail

abound. Meat is obviously in again, with the last vestiges of utility like offal, tendon, skin, and mostly-bony parts showing potential to follow the path blazed by earlier revaluations of cuts like oxtail, shank, flank, and hanger steak (when properly presented). Meanwhile, radical vegetarians are eschewing their eschewal of vegetables, and embracing ethical meat, in some cases even taking up a niche phenomenon of “hipsters who hunt.” And on that note, wild foods are another rapidly growing segment, where long-time market stalwarts like wild rice, wild mushrooms, and maple syrup are being joined by more niche and perishable products like ramps (wild leeks), wild berries, seaweeds, and edible weeds, as well as tree flavors like pine and cedar. While most new demand is currently concentrated in high-end restaurants and farmers’ markets, many of these ingredients are easily used as a sort of spice, adding a novel flavor and green-savvy profile to packaged goods like jams, pickles, baked goods, and packaged meals. Broader trends in popular culture also reflect this turn to the robust, the rustic, and the reinvigorated. The metrosexual of the 1990s and 2000s has been replaced by today’s lumbersexual: bearded, bush-savvy, and firmly masculinized. The Paleo diet, high in meat, greens, and fat, and low in carbs – aping imaginations of our huntergatherer past – is joined by Paleo movement and Paleo living (think barefoot running and body-based sports like parkour and free climbing). It’s a world returning to simplicity in materials, process, and presentation. It’s a turnip, freshly dug and lightly fermented along with its dirt, sitting on a wooden platter, rather than vaporized into an essence and injected into a sphere, looking like a turnip even though it is not, as it sits, mystifying, in a spoon that is also a bowl. Perhaps we can even spot a harbinger of other cultural shifts to come, an implosion of our outsized desires into the virtues of decline, decay, and degrowth. Disgusting? Yes, but yet delicious – and even, maybe, more truly connected to the nature of things. //// Dylan Gordon is a resident anthropologist at Idea Couture. He is based in Toronto, Canada.

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cheapest commodity chilli are retired dairy cows eaten?), newly noticed and reappropriated by a powerful elite as the height of fashion. And the romanticism isn’t the hippie dream of getting closer to nature – of nudism and uncut hair and a lack of deodorant. It’s about the sublime of 18th century German Romanticism found in the philosophies of Schiller or Kant, who contrasted merely beautiful things with the aesthetic perfection of those truly sublime, which, as Kant wrote in his Observations on the Feeling of the Sublime and Beautiful, are terrifying:

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How our pursuit of simplicity may be changing how we date – and not for the better

by andrea hirsch In April of 2011, I sat at my desktop computer, filling in pages and pages of questions related to my personal life. My hopes, my fears, my emotional stability – everything I might imagine discussing during the first few weeks and months of getting to know a romantic prospect. It took two days to get through everything, and then another two days to be accepted into the network. Full disclosure: I was putting together a proposal for a leading online dating website at the time, and this was all in the name of good research. But it also made me think; really consider who I was and what I wanted out of a partnership.

PHOTO: VIKTOR HANACEK

One Track Mind

While the process was tedious, it also made sense. Online dating was meant to mimic the rituals and behaviors of a typical dating experience, respecting and accommodating the getting-to-know-you phase to find a highly compatible match. It was designed to be as similar as possible to offline dating, only with a little more efficiency – you could meet people quickly, and find your match without the trouble and expense of leaving your home. It was worth the effort because it was driving toward one particular goal: to make a concrete decision about who you wanted to spend the rest of your life with. It was to address a real, emotional need, and the process to get there was a well-designed balance between exhausting and efficient. Fast forward to 2016, and the barrier to entry for most online dating experiences is a smartphone and a photo. Everyone is welcome to participate, regardless of how serious they are about finding someone special. We are presented with endless options and driven by one simple characteristic: attractiveness. We don’t have to sort through the emotional baggage of clearly articulating what we are looking for; we don’t have to give up on the possibility of finding someone better; we don’t have to make life-altering decisions on who is “the one.” When we swipe and text, we are not particularly invested in the process. We hope it might work out, but we don’t believe we are moving towards some great reward. We have taken all the work out of it, the thoughtfulness and personal investment wiped out from the experience. Simplicity rules all – at all costs. On the one hand, we may celebrate this change as a great advancement in the name of efficiency, choice, and empowerment. We can cycle through many faces quickly and without hassle, enjoying new and varied experiences whenever the urge strikes. On the other hand, we are allowing the principles of simple user experience design to trick us into believing that efficiency, low barriers to entry, and addictive and engaging mobile gestures are all we want out of our experiences. It begs the question, why are we consistently allowing a series of digital “best practices” to dictate how much effort we put into our lives – whether it’s dating or shopping or learning or traveling? Don’t the things that matter, such as romance and partnership, deserve more of our time and attention? Let’s look at what we know. We know that investing time and effort in the pursuit of our wants is proven to increase our sense of happiness once we achieve what we are working towards. We know that the more we dedicate and commit to a certain decision, the more happiness is derived from that commitment. We also know that we report

lower levels of happiness and fulfillment when we abstain from making choices and live in a constant state of limbo. And yet, we see business after business trying to find a way to make the Tinder version of their own digital product or experience. They want to somehow harness the power of forming simple, quick relationships. They want to capitalize on our addiction to sorting through multiple options based on one simple variable. They want to build superficial yet lucrative connections and loyalties with consumer groups without putting in the effort to get there. The problem is that it all seems possible, and, as consumers, we are letting it happen. Good user experience is built on the foundation of repeatedly removing barriers to access and user engagement until the experience is as frictionless as possible. However, by continuously removing the user’s need to exert effort, the value placed on the achievement – whether it’s finding the best person to date or purchasing a product – is diminished. Ultimately, living in a world where we don’t have to put much effort into getting the things we want or value will result in a lack of real happiness or true satisfaction. We are quickly forgetting just how valuable it is to spend the time doing, to research and seek out the best people, products, and experiences that work with our own personalities, needs, and desires. Tinder-like experiences have tricked us into believing that we can skip the hard work and find equally meaningful results. We have seen countless articles about the threat of AI – a supercomputer coming to life in such a way that it can control us, capturing our bodies and controlling our minds. But what if there is a more immediate risk that we aren’t yet talking about? What if we are creating user interfaces and structures that are so terrifyingly simple that we are destroying pieces of our own humanity, all without an autonomous machine – an “other” – to blame? What if our desire to simplify how we interact is already setting us on a path to undermine our work ethics, our happiness, and our relationships? What if we have simply gone too far? //// Andrea Hirsch is an innovation strategist at Idea Couture. She is based in Toronto, Canada.

Redefining Customer Experience Evaluating the Strategic Role of Customer Journeys by cheesan chew

Organizations with customer-centricity as their strategic priority have long appreciated the importance of understanding consumer needs, behaviors, and habits. How they influence customers’ perceptions and impact the experience of their interactions with brands is also crucial. Despite this focus and understanding, leaders and customer experience (CX) teams often have a difficult time translating high-level customer-focused statements and mandates into actionable initiatives and tactics. This disconnect between strategy and action is caused, fundamentally, by a lack of appropriate framing at each altitude of translation, which is illustrated here:

Consider a typical scenario where a CX mandate is shared with the organization at an enterprise level. The C-suite decides, “We are transforming into a customer-centric business.” Business units, departments, and teams are then asked to put this into their strategic plans and determine relevant KPIs to deliver – without clear translation as to how. The outcome is often ambiguity at lower altitudes, affecting those who are responsible for designing and delivering on CX mandates. A tool that is often used to clarify this delivery is customer journey mapping. However, the problem with the way many organizations approach journey maps today often arises when creating a tactic or approach at an executional and practical level, without first approaching it from a strategic business perspective. In our CX work, we are often called on to design end-to-end journeys in addition to segments of an experience, including onboarding, problem resolution, service usage, or billing. With the best of intentions, teams (typically at Altitude 4) are instigating these requests to design journeys, often without the required translations at Altitudes 2 and 3 to guide the process.

Enterprise (C-Suite)

Business Unit (Executive Leadership)

Department (Senior Leadership)

Team (Management)

Individual

Strategic Mandate

Journey Mapping to Address the Gap: Translation Gap

Altitude

Owner

“End-To-End” Customer Journey Financial Services Example: The Future Emerging Affluent Experience “Segment of” Customer Journey Financial Services Example: The Future Emerging Affluent Onboarding Experience

Delivery/ Execution

// Leaders and customer experience teams often have a difficult time translating high-level customer focused statements and mandates into actionable initiatives and tactics. //

What does it mean to take a strategy led vs. design led approach to customer journey mapping? First, it requires framing. Framing is the act of translating the enterprise level mandate to the scope and scale of a team’s mandate. This requires working with senior and executive leadership to not only articulate the business and department level objectives and points of view on CX, but also their ambition to deliver on the CX mandate across short, mid, and long-term timeframes. It also requires understanding the customer ecosystem. With a design led approach to customer journey mapping, it’s critical to define which customer the journey is reflecting. A strategy led approach layers on a broader ecosystem of relevant influencers and actors that may impact experience and decision-making. Another requirement is defining the fidelity of the journey. Fidelity is often dependent on the originating mandate, and determines the level of detail mapped. Strategic end-to-end journeys often result in business or enterprise wide macro concepts and implications. The outcomes of these journeys are often more strategic and used as “north stars” to align initiatives. Segment customer journeys are often much more detailed. They highlight specific interactions and are designed to highlight an ideal state of specific interactions. Finally, it requires alignment. Often, design led customer journeys are visualized from a “customer-first, customeronly” perspective. While a customer-first perspective is integral to the design process, considering the customer in isolation of the assets, constraints, culture, and capabilities of an organization can lead to disconnected, unrealistic journeys that are unable to achieve the buy-in necessary to implement.

Enterprise Context Human Centered

Human Centered

01 Frame the journey

02 Understand the customer ecosystem

Define the customer

Uncover customer behaviors and needs

Map the journey

06 Align to the enterprise

Tell the story

Construct a compelling narrative with a customer view.

Human Centered

Construct a compelling narrative with not only a customer view, but alignment to the enterprise to gain buy-in and move initiatives forward.

In the context of the enterprise, business unit, and/or department, scope the ambition and horizon of the journey.

Customers are strongly influenced by others in their network. From choosers to users, patients and their caregivers, consumers and social media, understanding the complexity of a customer’s ecosystem is crucial. Articulating a customer archetype is critical to designing an effective journey.

A design led customer journey is a well-constructed visualization of a customer’s experience through a service or product. It tells the story of how a customer interacts with an organization across various touchpoints in an accessible manner.

Human Centered + Enterprise Context A strategy led customer journey is a well-constructed visualization of a user’s experience through a service or product, strongly aligned to an enterprise strategy. It tells the story of how a customer interacts with an organization across touchpoints in an accessible manner, with deep consideration of an organization’s culture, capabilities, and constitution.

Immerse in existing research, or conduct new research to go beyond the surface of what a customer says, to what they do and how they feel.

With a multi-disciplinary team from across the organization, map key touchpoints across a journey.

With a journey mapped, connect back to the enterprise strategy in addition to business unit level and functional initiatives to ensure alignment and help the organization strategically prioritize efforts.

This comparison is not intended to diminish the value of design through the process of customer journey mapping. It is essential for organizations architecting customer experiences to be grounded in customer insight, and leverage empathy as a guide through the process. What is missing, however, is the critical tie to the overarching strategy and activities within the business. A strategy led approach advocates for leveraging empathy and then going beyond design, to connect a customer’s journey with an organization’s growth strategy – or customer needs to enterprise contexts – giving them purpose and influence at all altitudes of an organization. //// Cheesan Chew is chief CX officer, SVP at Idea Couture. She is based in Toronto, Canada.

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Are these isolated scandals, or are we looking at a syndrome here?

by will novosedlik What a week. As this is being written, the news is dominated by two of the most harrowing examples of capitalism-gone-bad that we have seen since the crash of 2008. Top of the page right now is the Volkswagen scandal. By the time this article goes to print, the shock will have long died down, or maybe just eclipsed by yet another predatory scheme in some other quarter of commerce. But at the moment, the fraud carried out by VW executives in an effort to mask the excessive emissions of nitrogen oxide by diesel engines (35 times the acceptable levels) has knocked the business world on its butt and left an indelible black mark on both VW and, by extension, Germany Inc. The financial fallout alone will be massive. In a matter of days, VW lost a third of its market cap (about $33 billion). It faces US$18 billion in potential fines. It has issued a profit warning, setting aside $7.27 billion to “cover the necessary service measures and other efforts to win back the trust of our customers." Given the scale of this disaster (it affects some 11 million vehicles), that estimate sounds wildly optimistic.

And, as if to rub salt in our collective wounds, VW CEO Martin Winterkorn, who resigned his post in the face of this monumental fraud, is rumored to be receiving an exit package of $32 million. As we try to absorb the impact of this catastrophe, we are seeing yet another news story that reveals the sociopathic potential of some of today’s captains of industry. Martin Shkreli, CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, hiked the cost of taking the toxoplasmosis-fighting drug Daraprim from $1130 to $63,000 annually. When accused of price-gouging by everyone from presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton to CBS medical correspondent Dr. David Agus, Shkreli replied, “this is simply capitalism at its finest. I’m trying to create a big drug company, a successful drug company, a profitable drug company. We’re trying to flourish, but… our first and primary stakeholders are patients, there’s no doubt about that.” As long as those patients have an extra $63,000 in their pockets. In the same interview, Shkreli actually went on to say that the price hike was “altruistic,” because with the “reasonable profits” he expects to gain from the price change, he can invest in the creation of a new drug to replace Daraprim, something he says “people sorely need.” If that’s altruism, ISIS is a charitable organization. The twisted logic that uses the profit motive to justify such crimes against humanity is beyond immoral. It’s downright evil. Somehow the notion of healthy competition has morphed into a rapidly metastasizing strain of predatory capitalism. Freed from the regulatory regimes of the mid-20th century, many corporations are operating without any moral restraint, as if possessed by the ghost of Ayn Rand, enabled by the hand of Milton Friedman, and ruled by the conscience of Bernie Madoff.

PHOTO: JAPANEXPERTERNA.SE

Between Wall Street and Main Street: Reimagining Capitalism

That is the question asked in a recent article by Henry Mintzberg, John Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University and author of the recently published Rebalancing Society: Radical Renewal Beyond Left, Right, and Center. Mintzberg lays out the evidence: the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Toyota’s faulty brake and fuel systems, Chevrolet’s ignition systems recalls, and Goldman Sachs’ commodities market manipulation. Seems you can’t swing a dead cat in the arena of late capitalism without hitting an instance of corruption or scandal. Is this nasty strain of capitalism becoming business as usual? Political economist C.J. Polychroniou thinks so. “The world is returning to the predatory laissez-faire capitalism that immiserated millions in the early 20th century. Since the late 1970s, most capitalist economies have been marching to the tune of neoliberalism – a term to signify preference for a set of economic policies favoring privatization, deregulation, and a “minimal” state. This is the version of neoliberalism developed by Milton Friedman and the so-called Chicago School and is usually associated with the Pinochet regime in Chile and later on with the so-called “free-market” policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. In more popular usage, it can simply be referred to as predatory capitalism.” Just how “predatory” has capitalism become? Harvard philosophy professor Michael Sandel puts it like this: “Over the past three decades… we’ve drifted almost without realizing it from having a market economy to a market society. A market economy is a valuable and effective tool for organizing productive activity, but a market society is a place where almost everything is up for sale. It’s a way of life in which market thinking and market values begin to dominate every aspect of life: personal relations, family life, health, education, politics, law, civic life.” To illustrate, let’s apply this “market society” model to some of the crimes cited above. Eric Reguly, European correspondent for Toronto’s Globe and Mail, has rightly asked the question, “What were they thinking?” of the VW execs who crafted a software hack to cover up the fact that their diesel engine exceeded emissions limits. What they were doing was comparing the price of public health with the price of going back to the drawing board on their engine design. With 11 million engines on the road emitting 35 times the allowable limit of nitrogen oxides, the effects on public health are not insignificant. But when people develop respiratory disease from breathing too much of this stuff, they don’t go to VW – they go to the hospital (if they can afford it). VW is not only saving itself millions in design and production costs, but is also passing the cost of disease onto both the healthcare system and the patients it supports. Shkreli’s bold assertion is that, by exponentially raising the price of a drug, he is only doing what any “good” capitalist would do. He’s trying to make a profit, after all. Raising the price by 5,500% would deliver what Shkreli called a “reasonable profit,” but at what cost? Not a cost that Shkreli will bear, but a cost borne by all those patients who have depended on this medication up until now, and will suddenly not have access to it. Who pays for their care when they can no longer get the drug? Not Turing. These examples clearly illustrate the false assumptions and complete lack of empirical truth to Milton Friedman’s belief that markets are “inherently just” – that they do what they do without the burden or bias of a moral perspective. They are, in the neoliberal mind, as amoral as nature itself. The difference, of course, is that nature lacks the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, while people know damn well what the difference is. It is impossible to execute a business decision without it having an impact on other humans, or on the world in which both humans and

businesses operate, even if those humans are not directly invested in that business. In this sense, the market should be exactly the opposite of amoral, because it affects people, communities, their livelihoods, and their environments. The trouble with the neoliberal concept of free markets is that humanity is removed from the equation. It’s as if the market is an abstraction, somehow operating independently of the people who use it, run it, profit from it, or are harmed by it. Much has been written about the difference between the stock market and the real economy. It used to be that the market served the real economy by providing the capital necessary to grow businesses and create jobs; now, it seems, we’ve turned it the other way around. Wealth used to be created by making products and providing services; now it is created by unregulated financial speculation. Since access to capital is limited to an elite few, the wealth that is created is not as widely distributed as it was in the years between 1945 and 1973, a time when there was a greater balance between government and industry, management and labor, and white collar and blue collar. As author Matthieu Ricard described this period in a recent Salon article, “Thoughtful regulation allowed the creation of a balance in society by applying an incremental wealth tax rate. People were more concerned for their fellow man and the social contract had a stronger element of cooperation instead of barefaced competition.” He continues to point out that, from the 1980s on, social solidarity waned and inequality grew, thanks to deregulation, de-industrialization, globalization, and the major tax cuts granted to the rich by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. So now we find ourselves in a world that has boomeranged back to a set of unbalanced conditions more akin to the days of the robber barons and plutocrats. We have, in the US, a concentration of banking power in the hands of six major financial institutions – the largest in the world – which hold assets of $10 trillion, equivalent to 66% of the entire US GDP. In 1990, these banks held 10% of total banking assets; now they hold 44%. That puts a dangerous amount of political power in the hands of a very few. As Robert Reich, US Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, points out, “market power translates into political power.” How else do you explain how, after the subprime crisis of 2008, the bankers who caused the greatest financial disaster since 1929 were bailed out by taxpayers and walked off with outsized bonuses while many of those taxpayers went without jobs and lost their homes? How else do you explain that the free trade deals that have been and are being struck around the world, without any public oversight, allow corporations to sue a sovereign state on the grounds of threatening the corporate right to make a profit, even if that right is in direct conflict with existing health, safety, or environmental laws? How else do you explain that we are now living in a world where private profits take priority over public rights? The real question is: how can we possibly reverse this dystopic trend? How can we move towards a world where there is a greater balance between political, economic, and social interests?

