Redistributing the Future: Understanding WorldChanging.com

NextD Journal RERETHINKING DESIGN

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Redistributing the Future: Understanding WorldChanging.com

Jamais Cascio Co-Founder, Editor, WorldChanging.com

GK VanPatter Co-Founder, NextDesign Leadership Institute Co-Founder, Humantific  Making Sense of Cross-Disciplinary Innovation

NextDesign Leadership Institute DEFUZZ THE FUTURE! www.nextd.org Follow NextD Journal on Twitter: www.twitter.com/nextd Copyright © 2005 NextDesign Leadership Institute. All Rights Reserved. NextD Journal may be quoted freely with proper reference credit. If you wish to repost, reproduce or retransmit any of this text for commercial use please send a copyright permission request to journal@nextd.org

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Redistributing the Future

1 GK VanPatter: Welcome Jamais. It was suggested to us recently that WorldChanging and NextD were/are working in parallel universes so I thought it would be good to get us connected. I can see that we are on different tracks but have many things in common including an interest in exploring “ways in which seemingly unconnected resources link together to form a toolkit for changing the world” to use your words. We also seem to be aligned regarding the belief that “How we work together is as important as the tools we use.” Can you share with us some of your project background? Why and How did WorldChanging get started?

Jamais Cascio: The origin myth for WorldChanging is that Alex Steffen and I were trying to figure out a project to work on together, and decided that a blog would be a good thing to play with while we worked out what we'd "really" do. The reality is more complex, of course. We knew right away that WorldChanging *was* -- and *is* -- what we really want to do.

Over the decade or so that we've known each other, we've each come to realize that a number of important but superficially-disparate threads were actually part of a larger, more subtle, tapestry: open source, emerging technologies like bio & nanotech, design, the environment, technologically-enabled social networks, the developing world, the "second superpower." We began to notice more and more ways in which these various movements and ideas had fuzzy boundaries -- Open Source Biotechnology, for example, or biomimetic design, or "smart mobs" as political forces in the developing world. When we started looking for more of these examples of fuzzy boundaries, we found them all over the place. And not just fuzzy boundaries, clear signs of interdependence: developments in one realm would lead to cascading changes in other realms.

At the same time, we each had found in our independent consulting work (Alex had been doing media strategy and nonprofit work in Seattle, while I was doing scenario and foresight consulting in LA and San Francisco) that many folks with the best of intentions were focused exclusively on the inevitability of bad outcomes. Positive scenarios, plausible visions of success, were either outside of what the clients considered possible or would end up as parodies. When Alex relocated to San Francisco for a while in 2003, this issue became a recurring topic of conversation. Why don't more people see that, while things are bad -- with a great deal of potential for getting worse -- success is not impossible? How could people who are trying to change the world see that they aren't just limited to the conventional toolset they were given years ago?

We started WorldChanging as a way of cataloging the crosscutting, interdependent tools, ideas, models and resources which would let us build a better planet.

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2 GK VanPatter: What is the purpose of WorldChanging today?

Jamais Cascio: In short, the purpose of WorldChanging is to alert readers to new possibilities.

We try not to post about negative developments without also giving readers a sense of what can be done to change things. Most of our posts focus on ideas, resources, models and tools for better understanding the planet and taking action to build a better world.

Moreover, we make a point of showing that the ideas, tools, etc. can come from wildly disparate, seemingly-unconnected sources. One of our credos is William Gibson's line, "the future is here, it's just not well-distributed yet" -- we're trying to redistribute the future.

3 GK VanPatter: OK super. In this sense our missions are very much aligned I think.

We find ourselves distributing news about a particular portion of the future that has arrived with implications for design leaders.

Working the future also happens to be one of our favorite project terrains in our UnderstandingLab practice. We have collaborated with Futurists on several projects where the goal was to create foresight tools that would enable designers to interact with various views of the future during the design process. Understanding the nature of possible futures can help to accelerate innovation. From our experience we know that such understanding often plays a significant role in many product design/innovation cycles. I am guessing that you must do a form of this work as well. Can you tell us a little about your consulting practice, what you do and how it works?

