In Future Tense
In this book, I explore the external future forces most likely to disrupt leaders, give practical advice for how they can make the future a better place, and suggest an ideal talent profile for future leaders. The New Leadership Literacies has many signals from the future, but there are no facts about the future.
I propose five new leadership literacies, but I ask that you open yourself to others that go beyond what I am suggesting. The literacies I introduce here will give you a head start on the future, but there will be others to come. What we’ve been taught about leadership in the past won’t be enough—even though each new literacy should be informed by enduring leadership wisdom from the past.
My views are based on working as a professional futurist in Silicon Valley for some forty years. My forecasts are plausible, internally consistent, and provocative. While nobody can predict the future, my forecast futures over the years have usually happened. While I don’t claim to be an expert in the present, I have been pretty good at listening for and foreseeing the future. The best futurists I know don’t quite fit in the present. I don’t quite fit in the present either, and I think that is an advantage.
In 1973, Institute for the Future had new grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Advanced Research Projects Agency (now called DARPA) to study the use of the emerging network for communication among scientists in the early 1970s, and I was able to join them shortly after that and come to Silicon Valley. It was clear to me by then that being a professor of sociology was not my calling; I was—and still am—called by the future.
Institute for the Future (IFTF) was a spin-off of RAND Corporation and Stanford Research Institute (now called SRI International) in 1968. IFTF is one of the few futures research groups in the world that has outlived its forecasts. We look back every ten years and ask how we’ve done. Over those forty-plus years, 60 to 80 percent of our forecast futures have actually happened, depending on your definition of happened. Even though we’re usually right, we don’t use the word predict. Nobody can predict the future. I like to say, “If somebody tells you they can predict the future, you shouldn’t believe them . . . especially if they’re from California.” The goal of looking out ten years is to look backward from the future and provoke, not predict.
When I came to Silicon Valley and joined Institute for the Future, I was hired to help prototype and evaluate what today would be called social media for scientists communicating with other scientists at NASA, USGS, NSF, defense contractor universities, and other government agencies—since those were the only people who could use what we now call the internet. Instead of social media, we used the nerdy name computer conferencing to describe these media, and our prototype system was called Forum. Jacques Vallee was leading our team at IFTF, and I was leading the evaluation research on these early forms of social media. This was more than ten years before The Well, which was arguably the first social medium for wider populations. We were prototyping social media, but only defense contractors could use our system since they were the only people allowed on the ARPANET at the time.
I have a vivid memory of getting a frantic call one morning from a staff person in a general’s office at the Pentagon. To the staffer’s urgent disgust, his general had just received a personal message directly through our system from a lowly research assistant at a defense contractor university. The message sent via Forum to the general was a biting complaint about the Vietnam War, as I recall. The general’s assistant shouted at me in horror: “Do you mean that just anybody can now send a crazy message directly to my general?”
“Uh, yes sir . . . at least anyone on our network,” I replied sheepishly. The twisting path toward a future when everything is distributed had cracked open just a bit. The move toward distributed authority was just getting going.
Much later in 2016 at Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, the Salesforce Chatter internal social media platform is being used to promote internal communication across a radically distributed organization. Chris Johnson, the executive in charge of Nestlé Business Excellence and one of the top executives in this very large organization, said recently: “I love interacting with people across organizations without the barriers of hierarchy” (quoted in Blackshaw 2016). The VUCA world is accelerating.