Sectoral Equilibrium

Progressive Taxation

Separate Accounts

Common Decency

Neoliberals tend to view themselves as realists. They subscribe to Adam Smith’s notion of the “invisible hand” of the market, in which individuals acting in their own self-interest create wealth, opportunity, and material benefits for everyone. Anyone who disagrees is labeled a communist, and is reminded that when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 it was proof that capitalism had triumphed, once and for all, and that communism was finally proven to be fundamentally flawed. Henry Mintzberg disagrees. He points out that what won was balance. In post-war Western economies, as mentioned above, there was less income inequality, a more even distribution of wealth, more balanced taxation, and more evenly distributed influence among public, for-profit, and not-for-profit organizations. CEOs did not make 400 times the lowest paid employee, unions were strong enough to protect their members against corporate excess, and the social contract provided greater largesse to society’s least capable and most vulnerable. Communism, on the other hand, was completely unbalanced, concentrating power in the hands of a few political elites while everyone else suffered. Now the private sector is behaving in much the same way as the communist regimes of old. Financial and political power is overly concentrated in the hands of a few, and everyone else is suffering for it. As an antidote, Mintzberg does not propose that the government take back the power it has surrendered to corporations, but that we recognize the importance of a third sector that he calls the “plural sector.” This is made up of organizations and associations that are owned by no one, and are beneficial to everyone. They include formal organizations like cooperatives, NGOs, unions, religious orders, hospitals, and universities, as well as informal ones like social movements and initiatives that are created when people come together to bring about needed changes. Such a plural sector, claims Mintzberg, is the only place where we could challenge the status quo, with relative freedom from the controls of public sector governments and the expectations of private sector investors. The plural sector, he continues, mitigates the sliding back and forth between the unacceptable extremes of left and right, nationalization vs. privatization, public vs. private, and communism vs. capitalism, that has characterized the last 200 years of history. Using the metaphor of a three-legged stool, he asks us to “imagine these three sectors as the pillars on which a healthy society has to be supported: a public sector of political forces rooted in respected governments, a private sector of economic forces based on responsible businesses, and a plural sector of social forces manifested in robust communities,” with no one prioritized over either of the others.

Although this is a core principle of neoliberal dogma, there are several problems with it. A reduced tax base means less funding for the infrastructure and social programs necessary for creating an environment in which it is safe and healthy for societies to grow, businesses to invest, and economies to develop. Infrastructure requires constant investment, and the cost must be shared, because no one individual or organization can afford to pay for it alone. Taxes are therefore the best solution we have yet devised to ensure the maintenance of healthy communities and environments. Tax breaks tend to go to those who can afford them. Along with the fabled 1% of individuals in whose hands is concentrated the greater part of the world’s personal wealth – for example, 110 Russians hold 35% of that country’s wealth, while the family that owns Walmart has more wealth than 42% of American families combined – the world’s largest banks and corporations can afford the legions of lawyers and accountants necessary to keep their taxes to a minimum. They are also legally entitled to move taxable income to offshore tax havens, further reducing their contribution to the public purse. Two years ago, The New York Times economics and finance columnist Steven Rattner found a 2008 congressional study that documented how subsidiaries of American corporations generated 43% of their profits in tax havens where they had only 4% of foreign employment and 7% of their foreign investment. In 2010, General Electric reported global profits of $14.2 billion, only $5.1 billion of it from US-based operations. And from 2005 to 2010, GE declared $26 billion in American profits while receiving a net tax benefit of $4.1 billion. A year earlier, Chuck Collins, Senior Scholar of the Institute for Policy Studies, showed how in 2010, 25 of the largest US companies paid more to their CEOs than they did in US taxes. The average CEO paycheck in this study was found to be $20 million, proving beyond doubt that the tax system heavily subsidizes bloated CEO pay. Finally, there’s the fact that in the period just after World War II, 32% of US income tax was paid by corporations. Now it’s 9%. If that is not imbalanced, what is?

One of the reasons that 2008 is so often compared to 1929 is that both crashes were the result of unregulated financial speculation. One of the US government’s efforts to protect the public from such chicanery was the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which split the commercial banks from the investment banks in order to safeguard the deposits of ordinary citizens. Unfortunately, the power of Glass-Steagall has since been significantly eroded, mostly due to flaws in its exceptions and exclusions – what most of us would call loopholes – which have increasingly enabled commercial banks to merge with securities firms since the law’s inception. Critics like Robert Reich and politicians like US presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders have called for the reform of this flawed legislation and the proper separation of commercial and investment banking.

The neoliberals will always remind you that you can’t expect investors and executives to operate with a moral compass. Greed is inevitable. Incentives in the form of stock options will eventually result in gaming the system; financial regulation will always inspire workarounds. To expect the financial world to be fair and transparent is hopelessly idealistic. Thankfully, there are individuals who are decent enough and brave enough to challenge that attitude. One such individual, celebrated in the 2014 Michael Lewis book Flash Boys, is Brad Katsuyama, the one-time RBC trader who was able to prove that certain high frequency traders were using a combination of complex algorithms and hyper-fast computer hardware to front-run trades, allowing them to skim more than $160 million a day off the transactions of ordinary investors. Katsuyama and his team developed software that acted as a speed bump to prevent such electronic front running, and then founded their own stock exchange, called the IEX (soon to be renamed the Investors’ Exchange). Their mission: to introduce fairness and transparency to the stock market in order to protect investors. The motto around IEX is, “We’re capitalists, but we believe in responsible capitalism.” For this, they are regarded by many with suspicion. It’s a sad statement on the reality of Wall Street that there are those who don’t believe IEX – or anyone in his right mind – would act in the interests of the common good. In a recent profile in Report on Business magazine, Katsuyama responded to this bred-in-the-bone cynicism. “People on Wall Street are no different than people in any other industry; they’re just incentivized to do the wrong thing. And the incentives on Wall Street are very, very high. That has created tension between Wall Street and Main Street. And I think that is going to change. We are living in an ultra-transparent society where there is very little you can get away with anymore”. Marshall McLuhan once quipped, “art is anything you can get away with.” He may just as easily have been talking about predatory capitalists. Thankfully, players like Katsuyama and pundits like Mintzberg and Sandel are part of a growing chorus of voices who are reimagining capitalism in a way that will ensure it has a sustainable future. Along with thinkers like Michael Porter and Gary Hamel, and business leaders like Paul Polman (CEO of Unilever) and Dominic Barton (McKinsey’s global managing director), this chorus is getting larger and louder and providing us with some hope that we can change capitalism from a form of elite predation to one of economic democracy. Here’s hoping the world listens. ////

PHOTO: TAXCREDITS

Will Novosedlik is AVP, head of growth partnerships at Idea Couture. He is based in Toronto, Canada.

Why is it so difficult to change our minds – even when the facts say we should?

by rachel kwan In 2014, India was declared polio-free by the World Health Organization (WHO). In 2015, Nigeria followed suit. Since the development and widespread adoption of the smallpox vaccine in the late 18th century, vaccines have contributed to a drastic decline in human deaths as a result of infectious diseases. At the same time that India and Nigeria were declared polio-free, previously common childhood diseases, like measles and whooping cough, saw a resurgence in the United States.

From a low of just over 1,000 cases in 1976, whooping cough bounced back, reaching a new peak in 2012 with over 48,000 confirmed cases. Declining vaccination rates are considered a major contributor to increasing children’s vulnerability to infectious diseases that were seemingly on their way out. Why is this the case? Much of the anti-vaccine position is not supported by credible scientific evidence. Claims that vaccination contributes to the development of autism, heavy metal poisoning, or a host of other frightening outcomes are

PHOTO: GATIS GRIBUSTS

unambiguously false. Despite the fact that vaccination has been enormously successful in improving survival against childhood diseases, well-meaning parents continue to refuse it. Many of these parents come from very educated backgrounds, yet only one of every five private school kindergarteners in the United States has received a full schedule of vaccines. This seems highly counterintuitive; one would assume that people who have received credit and recognition for thinking critically about the world would take a position that is grounded in facts, and scientific evidence has been overwhelming in affirming the safety and efficacy of vaccines. What is so unconvincing about one side of the argument that it makes it nearly impossible for a person to change their mind, in spite of it being in the best interest of their child? Can changing our minds be so difficult that even facts can’t make us do it? Rethinking a position is incredibly challenging, but there’s a lot more to it than simply believing evidence: we are, in fact, fighting a heavy evolutionary, social, and physiological heritage when we try to change our minds.

they weigh more heavily than the possibility of their child catching measles or mumps – so they avoid vaccinations all together.

Mechanisms for making consistent conclusions about the world have helped us survive as a species. One of the first difficulties we run into is that we’re predisposed to making conclusions about the world and sticking to them. American science historian Michael Shermer has written extensively about a phenomenon in human cognition called “patternicity.” He suggests that humans are very adept at seeing the world in patterns and stories, and this has developed as we evolved. We’re quick to draw causal relationships or patterns between the phenomena that we observe and to tell ourselves stories about those patterns. For instance, a rustling in the grass signals that a snake is lurking in the underbrush, and we react accordingly, snake or no snake. Even if this tendency to see patterns and tell stories can often be wrong, researchers Kevin R. Foster and Hanna Kokko have suggested that this behavior has stuck with us because, while it didn’t hurt to be wrong most of the time, the one occasion where the rustling grass really was a snake means jumping away and ensuring survival. We can constantly be observing and assessing the world around us, and we can make faulty conclusions most of the time; but as long as drawing quick conclusions takes us out of danger now and again, we will keep behaving this way. In a similar vein to the snake, the knee-jerk reaction of parents who heard of the possible link between autism and vaccination was that vaccination offers other plausible risks that

We are predisposed to a shared way of thinking, because building these types of relationships ensures our survival. We evolved to share the same beliefs as the people around us. Anthropology has traced the long history of human cooperation, dating

Understanding how we see the world is often a backtracking activity, where we find ourselves scrambling to explain why we already hold the position we do. There are many things we simply intuitively decide. Psychologists, cognitive scientists, and anthropologists have noted that oftentimes, we act first and retrofit with moral justifications later. Psychologists like Jonathan Haidt have tried to test this reflex by asking people around the world to read distasteful scenarios and observing how they experience an immediate, initial response of disgust. People then describe how this reaction fits into their understanding of right and wrong, a very common and simplified way to justify a situation. Humans are equipped with both the evolved need to jump to conclusions, and the habit to find a comforting explanation after the fact. We do this at the individual level, but we also rely on the strength and input of the social groups we live in to reinforce this, as can be seen with groups of parents choosing not to vaccinate.

back tens of thousands of years. Cooperation would be impossible without predictable behavior. The ability to interpret the intentions of other people and having a shared worldview is the primary reason human beings have succeeded and thrived as a species. Shared beliefs create mutually reinforcing benefits for both the individual and the group; they help us stay together as social groups, and social groups help individuals survive. Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s work observing humans and primates has noted that most human acts, even one as simple as a mother letting another family member hold her baby, involve making certain assumptions about another being’s intentions. The mother only entrusts her baby to someone else because she knows they will return the baby. Though this is a minor example, it is important to note how shared intentions and beliefs span almost the total range of human interaction, from sharing a joke to cooperating to completing a complex task. Our lives are so intertwined with each other’s, and cohesion and harmony within the group is so important, that Duke University researchers are finding that social exclusion can even be experienced as physiological pain. There’s very little incentive for most people to step out of this constant state of shared views, as it could mean being met with rejection or loneliness. As such, the psychological rewards for conforming to group beliefs are very strong.

Our bodies predispose us to building stronger relationships with those that we consider to be similar to us. We are most likely to share a position or perspective on the world with the people who are most like us. Our bodies ensure this by creating a pleasant experience when connecting with certain people and not with others. One important hormone in this process is oxytocin, which has often been referred to as the “love hormone.” Unfortunately, this charming name hides a more ambiguous nature: oxytocin does play a part in making people more amenable to closeness, but it can also make them less likely to make connections with others. Behavioral scientist Carsten De Dreu’s research shows that oxytocin promotes close relationships with our perceived in-group – that is, the group that we think we belong to – while simultaneously decreasing our friendliness towards those we consider to be outsiders. When anti- and pro-vaccination groups hunker down to reinforce each camp’s beliefs, occasionally lobbing exaggerated attacks and caricatures at the opposition, we see ramped-up oxytocin production in action. We are emotionally and physiologically rewarded for feeling like part of the herd. Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler have observed that, in cases where people have been given incorrect information,

// Can changing our minds be so difficult that even facts can’t make us do it? //

they are more likely to change their minds and update their position to reflect factual reality where their sense of self worth is reinforced. In other words, if a person is faced with new information that seems to undermine the position they occupy – and by consequence, the person they perceive themselves to be – he or she will often refuse the facts. So what does this mean in a business that is about changing minds and finding new ways to break down problems and create solutions? It’s important to recognize that innovation is fundamentally about change. Innovation asks how tomorrow will be different from today, and then looks to build ways of bridging the present with the future. Lurking in the background of change is the possibility that you or I might need to change our minds – to move from how we see things now to something new. Innovation is intertwined with the need to update our perspectives on the world and solve problems in a way that finds us thinking and doing differently. Recognizing that changing minds is hard to do is the first step. Some parents who initially

adopt an anti-vaccination stance eventually change their minds, but this can be a difficult process filled with turmoil. It seems counterintuitive that change is so difficult for a species that is differentiated from the rest of the animal kingdom based on our ability to think critically and abstractly about the world around us, plan for the future, and act on our intentions. However, we’ve inherited mental, emotional, and even physiological baggage that makes changing our minds hard. It isn’t something we’re predisposed to do, and it takes a lot of effort to do it well. For anyone working in innovation, a big part of the job is acknowledging this challenge and finding ways that we can make it easier to change our own minds, and that of our audience. Rather than clinging to the belief that it’s all about “mind over matter,” we’d be better off remembering that the mind is the matter. ////

Rachel Kwan is an innovation strategist at Idea Couture. She is based in Toronto, Canada.

FORESIGHT University of Houston College of Technology Foresight Program

PHOTO: KAUSHIK NARASIMHAN

Sharing beliefs with the group is a way to maintain and demonstrate social status, and going against this creates social exclusion. Being part of the group can be so powerful that people are inclined to cling to group beliefs simply because they feel a sense of belonging. Researchers Deborah Prentice and Dale Miller described the concept of “pluralistic ignorance,” where a majority privately believes that they are part of a small opposition that believes something different from the group, even though their position is actually shared by the majority. According to pluralistic ignorance, appearing to conform to the views that are held by the majority is a public declaration of belonging. People mistakenly believe that they don’t hold the majority’s view, and justify their silence because they fear being considered part of a vulnerable minority. For example, if your child were to attend a prestigious school along with other children whose parents don’t vaccinate, being the lone parent who decides to vaccinate can seem risky, potentially branding you as the careless parent who is exposing their child to the harms of vaccines. It is emotionally satisfying to conform to group beliefs as it reinforces group bonds and promotes a sense of comfort.

Foresight: + Houston Preparing Professional Futurists

FORESIGHT CERTIFICATE SEMINAR

APRIL 25-29

TO REGISTER: http://www.uh.edu/technology/departments/hdcs/certificates/fore/seminar/

And yet, patient centricity arrives on our doorsteps with both great promise and great baggage, carrying with it the hope of a return to who and what has always been at the center of care: the patient. At the same time, there is a new drive, impetus, and mandate for reform, improved design, cooperation, and collaboration. Making sense of patient centricity is an exercise in exegesis, but it is also more than that. In its subjectivity and variability, it also demands that we take a perspective and articulate a point of view. This is not so much to mark the boundary between what it is and what it is not, but, instead, to demonstrate its potential: what it can and aspires to be versus what it is. In this piece, I don’t attempt to explain what patient centricity is or isn’t. Rather, this acts as a manifesto of sorts, a declaration of intent. Ultimately, we shouldn’t seek to contain or capture patient centricity and nail it down as this or that. Its broadness is part of its appeal, and is core to the ways in which it reflects humanity. Yet, we should seek to harness its energy, its push to the new, and its ethical foundations as a means to make it understandable and usable, to embed it more fundamentally at the core of how we think and do healthcare.

by dr. marc lafleur

PHOTO: SENIJU

Currently, in healthcare, the term “patient centricity” is commanding significant thought and attention. While this, by and large, is a good thing, it is by no means uncomplicated or without nuance. Tracking the phrase means coming to terms with its complicated history and contested deployment. In one sense, patient centricity is nothing if not a curious, almost ridiculous term. How does something so fundamental and so intimate to human existence – health itself and how we take care of each other – arrive at a place where we require a term to remind ourselves of who lies at the center of care?

Patient Centricity: A Rapid Genealogy Nevertheless, the promise embedded in the term is neutered if we don’t understand where it comes from. By this, we don’t mean who coined the term, or the genesis of thinking that coalesced in the phrase, but rather the conditions by which patient centricity came to be as a response to a previous state of being. Patient centricity, as both a term and a concept, is a product of the institutionalization and industrialization of healthcare, a process that began in the late 19th century. It came about with the organization of clinics and hospitals around rationalized or Taylorist modes of operation on the one hand, and the emergent demographic principles of “public health” on the other. The execution of medicine and healthcare – up to this point an intimate and personalized endeavor – became an experience that existed at the intersection of science and management. To be sure, patient centricity is, and can only have life as, an institutional term. Patients themselves have always assumed – rightly or wrongly – that they are at the core of what healthcare is and does. This is evident today in the vast majority of conflicts that bubble up into the public sphere about healthcare; what they boil down to fundamentally is the conflict between the preservation of human values and the management of scarce resources. Over the past few decades, as the healthcare system became increasingly complex, dominated by major institutions and massive corporations and government bureaucracies, the system focused its efforts on two things: the rationalization of care through technology and efficiencies, and the evolutions of sciencedriven medicine. In the process, patient experience has deteriorated, and in some cases seems to have been forgotten altogether. This is a tragedy that strikes us in our most fragile and vulnerable moments.

As with many things, the seeds of changes we are seeing today were planted in the late 1960s. As various liberation and equality movements sprouted, and a sea change in how authority was conceptualized and trusted in (Western) societies developed, a concomitant change in how patients were seen and saw themselves emerged. In fact, a broad movement for patient rights became the first evidence of these changes; a nascent, yet nonetheless growing skepticism of physicians’ authority began to shift the dynamics of doctor-patient interactions. Alternative practitioners slowly began to shake off the accusations of quackery, and started to edge increasingly into healthcare ecosystems. In doing so, they provided a radical counter-image to the experience that many people had in more traditional healthcare settings. Today, we live in an era where the healthcare environment is increasingly complex and variegated. Caught between the seeming incommensurabilities of biomedicine on the one hand, and human values on the other, trends towards the rationalization of both care and costs have emerged and continue to develop rapidly. Similarly, the diversification of healthcare practitioners and services available offer people a range of different care experiences. At the end of the day, the dichotomies that have been set up between human-centered care and the scarcity of healthcare resources, between people and science, and between technology and personalized touch, are all fictions that we would do well to discard. From hospitals to the giants of the pharmaceutical world, and everywhere in between, the contours and constraints of care are changing. The values vaguely gestured to in the phrase “patient centricity” are becoming increasingly relevant.

A manifesto for change

It is often said that patient centricity does not have a singular focus, definition, or mode of implementation. While true, this fuzziness often devolves into meaninglessness – just another industry buzzword or shiny wrapper in which to hide the inertia of the everyday. Patient centricity, however, isn’t just a new way to spin an old offering. In my experience, these offerings should evolve out of the very values that infuse patient centricity, rather than simply being adjusted to accommodate them. In other words, it’s not about jumping onto the patient centricity bandwagon, but about locating the human within patient needs, which is already at the center of these founding disciplines: human-centered design and medical anthropology. That said, it was only as a result of beginning to see these values taking hold in the health space that I saw, and continue to see, an opportunity to do good work. In short, patient centricity isn’t a way to infuse health with humane, ethical, sustainable, efficient, and caring values. It is the only way. All of this, then, begs an important question: What does patient centricity actually mean? Rather than deploy a specific definition of what patient centricity is or is not, it’s best to think of it as a movement, a philosophy, an accumulation of values and aspirations, and a set of possibilities. At its core, we see patient centricity as an effort to re-ground health, healthcare, and healthcare delivery in the fullness of the human experience. This deceptively simple statement by no means eschews complexity. This means acknowledging that the actors in any health experience – starting, of course, with the patient

– are more than just the sum of their biology or their pathology. In the case of HCPs, it means recognizing the constraints in which they act, and acknowledging that they themselves are more than just the products of their training or their scientific authority. Patient centricity aspires to re-orient the culture of healthcare, and yet it manifests in various ways. This includes humble efforts to improve patient navigation through healthcare spaces, both physical and virtual, all the way to supporting the broader social, emotional, psychological, and physical health of patients. Patient centricity also fundamentally challenges the traditional scope of care to include a diversity of stakeholders. Doing away with the hierarchy of actors that once privileged the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship, patient centricity encourages a more social experience of health; it advocates for the incorporation of caregivers, family members, friends, and others into the care equation. By acknowledging the community of care in any health experience, patient centricity strives to recognize that, no matter their individual isolation, no person is sick alone. The ramifications of health and illness reverberate outwards to encompass everyone. Finally, while it is possible to edge towards patient centricity via an accumulation of singular tools, tactics, and programs, the ambitious promise of centricity is, and can only be, systematic in nature and in scope. Successful patient centricity is much more than the sum of its parts. Rather, in order to really mean something, the parts add up to something greater; they must speak to, and ultimately demonstrate, change on a cultural level. Fundamentally, patient centricity is about a change in mindset and thinking about the very foundations of care. At its very best, patient centricity aspires toward and pursues cultural change.