Jamais Cascio: To be clear, WorldChanging is itself not a consultancy. That said, both Alex Steffen and I, singly and as a team, have done extensive foresight consulting work looking at topics of global development, climate change, politics and the like. While we don't work as "WorldChanging, Inc." in that regard, we do focus on WorldChanging-type issues.

My specialty in this consulting work is "scenario planning," a structured foresight exercise intended to allow an organization (whether business, government agency, community group, or non-profit) to think both creatively and constructively about the challenges that may be coming down the road. The goal isn't to predict the future so much as to prepare for it. The scenarios crafted in these exercises are meant to illuminate the nature of challenges an organization may face in the context of a changing world. A scenario exercise will typically come up with 3-5 different plausible future worlds, each with its own unique story. The organization can then ask its members, "How could we respond if things turn out something like *this*?

What might we do to try to prevent a world like *that* from coming about?"

While the scenario methodology has its roots in the worlds of political strategy and global business planning, in recent years it has taken on some elements from the world of design. For example, the use of customer or citizen-centric scenarios, lifted from the

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world of product design, has helped planners refocus on how systemic or environmental changes affect the lives of individuals, letting them do more than just looking at the "big picture." In addition, Alex and I have come up with some of our tools for scenario brainstorming which reflect the growing influence of the free/open source and distributed-collaboration worlds.

Foresight tools and scenario methods have long been the province of corporate planners.

It's really exciting to bring them to community groups and non-profits -- groups which are typically well off the radar of even the most progressive traditional consulting companies.

Too often, activists and non-profits and the like have a single vision of the future, and it's a negative one. They rarely have a positive, "what if we win?" vision, let alone a constellation of possible outcomes. By helping these groups think about the future in more sophisticated ways, we try to help them come up with better ideas about how to bring about the future they want to see.

4 GK VanPatter: Understood. In your foresight consulting work where does the content for the scenarios come from?

Jamais Cascio: Two sources: the ideas of the workshop participants (fleshed out over the course of the scenario engagement) and the ideas/knowledge of the scenario writer (usually me).

5 GK VanPatter: What is underneath the type of foresight consulting that you do?

Is it Science, Art, Design, Business consulting, a combination, or something else?

How would you describe foresight’s foundation?

Jamais Cascio: It's more an art than a science, in that I'm not making testable predictions -- I know that the scenarios *will fail* as predictions, in fact. I am, however, trying to make people see things differently, to re-perceive their questions about the present and the future; that feels more like "art" to me. There are also obvious business and business-consulting aspects, as most of the foresight work I've done over the years has been for business clients (although that's less the case now).But I would say that what I do falls closest to the fuzzy intersection of design and storytelling.

For me, foresight work is most satisfying when it's about crafting a plausible, internallyconsistent, detailed imagined world. Worlds where a reader could say "yeah, I can see myself living here" or, better still, "yeah, I can really see this happening."

Worlds where people can see accurate depictions of movements or industries or ideas with which they have detailed knowledge. Worlds where the discontinuities and changes make the reader say "of course" and not "no way" -- not because the scenarios are timid or filled with conventional wisdom, but because the pieces all fit together in a way that such changes are understood as inevitable, no matter how radical.

Just like a well-designed physical object can feel "right" in one's hand, no matter how unfamiliar it is, I strive to build scenaric worlds that feel "right" in one's mind.

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6 GK VanPatter: Since we began this conversation the world was hit by the devastating tsunami in Asia. How has this cataclysmic series of events impacted WorldChanging?

Jamais Cascio: WorldChanging has contributors from around the world. Two live in India -- Dina Mehta and Rohit Gupta. They started posting updates to WorldChanging a few hours after the tsunami hit, back at the point when good information was hard to come by. Alex and I quickly decided to focus WorldChanging's attention on what was going on, but what was most remarkable was that the breadth of posts from WorldChanging contributors came not from editorial prodding but from the deep motivation on the part of our people to try to do something to respond to the events unfolding in front of us. Our coverage ran the gamut: links to on-the-scene reports, analysis of the political situation, research into how the local environmental conditions exacerbated or mitigated the flooding, mechanisms for avoiding these sorts of disasters in the future, a deep examination of how relief efforts can be made better, and much more.

