E26 Making Sense of the Future
Cecily Sommers is a futurist and business consultant. In this episode of 12 Geniuses, host Don MacPherson interviews Cecily as she explains her Four Forces of Change model. She shares which of those forces - energy, access to water, aging - will dominate the next decade and beyond.
Cecily goes in depth to describe how three technologies - artificial intelligence, bioengineering, and quantum mechanics - will reshape humanity. Finally, Cecily shares advice for how we can manage the incredible changes the future is sure to bring us.
Season Three of the podcast is dedicated to exploring the future and how life is sure to change over the next decade. This episode provides tools and guidance for how to better understand that future.
Cecily Sommers speaks, writes and consults on emerging trends, markets, and technologies shaping business and society. Cecily works with a wide range of Fortune 500 companies and organizations that are looking to stay ahead of the curve and become future-ready.
Don MacPherson:
The future… Few things generate as much excitement. At the same time, even fewer things produce as much anxiety. How long will we live? Will the economy flourish? Am I making the right career choices? Hello everyone, and welcome back to 12 Geniuses. I'm your host, Don MacPherson.
In Season 3, we interview experts about the future; the future of leadership, faith, happiness, automation, entrepreneurship, and other topics that will give us a better understanding of what this new decade will provide. Today's guest is Cecily Sommers. Cecily is a business futurist who helps organizations create accurate strategic visions and solve complex problems brought on by emerging changes. In this interview, Cecily discusses the four forces of change and three technologies that will fundamentally alter human life. She also gives very salient advice for how we can all manage the dramatic changes that the future is sure to bring.
Cecily, welcome to 12 Geniuses.
Cecily Sommers:
Nice to be with you, Don.
Don:
Let's talk a little bit about your background — you have a very fascinating background — and how that background has led you to become a futurist.
Cecily:
My first career began early, in a sense. I started taking ballet lessons when I was five, and that did grow into a professional career when I was a young adult. So, I was a dancer, ballet dancer, and also contemporary dance. And then, phase two, with a lot of stories and transitions between, was that I became a chiropractor, which was a translation from art to science, but also from self to others. And in many ways as still really seeking kind of the closest route of how we get to be our most expressed self, and the arts do that, and in my opinion, healthcare was ultimately about that too. And a parallel path of teaching anatomy and clinical sciences for about 12 years, and then, ultimately, because in my path as a chiropractor, I became a business person, which then gave me a segue and transitioned into my third, and I believe final career, the last 20 years as a business consultant.
I started in healthcare, focused on brand strategy. And the central questions of who you are and where you're going were really what anchored my work then, and they still do. And the work around who you are from my connection in the arts, I think felt very native and really deep in terms of what I could bring to businesses. And then the trending work, who you are in relationship to the environment is how any individual, and certainly any business finds its relevance. So, how do we keep up with it and evolve as the environment does? And then finally, we get to that, that work led me into foresight. And again, for the last 20 years, I am now known as a business futurist and have created a quite fascinating and rich experience and career in this form.
Don:
How did you become a futurist?
Cecily:
Watching contemporary culture and trends, and where meaning is for people, and how we find resonance with who we are and what we're doing, just started to beg, for me, a more interesting question about, how do we know what's changing and why? And so, that work took me down the path of studying foresight methods and tools and developing some work of my own, now captured in my book Think Like a Futurist. And so, developing models and tools for understanding, in my view, anyway, that change actually does have a kind of mechanical view that's helpful for us to understand what's changing and why and where it's likely to go. So, the mechanics of change as well as the nature of change.
If we're doing strategy, which is what I have been doing all this time, it seemed to me that it, at least in my feeling, it was almost irresponsible not to be really thinking about change and how it works and where it's headed in order for us to be strategic and make good decisions.
Don:
For those people who don't know what foresight is, could you explain?