Dr. Marc Lafleur is head of medical anthropology and a senior resident anthropologist at Idea Couture. He is based in Toronto, Canada.

PHOTO: MATTWI1S0N

Patient Centricity: What We Believe

The promise of patient centricity is also its peril. In setting up a suite of heightened expectations for patients and others in the healthcare system, we need to identify paths toward realization and implementation. New rhetorics, vocabularies, and shared hopes are a good beginning, but they also demand the need for someone to take responsibility for actual change. There is no doubt that patient centricity, when done correctly, is not just the right thing to do, but good business as well. In fact, as we move forward, the lines between these two things – doing the right thing and good business – are increasingly fuzzy and non-existent. At some point in our lives, each and every one of us is a patient. This fact alone provides us with a broad mandate for change. This manifesto – a statement of core beliefs – is my stake in the ground. ////

by jim dator

We have simply got to give up on trying to “predict” The Future. No matter how many billions of dollars DARPA and its subsidiaries are able to acquire to try to do so; no matter how huge big data gets; no matter how many books are written about Superforecasting or the foresightfulness of crowds; the time when humans could confidently predict the future of anything of importance has come and gone. Long gone. This is not a new development. Most humans have lived in societies where it has not been able to predict the future with some assurance for at least 350 years, probably longer. And yet, we still persist in believing we can.

Declarations about The Future are full of references to “most likely futures,” “least likely futures,” “probable futures,” “worst case scenarios,” “wild cards,” “black swans,” and a myriad of other metaphors, all of which are based on the assumption that there is a “normal future” compared to which all other futures are deviations. It is possible that we are hardwired to believe this. Scientists have recently discovered that we do not perceive reality and then act. Rather, the mind continuously forecasts an expectation that observation either confirms or rejects – though we will often go on “seeing” what we expect to see even though it is not there. We may have a naturally “forecasting mind.” If not entirely hardwired, then, at the very least, eons of generations of humans have been socialized into believing in the existence of an objective, more or less predetermined “future” hanging out there ahead of us. We (or some of the more enlightened and farsighted or better-paid of us) discern and then use this insight to shape our behavior so we can succeed in this “most likely future.” Even those of us who understand that we influence the future by our actions in the present, and who believe we should try to envision and realize a preferred future, still persist in envisioning just that: a Preferred

PHOTO: LANCE SHIELDS

Future. Not many contingent preferred futures. This notion of a single future is reinforced by repeatedly privileging the teaching of history – revising our images of the past as we go along, of course, to suit the fancies of the present – while utterly ignoring futures studies, even though it has existed as a worthy academic discipline for at least 50 years. In spite of the reality of enormous environmental and social change, we still believe that the past is prologue, and that we can learn all we can or need to know about The Future by studying the past. History is important. No doubt about it. The more we know about what has been – not only written history but also the much longer and more important period of unrecorded “prehistory” – the better. But what the past can tell us usefully about what will be is increasingly limited. Many years ago, when I was just starting out in futures studies, I had a highly technooptimistic, spaceflight image of the future. I had been steeped in the so-called “behavioral revolution” of the time, and believed it was possible to predict the future if I had the right model, collected the correct data, projected it properly according to the model, and analyzed the results fairly and diligently – all supported by an appropriately nice fat research grant.

But I ran into trouble immediately while trying to find the right model. While there were a huge number of fellow techno-optimists, there were also population and environmental doomsayers; there were women and their sympathizers who pointed out both were masculine fantasies; there were people who said that “women” and “men” were oppressive categories; there were indigenous people who argued very persuasively that high tech “development” was actually nothing but the de-development and destruction of once pleasant and successful cultures. Many poor or marginalized groups in society had similar objections to the high tech dreams and the doomsayers’ wailings. So who was right? That was my original query: let me study all of these images carefully and see who is correct, and then get a nice fat grant to use the correct model. But the more I studied, the more I saw that each view was both correct and limited. None captured the whole picture, and most saw no reason to fairly consider any worldview other than their own. During this process, I discovered that there are many, many alternative images of the future, each proposing some specific set of policies and behaviors, and each asserting that their view was correct.

I concluded, as a futurist and an academic, that I had the obligation not to decide which was correct (and certainly not to do so on the basis of my own personal preferences). Rather, I had the obligation, as a futurist, scholar, and consultant, to understand the logic and images of the futures that actually existed, and to share them with other futurists, students, and clients. And so, what has become the “Images of Alternative Futures” theory and method of the Manoa School was born. In order to make the concepts actionable, it was necessary to reduce the millions – if not billions – of existing images of the future that are articulated in books, movies, bibles, laws, policies, and plans to an absolute minimum. After testing a variety of typologies, we determined that the huge number of images resolved into specific variations of one of four generic images of alternative futures. These four are now usually labeled: Grow (or Continued Economic Growth); Collapse (from a single cause or a combination of different reasons, also known as New Beginnings); Discipline (around some set of essential core values, other than simple growth); and Transformation (typically a consequence of technologically-induced change, along with a “high spirit” version). These four futures became foundational to all of our futures work, and performed various functions for us. Understanding them – indeed, pre-experiencing them in some way – was a necessary prelude to envisioning a preferred future of a firm or community. More recently, as our awareness of the fundamental uncertainty of The Future has matured, we have downplayed the centrality of a welldeveloped preferred future. Rather, our visions of preferred futures should become bright, positive, but highly flexible guiding lights which always search for signs of the four futures, thus enabling organizations and individuals to respond to or move towards all four of them, and their variants, as appropriate. To say there is no normal future, no such thing as a best (or worst) case scenario, is to mean that we should be prepared to make the best of whatever future emerges by having anticipated, pre-experienced, and prepared for them each. We should not put all our eggs into the basket of any single preferred future, because there isn’t just one. It’s not The Future. Only Alternative Futures. ////

Jim Dator is professor emeritus and former director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies in the Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is based in Honolulu, United States.

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Developing a Killer Foresight Strategy

Foresight is not new. Its roots date back to the 16th century, when scenario thinking began. Spanish Jesuit theologian and scholar Luis de Molina introduced the theory of “conditional future contingents” – or “futuribilia” – as a way to explain concepts like free will, premonition, and fate. By the 1960s, French futurist Gaston Berger explored how one can contextualize events in the past and present in order to make choices in alternative futures in his work Phénoménologie du Temps et Prospective. And the early days of scenario planning date back

Strategic foresight is transdisciplinary in nature. It aims to improve one's ability to create, anticipate, and manage change in a range of domains – including scientific, technological, environmental, behavioral, economic, political, and systemic – from a variety of perspectives such as organization, industry, category, and global. Because disruption is inevitable, it creates an ongoing challenge to anticipate and manage the increasingly fast-paced world we live in, and, as such, building a global culture centered around foresight should be the goal for all businesses. It cannot simply be random undertakings, but instead fully aligned and deeply integrated with strategic planning processes. There is no strategy without foresight. However, strategic foresight is not without its shortcomings. For example, practitioners have difficulties in recommending a course of action – but that should not be their job. They need to be able to facilitate strategic decisions rather than add confusion and drive distracting dialogues. Between trend analysis disguised as foresight and poorly constructed scenarios, foresight practitioners need to do more to earn a seat at the strategy table.

to the 1950s through organizations such as the RAND Corporation, Stanford Research Institute, and Shell. Clearly, we have always been thinking about the future. But thinking is one thing; using it as a tool for survival is something entirely separate. The world has changed significantly since companies first started considering the future, but the very nature of a company’s ability to understand and shape what lies ahead is increasingly strategic and critical – and ever – evolving. Keeping apace is paramount. So how do you develop a foresight strategy that does this?

PHOTO: PROEINAR JØRGEN HARALDSEID

by idris mootee

Understand the Practice

Apply Effectively Many strategic foresights are merely creative futuring exercises, and lack industry context and analytical rigor. Though they have their value when used appropriately, purely analytical or creative studies of possible futures without connection to strategic actions cannot be considered strategic foresight. Nor can a collection of themes and trends, or a 4x4 matrix showing high and low probabilities of different risk scenarios. Strategic foresight does not claim to prophesize the future, nor does it embark on random predictions. Its job, rather, is to entice managers to start thinking of the future in a different way, as something they have influence over, rather than an invariable thing written in stone. It employs the assumption that the future is not predetermined, while acknowledging that certain dynamics are happening in unavoidable ways – and these can be leveraged. Strategic foresight should be a non-deterministic, actionably strategic, collaborative, and multidisciplinary approach to planning for the future. It can be envisaged as a four circles intersecting to form a view of what’s to come:

Analyzing the Future, through scanning and gathering weak signals.

Disrupting the Future, through system modeling.

Imagining the Future, through scenario building.

Creating the Future, through business design.

The use of scenarios is probably the centerpiece of any foresight exercise. Much depends on how scenarios are being constructed, how they are being applied, and how they are visualized. However, it has to be understood that scenarios are not compasses; they are maps. You have to provide the destination (which is your end goal) and the direction to get there. This means that strategic scenarios cannot predict what is likely to happen, or how and when. It is not a one-off exercise. The maps (or scenarios) are merely a catalyst to allow us to question our deep-rooted assumptions, discover techniques to identify challenges that need to be addressed, and develop a point of view. Well executed scenarios boast a range of advantages – but they can also set traps for the unwary. Many people may look at them and ask: “What do we do next?” A lot depends on the starting point. Even before the team starts preparing for the exercises, they must consider the following:

Aspect of Time – – – – – – –

Situation scenarios Outcome specific scenarios Process based scenarios Short-term scenarios Mid-term scenarios Long-term scenarios Scenarios without a specific time frame

Aspect of Quantification – Quantitative on core drivers scenarios – Semi-quantitative and qualitative scenarios – Qualitative scenarios

Aspect of Scope – – – – – –

Global scenarios Industry specific scenarios Problem specific scenarios Technology specific scenarios Competitive scenarios User specific scenarios

Aspect of Semiotics – Formal scenarios (the written text or storyline is the scenario) – Intentional scenarios (the text is not the scenario, but the mental future draft)

Aspect of Visualization – Complete formulated scenarios (with fully illustrated use cases) – Sketchy scenarios (with rough sketches)

Aspect of Applications – – – – –

Entrance or exit scenarios Exploratory scenarios Goal-setting scenarios Result-orientated scenarios Discover-driven scenarios

Strategic Foresight in Action: Industry Structural Transformation Industry structure analysis is one of the most important strategic tools used by analysts and strategy consultants. Professor Michael E. Porter of Harvard University is the world’s leading authority on industry analysis, and his work from three decades ago is still influencing strategic management today. He identifies five basic competitive forces that determine the state of competition and its underlying economic structure:

The threat of new competitors entering the industry

The intensity of rivalry among existing competitors

The threat of substitute products or services

04 05

The bargaining power of buyers The bargaining power of suppliers

These five forces determine the rate of return on invested capital (ROI) relative to the industry’s cost of capital. The strength of each of the competitive forces is determined by a number of key structural variables. However, when dealing with rapid changes in industry dynamics, disruptive technology’s implications on market power, and the winner-takes-all nature of network economics, simply understanding the current state of the industry structure is not enough. When strategic foresight principles are incorporated into understanding the forces that drive industry structural transformation, it becomes the future of strategic management.

PHOTO: JQPUBLIQ

Create Good Scenarios

The current microeconomic model is based on supposedly “logical” industrial structures that have companies competing not only with each other, but also with suppliers and customers for economic rents. Everyone will try to maximize their share through scale, as well as horizontal and vertical integration. However, there are emerging new industry structures that are very different from this traditional one, such as codependent systems that are cross-industry structured in nature. This is increasingly widespread due to technological advancements. These include platform companies that own the standard, which individual companies use to create their own unique competitive advantages. The strategic challenge is to strike the right balance between the profitability of the whole and that of individual participants. A fight to grab more economic rents could be highly counterproductive. One example is Google, who owns Android and yet works with different Android players such as Samsung, HTC, and LG to enlarge their user base while earning enough economic rents. Google’s objective is not to make money from Android, but to hold on to their search business, which is estimated to be more than 33% in the US and growing. It is in Google’s best interest to maintain Android’s dominance, despite the fact that there is not enough money to go around for all Android players.

To understand how the industry structure can be changed or disrupted, an industry structure analysis cannot be used. Instead, this is where strategic foresight comes into play. By constructing future scenarios and using it as an acid test for strategy, one can see the structural elements that are crucial for the current strategy to succeed and the weakest links of the current industry structure that can be disrupted. They can also reveal what new industry structure(s) would emerge and who would own the most valuable piece (and control key access and activities). These scenarios would provide the context for strategy development, which could then be used by the corporate strategy team to:

Augment understanding by seeing what possible futures might look like, how they might come about, who might make them happen, and why competitors or new entrants are betting on certain outcomes. Reframe existing strategic decisions by providing a new context for decisions and forcing very difficult conversations to the surface. Challenge or dispel assumptions about the “official” future and current strategy while creating new mental models to look at customer problems and solutions. Apply these scenarios to build new economic models and see how each can impact the transfer of value and how economic rents are being captured. Avoid groupthink in executive meetings by visualizing futures, and allowing companies to provide a safe haven for strategic debates and the sharing of ideas. Strategic foresight is still in its early stages as a professional discipline, and there is much to learn and experiment with. But while businesses are trying to understand the differences between strategic planning and strategy development, here’s a simple clarification to take away: we should always begin with strategic foresight, allowing it to inform strategic development, and then drive strategic planning. Strategic planning is very inward-focused in nature. Strategic development is outwardfocused. Strategic foresight is, of course, future-oriented. Start with the future and work your way back. //// Idris Mootee is the publisher and editor-in-chief of MISC and CEO of Idea Couture. He spends his time between London, New York, San Francisco, and Shanghai.

Rethinking Design: A Perspective from the Lululemon Whitespace Team

The team is comprised of three core areas: innovation management, which defines the types of problems they are working on; advanced technology, to understand solutions to those problems; and scientific research, to understand solutions in the real world and the value they are creating in the market. Lululemon’s innovation efforts are successful because they all stem from their commitment to partnership, which has manifested in multiple ways – partnership within the business at large, partnership with their store educators (retail staff) and ambassadors (athletes and yogis), partnership with their guests (customers), and partnership with their vendors. As with any relationship we enter, professional or otherwise, true partnership is built through curiosity, trust, respect, and humility. The Whitespace team holds true to these values. As a group, they are constantly selfreflective, hungry for knowledge, enthusiastic to participate, hands-on, and willing to immerse themselves in a problem so that they may challenge and strengthen their thinking and approach. MISC spoke to Brian Peterson, Whitespace’s Director of Innovation, to explore his perspective about what makes the team unique, and what “re” means to him.

by courtney lawrence

We recognize the Lululemon Athletica brand for its reputation of high quality and aesthetically inspiring athletic and yoga wear, as well as its strong company culture. Over the years, the company has maintained an extremely entrepreneurial spirit and a drive for breakthrough innovation. Three years ago, the Whitespace™ team was born as a way for Lululemon to strengthen and rethink their innovation capacities.

PHOTO: LULULEMON ATHLETICA

What is the overall mission of the Whitespace team? We stand for human potential. We collaborate with teams across the business and look at creating products, services, experiences, and conversations that allow our guests to get closer to their potential in athletics, yoga, meditation or whatever they are up to in their lives. This is in the DNA of the company as a whole, but also the specific lens the Whitespace team takes. Essentially, Whitespace is interested in solving real problems, sometimes even problems that guests don’t realize they have. This is key, as we’re a company that is continuously focused on innovation and the functionality of our products. We also act a bit like a competitor within the company, challenging the in-line design teams and the rest of the organization to push their limits. This is a symbiotic relationship, as we’re also challenged regularly by those teams. We talk ten years, invest in five years, and commit to three years. How do you push limits within the company? If you look at how Lululemon develops seasonal products, we typically operate within the context of incremental innovation – constantly updating seasonal styles, developing new products, and creating fresh concepts to offer our guests. Whitespace goes one step further, and looks at what competitive forces might do to challenge Lululemon. We explore areas that fundamentally challenge the way we work, the way we create products, and the ways in which we offer value. Much of our work happens outside of Lululemon’s corporate strategy, on projects that are more transformational or disruptive in nature. That being said, our work can, and does, inform our corporate strategy. Though our work is longer-term in nature, it’s critical that our team is adding ongoing value.

What kind of work environment do you believe inspires innovation? We work in a space called The Workshop, which is an area of exploration for Whitespace and the company as a whole. It’s a very hands-on environment, where we are working with technology and athletes in context. We are hacking, creating products, and measuring and testing athletes. We can simulate pretty much any environmental condition that an athlete faces, be it hot, cold, wet, or dry. We do what it takes to work with athletes doing what they do best – whether it’s running, biking, yoga, or any other sport – in the actual conditions that they do them in. How does the notion of “re” apply to the Whitespace team and what you do? What stands out is the idea of rethinking. As a team, our primary task is answering fundamental questions that force us to rethink our guest, our brand, and our products. We rethink what a product or an experience could mean for our guest, and what our guest will look like in the future so we can create a product that is right for them. What is an example of work done by the Whitespace team that illustrates the notion of rethink? We recently collaborated with our design team to rethink our women’s pant collection. It started as a research project about compressive garments for our men’s line, and led to an entire reimagining of our pant wall for women – which is a core pillar of our business. There is a general understanding in the apparel industry that most products competing in the area of athletic compression typically don’t live up to the claims they purport. This includes the contention that a tight-fitting pant or sock will help an athlete perform better. In reality, medicalgrade compression requires very specific knowledge about the user – measurements, blood flow, etc. We asked if there could be a unique value proposition that could be created for compression in our men’s line that is both true and helps us differentiate ourselves. This, in turn, led to an entirely new way of thinking about the technical design of our women’s pant line based on sensation. We partnered with the design team to combine sports psychology, our approach to training, compression science, and design, to create engineered sensation in our women’s pants. Together, we’ve fundamentally reset how we design our women’s pant line and how our guests experience our product through a carefully considered spectrum of engineered sensations, from “relaxed” to “tight.” This rethink allows any female guest to choose the right pants for her workout, and unlock her unique performance potential. How do you instill the ethos of “rethink” within your innovation process? As a brand, we are extremely active in our communities. We continuously engage in conversations with athletes, yoga practitioners, and the active-wear community at large. We talk to people who are doing interesting things, and we learn a lot from them. We are also hungry for feedback on our products; there are often seeds of inspiration we may discover that might have a very disruptive opportunity embedded in them. A lot of our ideas come from being active and aware in our

How is “rethink” a concept that is fostered within the team culture? Lululemon is a company where self-reflection, selfimprovement, and self-development are highly valued. It’s part of our DNA, and is how we create value for the business. We also embrace the moments when projects, concepts, and learning can be ambiguous. We know that, by default, effective people try to make the ambiguous tangible, so we hold space for ambiguity as long as possible and explore many different ways to solve problems and make solutions tangible and functional. It’s okay to be in a project “huddle” (team meeting) and to challenge the strategy, the perspective, or even the concepts all the way up to the point at which we deliver our ideas to the commercial in-line team. We hire people who can dance between ambiguity and tangibility. It’s science, with a good amount of art. In what ways is the team unique from your perspective? A lot of innovation groups are structured under lock and key models where they are not really sharing out the

TURN ART INTO DIALOGUE.

concepts they are working on with the business. For Lululemon, Whitespace is focused on collaboration and working cross-functionally with teams across the company. Whether it’s the operations, development, or design team, they are in it with us, developing the insights and how those projects can come to life so that when there is a handoff – taking a proof of concept into commercialization – they’ve been involved since the start. Further, we can’t actually commercialize our ideas without our in-line team partners. There is no element of surprise or space to wonder what we are doing, because the rest of the business is thoroughly involved in what we’re working on. What’s in store for the future of Whitespace? As a relatively new team, we have been working on our structure and how we intersect with the rest of Lululemon. As a growing company, there is, and will continue to be, a constant refining of that. We are really good at developing value and having the business turn that value into product insights and products themselves, but there is always opportunity to get better. As the concepts get more complex and disruptive in nature, the better we need to be. The opportunity for us to create a smooth transition from concept to real experience and product is what we’re going to focus on in the next little while, as we start to deliver our concepts to the business at a faster pace. //// Courtney Lawrence is a senior resident anthropologist at Idea Couture. She is based in Toronto, Canada.