WorldChanging efforts spread beyond just the blog. Dina and Rohit, along with another WorldChanging contributor, Taran Rampersad, who lives in Trinidad & Tobago (which was among the locations hit hard by last year's hurricane season), helped to create the South East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami weblog, probably better known by its URL, tsunamihelp.blogspot.com. Tsunamihelp, along with Wikipedia, had by far the best collection of information about the tsunami. More importantly, the site provided abundant information about what people around the world could do to help.

Another immediate result was the creation of the Architecture for Humanity/WorldChanging fund for reconstruction assistance. AfH (http://www.architectureforhumanity.org), run by WorldChanging contributor Cameron Sinclair, provides architectural assistance to humanitarian organizations rebuilding in the wake of natural disasters, particularly in the developing world. All of the money raised by the fund is going to tsunami-related reconstruction efforts; over the course of the 12 days subsequent to the disaster, we managed to raise well over $120,000.

Work is now underway in Sri Lanka, and AfH has been given the job of rebuilding the city of Kirinda and its surrounding villages. Cameron has done an outstanding, incredible job with this. He's a hero, seriously.

7 GK VanPatter: Yes I know of Cameron. A few years ago I nominated him to General Thinking, as I thought he was bravely going where few architects go. Lots of folks in our business talk about doing that kind of humanitarian work. I admire Cameron for actually doing it. We hope to do some collaborating with Architecture for Humanity later this year.

Among the tsunami aftermath related posts that I saw on WorldChanging was your coeditor Alex Steffen’s "Beyond Relief / Leapfrog Nations - Emerging Technology in the New Developing World." Alex was describing a concept that he calls ‘leapfrogging’.

I am guessing that might be WorldChanging language. He was tying the notion of foresight-design to that of relief efforts. He seemed to have in mind a forward-looking

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transformation that extended far beyond restoring previous levels of service and infrastructure.

Our NextD Journal readers are primarily from the design disciplines so we are very interested in and engaged in many forms of transformation. Help us better understand what ‘leapfrogging’ is and how that forward-looking vision might work in practice.

From your perspective how can foresight-design and ‘leapfrogging’ play a role in disasters such as the tsunami?

Jamais Cascio: Although we talk about "leapfrogging" quite a bit at WorldChanging, the term has actually been around for awhile. A political philosopher named Alexander Gerschenkron used it back in 1962 in a piece entitled "Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective," in which he argued that, sometimes, not having invested in a particular industry or technology can be beneficial when a paradigm shift occurs, as the society does not have to deal with sunk costs and legacy issues. The society can often adopt the new systems more rapidly and completely than can other, ostensibly more "advanced," societies, gaining the social and economic benefits earlier.

The textbook example of this concept these days is the widespread adoption of cellular phones in the developing world. There are already more mobile phones in India than land lines, a pattern being repeated across numerous up-and-coming developing nations. It's simpler to build out cellular towers than to string phone lines around the country, and mobile phones can offer a greater range of services, so many developing areas are jumping directly to cell phones for their telecommunication networks.

But it's not just in communications where we see leapfrogging happening. WiFi makes setting up urban computer networks easy, and is increasingly used in places like Brazil, India and South Africa. Solar and wind power is rapidly becoming common in rural areas of the developing world as replacements for using wood or dirty diesel generators for power. And numerous governments in the South are pushing investment in biotechnology as both a method of tackling local medical problems that Big Pharma isn't interested in (such as malaria) and as a way of pushing into a rapidly-growing part of the 21st century economy.

Leapfrogging is as much about how people live as it is about what sorts of things they have. So when it comes to the tsunami reconstruction process, leapfrogging can be a design consideration for what materials get used, how rebuilt villages get power and communication and information, and what kinds of work people will do in these communities. This is where foresight-driven design comes into play, as well: you ask not just "what do people here need now" but also "what might people here need in the near future, and what can we do to enable that (or, at least, not block that)?"

8 GK VanPatter: Thanks for this. If we separate out the technology specific content of your cell phone story example I recognize leapfrogging as a form of innovation process.

Over the years we have been asked to explain how what we do in our practice maps to various other disciplines, so we have made connections to numerous groups and models; to knowledge creation, organizational learning, systems thinking, foresight Page 6 of 10

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design and many others. I am constantly amazed at the links between unconnected logic sets, between unconnected siloed disciplines.

