PHOTOGRAPH BY IAN TUTTLE
ALUMNI NEWS
“Imagination closes the gap between what is novel and what is known. Imagination allows us to see beyond what our present assumptions define as possible.”
have a conversation.” Since retiring from Xerox in 2002, JSB has remained a driver of innovation as a visiting scholar at the University of California and independent co-chairman of the Center for the Edge at Deloitte, the global management consulting and business services company. The latter’s mission is to help executives operate at the intersection of technology and commerce. As JSB puts it, “We conduct original research on emerging business opportunities that are not yet on the CEO’s management agenda but should be.” A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education, a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and a MacArthur Foundation trustee, he has served on numerous corporate boards, including Amazon, for the past 14 years. The nine books he has written and co-authored include the seminal The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion (Basic Books, 2010). Its many fans include former Google CEO and Chairman Eric Schmidt, who said, “If you want to meet the challenges of living and working in the future, this book should be your guide.” The future is JSB’s special subject. He spends serious time thinking about how the digital tools he helped introduce are reshaping society at a dizzying pace. In the past, he says, when a new technology was introduced, it would be integrated over the course of a few years and then tended to stick around for a several decades until the next new thing came along. That interval no longer exists. The average life span of a new phone app, he notes, hovers around 30 days. We live in an age of never-ending change, a kind of Cambrian explosion of technology. To illustrate the seismic transformation underway, JSB offers a metaphor inspired in part by his love of adventure sports. For his parents’ generation, he says, things moved along at the stately pace of a steamship. “They set course, fired up the engines, and powered ahead. The survival strategy was to practice a lot of steady persistence.”
Then came the early digital age; change was faster but still manageable. To keep up, you played the wind like the skipper of a sailboat, tacking one way and then another to get where you wanted to go. But now the environment has shifted again, the flow of information quickening and becoming more turbulent. Navigating today’s dense information stream requires the skills and agility of a whitewater kayaker, who must constantly interpret rapids to get a picture of what lies hidden beneath the surface. “I like to say we really shifted from reading content to reading context,” he says. “If you are a whitewater kayaker, you learn to read context. Otherwise, you’re dead.” All of which was on his mind at the conference, when he blindsided the futurists by extolling the study of history. “I kind of surprised myself a little bit when I said that,” he admits. “I was reflecting on the techniques needed to read context. How do you understand how to fill in the missing pieces? It was a history teacher at Williston who got me to pay more attention to the context of events. A research historian knows how to probe and fill in holes until a picture emerges, ‘Oh, this makes sense. Yeah, this could be it.’ They understand how to unravel the forces that were in action at a moment of time, most of which were more or less invisible as they occurred.” JSB calls the technique “sense-making through imagination,” and he says it requires a mix of humanities and math and science folded together in interesting ways that build webs of connections and allow us to fill in blind spots. Machine intelligence alone is insufficient to the task, he says, citing Brexit and the 2016 election as recent events that experts armed with potent algorithms failed to see coming. “A lot of us thought we understood how to read the signals, but we did not read the context right. That’s to say data analytics—which many of us worship, starting with me—can’t do everything. Imagination closes the gap between what is novel and what is known. Imagination allows us to see beyond what our present assumptions define as possible.” SPRING 2021!BULLETIN 33