Parsons School of Design, part of The New School in NYC, teaches you to rethink and reshape what art means in the world today. You will have the opportunity to study and collaborate across all New School disciplines and become part of a new generation of artists committed to making a more just, more beautiful, and better-designed world. No wonder Parsons was named best Art and Design School in the United States*. newschool.edu/parsons *2015, Quacquarelli Symonds 2015 World University Rankings PHOTO: LULULEMON ATHLETICA

communities and talking with our guests. We’re a highly sensitive business, we’re always exploring new ways to integrate concepts into our business and incubate them. We also give our stores a lot of autonomy to operate, creating situations where they have to be entrepreneurial. So that mindset is fostered throughout the business.

Artwork by Communication Design (BFA) alumna Sabrina Santander, Teach&Learn. Photo by Martin Seck / Equal Opportunity Institution

Away from the Gimmick Reprogramming Fashion Technology’s Purpose

nology, but so far it seems directed towards evolved aesthetics or mimicry of function. The Twitter Dress by CuteCircuit, for example, isn’t necessarily adding anything new to our lives. Both products are simply connected garments that effectively do the same things as our phones, in a weak attempt to

make connectivity a fashion statement. The desire for connected products has intensified, and it’s very tempting for designers, engineers, and entrepreneurs to create unprecedented products and services to get in on the action, and yet a connected

world also brings new design questions and challenges to the table. Ultimately, we must ask ourselves: What are the potential ethical and social implications of using the body as a space for connected devices, and how do we most effectively design for the end user?

PHOTO: CRUSTINA!

In September 2015, designer Zac Posen teamed up with 22-yearold creative technologist Madison Maxey to debut an LED dress as part of the Zac by Zac Posen collection at New York Fashion Week. This intersection of technology and fashion has taken on new prominence, signifying a shift in both industries. Even in the past six months, the definition of wearables has evolved beyond the Kickstarter model and into mass, and we are now at a point where technology can be synthesized seamlessly into our clothing. At the same time, fashion technology – or FashTech – is veering into gimmick and away from purpose, leading us to wonder: “It looks really cool, but who cares?” Both up-and-coming and established brands are desperately throwing resources into this convergence of fashion and tech-

PHOTO: LISE LOTTE FLEUR

by valerie ann higgins and maria jeansson

Changing Processes

Emotional Connections

The problem starts right at the beginning of the design process as, more often than not, fashion and technology are created in silos, only coming together at the final stages of development. How technology is integrated into fashion is instrumental to a product’s success, as it directly impacts the complete process, from design and connectivity to our experience of the end product. Simply put, integration cannot be last. A bigger challenge, however, would arise if technology and fashion were to be integrated earlier in the process. New considerations would be needed at the forefront of the creative direction, including clear design briefs that express purpose and potential future repercussions. Deconstructing this design problem and re-programming the process could lead FashTech to finding it’s raison d’être beyond what currently exists on the market.

In order to design something sustainable, product managers need to first tap into their consumers’ emotional, behavioral, and cognitive lives. In 1964, Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan talked about the medium being the message, meaning that the communication platform embeds a symbiotic relationship influencing how the message is perceived. If this is true, why aren’t we questioning the intention and subsequent emotional response of these technologies as they gradually weave into our garments and onto our bodies? Dr. Conor Farrington, a social scientist and leading expert at the University of Cambridge, has centered his research on new health technologies and the emotional impact wearables have on a person. Dr. Farrington recently spoke of a valuable lesson that can be found in an anecdote circulating in the

CustomerCentricity wearables community: “In my research around a new diabetic device, which sits on the body and measures the glucose levels under the skin, I realized that people are often concerned about wearables broadcasting their sickness to people around them, either visibly (e.g. wearing or carrying bulky equipment) or audibly (through the beeping of system alarms). A related concern shown by some is that the technology constantly reminds them of their sickness. It’s a balancing act between the health benefits offered by the technology, which helps users to attain greater normalcy, and the visible reminders of sickness, which detract from normalcy. The biggest complaint was that patients didn’t want to wear something that constantly reminded them that they are sick. This demonstrates how simple the human connection to technology can be.”

Smart clothing is a clear sign that every industry is waking up to the potential benefits of smart, connected, and data-driven innovation – and no one wants to be left out. But from the consumer point of view, the rhetoric still feels very one-sided. There’s a complex web of stakeholders in need of a better collective understanding of how we, the consumers, actually want to interact with technology. Big business is investing heavily in the world of wearables, as data is increasingly playing a part in helping designers and retailers quantify this season’s must-have looks. However, there’s a glaring need for a shift towards the consumer. Take the cloud, for example. We know that wearables, FashTech, and cloud computing go hand in hand, however, brands are increasingly becoming data businesses and the cloud is not really a cloud – it’s your information existing on someone else’s hard drive. This topic has been discussed ad nauseam, but there’s something about the intimacy of clothing and the body generating this information that has added a more sensitive dimension, refueling the debate entirely.

DEAR LOST GENIUS,

Just a Gimmick

Finding Purpose There are, of course, some designers who are determined to find creative ways to make innovative FashTech products that enhance our lives – and the world around us. Katia Vega, a member of the Responsive Environments Group at MIT and a wearables innovator, has sought to find ways of allowing technology into our lives in a more thoughtful way. Combining invisible computing with the desire to empower human capabilities – and a little bit of magic – she develops novel ways of interacting with the world. Her inventions often use the body’s surface as an interactive platform by bringing technology and beauty products together. Her creation, Hairware, for example, uses our natural inclination to touch our hair in order to collect our digital movements. As Vega explains, “Normally, when someone touches his or her own hair, this action can unconsciously bring comfort at the same time as it emits a non-verbal message decodable by an observer. However, when the Hairware is touched, either by comfort or maybe seduction, the hair extensions recognize behaviors and a change in the digital environment. It then uses this information to learn algorithms that recognize a user’s intention and reaction.” It sounds complicated, but it’s something we can all relate to. These

THE WORLD NEEDS YOUR WILD IDEAS.

A FashTech Future movements and interactions are what we do naturally and Hairware is simply an unobtrusive way of measuring this. Another leader in this space is Holition, a UK-based venture founded on the principle that technology has a place within the luxury sector. Holition has pioneered several novel initiatives using premium 3D digital experiences for big names like LVMH and the Kering Group. Recently, they partnered with alchemist Lauren Bowker and her exploration house, The Unseen, to develop a project titled Eight Sense. This wearable sculpture is the first of its kind able to react to human biodata. It’s essentially a wearable mood ring which changes color and pattern as it visualizes real-time human data. Admittedly, this looks as though it’s veering into gimmick territory, but think of a product like this in a medical context, for example. Imagine if this technology could be used as a means for people with non-verbal skills to express themselves.

Assuming that the end game of all FashTech innovation is to empower the consumer, it’s important to consider the emotional impact these devices might have on our lives. As we diagnose the impacts, impasses, and opportunities involved with the hyperconnected human, we are reminded of the caution philosopher Gilles Deleuze offers in his Postscript on the Societies of Control: “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.” This is neither a criticism nor an endorsement of this tech-centric world, but instead a cautionary comment on how, by nature, we tend to ignore the long-term implications of the new and exciting. There is indeed a FashTech future ahead of us, one that might dramatically alter the landscape in which we live; starting the process with the user in mind has the power to influence and nurture a purpose-driven relationship between people and technology, enabling us to profit, learn, and benefit from our own data trails, rather than shy away. //// Valerie Ann Higgins is global luxury and fashion lead at Idea Couture. She is based in London, UK. Maria Jeansson is a senior innovation strategist at Idea Couture. She is based in London, UK.

AND WE NEED YOUR APPLICATION WWW.KAOSPILOT.DK

PHOTOS: KATIA CANEPA VEGA (LEFT), HOLITION (TOP)

Over the last few years, major players in every industry have opened their eyes to the possibilities this kind of hyperconnectivity can offer. Amongst the big names taking advantage of these opportunities in high-end consumer fashion is Ralph Lauren, with its launch of the PoloTech Shirt. Sensors attached to silver threads inside the shirt pick up the wearer’s movement data, heart rate, and breathing rates, which can be monitored on the accompanying app and uploaded to the cloud for analysis. It’s capable of providing real-time biometric feedback to your Ralph Lauren mobile app and is the first of its kind to reach mass retail, but, like most connected fitness devices, it simply tracks what you do. It can’t tell you what to do next. Then, of course, there’s the ancillary Apple Watch, which, it’s safe to say, was a misguided attempt at fashion technology. Its lackluster sales have been largely attributed to its one-day battery life, but it can also be argued that Apple failed to do its homework, as the watch offers nothing that the iPhone can’t do faster. It begs the question: Why would we want new products that perform the same functions as our phones? Here’s the worst kept secret in the world of wearables: at least half of consumers abandon them within months, no doubt realizing how pointless they really are.

A CREATIVE LEADERSHIP SCHOOL IN SEARCH OF THE POSSIBLE: A RADICALLY DIFFERENT AND BETTER WORLD.

Bottom of the Bucket List

// There is a belief that employees in support functions will also tend to be less committed to the company than employees who spend most of their time in core to mission or strategic roles. //

Reimagining administrative burdens as strategic advantages

Running a business isn’t easy, and one of its most challenging aspects is often overlooked and underappreciated: infrastructure. While the challenges facing businesses big and small – from international manufacturers to local coffee shops – are almost entirely different, they share much of the same day-to-day administration. In bringing people together to solve problems, deliver products, and serve customers, they must provide a solid infrastructure to best support the collective outputs of the group. Admittedly, business infrastructure forms differently in each company’s case, making it difficult to speak in general terms. There are, however, still many commonplace support divisions across organizations, for instance: marketing, finance, sales, and accounting. These functional areas join a host of other necessary processes and tasks for running a business. Within every organization, there is an implicit hierarchy of importance that resonates with employees and is driven by leadership’s vision. In well-led, coordinated organizations, every employee knows what this implicit hierarchy is; they know what matters most.

This hierarchy is often divided into four buckets:

01 Core to Mission 02 Strategic Initiative 03 Support Function 04 Administrative Necessity All four are crucial to running a successful business, but they’re not created – or treated – equally. Successful leaders are very good at “doing what they do” and, although it is not always the case, often view everything outside of their primary goals as a distraction. To accommodate, the best leaders hire a team to handle the rest and help build their business around them. Nevertheless, employers tend to hate when their team spends too much time outside of the first two buckets, while begrudgingly recognizing that it’s important to do so. Similarly, employees also tend to dislike spending time outside of the first two buckets. They loathe administrative necessity: logging hours, filing expenses, general paperwork, and so on. There is a belief that employees in support functions will also tend to be less committed to the company than employees who spend most of their time in core to mission or strategic roles, despite their specialties. This may be for two reasons: first, support functions are often cost-centers and don’t produce direct revenue for

PHOTOS: MATT MACGILLIVRAY

by christopher ho

the company, becoming a target for layoffs and budget cuts. Second – and perhaps more critically – these employees implicitly know that their function is not the most important at any given time. Poor organizations with ineffective leadership spend far too much time in the third and fourth buckets, bogged down by administration, bureaucracy, and support functions that don’t benefit the company in exceptional ways. On the other hand, smart employers and employees minimize the time spent in these buckets. They stay focused, are efficient, and use their time to push out good products and services. But ground-breaking employers don’t just minimize time spent in the third or fourth buckets – they transform it. We see this best in established companies when we employ a little hindsight. Two examples include Coca Cola transforming marketing from support to core mission, and Walmart transforming their supply chain from support to core mission. It’s important to understand, of course, that it’s not actually the business function itself that is considered core, strategic, support, or administrative; it’s the employer’s and employee’s attitudes towards them.

While many successful companies have become adept at transforming support functions into strategic and competitive advantages, there is still surprisingly little innovation in transforming administrative necessities. Perhaps this is because they are unanimously disliked, or perhaps because they are by nature quite tedious. Whatever the reason, it’s an entire subset of business problems ripe for re-imagination. What if the administrative tasks could become strategic, or even core to your business? Let’s look at some of the most mundane daily tasks and reimagine them: / What if we could transform filing expenses into strategically bulk sourcing and transporting items for smaller companies and employees? / What if we could transform time tracking as a way to accelerate performance review cycles or identify sales opportunities accurately and more frequently? / What if we could transform payroll into a way of making our employees financially healthier, happier, and more productive?

It’s time to change our views on these tasks, and realize that they are full of exciting opportunities. To enable these possibilities, we need creative solutions aimed at employers and employees equally. Consumer products available on the market today often don’t provide business value, and traditional enterprise products are often left unused because they don’t provide good user experience. New transformative solutions will hit this intersection perfectly. Administration doesn’t have to be a burden, and employees don’t have to get stuck at the bottom of the bucket. It’s time to reimagine infrastructure. //// Christopher Ho is a co-founder of Abletribe, a software that is transforming the administrative burden of payroll to make happier workplaces. He is based in Toronto, Canada.

Great Minds

Reframing thinking and doing within service design and delivery

Objects of design are becoming increasingly complex. In a growing number of cities around the world, organizations and governments are applying design approaches to help solve a variety of problems, including social, wellness, and environmental challenges. Businesses are also increasingly relying on design methods to effectively deliver more functional and innovative multichanneled service-systems. These days, design techniques are commonly being applied to the non-tangible, especially within the multifaceted domain of service.

PHOTO: DANIEL FOSTER

by jax wechsler

Unlike traditional design domains, service design does not stop with the delivery of a product, building, or thing. Service design requires continuous implementation and depends on the ongoing collective efforts of large numbers of diverse stakeholders – all necessary for good service experience. Here, we explore how collective design and co-creation can help to reframe thinking and doing within organizations. How can design support ongoing implementation and its associated change processes? How can design empower not only customers or service recipients, but also those involved in the service delivery, such as organizational members and partners? Service design is complex; many people need to work together to deliver valuable experiences to customers via distinct products and services that function holistically and seamlessly. It requires embracing change to create value, change that is co-created by many. Consider the vast range of people involved in the design and delivery of a financial or medical service, for example. Different stakeholders are required for different things at different times. This can be challenging to coordinate, particularly when stakeholders have dynamic requirements and needs. Just like a seamless concerto, service design and delivery can be challenging for organizations to orchestrate effectively. Henry Mintzberg, an authority in organizational studies, defines organizations as “collective action for a common purpose.” We all have our own meaning-making frameworks informed by our experiences, education, social groups, and culture. The notion of a common purpose can, therefore, be problematic when everyone sees and acts in terms of his or her own perspective. Each individual has their own mental model, and this disparity can result in working within silos. In organizational contexts, the mental models of employees, customers, and partners can vary considerably, but the service design journey often demands a modification of these mental models and a redefinition of personal and collective assumptions. Questions like “what are we delivering together?,” “what is my role in this?,” and “what does my organization stand for and why?” can shift as a consequence of the design journey. This is important as individual and collective thought informs decision-making and behavior. As such, some of the critical questions designers should be asking are not only about how they can ensure that their proposed designs get implemented, but also how their work can support collective action and the associated change processes required by implementation. What can they deliver to the organization that will help guide change and

support others in their work? What tools could they create for organizational stakeholders to empower them to sustain widespread change? Using some examples from an Australian case study located in a large telecommunications organization, let’s reflect on how design artifacts (also known as design objects) can help support service design and implementation. Design artifacts are created through the design process and include visual representations such as infographics, videos, posters, models, visualizations, and maps. Well-considered design artifacts are useful tools for navigating social processes, helping to reframe thinking, and guiding stakeholders through messy design and implementation processes towards better collective outcomes. As Einstein noted, you can’t solve a complex problem by using the same consciousness that created it. The way individuals think independently will inevitably affect collective outcomes, and the resulting customer experience. Otto Scharmer, in his book Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges, discusses the importance of dialogue and reframing thinking for co-creating improved futures. Theory U points to the importance of supporting generative dialogue in designing and enacting improved futures. According to Theory U, the quality of results produced by any system depends on the quality of awareness from which people in the system operate. Scharmer suggests that the formula for a successful change process is not “form follows function,” but "form follows consciousness.” By reframing consciousness, catalyzing empathy, supporting reflection, and generative dialogue, collective co-creation can come from a deeper level of humanity or intention. Scharmer and his colleagues, including Peter Senge, have written about these ideas in their work on presencing and Theory U, offering practical tools and concepts to support change, innovation, and the collective co-creation of improved futures. In 2013, I conducted an academic inquiry exploring the roles played by design artifacts within human-centered innovation contexts. Through a practice-led case study located in a large Australian telecommunications organization, we investigated the different roles some specific design artifacts played within a design-led innovation project. This involved the design of a new ordering and activation portal for complex IT products using human-centered design methods. The objects studied included infographics, videos presenting findings from customer research, personas, journey maps, a video communicating the conceptual design of the proposed service, design principles, high-level specifications, and wire-frames.

Within the study, several distinct roles were noticed for the artifacts, pointing to their value as mediatory and enabling tools within innovation contexts. The case demonstrated that design artifacts can function as political and persuasive tools, facilitate customer empathy amongst diverse staff, support organizational change by communicating customer-centric insights, provide valuable sensemaking frameworks, support collaboration and reframe thinking, communicate design knowledge, share visions for the future, and motivate collective action. How design artifacts can reframe thinking – and how it is possible to do the same with service design projects – is detailed below using examples from the case. Unlike design, innovation requires implementation. Innovation also requires persuasion, as do most service design initiatives. Executives need to be persuaded to fund projects, and many different stakeholders throughout the design and implementation journey require reasons to buy-in. To enact change, people first need to understand why change is required. Design artifacts, due to their engaging formats, can communicate the “why” in accessible ways. If compelling enough, well-produced design artifacts may be shared across the organization organically, creating a persuasive groundswell for person-centric change. In the case project, the design team created a series of videos consisting of first-person customer quotes discussing their challenges with the current services. The videos brought the existing problems to life in a more compelling format than a text-only report would have. The format helped stakeholders feel empathy for the customers, and staff shared it around the organization unprompted. The videos were shown to call center staff to help these employees understand the frustrations of the people on the other end of the phone, and were also included in a traveling roadshow aimed at staff who service this customer group to promote understanding of customer frustrations. These objects gave the customer a voice. They also helped staff understand the impact of their collective efforts when it comes to customer experience. As the videos were shared organically, it can be assumed that well-produced design artifacts that touch the human heart have the potential to spread customer empathy within an organization, supporting person-centric organizational change. Additionally, by sharing narratives about improved customer experiences, staff were reminded that their actions contribute to a shared common purpose that can have a positive impact on people. Design artifacts can also offer accessible frameworks for stakeholders by providing cognitive frameworks to orient both individual and collective thinking. Customer journey maps – which visually depict a customer’s pathway through a service and its associated touch-points – for example, can provide useful tools to orient discussion about present and future states. Senge talks about innovation stemming from the creative tension between the current state and a preferred future state, and these types of maps can provide useful frameworks for stakeholders to consider. They can outline things like the customer’s journey and their challenges, as well as opportunities for improvement; they can help to reframe thinking and provide shared reference points to orient thinking, dialogue, and action. Design artifacts such as these can also provide valuable “boundary objects” that sit between different organizational groups, supporting the collaboration required for better service outcomes. Whereas innovation is supported by the dissolution of organizational silos and stimulation of collaboration between departments, visual frameworks can help to seed innovation, smoothing the translation between differing mental models and supporting teams to think, talk, and act together. In the case project, a series of journey maps were used to communicate the customer experience, and clearly illustrated the complexity of current ordering and activation systems. They visually depicted the different touch-points, tools, forms, and systems customers required to order and activate products, and served as a framework to illustrate the current state, displaying the different staff departments and systems currently relied upon. Pain points and opportunities were indicated across the ordering, and an activation customer lifecycle highlighted areas where service improvement should be focused. These maps were used to springboard conversations about how to address current issues. They also played an important persuasive function, as they illustrated the inefficiencies of the existing service, substantiating the need for the proposed design recommendations. In organizational contexts, where lots of different groups need to work together to deliver complex services, design objects like journey maps can help staff understand

// Design artifacts, due to their engaging formats, can communicate the “why” in accessible ways. //

how their work fits into a larger ecosystem, helping to reframe thought about individual work practices in relation to an integrated whole; they offer stakeholders and staff alike a more holistic overview. This social, collaborative dimension of service design is important to consider when determining how to support change processes, and is a space in which designers are increasingly playing. They may consider asking the following questions in order to support service design and implementation: / Which stakeholders are important for the initiative during both the design and ongoing deployment phases? / Who needs to be involved in design and delivery? Who needs to be persuaded? / What design objects can support the work of these different stakeholders during implementation? What might others be able to use to persuade change and widely communicate the service vision? Service innovation requires a reframing of how people think and act, and well considered design artifacts can play powerful roles as mediatory, supporting tools. Design artifacts provide organizations with influential social tools that can assist diverse stakeholders to implement change. Within service contexts, well-considered design objects can help make change stick. //// Jax Wechsler is a human-centered design practitioner at Sticky Design Studio, and also teaches UX and design. She is based in Sydney, Australia.

