Monday 5 November 2012

A New End: A New Beginning (Part 1)

For almost a decade now, I have been traveling broadly speaking to groups of all sizes and almost every discipline you can think of about the big change that appeared to be converging on the horizon.

Often characterizing the coming shift in terms of breakdowns and breakthroughs, I’ve tried to build integrated mental pictures of the extraordinary nexus of driving forces – both conventional and unconventional – that seemed destined to reconfigure the way we live on this planet. My book, Out of the Blue, introduced an approach for making sense out of big events that would otherwise be surprises, and my latest volume, A Vision for 2012: Planning for Extraordinary Change, uses the breakdown/breakthrough themes to propose a general approach for dealing with large scale change.

So, I’ve been thinking about this possibility for quite some time. (My wife would probably tell you that I think about it all of the time.)

I generally agree with the many thoughtful people who consider predicting the future to be a fool’s errand. It is intrinsically fraught with so much complexity and uncertainty that the best one can do with integrity is to array potential alternatives – scenarios – across the horizon, and then try to think about what might be done if one of those worlds materializes.

Scenario planning has certainly been an effective discipline, helping many organizations to imagine potentialities that probably otherwise wouldn’t have shown up in their field of view. But as I facilitate organizations going through these exercises, the little, nagging voice in the back of my head is not asking, “What is the array of possible futures?” – it is always wondering, “What is the future really going to be?”. It wants concreteness. It wants predictions.

I think that no one knows for sure what the future will bring, but after some time of being in this business one begins to be able to discriminate between what is substantive and structural and what is largely speculative. For me, at least, some things have an intuitive sense of being real and important, and the rest of the possibilities lack just enough gravitas that I know that they’re only “ideas”. That intuitive sense is supported when it becomes possible to triangulate from a number of independent sources that all point to the same conclusion – the possibility has substance.

People always ask me after my talks what I think is going to happen. “With all of these converging trends, what is 2012 really going to look like?”. It happened again last week in a radio interview. Mostly I hedge and dance a bit and say that I don’t know for sure. There will be a new world and a new human that will come out of all of this. The notion of cooperation will shape the way people see themselves and the rest of the world . . . and there will be new institutions and functions, etc. Pretty general stuff.

But, over a year ago, the notion that all of this big change could spell the substantial reconfiguration of the familiar country that I have lived in all of my life began to gel in a way that moved beyond the notion of being just a possibility – a wild card – into that space of plausibility. I now have come to believe that it is likely and will happen – soon.
Ideas like this are so big and disruptive that it is really quite hard to get to the place where we take them seriously. For most of us, our lives are evolutionary – punctuated, perhaps with trauma now and then, but mostly populated by events that are familiar, even if they don’t always make personal sense. The concept that EVERYTHING might change is so foreign to any experience that most of us have ever had that even if we say the words and talk about the possibility, we really don’t internalize what this might mean.

Therefore, along with most folks, I’m kind of late to this game. There are other notable thinkers who jumped to the natural conclusion quite some time ago. Dmitry Orlov, for example, first started to build a theory of superpower collapse that included the U.S. in 1995. Only in the last few years has he been talking publicly about his ideas and the ultimate direction of U.S. trends. His book Reinventing Collapse is recommended. He also gave a great speech about the subject recently.

James Howard Kunstler, a wonderfully entertaining and provocative writer, was very clear about the systemic and structural nature of the larger problem in his 2006 book, The Long Emergency. His always interesting blog is a weekly assessment of where we’re going wrong. He clearly sees the demise of America coming this way.

Our own David Martin first outlined the financial dominos that were going to fall in a talk at The Arlington Institute in July of 2006, which he has updated on two subsequent occasions here in Berkeley Springs. Implicit in his treatise was the collapse of the U.S. and global financial system, but again, it’s one thing to imply those words and quite another to really believe them.

I was aggregating my own perspectives and being influenced by some of these folks such that last year while in Singapore I even told my friends there that I thought we were seeing the beginning of the end of the U.S. as we’ve known it. I didn’t think they really believed it then but, in the months since then, they reportedly have made major leadership changes in their government investment company to reposition it in the future away from the U.S. and the US dollar.

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