Cecily:
Foresight is about really keeping your eyes trained on the structural aspects of change so that you can see the systems at work, almost like the architecture of change. And from that point of view, then go, “Oh, we can make some sense of where we are now and why.” Put a why behind it. That's a little bit more than an opinion. And also, where the likely potentials are for what's coming towards us. And potential is a word that's used in foresight a lot. We are capturing the signals of emerging change so that we can see the potentials that are likely so that we can finally then exercise our imagination going, “Hmm, what might that look like then?” And that's using our brain to, I think, its best ability for forecasting, right? Some foresight in advance.
How do we take the best information that's the most literally grounded that we can try to make some smart views of what we think is coming and where we fit in that future?
Don:
If I'm phrasing this correctly, I believe you just said, ‘making sense of where we are in this moment.’ Where are we in this moment?
Cecily:
We have a society and a way of living, and mindsets, and worldviews, and institutions that were largely shaped in the industrial area. Every time there's a big technological revolution, our world views and values shift with it. And in the 20th century, we did so much. I mean, we just did so much. And you can look at any part of our lives to look at what it did for the economy, which is mass production of manufacturing, and certainly what that did for work, and markets, and economies, and the structure of them, and all that stuff. We had two world wars and then a lot of extra ones that also advanced technology. But on the back of those world wars, we created, for the first time, global institutions to say, there is kind of a bigger picture of what really brings us together.
This is a global society now. It advanced the values of democracy and it pulled America out of its isolation and into the global stage that it helped create post World War II, and all the countries we defined and divvied up at that time, too; and the organizations, the World Bank and NATO, and so many more. And we've been very busy spreading democracy, spreading capitalism, building technologies that kind of favor both of those things. And we are now at a time where those vessels, that worldview the institutions, the ideas even are starting to expire. They're not fitting anymore. So, I would say where we are at this time is we are challenging… It's more than just the disruption of the 1990s. I think things are expiring and new orders are emerging and we don't know what they look like.
So, it's incredibly turbulent. We have a lot of backlash against that move towards more freedom and democracy and capitalism around the world. There's a backlash underway, and it shows up in all kinds of forms. And so, there's profound turbulence and uncertainty, and it's scary. We can't really bank on too much in the same way that we used to. And we have to be really sensitive to what's emerging. So, it's exciting, it's frightening, and it's changing.
Don:
Is there a historic reference point that seems familiar to our current state?
Cecily:
I think, often, people are feeling like we're going to hell in a hand basket, that climate change is for real and that may be existential. We may be not just exterminating other lives and natural forces, but our own as well. This is a really strong feeling, but we have been at the edge of an extinction in many times before. That at least that's been the feeling or the view that people have had. So, if we go back in time, we can think of these pendulum swings between certain eras and when they change. And when they change, it's always violent and upsetting, and it really is destructive to the previous order before a new one settles in. we can look to ancient Greece as being one of those societies that was distracted by the Persians who came in and took control of that for quite some time before the Roman Empire rose and held its way for about a thousand years.
And felt very stable and secure and right and institutionalized as our time is now. We move forward to the French Revolution, and once again, we've unseated the former order to bring a new order. Revolutions have done that and we're at such a tipping point again, I think.
Don:
You've referenced the mechanics of change. Could you talk about what those mechanics are?
Cecily:
I view change as being grounded in four fundamental forces that shape human society, that these are universal, they've shaped society always throughout time and always will. The four forces are, that shape any society, are, first, resources. When you think about a group coming together and trying to sustain its life, the very first thing that they have to use and maintain and sustain their lives with is, what's the land provide? What is the water and earth quality, and plants and animals, and the rest of it? These are the things that we use to sustain and create life of our own. And so, that's the primary force. The second one is technology. What humans have done exceptionally well is that we find and create and invent tools to harvest resources and then make secondary products so that we can somehow figure out how to tie vines together and create a net.
And rather than capture each fish with a stick or our hands, we're now capturing six fish that we can bring home and strike a fire because that's an invention as well, and feed more people and invent a home, and all of those things that are really basic. That's the force number two, resources and then technology. The third force for any society is that you've got to have a band, a group of people that's strong enough and can remain stable over a time. That means that demographics have to be well diversified between gender for procreation and strength, but also between ages; how many people you have alive at different aged races and what their talents and skills are. So, demographics really matters to the stability of a group. Then the last force and fourth force is the one that sits on top of the other three, and that's governance.