01 02 03

by nathan samsonoff New technologies and the growing ease of communication has disrupted and changed many industries, but every few years we are reminded of one area that remains embarrassingly archaic: voting. Advancements in technology and communications had promised to not only make information more accessible about governmental candidates, but also make the government itself more transparent. Similarly, increased accessibility to fast communication should make voting more accessible to people who care for young children, work long hours, or may otherwise not have the ability to access traditional voting stations. Yet here we find ourselves, year after year, ticking a box on a piece of paper with a pencil. Voting is an important and revered right in modern democratic countries. While everyone seems to have differing opinions on the correct ways and correct people to lead a country, the actual number of people who exercise their right to vote is typically quite low, particularly for local elections that don’t receive national TV coverage. Let’s use the US as an example. Despite everyone having opinions on how to run the country, the bulk of voters are from only one specific age range (in 2012, 70% of those aged over 60 voted, compared to 40% of the 18-29 age group).

In theory, leadership and mandate in a democracy is decided by “the people.” In reality, it is decided by “the people who vote.” So, despite living in a democracy, the leadership and mandate given to the government is actually decided by the elderly’s votes, influenced by lobbying, Super PACS, and advertising. Since the general public gained access to the internet in the early 1990s, we’ve seen considerable growth in internet accessibility and the ease at which information is obtained. The logical outcome of this informational flow should be that more people are informed about their voting options, and they are therefore more willing to participate in the democracy their countries are founded upon. This, however, is not the case. As internet access has boomed from around 10% of Americans with access in 1994 to 80% in 2012, the average voting turnout in presidential elections has only increased by roughly 7%, keeping well within the 45-65% turnout range from the past century. So how can we use technology, including the internet, to encourage not just greater voter turnout, but also greater engagement in the political process and better knowledge of candidates and the impact they will have on everyone’s lives? There are three main factors that must be considered.

PHOTO: GAGE SKIDMORE

Revoting: Adapting Democracy

Information dissemination and distribution

Voter engagement and discussion

Voting and results compilation

Almost everyone in the world has a computer in their pocket that allows them to be connected and networked to other people. We can now receive all of the information necessary for making informed and intelligent decisions. Imagine a future where the Federal Election Commission can solicit clear and concise positions from politicians on a variety of topics, and distribute this information to potential voters. Content will be created and controlled by the political parties or local candidates to ensure their beliefs and mandates are accurately presented to the public. The electoral commission will simply enforce appropriate formatting and length of content and assist with dissemination. Changes in position can be updated on a daily basis by politicians, and users can receive notifications about important upcoming municipal, state, and federal elections, debates, and speeches. A number of websites and publications already aim to provide this service, but with mixed results. Often the motivations of the organizational body are questioned, and the data is disregarded as biased. The underlying challenge remains: How can technology be leveraged to help create better trust between voters and political parties while sharing this information?

Forgot to vote? Now your phone can berate you for that. Want to discuss politics? Forums for discussions are made easily available and curated to provide a safe and engaging experience. Politicians can send digital pamphlets in an easy and accessible manner without having emails filtered into spam. Want to ask your candidates questions? Online discussions, group chats, and even streaming video conversations make this possible. Much like Snapchat has created Stories for various events and people, similar services will enable instant content transmission, perhaps even with similar temporal properties. In addition to the social media apps at our disosal today, what future tools could be developed and used to further voter engagement and raise voter turnout?

Most countries vote with a pen or pencil and paper. Voter names cannot go on these forms so that people cannot be hassled about their voting preferences. This is the foundation of a safe and functional democracy. Other countries ask you to punch out a specific spot on the voting card, which can cause issues about what constitutes voting “intention” if you punched incompletely (also known as hanging chads). Some countries already use computer voting stations at secure polling locations, but these machines are produced by private corporations, which are driven by profit. The software is typically closed and proprietary, so you have to trust the company that made them to not be corrupt, rather than having some method of third party validation. Often, they are networked to receive software updates and send out election results. None of these methods are fully secure.

The best answer could be in our own houses and pockets. The opposition to voting via computers and smartphones is completely at odds with society’s acceptance of these devices for daily banking, health records, and transfer of personal images. While the risk exists for vote tampering on mobile devices or home computers, it’s easy to argue that they could be made at least as secure as paper ballots. If citizens could vote via their connected devices, it would allow for convenience at every facet – from reducing lineups at voting locations, speeding up vote compilation and counting, and allowing people who are unable to reach a poll to have their say. And we know how much we love our conveniences. Although technology is already used in elections in many ways – pen and paper, mail-in ballots, and voting machines were all at one time new technologies – there is a lot of room to improve voting efficiency and convenience. If done properly, incorporating technology to simplify the process would likely result in greater voter turnout and better overall interest and engagement. Making democracy more accessible and effective can be done in a secure, unbiased, and closely monitored way; we just need to take the next steps. Re-engaging voters by using devices that are already ubiquitous in our lives could lead to bigger and better things – and far bigger crowds at the polls. //// Nathan Samsonoff is an electromechanical designer at Idea Couture. He is based in Toronto, Canada.

Reimagining Innovation by dr. eitan buchalter and dr. tom chatfield

What do we mean when we talk about “innovation”? Do we really know what we’re talking about or where it should take us? Anthropologist Dr. Eitan Buchalter and tech philosopher Dr. Tom Chatfield debate what it means to reimagine innovation, and how to find a signal amid the 21st century’s noise. // Dreaming is a vastly underrated human habit: a gift for asking what other ways the world could be, or what something entirely apart from actuality might look like. //

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Dear Tom,

Every time I hear a discussion about the meaning of innovation, I see people marooned on the island of “What is it?” – with only a glimmer of hope to one day be rescued and returned to the land of “How can we make the best use of it?” How can we change this? First, I think we need to stop wasting our time and energy trying to pin down precise meanings. There is such a huge overlap between “innovation,” “invention,” and “creativity” that we are best off using these words interchangeably. It’s not that they mean exactly the same thing, it’s just that trying to define their differences creates an overwhelming distraction. Then, we face a second problem. All these words are claimed, time and time again, by people, organizations, and even governments who wish to appear as (and probably are) advocates for progress. But they remain uncommitted to embracing the uncertainty and risk critique for connecting words to actions. They want the talk without the walk. I think we need to get personal. We need to lose the generalizations and start talking about the language someone individually develops for innovating: how they personally seek to synthesize their experiences into meaning. This means that innovation can be an extraordinary synthesis of elements that other people would never connect – a kind of private language. It might, for example, mean establishing a “conversation” between some flies, dog urine, the pancreas, and your curiosity – as the story goes with Banting and Macleod’s discovery of insulin. If we’re trying to reimagine the language of innovation, we need to accept that the problem has nothing to do with a lack of clarity, but rather that we think lack of clarity is bad. It’s the ability to loosen our grip on clarity that enables us to innovate. If we pin something down with general terms in an effort to make it clear, we disregard experiences that have the potential to inform innovative thinking. Here’s what I’m proposing to begin our debate, then: there needs to be an iterative, conversational process occurring in the minds of innovators as they process their experiences. Over time, innovators will develop a sense of what deserves attention, what connections can be made between their experiences, and how. And here’s a question for you: given that innovation will manifest itself differently for each person, how can we (e.g. communities, organizations, and governments) possibly create an environment where everyone's innovation can flourish? Best wishes, Eitan

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Dear Eitan,

I think you’re right to highlight precision as a trap. It’s only too easy to dissect the diction of those who disagree with you as if it were decisive evidence of their idiocy (and your cleverness) and much harder to leave yourself open to multiple perspectives, to refuse to disregard others’ views. When answering this, though, I’m perhaps more interested than you in the idea of outcomes as opposed to processes. Aren’t outcomes the only bedrock upon which we can rest our hopes for innovation, given how suspicious we are of hair-splitting semantics? If we want to help as many different people as possible, isn’t it above all a focus on outcomes that will let us address them coherently? Learning and growth and ideas can all be outcomes, of course. But in reimagining innovation, I find myself looking for a historical sense to inform any description. One demand we can’t escape is that innovation is somehow new, different, surprising: a surplus to what has come before. How can we hope to generalize this without losing the openness and individuality you highlight? Here, I look towards the difference between robust and fragile attitudes. When it comes to predicting success, my favorite rule of thumb comes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who advises: don’t try. Attempting to predict the exceptional is inherently a mug’s game. Instead, devote your energies to understanding the differences between the likelihood of failure and the potential for success. Failure, in Taleb’s terminology, tends to be associated with fragility: something brittle, like glass, that shatters when it is exposed to sufficient stress. Ways of thinking, systems of government, lifestyles – these can be fragile if they are too tightly constrained, too reliant upon the delusion that all future possibilities can be anticipated. Instead, he advises, make yourself “anti-fragile” by being sufficiently flexible – develop the strength that comes from being buffeted by smaller shocks and stresses, rather than shielded. Don’t buy into the delusion of risk-free possibilities. Don’t stay the same in the face of challenges, but instead aim to become better under their influence. Get rid of all that is inflexible, foolish, and self-deluding. How are we going to reimagine the language of innovation in these terms? I would start with a stripping away: getting rid of excuses, pre-digested assumptions, and places to hide. What do you think? Best wishes, Tom

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Dear Tom,

Let’s begin with outcomes and processes – because I don’t think we are really in disagreement here. Outcomes are extremely important, yes. But there’s a paradox that needs to be spelled out. If we wish to unlock the potentials that innovations promise us, then we need to fully embrace the uncertain nature inherent in innovation. This means accepting that innovators can’t predict their outcomes – and if you ask them to do so, you are diminishing their ability to innovate. If you really care about reimagining innovation, you have to focus on the process of innovation and trust that good things will come. In a very Talebian sense, the history of scientific (and other) discoveries shows us that we can’t predict what information will eventually be useful. This means that if we wish to create an environment that actively supports innovation, we can’t also ask our innovators to plot their anticipated progress in milestones or a logical roadmap. Instead, I would argue, we should invest in making sure that individuals learn to recognize and develop their personal style of innovation. We should provide an environment where ideas can flourish. We should then trust that great innovations will emerge. This sounds risky, I know, but we don’t have a choice. Having said this, I think it is important to place some realistic parameters on how we support innovation. Let’s say we provide an environment that is ideal for innovation and we trust that good innovations will eventually come. At this point I think it would be right to judge innovators based on outcomes and timescales appropriate for their specific context. Even this, however, is not without its dangers. Some of our most important discoveries came after decades of work, with very little to show for it along the way. For instance, the joke goes that Sanger published twice and got a Nobel Prize each time. I’m not sure our current system would be prepared to wait for another Sanger. As I set out at the beginning, I think that each individual’s language of innovation comes down to finding a way of listening to, and being guided by, their materials. In this sense, I think Taleb’s notion of fragility speaks about humility in relation to who or what may inform one’s next steps. We must become okay with uncertainty; we must be able to trust that something good will come, eventually; we must ask what it means, institutionally and culturally, to embrace this. Best, Eitan

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Dear Eitan,

You mention the biochemist Frederick Sanger – who, alongside his two Nobel Prizes, described himself as “just a chap who messed about in a lab.” This embodies humility, but it also seems worth taking seriously as an example of the language in which he chose to describe his work. Whenever I think about my own field, writing, and what mysterious attributes might connect all those who have achieved great and innovative things within it, the one point I keep coming back to is simply that they wrote: they found a way of living that enabled the work to come, either because of or despite everything else. They built lives that worked for them. Going back to Sanger, I’m not saying his modesty is a universal model. It wouldn’t suit everyone; it wouldn’t be honest on many lips. What I believe he found was a perspective on his own life and work that was a piece of his personality, his field, his materials, and all the attendant uncertainties and possibilities they brought. We both know that language alone cannot do this. One thing many of my friends and colleagues would note, I know, is that financial security is a fine thing for those wishing to bring themselves to bear upon any field; that practical and emotional support doesn’t hurt; and that self-realization, modesty, and honesty don’t guarantee much. In other words, luck and circumstances count for a great deal. If you wish to be good and to do good – first, be lucky. Be born to loving parents, into comfort, into health and security. Then, goodness and good things are yours for the taking. If, instead, you are born into desperate need, suffering, conflict, and loss, you may nevertheless achieve wonders – but it will be far more difficult. And this suggests a question to send back to you. Whose language – whose view of the world and of the place of innovation within it – do we most wish to see re-examined; taken apart and put back together again? Whose minds are most in need of changing, and how might they be persuaded? Very best wishes, Tom

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Dear Tom,

Let’s start with an assumption, and see where it can take us in answering your questions. When thinking about what we can do to help people become better innovators, we cannot hope to target our efforts on a specific demographic or a particular innovative trait. Who would we target and what traits would we seek to instill? Instead, I think we're better off focusing on strategies that help individuals learn to listen to, speak on, and develop their ideas. How can we do this? I think your notion to always keep “doing” is absolutely the right principle for achieving this. I also think that, from a young age, we should highlight this “doing” as something we value and that needs looking after. We need to stop breaking things or applying bad lessons. The kind of “doing” demanded for innovation is innate. When we're young, we are good at innovating – we create without fixating on a specific endpoint, we allow ideas to develop organically based on intuition, interest, and curiosity. This is a basic human instinct – we call this play. However, as a society we largely see play – and more importantly playfulness (as this is the first iteration or display of our innovative behavior) – as trivial. Play is something children do and certainly not as serious or as important as literacy or numeracy. Furthermore, being playful is often a euphemism for naughtiness. Our education systems have created generations of people who resist their natural playfulness. This is a real problem. I believe that if we elevate the educational value of playfulness or innovation, we can affect a meaningful change in nurturing the next generation of expert innovators. We don’t need to change human nature. We all start out in life with the raw materials for innovation (serious, rigorous playfulness). I believe we have to carve out a space within education where children can fine-tune their playful and innovative thinking. And this space has to matter. If it’s not important for government targets or OECD league tables, for example, then, with the best will in the world, innovation will remain marginalized and we will struggle to fulfill the promise of innovation we so eagerly desire. Our job is to make sure we nurture our innate playfulness in a way that enables us to transition innovation from a niche skill into standard behavior. We are well on our way towards achieving this with literacy – so why not innovation? Best, Eitan

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Dear Eitan,

Nurturing playfulness: now there’s a recommendation I can get behind! I don’t want to bring too much autobiography in at this late stage, but I know that we are both the parents of young children, and that much of our time over the last few years has been spent both watching the development of language in a young mind, and working out for ourselves how to communicate with lives whose every day is a process of experiment-through-play. It strikes me, here, that one maxim of good parenting is also a maxim for nurturing innovation more broadly – what your child desperately needs (and what you may feel desperately short of) is your time and your total attention. My son learns the power and the fertility of language by twisting, turning, playing, laughing, taking a delight in throwing words at his parents and seeing how they react. We read, play, laugh, explain, explore. When taking play seriously, this is what comes to me: the need for spaces both within education and beyond it, where time, attention, love, and permission are priorities. What do international organizations turn to when trying to measure innovation? The 2014 Global Innovation Index uses no fewer than 81 indices to make its assessment. What interests me more though, is that the “outputs” it cares about fall into just two broad categories, those of “knowledge and technology” and those counted as “creative.” The summary offered in its foreword of the necessary conditions of breeding these is impressively pithy: “In order to build an innovation-driven nation, we need to educate our people well, and to provide them enough resources and incentives to chase their dreams.” I like the word “dreams” in particular. Like play, dreaming is a vastly underrated human habit: a gift for asking what other ways the world could be, or what something entirely apart from actuality might look like. Do we live in a society whose people can dream freely and passionately, informed by a rich grasp of their world? Here’s a manifesto for us both. Let’s strip away some false consciousness, some poor priorities, and some ignorance about what humans are best at. Let’s lose our contempt for pottering, playfulness, self-delight. And let’s find ways to attack, as best we can, the neo-Darwinian faith in an unfettered single path called progress. Let’s reimagine innovation by mobilizing some serious incentives around our dreams. With very best wishes, Tom

Dr. Eitan Buchalter is a senior resident anthropologist at Idea Couture. He is based in London, United Kingdom. Dr. Tom Chatfield is a writer, broadcaster, and tech philosopher. He is based in London, United Kingdom.

by dr. ted witek

A Deliberate Dismantling for Creative Destruction The recognition of the need to relearn most often precedes the step of unlearning. In other words, the realization that something has to change often forces the revamping of a procedure, removal of a policy, or refinement of a process.

Unlearning in this context is a removal of a belief or abandonment of a way of working. In some ways, it relates to what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” which, in simple terms, frees resources for new things. As expanded by Richard Foster, it is crucial to get rid of something while in the process of innovating in order to remain committed to the new, and not simply improve the old. Thus, unlearning is getting rid of something. It’s creative destruction. The unlearning process can be applied to simple processes in our lives, like how we communicate or go about daily routines; it is also applicable to tasks in which there is perhaps much more at stake, such as a presidential election or a long adhered to business model.

PHOTO: DR. TED WITEK

THE UN LEARNING S TAG E OF RE LEARNING

Unlearning cluttered thinking to communicate with crispness

But that’s how we do things here, son

The media is (not always) the message

What do I really mean by unlearning? One example involves presentations that are given to the C-suite. Our early days as students and developing managers seem to have been rooted in the necessity of detail, covering all possible scenarios and getting approval for actions. But, while there is never an excuse for not knowing your material, you don’t need a 100 MB PowerPoint file either. Often to the shock of a presenter about to pull up this file, I would ask: “We have 20 minutes; do you intend to show all 59 slides?” The answer that they were “mostly back-up” was typically followed by a rapid advancement to slide 20, leaving behind the introductory material with which I was already familiar. The unlearning in this case involves removal of the often-easier route of information overload and replacing it with the actual key issue at hand. The task is being able to crisply articulate the issues, the options, and recommendations. There are the only really three slides I ever asked to see. Unlearn the overload – then relearn the crisp.

There are times when organizations foster clutter, requiring its leadership to unlearn some highly effective/lowly efficient policies and procedures – often rooted in the days of typewriters and carbon copies. At one organization I worked at, for example, requests for travel approval required a rather detailed explanation of purpose, submitted in a paper folder, approved by the immediate manager, and then signed off by the CEO. This leader was clearly in command of the organization. In fact, at least six sets of hands touched this folder over the course of a few days. What unlearning is required in this case? Here are just three points to consider: first, develop good managers and unlearn the need to know every detail; second, you can have an awareness of your organization while unlearning the need to rely on a frustrating process to do so; and last, but certainly not least, unlearn micromanagement and learn to let go. The relearning here was about being concise and empowering employees, while maintaining awareness and control. It was possible to create a paperless policy that would take minutes instead of days and met all the objectives: a one-line email to a manager (for approval) with a copy to the CEO (for awareness), and a green light to proceed if not responded to within 24 hours, plus random brief audits to confirm all is in order. Crisp, efficient, and empowering.

