9: Hopes & Fears for Century 21

This document, reproducing chapter 9 of Christopher Barnatt's book Valueware: Technology, Humanity and Organization is made available for the purposes of private study only and is not for further reproduction in means electronic or otherwise. Note that all endnote references have been removed in the translation of this chapter into HTML.


Empowered by technologies and their fictions of reality, organizations enable us to survive and to realize our passions of collective will. Like the organizations of the past, those of the future will therefore be pillars of successful aspiration. They will also evolve erratically to greatness from competitions of love and hate; from dreams lost and hopes won. As such, Future Organizations will mostly redefine our realities not of economics or technology, but of what it really means to be human.

From Christopher Barnatt: Challenging Reality (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1997).



FOLLOWING A GRUELLING CAR chase and fist-fight in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, adventurer archaeologist Indiana Jones has his injuries tended by former girlfriend Marion. As she dismisses the battered hero's protests that he can manage by himself, Marion smiles 'You're not the man I knew ten years ago'. To this Indiana weakly retorts, 'It's not the years, honey. It's the milage'.

Time and toil continually weather us all. As a result, no mind can remain constant throughout the duration of a long project. One of the problems in writing a book -- let alone a trilogy of books -- is therefore maintaining any consistent set of beliefs whilst the work is being undertaken. For authors, books become journeys they may direct, yet whose outcomes they can rarely fully predict. Initial structures can remain solid. However, over time, the passion of writing inevitably rages, twists, falters, and then rages again, if not always in exactly the same direction.

As I open the final chapter of this book, and hence of the Future Trilogy to which it forms the final volume, I mention the above to acknowledge how I have inevitably part-crafted Valueware in the dark. This work commenced with the aim of answering the two questions of 'what is value?' and 'how, in future, will value be created?' In a roundabout way both of these queries have been addressed. Indeed, the last chapter offered two frameworks that drew together my analysis of Part I and Part II, and which in the process predicted several millennial realities.

However, throughout all of the eight chapters to date, most of this book has focused on the tools and human perspectives likely to shape future value creation, rather than on the nature of value itself. Perhaps strangely -- and somewhat contrary to my initial expectation -- this final conclusions chapter therefore makes a return to the actual definition of value. Further, these last pages also highlight my set of interrelated hopes and fears for century 21.



SURVIVAL, CREATION & TOUCH

Whilst preparing this book, I have come to the conclusion that all measures of 'value' stem from the fulfilment of three basic yet co-dependent human needs. As illustrated at the corners of my Value Triangle in figure 9.1, these are our requirements or desires for survival, for creation, and to touch or be touched. Such needs, I believe, are endemic to the human condition. Their fulfilment makes us 'happy' and keeps us motivated for life ahead. In turn, those collective, economic activities that may assist in individual aspirations to survive, to create, or to touch, are likely to be those that will enable business organizations most successfully to prosper and to profit.









At the apex of the Value Triangle, survival needs span two distinct levels. Firstly, they encompass those needs that lead human beings to value those resources, tools, technologies and social or organizational infrastructures that fulfil our most basic, physiological requirements. At this primary level, we will always value air, water, food, shelter and clothing, as well as the means of their creation, storage and supply.

A level up, secondary survival needs lead people to value those possessions, services and relationships that enable them to survive more comfortably beyond basic subsistence. In a strict anthropological sense, it can be argued that telephones, computers, refrigerators, televisions, fax machines, and indeed a whole host of other goods and services, are hardly survival essentials. However, from a comparative cultural or economic perspective, it also cannot reasonably be denied that most individuals now exhibit multitudinous physical and social needs which, if not fulfilled, will lead to their survival disadvantage in the modern world. Beyond being able to drink, eat and shelter in the here and now, it therefore becomes rather difficult to distinguish at a value level between those goods, services and relationships that meet our primary, short-term biological needs, and those which in turn enable our 'survival' to a greater degree of social, cultural or economic comfort.

The second corner of the Value Triangle highlights our need to engage in acts of creation. It therefore indicates how value is commonly attributed to all of those goods, services and relationships that enable creative acts and outputs to occur. On many occasions, individuals need to create in order to survive. However, for most people, there still remain creative aspirations whose actual or potential fulfilment are valued regardless of any associated survival implications. Indeed, many people continue to value tools and technologies of creation that may actually detract from the fulfilment of their survival needs. For many individuals survival alone is rarely enough, and indeed risk-all gambles are for some people what life is all about.

