In the fashion industry we’re very taken to ‘trends’: the colours, cuts, styles, fabrics of the next couple of seasons or so.
Very rarely do we spend time thinking about that, in fact, this means running after the as-good-as-accomplished anyway. Thinking 2, 3 years down the line is as rare as a diamond sold at flee markets, albeit many businesses pretend that’s what they’re cash flows and sales forecasts are all about.
Yet few venture to think about how their very own industry will look like in, say, 2020 or beyond. Chances are it’s no ways going to look the same as it is today (fashion e-tailing anyone in the early 2000?? catalogue, yes, but hey online???). Chances are there will be radical changes. And chances are that we’ll be encountering very serious challenges of running businesses the way we’ve done it in the last 30 years.
Scenario work: 2 approaches
Prediction of 2000 from the year 1901Scenario research is precisely the tool to tackle these type of ‘what will happen then’ incertainties.
Indeed there are – very roughly – 2 ways of how to approach that:
a) Draw out the future in say 100 years, look at how you want it to be, and direct you’re business’ accordingly by breaking the outcome back down into a time scale much, much nearer to the now.
b) Research all the different influence that will impact the world and how it will changes, you wanting it or not. Paint a clear picture of it. Add the stuff you would want to happen – sales increases, new product lines, new business – you name it. Then back cast to the present and get going adapting your business accordingly.
The first is relatively common. To the extent that the likes of Shell even brag about it. Reading for instance the Shell scenarios for 2100 it becomes apparent that they company calculates on
a) legislation on the environmental protection loosening up because
b) Europe and the world would be scrambling for energy recources and hence that
c) they’d be allowed to dig whereever they please: the Antarctic, fracking in the South of England or in areas of substantial fresh water resources. It’s – they way I look at it – old style scenario work, and a relatively habitual approach specifically in multinationals. An approach that so far has generally worked quite successfully. Till now, that is.
This is not saying that there asn’t research has gone into the building of these scenarios – and very likely also millions of dollars in fairly expensive digital simulation modelling. Yet – it relies on the fact that the way the past evolved, the future also will evolve accordingly. And they tend to rely on the assumption that we’re operating on an infinite amount of natural resources – or if not, then it’s past our life times. Both of these assumptions are as wrong as it could be. As a result, no matter how sophisticated the results, they cannot possibly be truly accurate.
The second type is different in a couple of major points, although much of the methodology otherwise is, in essence, similar. These major points are:
1967 Future Prediction – the use of the PC in the home and private settinga) the development of the past is not simply prolonged to the future, but radical changes are very seriously thought about. Think someone fantasizing about the potential of IT back in the 1950s or 1960. It was done, and actually, the forecasts where pretty accurate. But boy were those people considered nutters.
b) Intuition and common sense is used in the most radical way (see the 1st video above on the 1901 prediction of the year 2000). Daring to really take current technologies and their development in our minds to the extreme, gives – experience shows – a rather probable picture of how the world will look like once we’re gone.
c) Use indicators of extreme events of the present as indicators of common events in a couple of decades. Notably, when it comes to environmental changes. The moment you can perceive a replication across cultures, geographies – chances are statisticians won’t take it as ‘likely’ yet. But too many a case in our perception is likely already the first sign of a new status quo.
Good examples of such scenarios works comes for instance from the Forum of the Future’s work on fashion, cotton and consumers.
What good does it do?!
Looking back at predictions of the 1950 and 1960, sometimes even before that, it is rather astonishing how not the commonly accepted ones, but instead the ‘nutty’ ones have become the reality we live in. Physical artifacts not considered, it is amazing how accurately our lives have been predicted and depicted: home and internet shopping – very specifically for fashion – , abundant use of electronic means of payment via cards, space technology, mobile phones, wireless technology … it is all there.
The answer therefore is two fold: For one, by pushing the bounderies we discover things that really would make a difference to our lives in terms of convenience and desirability. And for the other, possibly more importantly, it shows that the development does certainly not come out of the blue, but has taken on intuitively a rather accurate shape. In other words: we are overall fairly good at conjuring up realities that seem very different from our own, but at the same time achievable even in our lifetimes with the technological and societal progress as time advances.
It’s just that we’re usually closing our eyes to the factst we know, and rather let us be taken by surprise.
The point is though, if we choose to keep ignoring the resource constraints we’re facing in the next 30 to 50 years, our worst case scenarios may for one rather get ahead of our own imagination.