While these previous examples highlight how unlearning and relearning can benefit individuals and organizations, let’s discuss the larger applications – and implications – of the process. The level of unlearning required to change a deeprooted process or business model can be challenging, which begs the question: Can the business survive if unlearning requires these roots to be severed? Looking at the the coverage during the Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012, the utility of print media messaging had been long established – but the trend of social media had seen its inflection point, and the Obama team saw it. There is a widespread belief that the Obama team out-mastered opponents McCain and Romney in the utilization of social media. What unlearning could have been involved here? It was not as straightforward as unlearning an old technology to make space for a new one. In fact, according to a Pew Research Center report, McCain supporters were slightly more likely to be internet users than Obama supporters (likely due to socioeconomic status and levels of education). On her blog Media Psychology, Dr. Pamela Rutledge notes that it was not the number of likes or posts, but rather the user engagement that the Obama team fostered. There was an unlearning of mass media messaging to give way to a technology fostering of peer-to-peer interaction – the ever-effective word of mouth. By 2012, the Obama campaign continued to foster this relearned strategy, with a digital campaign spend of $47 million to Romney’s $4.7 million.

// Optimal relearning is driven not by incremental adjustments, but most often by dismantling a process, policy, or procedure. //

The doctor will see you now... or will she? In other industries, the unlearning process begins slowly, if at all. Take the pharmaceutical industry, for example. It has long relied on the face-to-face interaction between their sales representatives and prescribing physicians in order to convince medical professionals of the scientific merits of their medicines. Year after year, however, the sustainability of this model comes into question, as it continues to command high budgets and resources. With increasing difficulty to access prescribers, and a per-visit cost typically exceeding $200, we can track a year by year downward trend in the number of companies maintaining this practice, but never an overarching demise.

It’s time to get deliberate There has been very little unlearning or creative destruction when it comes to this model, but there have been several attempts to build on the existing infrastructure. Pharmaceutical companies have started using digital alternatives to in-person meetings, such as “e-detailing” or “virtual sales representatives.” There are few success stories. Granted, some firms have recognized the growing importance of patients being able to choose between several treatment options – but these are all in addition to the traditional in-person experience. The room has been filling with water year after year, but as long as the head stays above water, the model persists. Will the increased inefficiencies, costs, and access difficulties be enough for pharma to unlearn? Or will the creative destruction of the model come from the hands of others? This highlights the difficulty in unlearning when there is so much at stake, and when conditions allow one to repeatedly try it again, year after year. Will the first to jump lose it all? Will total abandonment push even the most innovative drug product to a commodity for bazaar-like bargaining between drug company and payer? What exactly needs to be unlearned? It likely involves a parallel unlearning by a group of stakeholders, where pharma unlearns to gild the lily on true value and let the drugs mostly speak for themselves, while payers unlearn to force field every new product. The subsequent relearning could finally unleash pharma’s true value to public heath.

The need to relearn manifests in most aspects of our personal and professional lives, as the urge for things to change is a frequent and natural occurrence. Optimal relearning is driven not by incremental adjustments, but most often by dismantling a process, policy, or procedure. While often difficult, unlearning allows for a more deliberate relearning and, in many instances, liberates a host of resources for the relearning process and its benefits – until it’s time to start unlearning again. //// Dr. Ted Witek is a senior fellow at the Institute of Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation at the University of Toronto Dalla Lana School of Public Health, and senior vice president of corporate partnerships at Theravance. He is based in Toronto, Canada and San Francisco, United States.

htc.com

by maya shapiro If you haven’t begun to think about Germany as the epicenter of refugee resettlement in Europe, you probably haven’t been paying very much attention. With a reputation among asylum seekers as being stable, corruption-free, and open to refugee acceptance – and with political leadership that has everything to gain from making bold, humanitarian-focused promises – Germany is primed to be the destination for one million asylum seekers by the end of this year. Hundreds of thousands of people have

Taking a closer look at Germany’s response to the refugee crisis

already arrived in the country over the past few months, causing massive bureaucratic backlogs, as most have no prior registration as asylum seekers. Subsequently, Germany is facing logistical, administrative, and social challenges that are unprecedented in its own history and in the history of Europe as a whole. At the same time, the country is set up for enormous opportunity and positive cultural shifts. Employment levels are high, the economy is good, judicial systems are strong, and large cities like Berlin, Hamburg, and Cologne are full of vibrant, liberal populations that see value in

It must be an interesting time to be engaged with refugee issues in Germany. What sorts of local initiatives have you seen around you? How do you see them playing out over the next few months? Yes, it is an extraordinary time in Germany. So many initiatives have started in Berlin, in particular. There is Flüchtlinge Wilkommen (Refugees Welcome), Airbnb for refugees, and many Berlin-based Facebook groups through which people are trying to give things away for free or provide housing and food. There is a lot of desire to help. On the surface, this is all great. However, there is also a lot of complexity involved in these initiatives with regard to the national identity of German citizens. Over the past several years, there has been a strong inclination to do very public acts of welcoming and assisting refugees, not only as a response to crisis, but also in order to counteract the political and social rise of neo-Nazi groups in Germany who act violently towards migrants and refugees. My thought is that these public acts, as immediately helpful as they are, can distort the actual analysis of what is needed. For example, when people applaud at the train station, who is that for? And what does it mean in the long-run? What is it really doing for refugee rights?

turning asylum seekers into fully enfranchised citizens. If there were ever a time or place to reimagine and reinvent refugee settlement, this is it. MISC spoke to Kate Sheese, an advocate, educator, and PhD student in the department of Critical Social/Personality Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), who is currently living in Berlin and preparing for in-field doctoral research on responses to the refugee crisis. We asked Kate what was new and different about how Berliners are conceiving of the crisis and attempting to reshape the conversation.

PHOTO: MONTECRUZ FOTO

In the Eye of the Storm

What you’re describing is reminiscent of the “charity model,” on both an individual and a national level. It’s an older framework for helping. Do you see any organizations that are taking a different, more novel approach? It’s true, the “charity model” has been around a long time, and it can often be more about one’s own salvation and self reassurance, rather than actually helping those in need to rise up. Nevertheless, there have been several improvements on this model, particularly within the world of education. Public universities around Germany, for example, are starting to take notice of the influx of asylum seekers, and are offering spaces in their classes to newcomers. This is part of a bigger movement that is based on the idea that migrants should have the opportunity to study in order to make their integration process more meaningful and fulfilling. It is a direct response to classic forms of what has been called “integration” in Germany and other parts of Europe. This happens through “integration classes” that are offered free to migrants to give them information about German culture and promote assimilation. Offering post-secondary education to refugees, on the other hand, is more about mutual integration; everybody is part of a shared learning experience. This model takes into account that

// When people applaud at the train station, who is that for? And what does it mean in the long-run? What is it really doing for refugee rights? //

people have a capacity, a desire, and a drive to participate in scholarship. A particularly different take on this idea is Kiron University. This is a group that I’ve been observing and participating in for the past few months. It is an online university that, as of October 15, 2015, offers free undergraduate degree programs to refugees anywhere in the world. You could be in a refugee camp, or in the middle of applying for refugee status, or a landed asylum seeker. Students take the first two years of their programs through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The idea is that the third and final year will be offered through one of Kiron’s partner universities, which are all in Germany, for now. This feels new because, unlike the charity model, participating in an educational community is a dialogue. Refugees are expected to bring their own expertise and interests. It’s not just about learning the customs of the place, or adopting the ways of the new land. How does Kiron University perceive the problem at hand? Many refugees spend a lot of time unemployed. Even if they get permits (and some never do), and even if they find work, they are underemployed. People can spend years here not able to do anything at all, so they feel as though they are stuck in the mud, not moving forward. Studying offers some meaningful intellectual and personal stimulation that gives people the sense of moving towards a goal. Education also offers them the possibility of

moving into the labor market with more achievements under their belt. But Kiron’s initiative is as much about the problems with education as it is about the problems with being a refugee. The mission statement of the organization is “rethinking university,” so it intrinsically involves evaluating the set of practical and bureaucratic challenges that negatively affect refugees and asylum seekers and hinder them from accessing education. Challenges include: the lack of documentation, limited capacity of traditional (physical) universities, and tuition fees. Kiron University also recognizes that refugees may have particular social-psychological needs that may interfere with their ability to complete a degree program. From my observations, the group largely conceives of these as being either the result of prior trauma (in their countries of origin, in dangerous flight experiences) or other types of individual challenges related to integrating into a new society. It’s a huge undertaking, both conceptually and practically. Where does the organization get its resources? Kiron’s headquarters are based in Berlin and, at the moment, everyone involved in getting the project off the ground is a volunteer. One of the main issues seems to be securing funding to pay people to be able to work with Kiron full-time. So far, the organization has relied on grants from different foundations interested in funding social innovation projects. There was also a recent crowdfunding campaign that raised over ¤1 million. Right now, the incredible amount of work done solely by a team of volunteers is quite impressive, but it is also a little scattered and perhaps unsustainable. What other hurdles are there for the sustainability of the organization? One of the main challenges I see here is how to keep thinking very carefully about both the global and local dimensions of displaced peoples’ experiences. Refugees and asylum seekers may have many similarities, but they also have significant differences in terms of rights, protections, and resources available to them in different places. Then there are different forms of oppression based on nationality, religion, gender, etc. At the moment, Kiron seems to be offering a one-size-fits-all model, and I think the group will need to be prepared to deal with quite different realities if the university really wants to be accessible to any and all refugees. And, of course, it’s not just a practical or bureaucratic challenge. The conception of the problem of refugee education as an administrative one only goes so far. It’s a structural issue. There needs to be a political analysis of the problem as well.

reputation. In fact, Germany’s official commitment was specifically about disregarding the Dublin Accord [that states that migrants can only apply for asylum in the first EU country they enter], and applied mostly to Syrian refugees, which obviously left out a lot of other groups of refugees. In addition to that, two days after [Merkel] made those comments, there was a security closure that actually made it more difficult – in a physical way – for asylum seekers to come through. Even in the Schengen Area [the passport-free EU travel

zone], trains were being stopped. At the policy and public consciousness level, I think it was important that Merkel made those overtures, even if her subsequent actions did not reflect the promise. The rhetoric can be powerful and motivating. Ultimately, though, it’s important for people to take a more critical look at what actually happens on the ground. //// Maya Shapiro is a resident anthropologist at Idea Couture. She is based in Toronto, Canada.

// There has been a strong inclination to do very public acts of welcoming and assisting refugees, not only as a response to crisis, but also in order to counteract the political and social rise of neo-Nazi groups in Germany who act violently towards migrants and refugees. //

PHOTO: MSTYSLAV CHERNOV

That brings us back to a broader question. Germany has been called the “conscience of Europe” with respect to the country’s response to the influx of asylum seekers. Do you get the sense that Germans and the German government see themselves that way? When that particular phrasing came about, it was in response to when Angela Merkel was making big public statements about accepting refugees into Germany. At that point, the media seemed to really get interested in Germany’s

Torsion >> Bright Nickel with Maple Blades and optional Light

Celebrating the modern idiom modernfan.com

by paul hartley

Business research has a fatal flaw: it has an obsession with simplicity. People who do research for business are asked to create simple descriptions of the lives, thoughts, behaviors, and emotions of the consumer or user. They are expected to create insights that can be quickly understood and serve as the foundation for strategic decisions. But people are not simple, and any attempt to simplify them, or their social world, can be more of a destructive act than a clarifying one. Nevertheless, the relentless search for simplicity dominates how research is done in contemporary business.

Uncovering how business research obscures the realities it is trying to understand. PHOTO: NICK PAGE

Making It Too Real: Reification and Research in the “Real World”

The problem shows up in a number of places. There is a strong requirement for simple language, which is not necessarily a problem in itself, except that sometimes clear, but more complicated prose is denigrated as “too academic” or difficult. There is a preference for the executive summary over deeper, more complete descriptions. This is troubling because, although it is true people do not have a lot of time to read, a detailed understanding of their research subject is necessary to make appropriate strategic decisions. More often than not, executive summaries cannot deliver this information. In research, the preference for simplicity appears in an industry-wide desire for causal explanations (called drivers) of human action. It is also seen in the obsession with “needs” – constructs loosely based on Abraham Maslow’s now largely outdated, 75 year old theory of basic human psychological states.

The danger with this obsession is that by attempting to create simple explanations of people and their behavior, business researchers actually build a portrait of the world that creates a false reality rather than reflecting the rich chaos of everyday life. The pursuit of simple explanations has created abstractions like the “consumer,” the average shopper retailers call “she,” and the tech industry’s “user.” Through a process called riefication, these abstractions are made to be more real than actual human beings. This is a problem because the more real the consumer becomes, the farther we are from lived realities. This obsession with simplicity has forced researchers into a difficult situation: they must work in a complex world filled with incongruities, paradoxes, and irrational action, but must describe it to an audience expecting clean, rational, and causal explanations. To meet these demands, they often resort to reductionist descriptions, where the detail is stripped away in favor of a common denominator. This can be done carefully, but researchers often go too far. Many market researchers often reduce the complexity of what they see to the point where their explanatory model is no longer sufficient to actually explain everything that is going on. They do this by using tools designed to eliminate particularities and differences, such as personas, quant, big data, and discussion guides. These tools allow researchers to immediately eliminate the personal and the chaos of someone’s real life. They stop speaking about people and refer only to the consumer or the user – considering only the abstraction their tools and processes created. When considered together, reification and reductionism are the primary mechanisms through which business research creates simple views of the world around its research subjects. The category of the consumer is a perfect example of these errors in action. Put simply, consumers do not really exist. People exist, and they are sometimes consumers. The consumer as a concept is really an extension of the homo economicus, the rational human being at the center of economists’ models of economic action. For economists seeking simple, rational explanations of individual behavior, the consumer is a person who makes decisions to purchase something and is able to successfully execute this action by evaluating their options. They are a paragon of rational thought and behavior. Immediately, we can see this consumer is actually just an abstraction, one created to fill a model. It is certainly a poor way to describe a complete person. It is more of a description of a social role that every one of us inhabits now and then. Why, then, do businesses not try to understand when people are consumers, rather than just classifying them as solely consumers?

The answer is because it is difficult to deal with the complexity of people. It is much easier to focus only on what is immediately relevant to a business. Viewing a human being who is a complex entity with a rich social life solely through the lens of their purchasing preferences eliminates the need to examine their consumer behavior in light of their complexity. Because this preference has been normalized across business research, “the consumer” has actually replaced “a person” entirely. Human beings have been reduced to their consumption behavior and the consumer has been reified – made more real than a person – to facilitate strategic decisionmaking. This preference declares that it is the consumer that is real. The person is just a problematic overcomplication. The simplicity of this reified category is more valuable than the complex reality it hides. Today, the consumer is the unquestioned central figure in business research. Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year trying to analyze, categorize, and describe them. However, there are alternatives that would provide a more engaged, empathetic, and strategically useful view of humans and their behaviors. Contemporary anthropology, sociology, and culture studies, for instance, provide alternatives that benefit from recent developments in social theory and process. But their perspectives remain marginalized in the sphere of business research. To build a simple model of human behavior, one has to first believe that we can observe all of the moving parts and understand them independently. For instance, it is only possible to see behavior causally (governed by behavioral or emotional drivers) if you understand everything about what is involved and can trace the possible outcomes. You have to isolate how one thing drives another. Thus, the obsession with simplicity is actually a major statement in an argument about epistemology – about how human beings make sense and understand the world. It is also a major statement about how we learn the truth of things. To be specific, the attempt to make things simple involves employing an empirical positivist epistemological view. A positivist believes we can only know the world through direct experience – more often than not, through empirical observation. A more extreme positivist believes that whatever we experience about the world is true, and that this is the only truth we can gather. Whatever we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell can be considered fact. It also means that we cannot intuit information about the world beyond our experiences – but this is not necessarily the way we understand reality. Empirical positivism works best in the hard sciences. Geology, astronomy, experimental physics, chemistry, biology, amongst others, hold this epistemological

perspective because it is the foundation of experimental science or observational description. But it’s difficult to apply to the social sciences. One cannot describe a person as one observes a rock or a chemical reaction. Knowing that a person is a certain height, a certain age, lives in a certain kind of house, and has two children does not tell us much about them at all. But strangely, this is exactly what business research tries to do, although it uses demographics and psychographic observations for its descriptions. This means that business research – in its attempt to make things simple – has become a positivistic science about humans. The problem with this view, is that it is formed out of a desperate desire for science to be applicable to all things, including humans. Positivists not only believe that science can tell us what we need to know about everything, they assume that it is the method through which everything will become known. However, a complete understanding of human behavior has always eluded science. Business research relies on the belief that humans and human behavior can be examined using the same empirical perspective and experimental methods as the natural sciences. Believing this causes researchers to fall into a deterministic view of humans, and to describe a subject’s behavior as the outcome of their make-up. Seeing this as problematic, business researchers found alternatives to this deterministic perspective in the more positivistic social sciences, like psychology. As Hartmut Berghoff, Philip Scranton, and Uwe Spiekermann point out in their article The Origins of Marketing and Market Research, “roughly speaking, there are two schools of marketing thought. One favors psychology and science whereas the other privileges statistics by analyzing demographic and other data.” Although they are somewhat different, both share an empirical positivistic view and use methods inspired by experimental science. Their error is not in the intention, but in the process. By believing that we can “science” about humans in the same way that we do rocks, chemicals, and planets, we make the mistake that the truth of human interactions and intentions are not found in the characteristics of the person, but in the relationships between people, objects, and ideas. Instead of being too complicated for current science to fully understand, human behavior involves a number of massively complex relationships that defy strict causality. There may be no laws of thermodynamics, or Newtonian laws of human behavior like there are for motion. Additionally, you cannot set up objective experiments to analyze the complexity of behaviors like purchasing decisions. The belief that this is possible is a legacy of business research’s positivistic outlook. This is made

// This obsession with simplicity has forced researchers into a difficult situation: they must work in a complex world filled with incongruities, paradoxes, and irrational action, but must describe it to an audience expecting clean, rational, and causal explanations. //

PHOTO: D26B73; PREVIOUS; D26B73

more problematic by the fact that “in order to come closer to understanding markets, marketing experts struggle to reduce complexity in a trial-and-error fashion without a specific theory of how to accomplish this task. This approach generates error-prone simplifications.” Reification is the result of this ad-hoc approach to reducing complexity. Personas may perhaps be one of the most problematic constructions in business research. They do not play a role in contemporary anthropology or sociology, and are only found in research for business and marketing. They are also the product of several stages of reductionism and reification, built upon the belief that the construction of a statistically probable average will be more true than other methods. Their origin lies in the development of the concept of “Mrs. Consumer” which, according to Sean Nixon in his article Mrs. Housewife and the Ad Men: Advertising, Market Research and Mass Consumption in Post War Britain, was the product of market researchers “assembling the modern housewife” to benefit “various interventions into domestic living by helping to consolidate the figure of the average housewife as a knowable social type upon whom manufacturers and advertisers could act.” Their purpose was to create a new social role for women to inhabit, rather than to explain what was going on in people’s homes. Most commonly, persona development begins with some qualitative and quantitative research. Both start with the development of a questionnaire, and each questionnaire is designed to capture a range of demographic and psychographic information to elicit direct, pointed responses. Its purpose is to discover the innate qualities of a pre-selected group of people so that they can be properly “understood.” The researchers then take these questionnaires and bring them to a suitably large number of people. Conventional wisdom says that the larger the number of people (the “n”) the better the results. Once both the qual and quant phases have been completed, the data is crunched to yield insights across a number of metrics predetermined by the research team. These insights capture the average responses that represent the actual answers given by the respondents in the study. Once completed, the researchers then move to create segments by parsing the data and finding several populations that share common traits and dispositions. Once the segments have been solidified, the researchers develop personas to bring them to life as profiles of fictional individuals. They are built to represent the average and are given demographic and psychographic attributes collected by the study, embodying the insights as if they were real people.