When survival is not associated with any acts of creation, it is usually supportive of the final human need of 'touch'. This indicates how people value those goods, services or relationships that enable them to reach out and influence others, and/or which enable others to reach out and influence them. Such a reaching out may be physical or mental, and may most obviously involve immediate interaction with one or many other human beings in a shared physical location. However, touch value is often also strongly associated with those objects, relationships or experiences that enable human reciprocity across time or distance.

For example, at an immediate level, lovers may value a caress, whilst a sculptor may value those tools, and that time and knowledge, that enable her to craft a work of art through which she may touch other minds. In turn, parted lovers may value past memories of each other, and in particular objects that may trigger such memories. In a similar fashion, the future owner of a statue is likely to value the way in which its physical presence allows the distant inspiration of its sculptor to reach out to her across time and space.

As indicated by the two-way arrows in figure 9.1, each corner of the Value Triangle can assist in supporting the two others. It is generally only possible for an individual to touch another (or to be touched back), if they continue to survive. Touching one or more other human beings is also often only possible through some act or acts of creation. Similarly, most acts of creation, or those tools, resources and relationships that empower them, tend to rely on both survival and touch. In turn, it may be argued that we only value having our survival and survival comfort needs met so that we may engage in acts and experiences of creation and touch.

With not too much thought, most people can rapidly attribute at least one of the Value Triangle's three value measures to most of those items, activities or relationships that they personally perceive to be of value. Initially, usually just one value measure tends to spring to mind. However, after a few seconds of thought, a second frequently also enters the head.

For example, when I first conceived the Value Triangle, I was looking up at an old lamp shade. My initial assessment was that I valued it solely as an object that increased my comfort survival level by hiding the glare of a bare bulb. However, I quickly realised that I also value the shade as a possession that has hung in various rooms in most of the residences in which I have lived. In addition to its 'survival in more comfort' immediate value attribute, the shade hence carries with it a sentimental 'touch' value component, as it may trigger personal recollections of other times, people and places.

What the above example hopefully reminds us is how and why different things may be valued differently (or not at all) by different people. Recognising how different individuals -- different citizens and customers -- attribute value due to different Value Triangle associations will be of an increasing importance for those Future Organizations attempting to create most value. To further assist in an appreciation of the Triangle model, table 9.1 provides a few more examples of how survival, creation and touch need fulfilment may be attributed to some items, activities and relationships of commonly perceived high value.



ITEM, ACTIVITY OR RELATIONSHIPSURVIVAL, CREATION OR TOUCH VALUE COMPONENTS
TelevisionIncreases survival comfort due to the touch of other people and their ideas across time and distance.
Personal computerMay assist a user to create in a variety of media, to touch and be touched by other people and ideas through network communications, and/or to survive (more comfortably) if used to organize one's life and/or to engage in business activities.
Evening out at arestaurant, bar or clubAids physiological survival due to the intake of food and liquids, as well as enabling one to touch and be touched by fellow human beings in a process that may also increase one's social/cultural comfort survival level.
Attendance at a sports eventEnables one to be touched by the activities of others -- both participants and fellow spectators -- and usually to touch others as one becomes part of a cohesive or adversarial social climate that increases one's survival comfort.
SexAn act of touch that can also enable race survival through a process of biological creation.
LoveThe creation of a mutual touch affiliation that enhances and empowers many aspects of survival.
MoneyA medium of exchange that, through a common desire for an ordered system of survival, enables the barter, control, alteration or acquisition of physical and sometimes emotional resources that may result in survival, creation and touch.


Table 9.1 Objects, Activities & Relationships of Common Value



VALUEWARE AHEAD

What I wish to propose with the Value Triangle is that any object, service, person, relationship or experience that is valued has to be at least part-fulfilling a basic human need to survive, to create, or to touch or be touched. Further, I would suggest that those objects, services, persons, relationships or experiences attributed with most value will be those that help to part-fulfil two or even all three of our needs for survival, creation and touch in amalgamation. Organizations seeking themselves to survive, to create, and to interact with or 'touch' their own environment, therefore need to address how they ought to act in order to fulfil one, two or three of the human needs highlighted at the corners of the Value Triangle.