That what humans do, and I think this is maybe true in other animal societies too, is that we create rules for cooperation and we institutionalize those as rules of law. It can be taboos as well and rules of the market. And so, government is an institutionalized form of governance, but I, in my four forces model, what I look to in understanding change is to see what's changing the very basic parts of how we even construct ourselves. What's changing in resources? What's changing in technology, and how is that advancing who we are and how we live together? What are the pressures from demographics and how it's stabilizing, or destabilizing, or mixing up who we are and creating social cohesion among us? Then lastly and reactively is how are we responding to it, reactively or proactively, through our rule making and through the things that ultimately bind us together, and say, “Yeah, we're going to work together and make these things happen”?
I watch those four forces for clues about where we are and sense making for where we are now and where to look for emerging signs of where we're headed as well.
Don:
As you look at those four forces, what are a couple of resources that you see really changing the way we live and work over the next decade?
Cecily:
Well, some of these are technologies that are already in existence. Technology is how we find new resources at this time that they allow us either to explore and find resources within the planet or other planets, which we're now doing, going to Mars and asteroids, and looking for ways to harvest new energy sources because energy's kind of the big deal when it comes to an economy. But nuclear is probably very likely to come back unvague, I think. As our electricity, the electric cars may get its tipping point pretty soon. But otherwise, we're going to be continuing to look at battery storage alternative sources. Again, where do we find, I think, extraterrestrial sources are what's leading the space race these days of, how do we continue to find new resources beyond this planet? It's crazy, right?
Don:
It's mind-blowing. Yeah.
Cecily:
I know it is.
Don:
I just had a conversation with a friend of mine who was a Marine for a long time. He was a Colonel in the Marine Corps, and he just retired, and he was talking about asteroid mining as something that this is a regular conversation that is being had.
Cecily:
It is a regular conversation that technologies are being proven to try to do it. People are trying to stake out, put their flags in these different planets as to who's going to create territories out of them. These are the things that you watch is that usually as we develop the will and the technologies to make it possible, you can expect that it will come to pass. It's just a matter of when.
Don:
What about water, access to clean water, being a force for mass evacuation, immigration, immigration? What are your thoughts on that as a resource?
Cecily:
One part of what you're talking about is how do we access clean water and desalination? There are exciting technologies about dealing with water shortages and excess water, but maybe the more important thing that you are addressing is that the force, the pressure on migration is that where people have lived and made lives is going to be destroyed or change at a minimum. And so, we’re seeing, rapidly, climate change affecting all of us with… We've got storms coming right now, fires blazing, and coastal waters that are encroaching on places where people have lived for a long time all over the world. I think that may be one of the stronger pressures overall is how do we deal with climate refugees and the mass migrations around the world? And that becomes a huge economic and political pressure, as we know.
And when we see pressures like that come, one of the reactive buttons that gets hit, which is one that's very loud in our midst right now, is around immigration. Again, these are some of the drivers around why is immigration such a big deal? Has not to do only with mobile technologies and allowing people to move around the worldwide. It has a lot to do with the kind of ways in which people can't make lives, make their lives where they used to live. So, climate refugees, conflict refugees, and all the rest are moving around the world, and moving into places where we're saying, “Yeah, you're not…” This us-them thing starts to really magnify and get hot.
Don:
We talked a little bit about resources. We've talked about a couple of the technologies. Are there other technologies that you have identified that are game changers for the next decade?
Cecily:
Well, the next decade and beyond, I think the three big technology revolutions that I'm watching are AI, biotechnology and quantum physics slash computing. I think those are the ones that are redefining almost every part of what we understand to be true and real. AI is redefining intelligence at its core. What we're able to do with gene editing and CRISPR technologies and the rest is redefining and allowing us to engineer life different from the way nature first set it up. Quantum computing, in a way, I think is just profound, is likely to redefine what we understand about reality.
So, intelligence, life and reality are all undergoing through these three revolutions. I'm going to use the word again; they're redefining what they even look like. Yeah, I think this will be shaping humanity much less how societies are organized, how businesses work, and what everyday life looks like for us going forward.