Every step of this process is devoted to reducing the complexity of real life, and developing a perspective on a statistically probable average. This means there is a danger of being too reductionist at each step. First of all, the development of the questionnaires is often a process that begins before the research has started. The researchers develop a perspective of what they want to learn while creating a profile of the kind of people they should speak to. This means the questionnaires and the sample pool are intended to only examine a subset of what is actually going on outside their doors. Done properly, this work is conducted after some initial exploratory qualitative work. However, very often the sample segment and the questionnaires are built without this prior phase of research, and are thus burdened by assumptions that are effectively unacknowledged hypotheses. Although this may seem relatively innocent, researchers may not actually be couching their questions in the right language, or may be asking the wrong questions, while answers are reduced to simple responses to prompts. Once the questionnaires have been coded and analyzed, market researchers then move to develop segments. Segmentation is a difficult task, because there is rarely any clear way to prioritize similarity and difference. Most often, the segments are built around clusters of people who have the same demographic characteristics and answered the questions in different ways. The segments are supposed to represent subsets of the sample that answered the questions differently than other people, and have a contradictory view about the subject at hand. However, the process of clustering is an act of reductionism. By clustering data together, one creates a category based on similarity that eliminates any differences. Making distinctions between categories shows a prefernce for difference over similarity. More often than not, the process of doing segmentation has more to do with these decisions than the data set. As a result, segments are actually analytical constructions created by the researchers. Once the segments have been built, the development of personas begins. The purpose of the personas is to be an exemplar of the segments that can be used to guide strategic action. While they are useful in socializing the insights found in the research, they are the products of the most problematic act of reification. A persona is actually a tool designed to eliminate the richness of individual lives and replace it with an archetype. It is the product of a series of reductions and simplifications. Its relationship to the people who participated in the study is tenuous at best. The “scientific” processes that got the researchers to this point obscure that this distance exists. It affords them a sense of safety by

// Put simply, consumers do not really exist. People exist, and they are sometimes consumers. //

Instead, anthropologists and sociologists try to situate real people in the complicated network of relationships and trace the impact of actions upon actions. Researchers of this kind try to elevate the particulars of real life and not to efface the difficulties and complexities of difference. We allow the people we study to explain differences and commonalities, and create strategically important reports of how experience explains action. For contemporary business to adapt to the demands of innovation, it is important to transition away from trying to define people and assume that this explains them and their behavior. Instead, it is essential to not assume that people are static, definable entities. We should be working to study the impact of their decisions and the trajectories of their intentions. We should understand how their behavior is part of a complex set of social rules and constraints as well as intentional action. Instead of creating an artificial world of defined, rational behavior, we have to look at the chaos of real life and be satisfied that it is complicated. Business thinkers and business researchers need to come to terms with the complexity of real life and learn to deal with these complications at the level at which they are found. Innovative ideas cannot be built on inadequate views of human experience. //// Paul Hartley is head of human futures, senior resident anthropologist at Idea Couture. He is based in Toronto, Canada.

PHOTO: DOV HARRINGTON

guaranteeing their analytical decisions are sound. But what it actually does is allow a persona to become more real than the individuals in the study, because it is simpler to understand. This is amplified by the fact that when employees within a company talk about the personas over and over again, the personas live on while the participants in the study are quickly forgotten. The positivistic view of business research holds that these analytical constructions adequately reveal truths about people because they are the product of scientific processes. However, this perspective does not acknowledge the problems inherent in the sequence of simplifications and reification that gives rise to the personas. The belief in the infallibility of statistical methods and scientific analysis obscures the fact that human beings rarely share the characteristics of a statistical average. In fact, the larger the sample and the more variables measured, the less likely it is that someone in the study will resemble the average. For instance, if we take fifty body measurements and use them to understand someone’s body, the likelihood that any one of us resembles the average person (within two degrees of deviation) drops below five percent. An “average person” is itself actually a statistically produced fiction. The more people involved in the study, i.e. the higher the “n,” the lower the probability that any one person matches the average. The problem with personas is that they are a reification of a created individual that is more representative of a population than of individual people. Because these averages are functional fictions, they cannot represent individual experience. They cannot help us understand the nuance of human action, thought, or emotion. They cannot adequately describe the chaos of real life in a way that connects strategic decision makers to the contexts and behaviors of their customers. The alternative is to eliminate the positivistic view and conduct business research from a different perspective. Examining the traces of human action, the relationships between people and their environments, and the affective dimension of human behavior is the best place to start. These can only be captured in a different kind of ethnography, one that does not try to eliminate the individual and the particular, but seeks to describe and explain it. To understand people, we need to examine them as they are, and not create artificial portraits just because they are easier to manage. Contemporary anthropology and sociology offer the alternative. While researchers in these fields are still committed to empirical observation, the way that they tell the story of the people they study is quite different. Anthropologists are not positivists. There is no attempt to create fictional personas to stand in for a population.

HERE, IMAGINATION IS THE NEW CURRENCY

Umbra Shift is an extension of Umbra that focuses on contemporary influences in the design community. The result is a collection that expresses diverse points of view, yet sits together with a shared belief in ideas that are functional, familiar and forward thinking.

Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re looking for the next generation of artists, designers, inventors, digital innovators and cultural leaders. Find out how to put your imagination to work at ocadu.ca

Learn more about our design collaborators at umbrashift.com

Create/ Sarah McNair-Landry & Patrick Thompson

by mira blumenthal As the ice walls in Baffin Island rise and fall with the tides, visual artists Patrick Thompson, Alexa Hatanaka, and Danny Osborne have a short window in which to paint on the icy surfaces; they must work in tandem with nature to complete their task, both in terms of their timing and the materials they use. Gauge, the short film that explores the creation of this artwork under extreme temporal and environmental conditions, captures these short-lived paintings. The project brought together the artists with filmmakers Sarah McNair-Landry, Eric McNair-Landry, and Erik Boomer, and sound artist Raven Chacon, to create something uniquely engaging and

beautiful. The painted ice walls are presented in a ten-minute video loop â&#x20AC;&#x201C; offering the audience a glimpse into the enigmatic world of the Great White North. MISC interviewed director and Arctic explorer Sarah McNair-Landry and artist Patrick Thompson to learn more about this noteworthy project. Describe the role of temporality in the film and the transient nature of your artwork. Sarah: The artists had six hours to paint the ice wall as the tides dropped, then six hours later their art would be gone. Eric, Boomer, and myself were tasked with capturing the art before it disappeared under the water. At the time, this was quite stressful,

because we could never re-shoot a moment. Once the art was gone, it was gone. For me the process was quite unique. Often humans feel a need to leave their mark everywhere, but we were very careful not to leave our mark. This project taught me to appreciate the small moments, admire beautiful art, and let nature run its course. Patrick: Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve made hundreds of paintings in the streets that have all eventually been covered over by city workers or other artists, so saying goodbye to my work is not new to me. In a strange way, I actually feel like the art disappearing made the process even more satisfying â&#x20AC;&#x201C; we simply accepted that the pieces were temporary. This sense of calmness certainly made the

desperate scrambling over giant ice chunks, the falling into ice caves, and the freezing of our tools worth the effort. We could give the paintings everything we had for six hours, knowing that only the camera would remember the moment. What was the experience like working with food coloring and burnt cow bone on ice for the first time? Patrick: We had no idea how the food coloring and burnt cow charcoal would take to the ice, but we had a feeling it would work. Our team was very open minded; we went into it with the mentality that we would simply react to whatever results we produced. The ice on the walls was porous in places and rock hard

in others, and the color would either run, stick to, or soak into the surface. The temperature also affected the texture of the ice, of course. You can see a lot of these variations happening in the stop-motion video footage. Tell us a bit about the overall experience of painting in these extreme conditions. Patrick: As you can imagine, we faced many environmental challenges while working on a rising and falling ice wall while standing on shifting ocean ice in the freezing cold. There were many moments when I thought to myself, these kind of opportunities are what I live for. We experienced so many incredible moments (and accidents) while filming Gauge that could only ever have

happened during a project like this one, a project that was centered on experimentation and play. The limitations and challenges that you are forced to work under as an artist must be accepted and enjoyed. It is the struggle between expectations, experimentation, and expression that is a driving force in my work. For more information on Patrick Thompson or Alexa Hatanaka, visit pasystem.org or @thepasystem on Instagram. ////

Mira Blumenthal is an editor at Idea Couture. She is based in Toronto, Canada.

Create/ Daniel Fishel

by mira blumenthal Daniel Fishel is a New York based illustrator and hand letterer. He has been named one of Print Magazine’s 15 Under 30 New Visual Artists, and has had works published by The New York Times, GQ (US and Japan), The Globe & Mail, Buzzfeed, and McSweeny’s – to name a few. MISC interviewed Fishel about his artistic style and discussed how technology, fashion, and living in the Big Apple influences his art. How would you describe your artistic style? I draw and paint evocative figurative illustrations that conceptually illuminate the

tensions we have with ourselves, other people, and the things we own. Why do you prefer illustration and hand lettering rather than other types of visual art? I am drawn to how accessible illustration is. I can make something for a magazine, and, if you wanted to, you could buy that magazine for a few dollars and clip out my artwork. Although I greatly respect gallery art, having my work in a gallery would mean less people seeing it and even fewer being able to afford to buy it. Do you find that technology is central to

your art, or is the computer just a method through which you are able to express your artistic visions? I think it’s necessary that I incorporate technology into my artwork. Smartphones are ubiquitous in our daily lives, so if I didn’t include people taking selfies or taking photos of other people, places, or things, it would make some images feel less relevant to our present moment. With regard to how I create my pieces, using a computer is only half of my process. I draw my line work by hand using black acrylic paint and a brush, and I create textures using ink washes, linoleum cuts, xerox smudges, and many other materials. The computer allows

me to collage all of these elements in a way that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to do if I were using traditional media alone. Does your taste in clothes and music or your hobbies influence your art? Does living in New York? Sure! I like to think that the people I surround myself with, their fashion choices, as well as all of the experiences I go through, make a visual impact on what I create. A pattern on a shirt, an activity I take part in... all of these things play into the visual tones of what I make. New York is filled with all types of characters and personalities that make it hard to not want to include them, in some way, into a piece.

How has your style evolved in the last five years? The big difference between my work now and my work five years ago is that I am more interested in building worlds within my art and having it reflect my own unique view of the world through visual storytelling. Social media and technology have been excellent in helping me share my work, which has led to opportunities that I wouldn’t have been able to have 15 years ago. It has leveled the playing field so that I can shine as bright and be as important to consider for an assignment as someone who’s far more seasoned than me.

Who’s the coolest client or publication that you’ve drawn for? Getting to draw a series of reimagined tarot cards for the Portlandia Activity Book published by McSweeney’s was by far the coolest and most fun assignment I have ever worked on. They gave me a lot of freedom to interpret the cards conceptually and to be as funny or as dry as I wanted. For more information on Daniel Fishel, visit o-fishel.com or @o_fishel in Instagram. ////

Mira Blumenthal is an editor at Idea Couture. She is based in Toronto, Canada.

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R E T H I N K I N G

I N D U L G E N C E :

2 0 3 0

IN DUL GENCE

“I really shouldn't, but...”

by /

ROBERT BOLTON • EMILY EMPEL • JAMIE FERGUSON • M A T H E W L I N C E Z

feature designer /

ndulgence is the act of doing something special, something you know you shouldn’t do. It involves temporarily bending or breaking your personal rules and going beyond your usual behavioral boundaries.

INDULGENCE: A

COLLECTION OF FUTURE EXPERIENCES

Indulgences are exceptions. As humans, we live for them. They gratify our instinctual desires for pleasure. For consumers, they drive purchasing decisions. For brands, they represent an opportunity to connect viscerally with consumers, to create associations of bliss.

JULIE DO

Indulgence is an experience that blends the slight mischief of bending the rules, with a satisfying sense of fulfillment. In today’s world, it’s as much a candy bar as it is an expensive green juice. It’s the latest wearable device with a full-grain leather strap. It’s splurging on an Uber ride when public transit would have sufficed. Moments of indulgence are constantly being redefined by the evolving cultural codes that govern our desires and the emerging products, services, and interactions that meet those desires.

102 R E T H I N K I N G I N D U L G E N C E :

SPECIAL FEATURE

A COLLECTION OF FUTURE EXPERIENCES

leisure 02 intimacy 03 expression 04 nourishment 01

he objects of our indulgence are tied to notions of scarcity, as defined by individuals and by society. Scarcity may be self-imposed, as in when you choose to go on a diet and limit your intake of gluten. Scarcity may also be culturally dictated; the gluten example applies again. For instance, you eliminate gluten from your diet, except at the baseball game when a hotdog is allowed; a temporary suspension of the rules. You rationalize that the baseball game is a special occasion. But it’s about much more than trending diets. Generally when we talk about scarcity, we’re talking about constrained resources like water, oil, and coal. Or it’s our money, space, and time –things we have a limited amount of that can provide us with experiences of joy, satisfaction, and relief. So how do brands exploit the power of indulgence? How do we create desirable experiences of indulgence for consumers? Can we design for indulgence? At what point does indulgence become vice? How do we locate the sweet spot, a relatively harmless craving we feel we deserve?

While indulgence is personal, its parameters are in large part established by a shifting set of social norms. In this feature, we examine the future of indulgence, considering how current forces of change – as they play out over the coming decades – could influence the way consumers indulge. If we can make fair assumptions about what will be perceived as scarce, we can infer what will be perceived as indulgent. Here, we consider just one possible future scenario. Within it, we’ve carved out several vignettes that explore the nature of scarcity, desire, and indulgence. These fictions depict lived human experiences; each short narrative points to critical future considerations for brands that hope to understand and shape the future of indulgence. These considerations can be used to spark conversation about how insights from the future can be integrated into strategic dialogue today.

WEAK

SIGNALS

Weak signals are real-world data points that indicate a potentially significant change could be underway. We collected a series of weak signals that we suspect might influence the future of indulgence. Probing these signals – in light of the social, technological, economic, environmental, and political forces of change that inform our macro world – we generated several scenarios demonstrating how people may indulge in the years to come.

Macro Worldview: We’ve situated our thinking around indulgence in a world where many of the forces we see today continue their trajectory. Our scenarios are set in a future that brings to life the types of issues that are top of mind for businesses today, such as new notions of privacy and data use, the emerging meaning of luxury, and shifting need states as they relate to varied life stages. This world assumes continued environmental change, innovation in the food, energy, and digital technology sectors, as well as persisting cultural trends around sharing personal information online. The long-term effects of pollution mean breathable air is scarce. As a result, income inequality is echoed by an amplified disparity of life expectancy. For many, life is sealed inside apartments and offices, tubular walkways, artificial indoor parks, and malls. Maybe a few outdoor steps between buildings. A picnic at the biodome is something of an extravagance. Actually spending prolonged time outside is a whole other level of thrill, one prohibited by most life insurance and health plans. The idea of privacy is all but obsolete. Constant geolocation, biometric sensing, and cultural expectations of sharing personal information make anonymity scarce. And while the choice to opt-out of social sharing is allowed, it is uncommon, suspect to some, and even a little bit taboo. Moments of true privacy – of both solitude and intimacy – are to be savored. Innovations in food science provide more scalable, sustainable, and affordable synthetic alternatives. Nutrition is abundant, and the world’s food security issues are generally overcome. But a farm fresh meal is a rare experience. Demand for natural foods far outweighs supply. For those who can afford them, “real meals” offer a delicious connection to humanity’s farm heritage. People are left to make many of the same trade-offs they make today. Defining one’s lifestyle is a question of negotiating the right balance between privacy and publicity, convenience and quality, health and immediate gratification, personal enjoyment and the greater good of society.

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S P E C I A L F E A T U R E 105

LEISURE

by / MATHEW LINCEZ

Future Experience He’s had enough of staying in. After a while they all look, feel, and smell the same; the airports, hotels, restaurants, malls, business parks, and office towers. Hermetic homogeneity. He keeps a mental note of his personal risk assessment – he knows that HR and accounting are too. He’s been good this year, he hasn’t gone out in a while. But more and more, it feels like being caught in a rat maze.

LEISURE

INTIMACY

EXPRESSION

NOURISHMENT

In a densely populated and polluted megacity world, where breathing outside air can reduce your life expectancy and actually kill you, how will the wealthy experience the sounds, sights, and smells of city life?

Despite coming and going on those crisp new Hepa9 busses, the hotel staff are symptomatic – he catches them sneezing, wheezing, and finding it hard to catch their breath. It’s obvious they’re exposed more often than not. He wonders about the health of their children

compared to his own. It’s impossible to deny the difference between the haves and have nots, between his experience (and overall health) and theirs. Despite this, they seem happy. Happy to have a steady job with some benefits. And they’re free. It’s making him anxious. He thinks too much. Jogging on the treadmill 80 floors up in the hotel’s gym, he discerns that, while the view is spectacular, the novelty is gone. All megacities look the same from up here. He daydreams about walking and running outside through crowded streets and open-air markets. The noises, the smells, the textures.

THE

NOVELTY

GONE. ALL CITIES SAME HERE.

MEGA-

LOOK

FROM

THE

106

RETHINKING INDULGENCE: A COLLECTION OF FUTURE EXPERIENCES

Forgetting the past and ignoring the present weighs heavy on his mind. Several days ago, he rolled the window down during his ride in from the airport to feel the unfiltered breeze, despite the driver’s displeasure. The memory stuck with him all week.

The water runs down his face and neck, it’s on his hands and legs, he’s sweating and it’s soaking in. He must change and wipe down before it’s too late. There’s a vending machine with smog wipes, but it doesn’t take cash, only cards. Damn. They’ll know.

Tomorrow is a day off. No meetings, no work. After speaking with his kids, he decides to indulge in an orgy of exposure. He removes his watch (a company “gift”) and disconnects the chip in his sneakers. He leaves his smog mask behind. He dials the front desk and orders a car to take him away from the hotel – he can’t be seen leaving on foot. Shame. A mile or two, and the driver stops. After a few deep breaths from his inhaler, he steps out of the car and into the air, the noise, the tastes, the textures, and the smells. He starts jogging. It rains. He knew it would. It stops.

He turns back to the hotel, walking past security with his hand up: don’t ask. Going through the lobby, he ignores the concierge and takes the elevator up, going straight into the shower. On the phone he says, “A restorative cleanse please. Thank you.”

01: LEISURE

SPECIAL FEATURE

Considerations for the Future: Indulging in Culture

HR Support

Cascading Systems

As the gaps between those with and without resources become more profound, affluent consumers will seek

As a greater amount of employers collect deep analytics on their employees through personal tracking,

More businesses will invest in simulations that model how their product portfolios interact and influence the

new indulgences that allow them to disguise their true selves and immerse in culture at the edge. In this way, they are more easily able to integrate into a new environment without the risk of impacting their life score as it relates to categories such as pay or insurance premiums.

companies will be divided as to whether their HR programs are viewed as supporting or restricting an individual’s lifestyle and behaviors. HR functions will need to build their analytical capabilities in order to effectively structure remuneration, benefits, and coaching programs.

external environment at a micro and macro level. Before a product is even released, businesses will meet with public and private sector partners to mitigate risk.

Device Fatigue As consumers get fed up by the thought of adding more devices to their routines, they will actively seek out ways to escape through disconnecting some of the technology they usually rely upon. Unlike 2015, these consumers will face more heightened risks when they go dark, and will look to engage with brands that promise safe forms of this indulgence.

AFTER

BREATHS HIS

DEEP

FROM

INHALER, HE

STEPS CAR

FEW

OUT

AND

AIR, THE

OF THE

INTO THE NOISE,

THE TASTES, THE TEXTURES, AND THE SMELLS.

Designing for Safety As urban environments become more synonymous with emerging types of risks, brands will proactively build modern views of safety into the product and experience development cycle. These innovations will work to counter and reduce environmental impacts on individual health.

WEAK

SIGNALS

DANGER PAY:

Companies like Panasonic are already compensating their workforce for moving to environments that have a higher likeliness of impacting their health, such as China.

AIR QUALITY CONTROL:

As the particles per million rise in cities like Shanghai, the process of monitoring clean air is being designed into products to track air pollution, like the wearable TZO.

DESIGNED ENVIRONMENTS:

Cities like Dubai are making major investments in infrastructure, turning their cities into controlled areas of oasis and exploration for affluent visitors.

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108 R E T H I N K I N G I N D U L G E N C E : A COLLECTION OF FUTURE EXPERIENCES

by / MATHEW LINCEZ

S P E C I A L F E A T U R E 109

01: LEISURE

As water increasingly becomes a managed and costly resource, how might everyday activities be repurposed as indulgences?

Considerations for the Future: Resource Measures In redesigning infrastructure, local municipalities will be open to partnering with big brands to help drive better informed visions of how needs, like water capture or recycling, should be managed. Regulatory constraints will make it more critical for the public and private sector to act as partners from the onset of any development project.