In light of these propositions, general 'answers' to this book's two broad questions of 'what is value?', and 'how, in future, will value be created?' may begin to be crafted. Firstly, in answer to the question of 'what is value?', I have hopefully now validated a reply that value is that which enables survival, creation or touch. Secondly, by combining this definition with chapter 1's isolation of 'valueware' as that productive overlap of technological, human or organizational hardware and software that may actually do something useful, a generic statement concerning future value creation may also be made.

Specifically, it can reasonably be claimed that all sources of future value creation will be attributable to overlaps of technological, human or organizational hardware and software that enable survival, creation, touch, or some combination thereof. All of these definitions and conceptual combinations may subsequently be encapsulated in a single, generic valueware diagram as illustrated in figure 9.2.









Those concepts and definitions encapsulated in figure 9.2 may now be used as tools in assessing the 'value' of all conceivable present and future value engines and value perspectives. Indeed, they will be applied below to enable us to reflect more carefully on some of our previously highlighted means of future value creation, such as computer networks, new middleware software, and virtual communities.

As these final reflections take place, I also wish to recall five key themes that have been interwoven across the eight previous chapters. These, I suggest, all deserve significant individual and organizational attention, and specifically encompass the following key hopes and fears for century 21:



By examining this set of one fear and four hopes, the following sections highlight how those value engines and value perspectives explored in previous chapters may in future impact on individual desires to survive, to create, and to touch or be touched. Further, as the basis of a proactive mindset for future shapers, they may also suggest how organizations can be transformed to play their most effective role in meeting widespread human needs.



TECHNOLOGY RICH BUT VALUE BLIND?

Last summer one of my MBA students wrote a dissertation that explored problems with new information technology systems in Brazil. In one of our meetings he told the tale of a large bank that had recently invested in its first automatic teller machine (ATM) or 'cashpoint' network. At a cost of many millions of dollars, this had unfortunately reaped few of its hoped-for benefits.

The problem with the new ATM system was not that the involved technology did not work as planned. Rather, what the bank had somehow ignored when developing its new system was that a high percentage of its customers were illiterate. Once the ATMs were installed, counter staff therefore had to spend large amounts of time helping customers to use them. This in turn negated one of the main purposes of the new system, which had been intended to reduce the number of human tellers required to run a branch.

This story provides an horrific example of an organization that became technology rich but value blind. Whilst alarming, the tale is also hardly an isolated one. Indeed, as I bemoaned when I introduced the concept of valueware back in chapter 1, today a very large number of individuals and organizations appear to invest recklessly in information technology systems that deliver little, if any, real value.

As we have seen across this book, many of the incredible technologies of the Wired Age may allow us to create value in new ways. Unfortunately, the availability of such technologies also risks turning many individuals and companies into hardware and software junkies capable of squandering more and more of themselves and their profits away.

Virtual working practices like telecommuting, virtual organizations with minimal physical infrastructures, and on-line virtual communities, are now all becoming commonplace. They have also only become possible in recent years due to the development of ubiquitous computer networks and middleware software tools. It is therefore perhaps hardly surprising that many companies are now eager to join that rapid, organizational dash to exploit such technologies to their maximum. However, what such firms ought not to forget is that, to date at least, almost all business initiatives solely involving the cutting-edge application of new, on-line technologies have failed to deliver even the hope of a cost-covering reward. Not least this has proved to be the case for almost all Internet pioneers. Even many of the service providers that link people into the Internet's global network have yet to make a profit. Don Tapscott's wry comment in The Digital Economy that there remain 'more prophets than profits on the Net' therefore ought not to be ignored.

The dividing line between effective, value-creating new technology adoption, and value-negative new technology overkill, will remain both blurred and in motion for years if not decades to come. Almost certainly, in the first half of the 21st century, a great deal of technological hardware and software will therefore continue to be wasted outside of value-positive valueware overlaps. Successful Future Organizations will subsequently be those that learn to monitor their surplus technology investments more successfully than their competitors in order to waste the least. One way they may do this is by constantly questioning how each combination of technological hardware and software they employ may be enabling their customers or workers to more comfortably survive, to create, or to touch and be touched.

In undertaking such a questioning, we would all be wise to temper any evangelism for new on-line technologies with the knowledge that too many hopeful soundbites have already been too greatly believed. As thought tools and drivers of action, soundbites such as 'technology can take the place out of workplace' can prove of significant, proactive value. However, it also needs to be appreciated that the ability to negate distance with the technologies of cyberspace will remain a little more limited than many technoholics and telecommunications companies may ever choose to admit.