Don:
I think most people understand artificial intelligence. There have been enough stories about it. People are using it or are subjected to it, voice recognition, and recommendations from Amazon and whatnot. I also think that people have a pretty good sense of what's possible with bioengineering. Maybe not what's possible, but you can see something that has been manipulated. Quantum, it's mind-boggling. It's so difficult to understand. How would you describe what it is and how it can shift or change reality?
Cecily:
The basis of quantum is it's not this binary code. It's actually, in fact, non-binary. And it's not an objective reality. It includes and accepts that things are neither this nor that. And that if it appears to be like Schrödinger's cat, either alive or dead, it's your perspective. And that everything that we view is really shaped by the instruments you choose, the experiments, the way they're set up, is that you're going to get back exactly what you sought to see, not necessarily an objective reality. It's always subjective and that it's changeable depending on who's viewing it, and that more than one thing can be true at the same time.
So, as a futurist and as a change watcher, one of the things that I see about the new influences of things that are emerging through these forces; these four forces, meaning technology being among them that while quantum is not mainstream yet, the very fact of its emergence and laboratories, and that it's starting to come to the edges of maybe being something we can do, we're starting to think more quantum. For instance, in our political discourse, we have something called alternative facts, right? I mean, this is really the thing, and it's driving people crazy because this is a… It's either true or it's not true. I find it interesting that what is coming into our culture and is starting to emerge as a part of our reality is this conversation around not this, not that.
And it's really hard for us to reconcile because things are verifiable, right? We have facts, and that's verifiably a lie. And yet, we are running different narratives, we are running different realities. And isn't it interesting, at least to me, that this has a kinship, a parallel to what quantum is going to be offering too? This is what change looks like, I believe, is it starts to seep into our world in this way. So, that's very interesting to me. And at the same time, that we are starting to explore what consciousness is. Is this something that we can even begin to study? Would quantum be a tool that allows us to study consciousness? We hear and understand that this is something that's more in our discourse as well. So, alternative facts and consciousness and non-duality and all of these things are starting to be emergent.
Don:
What demographics are high on your list of influencers over the next decade?
Cecily:
Well, there are a couple of drivers there. One is just age. So, at the two ends of the age spectrum, we have; we're working on technologies that can extend life. We have been extending life quite dramatically in the last 100 years from a lifespan of 35 to 50, to 75, to 100 now. That's pretty remarkable. We are working on technologies that, maybe that we can engineer; immortality, and that's a very serious scientific effort that people are working on. All of this may sound incredible and may sound wrong. I mean, a lot of these things sound wrong to us. I often encourage people that when we have a visceral response to something that just feels so wrong, like we have a sense of like, we just say, “Ew. That's just ew.” We recoil from it.
And part of our job really, as we start to face change, is to lean into it with more curiosity. And so, I encourage people to move from a posture of resistance of ew, to one that's more leaning forward that says, “Ooh, tell me more.” In any case, that's one piece of what's happening in demographics is we are extending life, on the one hand. And while we have many more children surviving, which used to be just drastic mortality rates around birth and early years, we're not producing as many people on the planet. We're actually just having more people live well. So, the population growth is continuing. That's a huge burden on the planet. And as we talked about, as resources change, which is climate change and more, people are moving around a lot. And so, that's a demographic pressure.
Inside of demographic pressures, we also have other forces that are acting. So, some of this is again, the mixing of people across borders, across economies, across cultures that we're experiencing right now, which I think is only going to be deepening and it also deepens the reaction against it. That's kind of in the demographic force field, as I call it. And then, I think, critically, we begin to also see science affecting demographics in that back to the bioengineering of redefining life. We now have the capability of, not just test-tube babies, but we can engineer human beings without the need for a female or a male to be present.