I am not an economic historian and do not know Alexander Gerschenkron’s work but I have seen this process logic elsewhere over the years. It can be found at various scales throughout the spectrum of innovation from products to organizations to, as you suggest, villages, communities and countries. Fundamentally it is a logic set that connects to nonlinear thinking and non-linear transformation. I have seen other versions of this process logic in the context of organizations. I believe leapfrogging more or less maps to the logic of the double loop learning model created by Chris Argyris a Professor of Education and Organizational Behavior at Harvard and Donald SchÜn of MIT in the 60s and 70s as part of a suite of useful models created around so-called Organizational Learning and Action Science. They too were interested in social systems intervention but at a smaller scale than the realm of Mr. Gerschenkron.

As you likely well know, several future forward versions of this model can be found in the organizational transformation business where the goal is often for an organization to create a strategy of reinvention and or renewal for itself. Whether it is called double loop innovation, leapfrogging or some other linguistic concoction, the logic of the process seems very similar. In this kind of organizational transformation model participants do not start reimagining their organization based on where it is presently. Instead they move mentally out into the future where they reimagine their organization without the constraints of the existing structure and its legacy systems.

In doing so they take into consideration, future trends, demographics, as well as other measurable and unmeasurable dimensions of possible marketplace context change. After the future model of the organization is reimagined they connect it back to the existing organization and then see what falls out. Although not new, it remains a process logic that can serve as an effective way to change corporate mindsets.

At NextD we are very interested in how the scale of challenges facing the world and therefore facing designers are changing. In this Journal we often talk about how design can contribute at various levels in organizations but the tsunami is an example of a set of challenges at even greater scale. The challenges involved there are huge, complex and often fuzzy.

It is no secret that the tools and models needed to understand and grapple with challenges at such scales cannot always be found in the traditional design industries.

This is one reason why we encourage young designers to begin making bridges to many diverse disciplines outside of design as early and as often as possible. It is a strategy that has proven to be very effective for us in practice. Through NextD we try to present and share a living example of how to do that. The reality is that many tools, methods and insights can be found outside our own community.

In this regard I very much liked this bit of text from your WorldChanging site: �WorldChanging.com works from a simple premise: that the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us. That plenty of people are working on tools for change, but the fields in which they work remain unconnected. That the motive, means and opportunity for profound positive change are already present. That another world is Page 7 of 10

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not just possible, it's here. We only need to put the pieces together‌. Therefore, we focus on resources that help people collaborate and cooperate, for we believe that collaborative technologies and cooperative models are the keys to working together more effectively, and that working together is the revolution that is changing the world.�

With this in mind, let me ask you a difficult question. If we acknowledge that the challenges are huge and complicated, what kinds of tools, models, and ideas (other than foresight design) are you seeing so far at WorldChanging?

Jamais Cascio: That's a hard question to answer, as there have been so many examples. As of today, we have nearly 2,000 articles up (of varying lengths) covering a broad spectrum of ideas. One of the signal pleasures of operating a site like WorldChanging is seeing, on a daily basis, that tools and concepts for building a better world are all around us.

But broad themes do present themselves. You've already mentioned foresight design, and we just talked about leapfrog development -- those two are certainly fundamental ideas for us. We also see solutions coming from the world of free/open source software, especially as a model for everything ranging from biotechnology and pharmaceutical development to politics and education. The ability of groups to take advantage of the power of the Internet in order to collaborate on solutions is often underestimated.

Transparency -- seeing the usually invisible processes at work, whether in the environment, in our infrastructure, or in our politics and markets -- comes up time and again as an important element in WorldChanging solutions. So do interdisciplinary approaches, mixing seemingly disparate realms, each part acting as a provocation to the others. Biomimicry and Ecomimicry are wonderful examples of interdisciplinary applications.

The so-called "Second Superpower," where individuals armed with information, communication networks, and sometimes camera phones can pose a powerful alternative to traditional sources of political power.

Understanding the world through science. We are very pro-science at WorldChanging, believing strongly that testable information and analysis must be at the core of good decision-making regarding planetary stewardship. We're not going to be able to survive this century by turning away from science and responsible technological development.