For a start, it is becoming increasingly clear that many individuals remain economically and socially bounded by the linguistic peculiarities, traditions, and culture of a non-transcendable local geographic location. Today, anybody with an Internet connection can join any public access virtual community on the planet. However, as many non-US citizens quickly discover, such on-line meeting spaces remain largely middle-class American rather than global, exhibiting as they do many of the associated traditions and language peculiarities of a hyperreal American Way.

With the above observation I hope not to imply that to have how one lives, thinks or talks 'constrained' by local geocultural boundaries is in any way wrong. Yet, as a British participant in several US-based virtual communities, I never fail to be struck by the linguistic and cultural rigidity of such communities' supposedly 'transparent' geographic bounds. Words, education systems, and even public holidays, tie us to specific geographic locations as surely as our physical bodies. They hence create certain barriers between people who live or were raised in different regions of the planet. Granted, the tools of the Information Superhighway (for many years labelled by the Americans as the National Information Infrastructure), enable such barriers to be mostly overcome. However, what I wish to highlight here is that the 'freedom' from geography so often associated with networked technologies is on occasions only a 'total' freedom for those who share roots and a background in a common geographic, cultural and linguistic location.

When questioning the value-creating potential of many on-line developments, it also needs to be remembered that significant psychological distances have yet to be bridged by technology alone. Whatever the champions of teleworking, virtual teams or virtual communities may preach, distance still introduces tension into any relationship lived or worked apart. Contact by phone, e-mail, video-link, and perhaps even VR-link, is likely to remain less frequent, more regimented, and probably less multisensory, than any other form of exchange involving two or more co-located human beings.

All of those communications we undertake with other human beings at a distance require our brains to work overtime at filling in the gaps. Such spaces in those experiences we yearn to share are created by the deficiencies inherent in all present and likely future communications technologies, as well as by those periods of time we have lived apart. There are no chance meetings in cyberspace. Even family members or friends only pick up the phone at an habitual time or when one party or the other desires a communication. And this makes communication at a distance very different from that which continually happens by chance proximity in almost all homes and offices. Relating to anybody at a distance will therefore never prove as comfortable an experience as meeting with them in the 'meatspace' of the face-to-face. Computer networks will hence remain value-limited in fulfilling some of our most basic human needs of survival comfort and reciprocal touch.

Due to the tensions inherent in remote communication, all successful virtual communities are likely to require the 'augmentation' of on-line member relationships with 'real' meetings in the flesh. Similarly, most on-line business activities will always be able to be augmented 'in real life' or 'IRL'.

It used to be said that absence makes the heart grow fonder. This may, perhaps, remain the case. However, what we can today report with more certainty is that geographic distance makes any relationship more stressful. Value creation opportunities are therefore likely to become increasingly apparent for those organizations prepared to strip technology away. As demonstrated so powerfully by Generation X, the Wired Age is more than anything about connecting people to people. The most value-sighted organizations will therefore be those that recognise how even the 'best' technology will always have significant social limitations.



RELATIONSHIP-RICH MARKETS?

Moving from the negative to the positive potentials for value creation in the years ahead, my first hope for century 21 is that we are currently witnessing the emergence of relationship rich markets. A large proportion of industrialised economies today are awash with hyper-disposable goods and an over-abundant supply of services. It is therefore a shame that in parallel more and more of their citizens live alone, watch alone, consume alone, and die in isolation. Increasingly, what many individuals are lacking in their lives is the ability or even potential to touch and be touched. My hope for relationship-rich markets is therefore for economic systems capable of selling people back to each other.

Business organizations across the 20th century have become rather good at helping their customers to fulfil their survival needs in greater and greater material comfort. Tools and media that enable people to create are also in an increasingly abundant supply. Indeed, more people now engage in DIY, gardening, video making, and a whole host of other creative activities, than ever before. However, what modern markets remain rather poor at is meeting the aforementioned, burgeoning needs of many individuals to touch and be touched.

To nowhere near the degree of even twenty years ago are employers, nations, local communities, religions or extended families helping to fulfil the touch needs of many lives. Clear opportunities therefore exist -- and will probably continue to grow -- for business organizations to augment their goods and services with a social element. Indeed, many companies may increasingly be able to package affiliation as a product in itself.