The example is the following. We now have proven that you can take skin cells, for instance, from a live human being and cause them to reverse engineer into their very initial nascent state called the stem cell. And a stem cell is a cell that can become any type of tissue. So, we can take skin cells, reverse engineer them into becoming stem cells, and then re-engineer them and point them to become new cells. And in this case, we can make those cells become a sperm and we can make them become an ovum, and they can reproduce right there without two people having to come together, not even in a test tube source; not from harvesting eggs from a woman, not from harvesting sperm from a man, but just by the cells themselves.
Don:
And this is a real capability right now?
Cecily:
It is.
Don:
You talked about global institutions that were created in the previous century, and it seems like, more than ever, we need global institutions to have conversations around this excitement. We have these new tools, we have these new technologies, where are we with governance? It seems like we're moving very, very slowly and we're not moving in the direction where we're having conversations around tempering this excitement or maybe having thoughtful foresight, tech conversations that are benefiting the people of this earth.
Cecily:
Government is always reactive and it's the last to actually do something, and usually under a lot of pressures from social movements and market pressures and so forth. So, a lot of where change comes from really is, again, through social movements primarily. What are the things that seed those conversations? And what seeds them often are these beautiful institutions, and think tanks, and consortia, and people who are writing papers, and they argue with one another, but they're working on it. I think people are thoughtful. We are reckless and thoughtful all the same time because that is the nature of human beings.
Don:
One of the things that, when we were preparing for this conversation, that stuck with me was a quote that you said, “We create our own value today by keeping up with these changes.” Do you want to elaborate a little bit on that?
Cecily:
Well, I mean, this is the mandate of evolution. The only way that we buy our way into further existence is by staying relevant. And that means that we evolve in a cooperative and constructive way with the environment. So, this is very interesting to me right now as the environment, again, I've been using the words roiling, and turbulent, and frothy, fast, accelerating. It's upsetting. We don't know how to control it. In fact, the answer is we can't. And that feels really new to us. So, it's interesting. If evolution is the name of the game of keeping ourselves relevant, then we have to up our own game to be intentionally accelerate our own evolution as humans.
Don:
We talked a lot about the four forces, the mechanics of change, what doesn't change?
Cecily:
The four forces don't. In my world, those are kind of universal, so that's helpful. Another thing that I believe doesn't change is human nature. And this is very, very useful. Again, I'm a strategist. I just use foresight in service to strategy. And so, when we're trying to find, locate ourselves now and in the future, the thing that we want to hold onto are the things that don't change. We need to study the things that are changing, that are erupting and have the roots in these four forces so that we can make sense of what's happening, and where they're headed, and we can create scenarios and get a view of what the future might look like so that we can find ourselves there. But what we will be answering in the future is the same things that we have always been answering that are around the basic human needs.
We can anchor ourselves; I think quite beautifully in that. What people always need is the same. And we need of course, to be connected, and loved, and to belong. We need to have some success. We like to acquire things and feel secure. We need to create communities. We like power. We sadly like to exercise that power over other people and have dominion and be top people. I mean, there is a range of human experience that seems to be very consistent throughout time, and I don't think that is going to change
Don:
When you're working with an organization that could potentially be disrupted or is going to be changing, how do you help them prepare for that?
Cecily:
Well, I kind of use the framework that we've been discussing so far. I've written a book called Think Like a Futurist, and it's subtitle, What Changes, What Doesn't and What's next. And so, in many ways, I think what organizations need to do is to start to understand those three things. Having a way for studying what changes, I've outlined that we study the four forces to get a sense of what's changing, and why, where it's headed. That's really critical. We don't want to get so bundled up in this kind of reactive pursuit of trends and best practices and who's doing what. We really want to get a long view so that we can be really smart about it, and do it based on some good research.
But we also want to really understand what doesn't change, and what's your stake in the ground as an organization? In addition to human nature not being something that doesn't change and is constant, for an organization, their purpose should be constant as well. Strategy's really based on that. The way that we navigate through change is that you have to stay constant and true to your own purpose. Otherwise, it's absolutely arbitrary and reactive. And that's a really hard spiral, exhausting spiral to be in. So, everything should be answered about, who are we? And what are we really committed to? And do we have a clear point of view on the needs that we are meeting for our customers or our stakeholders?