Future Experience She hadn’t enjoyed a long, hot shower since her 58th birthday. Living in California, she can’t remember ever really taking a bath. These days, Claudia feels lucky to finish a shower without any remnants of conditioner in her hair – even though the easyrinse products finally became available for curly, greying hair. With the addition of smart meters and the requirement for super-connected homes, city regulations and utilities pricing forced even the most stringent of “climate deniers” to comply with conservation efforts. Not that there wasn’t the promise of relaxation outside her walled garden, but Claudia’s municipality had adopted specific water use policies and she hasn’t felt adventurous enough to travel alone. The social pressure to conserve, after many blissful years of excess, was tremendous – not to mention the cost of and the penalties for resource misuse, which were even worse. Signs, sounds, and smells everywhere reinforced the same message: “Everyone must do their part.”

Her six year-old grandson didn't know any different. For him, 120 second lukewarm showers were the norm. Claudia shared her memories with him, of unwinding in a hot shower after a long day. He didn’t understand the appeal. And then, during one conversation, Claudia saw it. Browsing through her social feed, she was shocked to see a video of a modern woman in a hot shower. According to the ad, the nearby Hotel Chanteclair was “Redefining Ethical Indulgence.” Sounds expensive, she thought. A few minutes later, another pop-up came across her feed, highlighting a new one-night hotel package that included an infinitely long hot shower. She caught herself fantasizing of room service and streaming in bed. But was this real? After doing a bit of research, Claudia learned that Hotel Chanteclair was part of a growing number of boutique hotels who competed for access to resources, and made them the central part of their customer experience. The technology

behind this water recovery was created to be a marketing feature more than anything else. But at this point, Claudia didn’t care. And so with that, she booked a night and filled her suitcase practically to the brim with toiletries. As she started to make her way to the door, Claudia was suddenly filled with nostalgia, and turned back to grab a deep conditioning hair mask. Hidden at the back of her vanity, she opened the tub and smeared a huge dollop of the Oribe Signature Moisture Masque on her hair. And then she saw it: a tiny sample of Pantene conditioner, the same kind she had used at summer camp. The smell had somehow kept after all these years! And so she doubled up on hair care, quickly wrapped a vintage scarf around her head, and put on a pair of huge sunglasses. Claudia was feeling less like a 67 year-old, and more like her old self. A new kind of California dreaming...

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SIGNALS

PARTNERING FOR CONSERVATION:

Branded Sustainable Design Organizations will race to hire marketing and design firms that deeply understand how to embed nuanced views of sustainability into the value chain. Resource constraints will make it common for brands to continuously remind customers of what they are missing when they stick to their tried and approved routines.

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California created a Pandora station to encourage preservation and motivate people to take shorter showers while listening to music.

ELEVATED RETAIL:

In a time when retailers are increasingly focused on online experiences, retailer PIRCH is creating glamorous in-store opportunities for customers to try their high-end home appliances.

Competing for Escape As resources become constrained, and public officials look to demonize individuals who engage in unapproved behavior, brands will capture indulgence in confined experiences that are positioned as guilt-free. More than ever, it will be critical to design not only products, but spaces for consumption as well.

CONCERNED BEAUTY:

Brands like Kahina Giving Beauty are starting to shift the ethos of the beauty industry to be more mindful and inclusive of growing ethical and environmental concerns.

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SPECIAL FEATURE

LEISURE

INTIMACY

EXPRESSION

NOURISHMENT

by / EMILY EMPEL

In a future world where public and private lives increasingly blur together, what is the relationship between dating, intimacy, and indulgence?

INTIMACY Yes, she’d felt exposed before. A quick Google search pulled up hundreds of hours of footage and millions of pictures, colors, and smells. She never had much of a choice. Her parents started documenting her life before her birth. Lyla was born to be an “opt-in” kind of girl, raised to share every move, decision, and thought with the world. Before now, she had never felt weird about the fact that her whole life was essentially re-livable. In fact, her life wasn’t that different from most of the people she knew. You could get to know Lyla, without ever really knowing Lyla.

Now, at 42, she was overwhelmed by the thought of starting over and building a new story. Dating was awkward enough, and especially challenging given her wife’s recent decision to separate and Lyla’s (now former) love of a good shareable moment. Not so deep on the web was a “relationship trail” available that made even Lyla a bit uncomfortable. A few years ago, she uploaded the dream journal she and Elizabeth shared during a bout of therapy. Not to mention the risque video she recorded for their 10th anniversary that had over three million likes and 540,000 shares. At the time, it felt like total reinforcement given the wrinkles and sags forming in their relationship. Now, in hindsight, it seemed more like a testament to Lyla’s need for reassurance about her body.

Future Experience

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02: INTIMACY

RETHINKING INDULGENCE: A COLLECTION OF FUTURE EXPERIENCES

Before committing to meeting, Lyla knew there was a near-certain likelihood that a potential date would find these moments, along with many others. They would quickly be able to piece together who she was as her best, worst, and most quirky self. Oddly, Lyla wasn’t bothered by the thought of a professor, colleague, or friend experiencing her relationship history, or even the occasional dirty video. Maybe it was the fact that these people had an array of lifestreams to choose from, and most seemed way more interesting than her former relationship. Whatever it was, Lyla felt more freaked out by the thought of needing to share this part of her life with a total stranger that she might fall in love with, date, or just spend a night with. She wanted a break from it all; she yearned for a few days in her life where she didn’t feel like she was performing for the world. But how could she possibly start over? Social engagement felt as natural as breathing. In a moment of weakness, Lyla shared an image on her lifeline and asked: “How do I rediscover my true self, not just the version I’ve already shared?” She anxiously awaited the results.

SPECIAL FEATURE

“HOW

Considerations for the Future:

DISCOVER SELF, THE

REMY

NOT

JUST

VERSION

ALREADY

TRUE I’VE

SHARED?”

Rethinking Courtship As the traditional trajectory of courtship breaks down, industries like commercial sex, dating, and relationship management will have to find unique ways to engage users by inventing new, disruptive interaction models.

Slow Reveal

Gameful Flirting

Brands might design relationship platforms that embody privacy as a value. Users could opt in to systems that mask their outstanding digital identity in the initial stages of dating. Applications could then slowly reward users for making authentic connections by giving them more nuanced, relevant information about their match or partner over time.

As we spend more time in the hybrid space, brands will build more incentives into their back-end systems to help users ''achieve'' certain behaviors from other users, such as getting over an ex or being more comfortable in bed.

Non-Traditional Inputs As data becomes more prevalent and the ability of analytics increases, industries inside and outside of dating will search for nontraditional inputs such as natural language or olfactory and mood-based cognition, to better match individuals based on how they interact in real life.

WEAK

SIGNALS

AMATEUR HOUR:

Sites like MakeLoveNotPorn enable average people to upload and share their sexual experiences with the world, blurring the line between amateur and celebrity.

THE ALWAYS-ON MUSE:

A slew of Kim Kardashian wannabes are curating their lives on platforms like Instagram and Periscope to showcase their best selves without regard for future implications.

VERY PUBLIC CIVIL SERVANTS:

Members of public office are increasingly expected to interact with their constituents first-hand to share the reasoning behind key decisions and manage expectations.

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SPECIAL FEATURE

by / EMILY EMPEL + JAMIE FERGUSON

In a world where increasingly sophisticated algorithmic interventions tailor content for pointed online navigation, how can the individual indulge in unbounded expression?

EXPRESSION Future Experience

LEISURE

INTIMACY

EXPRESSION

NOURISHMENT

The past few days had been a challenge. She tried all the “right” and publically recommended solutions, but Christoph was a colicky baby and there was simply no approved solve. After countless conversations with other moms, she felt like she had done everything, from wasting her money on a smart baby bottle (from the makers of the first smart stroller-crib converter), to blowing her hourly paycheck on a child food service that supplemented each meal with nanoceuticals. She even stayed up past 3 am to attend a VR conference by Dr. Wei Shin, the most trusted newborn wellness consultant

in the world. It was a waste of time. A tightly curated crowd. All the other single moms there had high new mother ratings too. No wonder; no one was sharing a true experience. Nothing she heard was new, different, or valuable.

NO ONE WAS SHARING A

TRUE

NOTHING

EXPERIENCE. SHE

HEARD

WAS NEW, DIFFERENT, OR

VALUABLE.

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RETHINKING INDULGENCE: A COLLECTION OF FUTURE EXPERIENCES

WHO

DID

WISH BE

WERE TO

SHE

SHE COULD

THERE NO

RULES

MOTHERHOOD?

And so she did the unthinkable. On yet another sleepless night since Christoph was born, in a tired stupor, she considered venturing to a place unknown. A space so far into the web that there would be no translation technologies, no event orchestration. It took a lot of planning to get set up. She needed an avatar account outside of her algo-curated life sphere in order to experience something that would be unconnected and untraceable from her history, but complex enough not to sound any alarms. No small feat. Of course, she knew the risks. In entering this space, she had to commit to an alternative persona that would play out in places and with people who did not correspond to her defined status. Who did she wish she could be if there were no rules to new motherhood? The setup was exhilarating, terrifying, and revelatory. And with a simple click, she entered.

03: EXPRESSION

The other single mothers she met seemed to be speaking another language – a conversation ensued without an optimized script. Baby food products that had not been regulated or supplemented were discussed; the strollers they referred to could not be geolocated; the pacifiers not digitized. They actually shut off their devices to sleep! No wonder their new mother scores were appallingly dismal. But she was a voyeur into this alternative life sphere, and drunk on possibility. Never since entering this new life-stage had she felt more connected.

SPECIAL FEATURE

Considerations for the Future:

WEAK

SIGNALS

RECOMMENDATION VS. RANDOMIZING ENGINES:

Platforms like Netflix hinge on the idea that customizing recommendations for their users outweighs companies who embed notions of serendipity into their system, like StumbleUpon

Depersonalized Experience In a world where personalization becomes the norm, consumers will look to brands that allow them moments to indulge anonymously in mass culture. Individuals will crave experiences that let them connect to users in subcultures without being fearful of future impacts.

ALGOTRADING:

In finance, traders are using forms of machine intelligence like Black Algo Trading in order to program autonomous agents who act on their behalf and influence financial markets.

Terms of Engagement

Rethinking Trust

Instead of demanding user data at the outset of an experience, brands will allow users to set their own privacy and personalization limits in both the virtual and real space. Individuals will become more savvy with what they do and don’t share, and will look to advisors and platforms that let them build their own terms and user experiences. Users will finally be trusted to define their edge and game rules.

As platforms become more scrutinized, consumers grow weary of credentialing and reviews as a way to demonstrate subject matter authority. Instead, they’ll look to imperfect users and interactions as the more authoritative and authentic voices.

Designing for Inclusion: In a world where individuals are constantly scrutinized by their technology, network, and peers, more brands will look to comparative industries like game design or psychology in order to build experiences that are inclusive for a range of personality types and lifestyles, such as introverts, aging millennials, or single mothers.

THE CUR-RATED LIFE:

Although Peeple received backlash for giving users the ability to “rate” others, the idea of people being measured and peer-reviewed is already happening in the workforce.

NEW DARK HANGOUTS:

As users grow increasingly weary of the internet, they are flocking to alternatives like the Dark Web with the hope of having non-traditional online interactions.

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SPECIAL FEATURE

LEISURE

INTIMACY

EXPRESSION

NOURISHMENT

by / MATHEW LINCEZ

In a world where consumers are increasingly focused on fresh, natural, and organic food choices, how might synthetic nutritional alternatives evolve to fulfill on the promise of indulgence?

Future Experiences

Special Fresh It was a bit of a stretch. He had to give up buying more mobile minutes to afford the purchase, but it had been a while since the family experienced the smells, textures, and tastes of fresh, naturally grown fruit. The basket of organics was a gift – an indulgence – and he was proud of it. It would be something the family could enjoy together during this special occasion. The unwrapping, portioning out, and sampling would be a photo-worthy

moment – especially for the children, some of whom had never bitten into and tasted naturally grown fruit. Sadly, he knew this would be one of very few times they would experience “freshness” together. At least his children would have a small taste of the good life, and, despite their current situation, they would be inspired to achieve a life that could afford them the luxury of fresh and natural products in the future.

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RETHINKING INDULGENCE: A COLLECTION OF FUTURE EXPERIENCES

04: NOURISHMENT

SPECIAL FEATURE

Rebellion It’s just another lunch at Simply Fresh Organics. The crew talks relentlessly about their designer diets, exercise routines, and expensive subscriptions to bespoke health and wellness programs. Any challenge to the anti-synthetic elite is met with swift discipline. Sara sips her mineral water while watching a couple binge on sugar-coated cocktails. Micromanaging her choices, constantly trying to find enjoyment within increasingly tight guidelines, is starting to take its toll. On the way back to the office, she feels compelled to leave the group and walk into a local corner store. Freshly baked desserts call to her. Maybe it’s the act of rebellion that makes her feel so good, as though she’s finally escaping a trap she’s been desperate to get out of. The Twinkie is within her grasp; her old habit is irresistible.

Blending the Rules

Sandwich Boy

Gale stared down at the usual blend of powdered nutraceutical supplements and their well articulated functional benefits. The low-cost subscription program helps her fill the nutritional gaps in her diet and maintain a balanced approach to prevention, as prescribed by her doctor. At any age, prevention is important. For Gale, it’s about consistency, and this means sticking to her plan and its highly specific formulas. Being on a fixed income with a limited benefits plan can reduce her quality of life options, and any minor deviation could bring about catastrophic results. She reflects on this momentarily as she anticipates modifying her post-lunch digestive recipe. She still finds ways to indulge by adding extra ingredients like cannanibs, Xyli-Sweet, and peanut butter gel to her shakes from time to time. A touch of “special,” she calls it. A little something that makes the shake taste so much better.

The boy diligently builds a sandwich from freshly catalyzed grains, printed on-demand legumes, and rapidly cured, synthetic, lab-grown proteins. His older brother enters the kitchen and steals the sandwich. The boy shrugs and repeats the process, this time with a newly installed, artisanal aging algorithm and third party flavor enhancements. His smeats never looked, smelled, or tasted so good. Jailbreaking the protein synthesizer voids the warrantee, but it’s a chance he’s willing to take to unlock a whole new world of treatments, textures, and flavor profiles that the family’s base model appliance wouldn’t typically provide. Besides, all his friends are doing it.

Considerations for the Future:

WEAK

SIGNALS

MASS GROWN ORGANICS:

Alternative Currencies In the developing world and emerging markets, brands might go beyond packaging strategies to offer consumers payment options that more closely tie in to the types of resources they have at hand. Whether they are in the form of barter marketplaces or local lenders, these currencies will afford consumers the ability to indulge in new products and services.

Consumption as Play In a world where the norm is to be ''always on,'' consumers will look for indulgences that represent the opposite of efficiency. These customers will revel in brands that treat each moment of product interaction as an occasion for individual expression.

Reframing Treats and Cheats In the near term, the wellness sector will merge all industries, whether food and beverage, consumer electronics, or automotive. Established brands will creatively design for nostalgia, while keeping up with new customer and regulatory wellness requirements.

Fresh as Luxury As it becomes more difficult to procure fresh, organic ingredients, these food categories will command a premium in the global marketplace. On special occasions, consumers will supplement their own crops with fresh treats that come from worlds seemingly unknown.

Companies like Green Onyx are creating consumer appliances that increase access to fresh, organic ingredients in an effort to mitigate political instability from food shortages.

LAB GROWN PROTEINS:

Startups like Modern Meadow and Beyond Meat are developing substitution technologies in the hopes of developing palatable synthetic proteins.

PERSONALIZED MEDICINE:

With modern medical advancements, consumers are increasingly able to tailor their drugs and treatments, moving the idea of health care away from the collective, and towards the individual.

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CONSUMERS ARE CREATORS 122

RETHINKING INDULGENCE: A COLLECTION OF FUTURE EXPERIENCES

CONSUMERS ARE EX

empathy

SPECIAL FEATURE

CONSUMERS ARE STO

CONSUMERS ARE TASTE-MAKERS

IN DUL GENCE

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CONSUMERS ARE ACTIVISTS

empowermen t However foreign it may seem, the future world embodied by these vignettes reflects plausible trajectories of change forces we see playing out today. In fact, successful organizations are already rethinking their strategies and building the capacity to consider emerging worldviews like this one, along with other future scenarios, on a spectrum of possibility. It’s one thing to invest in emerging technologies; your brand may be prototyping the must-have wearable of tomorrow or the staple IoT object of the connected home – but so are your competitors. Valuable differentiation will depend on understanding the needs, expectations, and desires of consumers living in a world that looks nothing like today’s.

Instead of designing for a present that’s becoming obsolete, why not design for a future that’s yet to be realized?

brainstorming In this thought-provoking book, Idea Couture CEO Idris Mootee offers a methodology to transform companies and cultures, and is a mustread for businesses looking to incorporate design

Robert Bolton is a senior creative strategist at Idea Couture. He is based in Toronto, Canada.

thinking into their company’s DNA.

Emily Empel is the co-head of foresight at Idea Couture. She is based in Toronto, Canada. Jamie Ferguson is a design and foresight strategist at Idea Couture. She is based in Toronto, Canada. Mathew Lincez is the co-head of foresight at Idea Couture. He is based in Toronto, Canada.

Available at Amazon.com & booksellers everywhere.

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rhonda mcewen @rhondamcewen

tweetback

If you could reimagine the world, what’s the first thing you would change?

Rhonda McEwen is an assistant professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology and at iSchool, at the University of Toronto.

Reimagine the relationship between technology and our senses so that interactions extend beyond the visual and the auditory.

Reimagine how we lead in this new era where change is fast and furious = exciting

by will novosedlik So much in the world needs reimagining, that it’s difficult to know where to start. How do you prioritize when there is so much to rethink

and reposition? Is there one overarching problem that, when solved, would have a cascading effect on all the others? What are the big challenges? We wanted some answers, or at least somewhere to

start. So we asked business people, academics, and entrepreneurs the question: If you could reimagine the world, what’s the first thing you would change?

marlies van dijk @tweetvandijk Marlies van Dijk is provincial implementation lead: innovation/ quality and healthcare improvement for Alberta Health Services.

We need to reimagine and retool the way we practice religion in Africa, because it is contributing to our advancement and progress.

jk osiri, phd @jkosiri JK Osiri is director of international business education & associate professor of management practice at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

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We need to reimagine linear supply chains as value networks, which in turn will give us sustainable business models.

140 character answers. That’s why I do my TWOG.

Education garry kasparov @kasparov63 Garry Kimovich Kasparov is a Russian chess Grandmaster, former World Chess Champion, writer, and political activist, considered by many to be the greatest chess player of all time.

henry mintzberg @mintzberg141 Henry Mintzberg is one of the world’s leading academics and most outspoken commentators on strategy and management, known for seeking the truth and sharing it.

sally uren @sallyuren Sally Uren is CEO at Forum for the Future, a global not-for-profit that works with businesses, government organizations, and others to solve complex sustainability issues.

james chan @accidentalcity James Chan is cofounder of Hub Ottawa, a co-working community optimized for people and organizations bettering the world.

Let’s go big: we need to reimagine our capital markets system that’s only focused on measuring profit & shareholder value.

charles pascolar @cpascolar Charles Pascolar is VP global marketing at Payless Shoe Source.

Practically, the United Nations. Need new org based on values. Culturally, the failure of risk-averse thinking.

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The way that we build our urban landscapes mirvish+gehry @mirvishgehryto Mirvish, Gehry Partners LLP & Projectcore is the group behind Toronto’s next architectural landmark, designed by Frank Gehry, combining art, culture, and downtown living.

Mobility harald felgner @haraldfelgner Harald Felgner is Head of Mobile and IoT at AXA Insurance.

philip e. tetlock @ptetlock Philip E. Tetlock holds the Annenberg University Professorship at the University of Pennsylvania, and is the author of Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction.

How we go about judging who has good judgment

TRANSFORMATION IS HARD.

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YOU’RE GOING TO NEED SOME CONCEPTS, TOOLS, AND FRAMEWORKS. AN ESSENTIAL READ FOR TODAY’S TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERS, THE M/I/S/C/ GUIDE TO DESIGN THINKING IS A SPECIAL COLLECTION OF THE MOST PROVOCATIVE AND PRACTICAL ARTICLES ON HOW TO TRANSFORM YOUR ORGANIZATION THROUGH NEW WAYS OF THINKING AND DOING.

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P U B L I S H E D B Y:

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