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As a theoretical background to the module we need to explore the current versus ideal
future concept a little more in detail. The current situation or the current state
of a system was brought about or came into being as a result of decisions made in the
past, and co-production of the outer and inner environment throughout the past. This brought
the system to where it is now. This configuration of the system drives it into a current future
and this is called momentum. So the force that drives us forward is momentum. To illustrate
momentum we can use the analogy of a tanker. If we picture an oil tanker, fully laden,
going at full speed, maybe in a fog, towards a sandy beach, it will actually glide out
of the beach even if it can't drive in the water anymore. The momentum will propel it
forward. And the larger the tanker is, the heavier it is, the faster it goes and the
less resistance there is on the beach, the further inland the tanker will go. The same
is true the larger our organisations are, the greater the momentum will be and the more
difficult it will be to change. We could also picture a ship in a fog suddenly seeing an
iceberg or a rock in front of it. The captain will not be able to turn the ship beyond momentum.
The captain may have the choice to hit the iceberg or to capsize the boat if it is turned
around at too great speed beyond momentum. We cannot change systems beyond their momentum.
In an organisational context, it means a large organisation has a lot of momentum and cannot
be changed overnight. In society as well, large systems, like an education system, take
several years to change. Our four year election periods are a huge hindrance in managing societal
change, because the momentum of the change would take longer than the period of elections
are. The momentum drives the system into its current
future. A current future really implies more of the same behaviour. It represents the current
logic. I carry on doing what I am doing. The organisation carries on with its current strategies,
its current markets, its current policies. It is really a more of the same. And this
allows forecasting, or this is the basis of forecasting. What we do in forecasting, we
extrapolate where we would end up if we carry on doing what we are doing now. Of course
there will be environmental change, so as we move into the future, our interaction with
the environment will change and that gives rise to alternative current futures.
Typically, the current future situation involves deterioration. And we illustrate that with
the boiling frog. The boiling frog syndrome means that if we are taking a frog and put
it into cold water and we start heating the water slowly, it will not notice that it is
getting hotter and hotter and will happily boil to death. By comparison, if we were to
take a frog and throw it into hot water, it will jump out immediately. So why does the
frog not detect gradual change? Because apparently it has a nervous system that does not detect
gradual change before it is too late. What would be some of the examples or the
relevance of the boiling frog? For example, in an organisation we could observe a decline
of sales. Every year, a couple of percentage points less. If we compare this year to last
year it may be only two or three percent worse than it was last year, so this is not necessarily
a calamity. And if we compare next year to this year, there may be another two percent
less. So we don't notice how bad the situation gets, unless we are comparing it to large
intervals of time. Suddenly, over five to ten year periods we are talking a decline
in market share of maybe twenty or thirty percent. And this is huge. But from one year
to another we don't notice this. In our private life we may be gradually putting on weight,
a little bit one year after another. So this year it is not so much worse than last year,
but if we are looking at it over periods of five or ten years, and forecast the continuation
of that trend into the future, then there may be very serious health or other results
looming. And because of the alternative current futures, we don't know what the result would
be if we carry on with our current behaviour. Would it be a high road or a low road scenario?
If we carry on smoking more and more as we do every year, will we die of lung cancer,
or will we die of heart disease or will we stay healthy? We do not know exactly what
the outcome will be, but in general it involves deterioration.
The current future also contains contradictions. What we mean by that is not everything gets
worse. Some things get better, technology for example, many solutions in society are
there that were not there few years ago, in medicine. Some things get better, some things
get worse. And when we are doing scenario development, when we look at alternative futures,
we are putting together related variables, some of them negative, some of them positive
and that is how we can design a range of forecasts from a lower road to a higher road. This is
how we call it in scenario development. If the current future is undesirable, it is
time that we are designing an ideal future. The ideal future resides in conceptual space.
What we mean by that it is part of the in-formation field that I have been talking about in the
first module. The in-formation field is that field of ideas that in-forms, puts form into
the manifestation of a system. If we have an ideal future towards which we strive, the
ideal future in-forms our behaviour and makes us develop in a different way. Ideals by definition
cannot be achieved, they can only be approximated. Why is it useful to have an ideal future if
one cannot achieve it? Well, precisely because one can carry on striving
towards it and it remains valid as long as the system exists. For example, if as a person
I want to have a happy marriage and I design an ideal around that, then as long as I and
my partner are alive, that vision will remain valid. Or if I have the vision of being fit,
vital, healthy, then this is a valid vision throughout my life. Even if I am fit now,
or healthy, it is a state that can be improved on. I can be healthier, fitter, etc.
Likewise, in an organisation, if the organisation has a good vision, it can carry on developing
towards the vision. One of my favourite visions is Audi's Vorsprung durch technik, leaping
ahead through technology, which very clearly describes what the driving force in that organisation
is and what its vision is. It wants to leap ahead of the competition through its technology.
So even if it has superior technology at one moment in time, the competition would catch
up with it. To stay ahead, to leap ahead, it needs to have the next technological improvement.