As discussed in several previous chapters, some organizations are now trying to build virtual communities over the Internet. Their hope is that they will be able to use social ties to foster long-term consumer loyalties to their on-line information and service content. In this pursuit some companies will almost certainly succeed. This should in no way be taken to imply that all tradable human touch needs will be able to be met on-line. As noted in the previous section, relationships fostered electronically over physical distances tend to be more stressful and less fulfilling than those mediated in realspace alone. However, the limitations of cyberspace interaction will far from totally negate many emergent opportunities to generate touch value for individuals via on-line media.

A part-social trade in human or organizational affiliation may become a necessary prerequisite for many on-line business that hope to foster a loyal and long-term customer base. Today, other customers can transform a bar from a place where shelter and refreshment 'survival' needs are met, into a 'touch retreat' where they can socially interact with others. In a similar fashion, one-to-one and one-to-many electronic interactions on-line have the potential to value-augment Internet shopping malls and a whole host of other cyberspace business arenas. Indeed, even the text-based virtual communities of the late 20th century have transformed the web browsers of many individuals from information access tools into habitual social places.

Of course, not all organizations aspiring to meet the increasingly unfilled touch needs of a free agent, affiliation-starved population will need to venture into cyberspace. Granted, usually the greater the number of communication channels available between consumer and organization, the more successful any 'affiliation product' setting out to meet human touch needs is likely to be. However, the degree to which individuals can buy-in to a psychological home is likely to prove far more critical in most relationship-rich marketplaces.

As previously noted in chapter 3, to date very few organizations have succeeded in building strong affinity products into which consumers may achieve a high degree of buy-in. Those that have, including Lucasfilm with Star Wars and Paramount with Star Trek, have often been in the film or television industry. Yet this does not have to remain the case.

Already boundaries between goods, services and relationship/affinity product industries are beginning to blur. Pepsi's $2bn deal with Lucasfilm for the rights to use Star Wars to promote its beverages provides just one example of a large-scale, physical-product/relationship-affiliation tie-in that may point towards many more relationship-rich economic potentials ahead.

The mass global affiliation that Paramount has managed to sustain long-term to Star Trek is another example of a relationship-rich product that ought not to be reasonably ignored. Tom Mazza, an Executive Vice President at Paramount, describes 'The Franchise' as having a 'very theological umbrella hanging over it . . . [that] . . . asks viewers to buy into a lot of belief systems'. Similarly, Brannon Braga, the Supervising Producer of Star Trek: Voyager argues that the multi-billion-dollar, 'collective consciousness' Star Trek universe:


. . . is mythos. It represents something positive that people need. It has persevered long enough that parents will pass down an interest in Star Trek to their children. The characters and the morality tales are so important and appealing and hopeful. We need mythologies. We need heros to come back to again and again. In the American culture we don't have that. Except for Star Trek.


Having cited the above, I would hardly like to suggest that the greatest market opportunities ahead will all involve fulfilling the touch needs of the human psyche to boldly go. However, many organizations that have become so expert at selling single goods and services in single instances may still have a great deal to learn from some of those metamedia empires of science fiction entertainment. After all, Paramount, Lucasfilm et al have successfully found a formula that not only fulfils a powerful human need to affiliate, but which in addition sustains a highly dedicated loyalty to a long-term brand.



A GENTLER MODE OF CAPITALISM?

As the organizations that consumers purchase from become more important in affinity terms than many of those they work for, so my second hope for century 21 is for the emergence of a gentler mode of capitalism. As also initially discussed in chapter 3, it may well be that it is not how we trade, but rather what we trade, that is in need of review if collective humanity is to reengineer a brighter, more sustainable future. Indeed, as and if we evolve from a trade in physical 'survival' and 'creation' goods and services, and towards markets richer in traded relationships or 'touch', so the environmental cost of mass capitalism can only decline.

In the May of 1998, a study from the Worldwatch Institute reported the hardly surprising fact that the world was economically richer yet environmentally poorer than a year before. As Worldwatch president Lester Brown noted, whilst the global economy had expanded in 1997 at a near record four per cent, the same year had also been one 'of disturbing new signs of environmental stress'. Rainforests that had burnt for months had irreversibly damaged rich ecosystems. Ice caps were melting, whilst global temperatures, CO2 concentrations, and carbon emissions, had climbed to record highs. During the course of 1997, the human population of the planet had also risen by over eighty million, with well over three hundred cities now boasting more than a million citizens.

