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Organizations are good at seeing the future. They are bad at moving toward it.

Intel did not neglect to hire foresight talent. For years the chipmaker employed an in-house futurist and teams of ethnographers, a sensible investment for a firm whose factories take a decade to pay off. Yet the company has spent recent years losing ground to rivals. Greg Lindsay, an urbanist and futurist, puts it dryly: you can lead someone to the future, but you cannot make them embrace it.

That gap between seeing and doing is the quiet failure of most planning. Governments and firms commission forecasts, scenario exercises and strategy papers in abundance. Most end up on a shelf. The problem is rarely that nobody saw the change coming. It is that the people who saw it could not persuade the people who decide.

Mr. Lindsay's remedy is to swap the report for the story. In "threatcasting," a method developed at Intel by Brian David Johnson, experts from different fields sketch a specific person in a specific place meeting a specific threat. He calls it "Black Mirror Mad Libs." America's army commissioned comic-book artists to illustrate such scenarios about cyberwarfare; the resulting book is still used to teach cadets at West Point and Annapolis. A chart asks to be understood. A story asks to be felt, and feeling is what moves budgets.

Organizations struggle to change even with the best intelligence. The forecast is usually sound, but what it asks for, change, is often too expensive socially, politically, or financially for an organization to accept. Mr. Lindsay's skill at prediction is rare; rarer still is the leader willing to act on what people like him see.

HCD Production Guide

Greg Lindsay is the only person who’s ever beaten IBM’s Watson computer, and he just told you that the best tool to make predictions in for your program is already at your fingertips: storytelling. But making a story out of your vision is hard work, even in the AI age. The HCD Production Guide gives you the framework you need to get your vision out of your head and onto the page with a walk-through of building a draft, putting it in front of users, and asking the questions that surface what's broken. Thirty minutes per session. No drawing skills required.
[Get the HCD Production Guide →]

HCD Guide Series

Seeing the future is the easy part. Building something people will actually use is harder. The HCD Guide Series covers the full path, from discovery research through testing to pilot, with practical methods your team can put to work without waiting for a perfect budget or a perfect plan. [Get the complete HCD Guide Series →]

From the Masthead

Greg Lindsay brings us home in our 60th(!) episode this week, which feels incredible. Thank you for being with us so far; we so appreciate seeing you open this newsletter every issue. We started in the fire of grief; now we feel like we’re picking up steam. 

That feeling resonates with the theme that surfaces over and over again in Greg’s talk: pacing. In Greg’s work, that means forecasting the possible future effects of technology so that potential harms can be planned for and responses can be paced out in an orderly manner. 

That thread of pacing runs throughout our September episodes, with Dr. Tyler Musgrave and Jarrett Reed sharing their strategies for pacing through change. Each works to provide their customers, clients, and colleagues consistency and to make change acceptable, if not always exactly welcome. 

What I think Tyler, Jarret, and Greg show us most urgently is that there is not a single solution for the enormous amount of change any one person, organization, or society faces in the current moment. Instead, there is a solution set; a series of concurrent actions we can take to address the preservation of past knowledge, the triage of current moments, and plans for the future. It’s the combination of these concurrent actions that will allow us to not just set a sustainable pace of change, but to leverage what evolves to the advantage of ourselves, society and of humanity. 

If that seems like an enormous vision to land in your inbox on a Tuesday, that’s because it is. But the future is coming for all of us; what we make of it is up to us. Let’s make it human-centered. 

With you in the work, 

Ana & Ishmael Interactive

What we’re into this week

Scott

Black Mirror has never been a show I can watch, but Greg’s talk reminded me of another Brit TV hit: Slow Horses. 

Aaron

The spy show? 

Scott

The spy show. 

Aaron

Tell me. 

Scott

Greg’s group of experts who can’t move an org forward reminds me of the Slow Horses, who are really good security agents who have messed up in various ways and are sent to what in the US we call a rubber room: Slough House. But they’re really good, and they persistently see how things are going down in a way the cool kids in the main office, Regents Park, don’t. They lead the Park to the spymaster, but they can’t make him see it, as Greg would say. It’s what I imagine a lot of research teams go through. 

Aaron

Huh- yeah…I know this isn’t the main point of your statement here, but picking up on the tv reference…I really appreciated the recurrence of pop culture in Greg’s interview. It could be such an academic area, forecasting, but he makes it super accessible. I, of course, was so excited by the fact that they used Marvel—Marvel!—illustrators to make predictive class materials for the military! Reminds me of this book about Marvel illustrations, which is one of my touchstones, personally. 

Ana

Marvel is a true phenomenon, but my issue with both Marvel and Slow Horses and Black Mirror is that…this is all stuff about bad stuff, which, come on, yall, there’s another side of the coin: how can we imagine good stuff? How do we get ourselves out of Black Mirror and into, idk, Pearlescent Mirror or Rainbow Mirror whatever the opposite of Black Mirror would be? 

Scott

Disco Reflective Mirror? 

Ana

Could be!! So yes. 

Anyway - Greg’s talk sent me back to the Preamble to the Constitution, actually (curveball, I know). It’s so optimistic, yet matter-of-fact:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. 

One sentence and BAM-we got this: “more perfect union” “general welfare” “blessings of liberty”. It’s organizing a vision for the future based on looking at what could get better, rather than on what could go wrong. Doesn’t seem like that should be hard to do, but humans don’t seem to do it very often. 

 Aaron

Reminds me of the Agile Manifesto. 

Ana

I hesitate to equate the two but I get your vibes! I think these were similar groups thinking on similar lines: how can we look at the evidence we have that drives towards a positive future, and amp up work that’s going in that direction, rather than just try to prevent bad things from happening or laws from being broken? 

Aaron

Okay okay I got you there. I’m now picturing a bunch of 1990s hackers wearing 1790s wigs, but—I can pick up what you’re putting down.

Scott

Ha! Washington in a hoodie. Franklin!! He would wear a hoodie.  

Ana

If anyone uses AI to generate those images, they are banned from the server. Admin warning! But anyway, my point is: the Founders did some good work the day they agreed on that sentence. 

Aaron

Yeah- agree. 

Credits

Guest: Greg Lindsay | Host: Aaron Meyers | Producer: Ana Monroe | Words: A. Adams