Mastering the Drivers of the Extreme Future

Do you know which parameters drive the trends of the future? James Canton, a leading US futurist, identified five major drivers of what he calls “The Extreme Future” in his likewise-titled new book: change, speed, complexity, risk and surprise. Today, let’s take a look at each of these five drivers that you are likely to encounter during your business career — and learn how you can master them.

1. Speed: Faster, faster, faster

The speed of events and actions has massively increased over the last few decades. This does not only hold true for the world of football, but also for the world of business. Following its acquisition by Google in October 2006, YouTube’s value went from zero to USD 1.65 bn in less than 20 months. About one year later, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg sold a 1.6% share of his company to Microsoft for a sum of USD 246 million. One year after making his social networking site open to the general public, the deal put the valuation of Facebook at USD 15.6 bn. In the same year of Facebook’s rise to fame, AOL Time Warner’s market cap plummeted by almost half. As media mogul Rupert Murdoch noted: “The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.” My tip: Master speed by becoming a faster, more fluent thinker to quickly spot and take action on emerging business opportunities.

2. We are living in times of exponential change

Take a minute to reflect on what has changed in the last 20 years: What new products and services have emerged? What new companies have surfaced, and which former corporate giants have lost their importance — or even disappeared completely? How has your work and lifestyle changed?

If you spend some time on these questions, you will notice that there has been huge change, massive change in the last two decades. And — thanks to our first driver — the speed of change has increased over the past years, which explains the header line of this paragraph. So trust this truism: “The only thing that will never change is change.” And take note of a central insight from Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” My tip: Become a more flexible, more creative thinker. Learn how to constantly reframe your business challenges in times of change.

3. Complexity: More — more — more

Think about the number of TV channels, newspapers, magazines, books, mobile phones, fashion malls, or airlines that you can choose from as a consumer today. How do you keep an overview? How to make the right choices? One consequence of the previous two drivers is that our lives have become much more complex — and complexity has a tendency to become overwhelming. So how can you best deal with it? Unfortunately, complexity can hardly be rationally managed, as Albert Einstein already noted: “When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large, scientific method in most cases fails.” My tip: Creatively respond to complexity by reversing the concept in line with Winston Churchill’s advice: “Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge.”

4. Risks: More, higher and new risks

In the new millennium, the risk landscape for both individuals and businesses has changed dramatically: We face more risks (driven by technology, globalization, increasing complexity), new risks (just think of terrorism, new diseases, new competitors, etc.) and higher risks (e.g., consider the significantly higher volatility in global financial markets that we have witnessed in recent months). As the current US subprime crisis has vividly illustrated: In an increasingly complex world, traditional risk management analyses tend to fail in their attempt to proactively deal with imminent risks. My tip: Refuse to follow the herd and develop your own risk management methods. Do your own thinking. Thereby, creatively shift your perspective to focus on what has been there all the time, although everybody else fails to take notice of it (vuja dé).

5. Surprises: Get ready for more

Surprises can be positive and negative: At the end of 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Iron Curtain and communism in Eastern Europe was a sudden, extremely nice surprise that dramatically altered the world map and offered massive new business opportunities overnight. In early 2003, SARS was a sudden, very scary surprise that cost the lives of nearly a thousand people and massively affected the lives of over a billion people in Asia. And of course, the SARS crisis had a major negative impact on a number of industries (e.g., travel, airlines, hotels) while at the same time being a great business opportunity for certain niche industries (e.g., think of a producer of face masks). My tip: Most analyses fail to predict surprises and to adequately respond to them — creativity and the ability to quickly come up with new ideas help you to deal with any new surprise.

Conclusion: Reframing exercises, reversals, perspective shifts, flexibly embracing ambiguity, paradoxes and change, fluent thinking and the ability to quickly come up with great ideas are all standard mental strategies of a savvy creative thinker. Hence, for both individuals and companies alike, one simple and promising way emerges to master the five drivers of future trends: Invest time and money to become more creative! After all, Albert Einstein is right once again: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”