Nobody can seriously believe that, even in the medium-term, a continued, manufactured-goods-driven global economic growth can prove sustainable within our closed planetary system. Hard choices therefore need to be made now if future basic survival needs are to continue to be met for even the currently-fortunate rich minority. Worldwatch's 1998 study did more positively report a growing investment in wind-driven power generation. A rising trend for taxing environmentally destructive activities, rather than income, across a handful of European nations was also noted. However, there can be no doubt that these and similar planet-friendly initiatives alone will do little or nothing to break our current cycle of increased physical consumption and accelerating resource depletion.

Quite simply, the hard fact of capitalism is that it is self-fuelling. Demand feeds more demand. That's how the system works. Therefore, as long as our markets are geared towards selling physical goods and physically-manipulative services, the more and more resources the human race will continue to consume and to waste. The only 'way out' -- beyond opening our horizons to the vastness of space -- therefore has to involve a fundamental shift in that type of consumption which we permit to continue to self-feed.

New relationship-rich markets that economically substitute group affinities and traded human interactions for physical products or services have the potential to prove a part of our salvation. Indeed, one may reasonably argue that those extended groups and structures -- such as local communities, extended families, nations and long-term organizations -- that used to meet so many touch needs have only eroded because 'me-first' market forces have been allowed to accelerate resource-intensive survival and creative individual wants to the fore.

To get back what many now realise we have lost or are losing, we probably need to place a price tag on many of those identity and affiliation social comfort blankets that we used to think of as 'free'. Like it or not, we have created a society and culture -- and not just an economy -- that measures and allocates almost everything of human value in money terms alone. To heighten a broader fulfilment of our touch needs, we therefore may have no choice but to reflect our affiliation wants as economic wants in the global marketplace. It also need be no bad thing that 'the best things in life' may all end up priced in dollars.

We simply need to keep remembering that capitalism is self-fuelling. The system thrives on demand fuelling more demand. The prize for turning human affinities into dollar-mediated, mainstream relationship products will therefore be an increase in their supply and a fall in their price. In parallel, any move to tweak our economic system to value touch, in addition to survival and creation, has to lead to a decrease in resource-draining global consumption.

To advocate placing a monetary value on that social something which actually marks us as 'human' may appear both heartless and cold. Yet, by learning to trade in those connections we collectively so desire amongst ourselves, we may double-win by improving our social quality of life in addition to decelerating our rate of resource depletion.



INTERDEPENDENCE OVER INDEPENDENCE?

The strongest indication yet that the above hope may prove more than a pipedream can be found stemming from almost any study of Generation X. Today, there finally appear to walk amongst us a generation who value interdependence over independence. My third hope for century 21 is therefore that this most powerful value perspective will spread. As and if it does, so most individuals and organizations may finally realize how their individual ability to survive, to create, and to touch or be touched, has to partly depend upon their neighbours.

Humanity has become a hive organism. Indeed, my intention in championing the hope of interdependence over independence is to highlight how, whilst mass connectivity may support mass global individualism, it also powerfully serves to illustrate the interwoven fragility of the global creature we have all become. As Gregory Stock argues in defining the single, collective human and technological superorganism of 'Metaman', all individual human beings are today also interdependent 'cells' within a wider, cybernetic whole. As the 21st century dawns, increasingly no individual, no organization, and no nation, can survive, thrive, create or touch in isolation. As Stock concludes his study of our collective, living machine:


Metaman affirms that we are all connected -- giving to and drawing from one another as we participate in a momentous step in the evolution of life. Stone tools came from Africa, writing from the Tigris-Euphrates valley, paper currency from China, the steam engine from Britain -- all humankind has played a part in bringing Metaman into being. Together we can exult in this shared accomplishment, try to solve the immediate problems at hand, and look with anticipation to the amazing future stretching before us.


Whilst the above may appear fanciful and even glibly idealistic, traditionalists ought not to ignore the way in which network connectivity and globocultural convergence are bringing more and more of humanity together. Through shared music and television, computer games, global news, and the Internet, those young people now entering the world of business organizations harbour a fresh and collective value creation mentality. Many appreciate how their actions will both influence and depend on the actions and reactions of others as never before. Indeed, as discussed in chapter 5, some stakeholder-led initiatives in value based management already partially reflect this fact.