Distributed, decentralized, networks for energy and information. Reimagining our core social systems, in particular cities and transportation. Embracing a model of sustainability which isn't satisfied with reducing footprints to zero, but actually seeks to restore the environment.

Most of the tools and ideas we need to build a better world are already here -- and the ones which aren't here yet are close on the horizon. People who tell you we don't know how to solve big problems such as global warming or extreme poverty either don't know what they're talking about or have an agenda which doesn't want to see big problems solved. We can build a better world -- more sustainable, more democratic, more fair, more knowledgeable -- but we have to choose to do so.

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9 GK VanPatter: In closing I want to turn slightly and ask you a media related question building on your comments about shifting power and potential of the internet, most specifically as a publishing tool.

It took us a while here at NextD to figure out that what we have really created is a media channel with a specialized focus, not being covered in the traditional design press. It is a channel that can reach directly into the backyards of many institutions to connect directly with readers who are interested in change, innovation and the rethinking of design. In a very promotional oriented industry we can reach through the spin to create more authentic views into the conditions of design and the value that it can add in circumstances were renewal and new pattern creation is called for. We are constantly walking that fine line of balance between the need for change and the value that design brings to the world. We are essentially engaged in the construction of new meaning around the concepts of design and design leadership.

In launching NextD we created a new path through the forest that many of our readers seem to appreciate. Some institutions are aligned with the forward motion of what we are focused on while we likely make other institutions nervous. We are talking about a future that has already arrived, but one that is not always reflected in our institutions at present.

I’m sure you saw the recent anniversary edition of Ad Busters magazine where they called the right to communicate a new human right and one of the most important rights of this 21st century where much of communication media is controlled by a few powerful players. The Ad Busters crew refer to this as the age of systematically distorted information. They connect shaping communication to shaping our consciousness to shaping our future.

I would be interested in your take on WorldChanging as a media channel engaged in communication outside the realm of traditional institutions. You too are engaged in the reconstruction of meaning regarding what’s possible now, the future and how we might best get there. How do you feel about this role at this particular moment in history?

Jamais Cascio: We knew from the outset that what we were building wasn't a traditional form of media. Both Alex and I have worked extensively in traditional media outlets, from newspapers to magazines to television. We know the power and the limitations of these paths, and recognized that the Internet offered ways to transcend those limits. One of the models for what we wanted to build with WorldChanging was the Whole Earth Catalog, but we wanted a kind of WEC which could only be possible with the tools of the web.

The web offers immediacy. Embedded links. Conversations. Rapid prototyping of ideas.

A global reach combined with a personal voice.

We often refer to WorldChanging as an "Attention Engine:" we try to translate the attention we receive into attention for those resources, models and ideas we point to and discuss. We aren't always successful, but we are increasingly learning how to accomplish this goal. Sometimes we see success in other websites and media outlets picking up the stories we talk about -- with or without attribution :) -- and sometimes we see success in the growing use of language and terms we've pushed. "Leapfrogging" is Page 9 of 10

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an example of the latter. As I indicated, by no means is it a new word, but it's showing up in discussions of development issues more often now than it did a year ago, and I think that WorldChanging is partially responsible for this.

Sometimes we see success in the success of projects we help promote -- as of this last week, the Architecture for Humanity/WorldChanging Tsunami Reconstruction Fund has generated over $140,000. That's wonderful. It's also humbling.

We will try to use this power only for good. :)

10 GK VanPatter: What's next for WorldChanging in 2005?

Jamais Cascio: Continued growth, and the need to grapple with the implications of continued growth. We would like to add more contributors from more of the world, and to increase the volume of substantive material we present to our readers. We have more interviews lined up, more book reviews, more essays -- more material unique to WorldChanging. We'll continue to do the bloggy links and references, but we intend to focus increasingly on the ways in which our contributors can provide distinct insights.

As you may know, Alex will be co-presenting (along with Bruce Sterling) the final night keynote at South by SouthWest in Texas; Alex will also be speaking at the upcoming Doors of Perception conference in India. I have more radio interviews coming up.

Public speaking increasingly figures into our plans for 2005. We have some other plans bubbling away we're not quite ready to announce publicly just yet.

Ultimately, though, what's next for WorldChanging is to work to continue delivering what we have tried to provide from the outset: access to resources, tools and ideas for building a better world.

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