And that we have a belief about that because that belief should hold true regardless of the changing conditions. It's at that intersection that we can then create all kinds of innovation practices and scenarios and say, “So, let's take a look at what that looks like for us, given who we are now, where we are in our own development as an organization, and how far out we're going to invest so that we can make a plan for what's next.” And that typically looks like an innovation pipeline, a strategy. And then, the way we get from here to there is through innovation. And so, my work always hits really strongly on strategy. Know who you are, this sense of purpose.
Know what things are changing so you can point yourself into it. And then, once you've got that plan, we've got to invent it. And that's the innovation process that I lead people through too as well.
Don:
This conversation has been illuminating. I vacillated between excitement and apprehension, and back and forth, back and forth. Where do we go from here?
Cecily:
It's not so much, where does society go from here? Is where does each one of us go from here? What change looks like is the change that we take on for ourselves. We're only capable of the change that we can see and that we can invite and adapt to. This circles back around to evolution in a way. So, there are mindsets and practices that I think prime us for change. Among them, I talk about four practices. One thing is to really retain your own optimism. I talk about the future as being a faith-based venture. That what we are really stoking in a way is to say we have a vision. We have to have faith in the vision that it's worth doing. We also have to have faith on ourselves to be the ones that do that, right?
We're the ones to bring that vision into the world, and that's what sustains us. There is no guarantee, there is no certainty, but we are putting a stake in the ground that the vision is worth it, we're the ones to do it. And then, ultimately, we have to have faith in the process. And that is the exercise of optimism overall is that it's a faith-based venture, and we have to know it's worth it. So, optimism is practice number one. The second practice is curiosity. When we see things that are different or unfamiliar or that aren't like they've been before, we automatically make them wrong. And we say, “There's something wrong here. There's something wrong with the world.” And what if, what if there's nothing wrong? What if we shift ourselves into saying,
There's actually nothing wrong here? It's just the way that it is.” So, we can choose to be curious about what's changing and why.
The third practice; optimism, we have curiosity, is courage. And courage is there for us at every moment, and probably something that, in ways that we don't always acknowledge, we exercise every day. And we have to become our own champions and recognizing in the ways that we go, “Yeah, I just did that.” So that courage does not mean the absence of fear at all. We can look uncertainty in the face, but there's a sense of like, “Yeah, but this is the right action. Even if I fail, I am down for the learning that comes. My courage is one that will pick me up if there is failure, and that failure is okay. I'm going to bank myself on a vision worth doing.”
Which leads me to the last practice, which is patience. Change is a very, very long-winded enterprise. It doesn't come overnight. It certainly doesn't come by next quarter. It may not come by next year or in two years’ time. You will have signals of growth; you will have learning; you will have development of people; you will have new capabilities, but if you're looking for, again, in a business context, direct ROI from something new, be patient. We know this from our own lived experiences, as people, that transitions are always very long, and sometimes hard, but it comes from staying with something over time.
Don:
Cecily, I'm sure a lot of people are very interested in your work, learning more about you. Where can they find out about you?
Cecily:
Probably the best place to find about me is at my website, cecilysommers.com. And you'll find ways to contact me there. Also, on social media and LinkedIn, I'm @cecilysommers wherever there is a browser, and I welcome new and open and interesting conversations. That's the thing that turns me on the most.
Don:
We'll put that information in the show notes. Sommers is S-O-M-M-E-R-S. Cecily, amazing conversation, a great way to start 2020. Thank you for taking your time and sharing your wisdom with us, and thank you for being a genius.
Cecily:
It's a great pleasure. Thank you, Don.
Don:
Thank you for listening to 12 Geniuses. Our next episode will be about the future of leadership. We are bringing back Dr. Robert Eichinger to the show. You might remember him as the first guest from the first season. He has new insights on how our brains work when we are at work, and what is required to be an effective leader now and in the future. Devin McGrath is our production assistant; Brian Bierbaum is our research and historical consultant; Toby, Tony, Jay, and the rest of the team at GL Productions in London make sure the sound and editing are phenomenon. To subscribe to the podcast, please go to 12geniuses.com.