Around the globe, enlightened boardrooms -- as well as information surfing youngsters -- are awakening to a world of inescapable cultural and economic cause and effect. Increasingly, the freedom to be an individual -- be it an individual person, organization or nation -- will have to be tempered with the responsibility inherent upon any entity whose actions part-determine the survival and comfort of a wider whole.

Whilst primarily highlighting the symbiotic connectivity of billions of human beings today, any championing of interdependence over independence may also remind us that we remain irrevocably linked to others across time as well as distance. The actions and achievements of our ancestors define to some extent who we are and what we may become. Our ancestors seeded our culture. We may therefore never be 'free' of their influence, failures and accomplishments. Indeed, as we grow older, we may all individually realise how advancing maturity involves learning to live in one's own shadow. As we ourselves, our civilizations, and our organizations age, we must therefore face the sometimes painful fact that our futures will be defined not just by possibilities ahead, but by certainties past.

Just as history and culture link individuals and their creations back into time, so our personal and collective actions today may also weigh heavily on those to come. Across the 20th century, future generations have often been neglected stakeholders in our planning. In championing interdependence over independence, we should be mindful not to forget this fact. A life of truly fulfilled survival, creation and touch needs has to involve more than personal satisfaction in the here and now. Or as I suggested in Challenging Reality, one key mindset element for the Future Organization may be to live for today, whilst planning for tomorrow, and building for the future.



FUTURE GAZING AS FUTURE SHAPING?

When introduced to an audience as a futurist, I have become used to one of two typical reactions. The first is the wry demand to predict next week's lottery numbers. The second, usually voiced with an even more cynical dismissal, is that all future gazing and future studies are a waste of time. After all, as so many critics continue to argue, nobody can predict the future. 'Absolutely not', I usually reply. 'But that doesn't stop us from predicting a whole range of possible futures from which we all may choose'.

My final hope for century 21 is for future gazing as future shaping. With this I intend to infer that all valuable works of future studies must have some proactive potential. Like many other groups of academics, a great many futurists appear to write and preach solely to each other -- effectively to the 'converted' -- rather than spreading their wings within other more cynical but also more critical spheres. Such inward looking futures work is, I believe, largely a waste of time. It may fill bookshelves and academic journals. However, it almost always fails to make a difference.

As a futurist -- a label, I might add, I never went out to seek -- I have no wish to endlessly describe how our lives and economies might turn out in years to come. Rather, from what I hope is an educated position, I wish to inform others about what I believe are the most value-laden options for times ahead. In the light of such future scenarios, present day individuals and organizations may then start to make choices that will directly and positively shape all of our years and decades ahead.

Proactive futurists -- futurists who seek future gazing as future shaping -- ought to present themselves as technological and organizational catalysts and collage artists. Future studies is most usefully about weaving webs of possibility, raising questions, and crafting mental models which may positively impact on the actual behaviours of key future shapers such as managers, research scientists, and politicians.

Visualising possible futures is an art in itself, if a complex and mentally abrasive one that is hence either undertaken narrowly or not at all by most planners. It is easier to believe that only things in one's own area of expertise are about to change, rather than to accept (as discussed and modelled in the last chapter) that there may be far broader transitions afoot. Nobody can predict the future. But many people with free-thinking creative visions may shape it. And some actually will.

There are -- most probably -- only two certainties in life. The first is death, and the second the fact that until death occurs we are all going to spend the rest of our lives in the future. As a consequence, we all have an incredible incentive to turn future gazing into future shaping.

So does a potter 'predict the future' when she weighs up a piece of clay? Or an architect gaze foolhardily ahead when drafting building schematics? No. Rather, what they both attempt is to future gaze in order to help themselves or others to future shape. Nobody can 'predict' the future of a lump of clay. Yet a potter can plan its many possible craftings on the wheel. With such 'foreseen options' she may then act with her skill to turn the clay into a bowl or a plate or a mug. Similarly, an architect may future gaze by drawing up a range of plans that he and others may shape into the actuality of a future building. In a generic nutshell, future gazing becomes future shaping when and if it brings the possibilities of the mind's eye into sharp reality.