What is important is that the logic of the ideal future is not the logic of the current
situation. One needs to think differently in order to produce an ideal future. We can
take the example of health. If I am analysing the existing situation, which may be diseased,
the one thing I will not find in that situation is health. Likewise, if I look at a diseased
marriage, or a diseased organisation, I can analyse it but what I will not find there
is happiness or profitability, one will not find that in the current situation. The logic
of the problem is not the logic of the solution. What that implies is that in order to formulate
an ideal future, one needs to think differently, one needs to have a different logic of functioning,
of behaviour then the current situation. For example, if the current situation produces
disease, then I need to find a logic that produces health. And analysing the current
situation does not give me an understanding necessarily of what the healthy situation
looks like. If I am producing an unhappy marriage at the moment, analysing the unhappy situation
will not allow me to understand the logic of happiness, because it requires different
functioning, different behaviour. Likewise, if we go into an organisation that is problem
riddled, or a society that is problem riddled, analysing the problems will not reveal the
ideals or the solutions. One needs a shift in logic to do that.
The logic of the ideal future is higher order logic. What that means is that it transcends
the situation of the current future. For example, once a year there is a heart week. And they
tell us to prevent heart disease from happening we should change our nutrition, exercise more,
stop smoking, manage stress and so on. When there is cancer week, we hear the same strategies,
change the nutrition, do more exercise, manage your stress, supplementation and a couple
of other strategies. If we add to that prevention of specific diseases like malaria prevention
if we go to a malaria area or protection to not get ***/AIDS and if we add to that some
basics like hygiene, then we have maybe ten strategies that create health. And creating
health eliminates all disease. There may be hundreds of diseases caused by hundreds of
different strategies, but to create health requires a few strategies. It is higher order
logic. Likewise, when as an organisation consultant I come into an organisation that is problem
riddled, we typically have many different kinds of problems. And often there are many
different solutions proposed. But if one goes into creating a systemic learning organisation,
this is higher order logic, it is like creating health in the organisation. By creating that
particular learning organisation, the existing problems dissolve. They disappear, like heath
disappears or dissolves disease. The ideal future is required for dissolving the problems
in the current situation. To do that, we need to backcast. The ideal future requires backcasting
to the current situation. What that implies is once we formulated what
the ideal state of the body or the marriage or the organisation should be, we need to
backcast what are the strategies, the courses of action we need to take to start moving
towards a more ideal future. And this is what we refer to as backcasting.
How do we move towards the ideal future? Once we have backcast the ideal future and determined
the courses of action we have to take, this is normally done through implementation planning,
we have at every moment in time a choice to move towards the current situation or to move
towards the ideal future. For example, if I have formulated a new career for myself
and one of the strategies is to get an MBA, I have the choice of going to the cinema as
I used to do twice a week, or learning for my MBA. So every week when I had my meeting
with my friends to go to the cinema, I have the choice: cinema or learning for the MBA?
Next week again: cinema or learning for the MBA? Once I am on the path towards learning,
my friends will not expect me any more to go to the cinema with them. The momentum that
drove me into regular weekly behaviour has frizzled out and the new momentum has become
to automatically learn. So in this way, the current future starts
reinforcing the ideal future. The logic of the momentum has become the logic of the ideal.
There are still alternative possibilities that can occur along the way, so it is not
a straight path towards the ideal future, because environment changes may require that
one deviates from the path at one stage or another, but one can always determine strategies
to move around it towards the ideal future. In an organisation, once we have formulated
ideals that we want to achieve as an organisation, we need to structure the organisation and
the behaviour of the parts and the members of the organisation in such a way that they
move towards the ideal future automatically by default. Like the current situation is
moving into the current future by default, so we have to wire the organisation towards
managing ongoing change in a learning manner to achieve its ideal by default. When we have
achieved that, then we have a learning organisation and we have wired the organisation for ongoing
change. This is the purpose of our programme on Organisational Transformation.
There are different ways that we engage with the current and with the ideal future as a
person, as a system. The current future pushes us into a particular direction. It pushes
us through habits, through structure, through existing laws, existing plans and so on. By
comparison, the ideal future pulls us, it inspires us to formulate new strategies, make
new plans, think differently. From a cognitive perspective, the current future has a current
logic, it is the current thinking, the current worldview, the current mental models that
perpetuate the current situation into a current future. The ideal future requires a new logic.
If we are looking from an emotional perspective, the current future arises passion. If we don't
like the current situation, we are passionate about the changing. That is why revolutionaries
are so passionate about what they are doing, they want the change the status quo, they
regard it as unjust, as untenable, etc. By comparison, the ideal future arouses enthusiasm.
The word enthusiasm comes from Greek, meaning "god in us" and it means there is a larger
force, an in-formation field that inspires us to do things differently. By comparison,
passion comes from Latin, it arouses suffering to change things, while enthusiasm is inspiration
to do things differently. So according to the current and ideal future,
we have two ways of going into the future. We can create a future by default, this is
the current future mode setting, we carry on as in the past, or we deliberately design
a future, an ideal future, to move into a direction that we find more desirable. Either
way, it is our responsibility. So if we are having a current future that is undesirable,
it is our responsibility, and if we are moving towards an ideal future, it is our responsibility.
Ideally of course, we will have our default set towards the ideal future as I have explained
in the previous slide, that I am automatically in my behaviour informed and inspired by the
ideal future and moving towards that, all my behaviour becomes habitually that of creating
the ideal future. If we don't have an ideal design, then we are likely to have a default
setting that moves us into an undesirable current future. And this is expressed by the
famous Proverb where there is no vision, the people perish.
Ackhoff has another saying describing a similar thing, plan or be planned for. If we are not
planning our lives for ourselves, others will plan for us and will make us do what they
want to do. So it is our responsibility to create an ideal future. When we talk creating
an organisational future or a societal future, it is our collective responsibility, it cannot
be done by one person alone. It is collective and it requires a formulation of an ideal
future to which the collective agrees, around which the collective aligns and then moves
towards it, co-produces it.