As Dr Michael Moynagh, an advisor to The Tomorrow Project, informed me when we first met, 'we have to find the psychic energy to start thinking about the future or we are all in trouble'. And today this need not prove as difficult as it sounds. With those new, technological and social tools of cyberspace, we have in our heads and our hands the means with which to future gaze and to future shape our collective tomorrows as never before. By learning to recognise future gazing as future shaping -- whether it be in planning a new shelf in the kitchen, a new form of organization, or a whole new economy of relationship-rich markets -- we may all play a role in defining our most valued way ahead.

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ENDINGS & BEGINNINGS

There comes a time when any well-chewed research study, mental spark, or even vague reflection, has to be cast forward into the messy uncertainty of reality if it is ever to be judged a failure or a success. Ideas -- be they the product of corporate research and development, boardroom brainstorms, academic debate, or Sunday afternoon daydreaming -- can do nothing but die if they are left forever in the dark sanctum of the human mind.

The economy of the future will probably above all else be an ideas economy. However, this will not mean that raw ideas in isolation will ever have much value. Nor, in a 21st century in which we seem destined to increasingly value imagination over ingenuity or awe, are those products, services or even relationships resulting from good ideas likely to be attributed with significant worth. Rather, as is already becoming apparent in so many markets, what will be most valued in our emerging ideas economy will be those technologies, those individuals, those organizations -- those valueware overlaps -- that will transform ideas from mindspace to realspace or cyberspace and beyond.

The economy of the future will be an economy that will more than anything champion action over inaction, and that will more than ever before reward the speed, flexibility and commitment of those daring to surf. To survive, to create, and to touch and be touched, future individuals and organizations will have to get used to taking constant initiatives. They will also have to continually internetwork and to promote themselves in somewhat abrasive marketplaces awash with dynamic global cultures. No longer, as in rose-tinted days gone by, will one or a few good ideas support any individual, organization or industry for life.

Find an analogue clock or watch with a second hand, or else a digital timepiece with a seconds display. Now watch the 360 degree rotation of the second hand, or the advance of the digital digits, for a complete minute. Go on. For once, when encouraged by an author to put down a book and do something, go ahead and actually do it. There. Wasn't that a complete waste of time? Yet watching minutes, hours, days, months or even years count by is the game that many individuals and most organizations continue to play. In a world in which the rate of change has barely got out of first gear, procrastination continues to rule OK.

In a new ideas economy of relationship-rich markets and mass global interdependence, a mode of capitalism may soon emerge that proves gentler on our planet and even ourselves. However, even when and if it does, there can be little doubt that the harsh whip of time will continue to lash across us more sharply and rapidly than ever before. Often an idea today will have to be transformed from mindspace to realspace or cyberspace tomorrow to have any hope of creating any value. Perishability will become a characteristic of a growing number of products, services and traded relationships. In any race to create value, clock watching will be out. Period.

In our dawning future, individuals are increasingly likely to place a greater and greater value on 'free', unpressured time. Time to take care of their physiological and psychological survival. Time to create. And, perhaps most importantly, time to touch and be touched. As the words of Douglas Rushkoff reminded us so clearly in chapter 6, 'people are coming to value time itself -- time for contemplation, and time for non-intermediated contact with other human beings'.

As we enter the third millennium, today's accelerating convergence of technology, humanity and organization looks certain to continue. Hidden from view before us there now lie the first thousand years of human history that may be dominated more by markets and capitalism than by the politics, feudalism and warring religions of so many earlier centuries. We may already clearly see how joint social and economic technologies, such as those of the Internet, may both simultaneously enrich and degrade our quality of life. Such parallel enrichment and degrading can be noted to have accompanied the growth of market economies and capitalism since the Industrial Revolution. A parallel giving and taking away is also likely to continue as developments accrue in metamedia, virtual reality, genetic engineering, and new, free-agent lifestyles.

If there is one historical lesson that we may learn about value, it is that whenever the new has augmented the old with additional value, then somewhere else it has also taken value away. Blinded by fresh magic, we often don't see any value loss at first, and sometimes not until it is too late. Yet this timeless historical fact ought not to make us fear any future technological, social or organizational development.

Adding and taking from ourselves is what the dynamism of evolution that keeps us alive is all about. Humanity thrives on change. Going back has always been creative death. The loss or ending of anything worthwhile usually also provides us with the exhilarating if frightening hope of a new beginning.



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