Introduction

People have always been curious about what lies over the horizon or around the next corner. Books that speculate about the shape of things to come, especially those that make precise or easily digestible predictions, are consistently popular. But lately, the number of books seeking to uncover or explain the future has exploded. The reason for this — which, ironically, no futurist appears to have foreseen — is that rapid technological change and historic political and economic events have combined to create a climate that is characterised by uncertainty, and there is much anxiety about how civilisation may develop.

The world today offers more promise than ever before, but there are also more threats to our continued existence. During the writing of this book, for example, we saw the sudden collapse of Egypt’s Mubarak regime, and the domino effect it had on the Middle East; the emerging recession in parts of the United Kingdom; the economic plights of the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain); the perpetration of medieval atrocities in Syria; and the explosive success of the iPad, which sold almost 12 million units in the first economic quarter of 2012. That’s not to mention attacks on confidential government and commercial data, the discovery of a Higgs boson–like particle, and the alleged detection of particles travelling faster than light, which is supposedly impossible (it was later revealed to be an error, but you never know what else may be found with time).

In short, the future is not what it used to be, and it needs rescuing. There is now a high degree of volatility in everything from politics and financial markets to food prices, sport, and weather, and this is creating unease — especially among generations that grew up in an era which was characterised, with hindsight, by relative stability and simplicity; in a world that was more like Downton Abbey than Cowboys & Aliens.

There is a problem with most books about the future — and indeed, there is a fatal flaw with almost all of our thinking about what will happen next. This is because of a simple point. The fact is, there is no single future, regardless of our deepest desire that it be so, and there is no heavenly salvation in sight.

Our views about the world change regularly. We know that the present is highly uncertain, and we are even starting to question what happened in the past (at a recent futures summit in Provence, France, Grigory Yavlinsky, the former presidential candidate, admitted to us that the most uncertain thing about Russia was its past). Logically, if the past and present are uncertain, the future will be, too. And if the future is uncertain, there must be more than one possible future.

There are always many different ways in which a series of events might unfold, so suggesting, as many futurists and technologists do, that there is one specific, inevitable future to come is not only inaccurate — it is also dangerously misleading. What is even worse is when the two of us, as futurists, are presented with several possible futures and asked to decide which is more likely to occur. Linear analysis — the extrapolation of current events to the future — is a very straight road that doesn’t allow for the unforeseen shocks that come from all sides. As the historian Niall Ferguson has observed: ‘It is an axiom among those who study science fiction and other literature concerned with the future that those who write it are, consciously or unconsciously, reflecting on the present.’ Or, as we like to say: all futures are contemporary futures, in the same way that all prediction is based upon past experience.

This is one reason why so many predictions about the future go so horribly and hilariously wrong. For example, an article in The Times in 1894 suggested that every street in London would eventually be buried under nine feet of horse manure. Why? London was rapidly expanding, and so was the amount of horse-drawn transport. Londoners would, it seemed at the time, soon be up horse-manure creek without a paddle. What the author of this prediction didn’t foresee, of course, was that at exactly this time engineer Karl Benz was developing the horseless carriage in Germany, and the new invention would change everything.

Four years later, in 1898, Benz made exactly the same mistake of extrapolating from the present. He predicted that the global demand for automobiles would not surpass one million. Why? Because of a lack of chauffeurs! The automobile had been invented, but the idea of driving by oneself had not. Thus it seemed inevitable that the world would eventually run out of chauffeurs, meaning that the manufacture of the automobile would come to the end of the road.

It is also misleading to analyse trends in order to predict the future. Not only must trends be lined up with ‘discontinuities’, counter-trends, anomalies, and wildcards (which have a nasty habit of jumping into view suddenly, from left field), but also they are retrospective — not ‘futuristic’ at all. A trend is an unfolding event or disposition that we trace back to its initiation, so trends tell us next to nothing about the direction or velocity of future events.

Trend analysis is not foolproof because the world is not binary — it is systemic, and influences interact with each other in complex and surprising ways, leading to change. It is rare for a new idea to extinguish an old one, especially if it has been in circulation for a long time. For instance, despite the facility with which mobile technology can deliver media content, there’s still something reassuring about listening to the radio in the car or reading a daily newspaper, whether that be in print or online. And while e-payments have transformed the banking industry, we still have physical branches and the number of channels through which to conduct banking is expanding, not shrinking. Change can happen rapidly, but in most instances it takes decades, often generations, for something new to cause something else to become extinct. Moreover, while means of delivery, business models, materials, competitors, profit margins, and even companies may change radically, deep human needs, such as the desire to tell or listen to stories, remain constant.

True, occasionally an idea or event occurs that is so significant that history is divided into ‘before’ and ‘after’. Examples, arguably, include the development of the steam engine, the automobile, the microprocessor, the mobile phone, and the internet; the collapse of the Berlin Wall; 9/11; and the rise of Google, Facebook, and Amazon respectively. But even here there is not uniformity. We all have a particular lens through which we see the world, and no two individuals ever experience events in the same way. More often than not, different individuals and institutions will experience the present in slightly different ways depending on where they live, what they do, and how they have grown up. Therefore, there is always more than one reality (or worldview, as we like to call it). And if there is more than one present, there must certainly be more than one future.

This notion that there is no linear pathway is a good thing, as is the level of uncertainty that surrounds the future. Indeed, in many respects this is one of the most interesting times ever to be alive because almost everything that we think we know, or take for granted, is capable of being challenged or changed, often at a fundamental level — even human nature, if Joel Garreau, the author of bestseller Radical Evolution: the promise and peril of enhancing our minds, our bodies — and what it means to be human, is to be believed.

We believe that the only rigorous way to deal with a future so uneven and disjointed is to create a set of alternative futures that cover a number of possibilities. This technique — called scenario planning or scenario thinking — originated as a form of war-gaming, or battle planning, in military circles, and was picked up by, among others, oil company Royal Dutch Shell, as a way of dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty. In Shell’s case, scenarios correctly anticipated the 1973 oil crisis, which hiked prices dramatically, and the corresponding price falls almost a decade later. Other incidences where scenarios have foreseen what few others could include Adam Kahane’s 1992 Mont Fleur Scenarios for South Africa, which helped to promote a peaceful transition to democratic rule, and two sets of scenarios created by the authors of this book, one in 2005 for a major bank and one in 2006–2007 for the future of the teaching profession, both of which identified futures around the global recession of 2007–2012.

This is a book about the future that offers a number of alternatives for discussion and dissection. It is not merely about trends, although we do look at key trends in demographics, technology, energy, the economy, the environment, food and water supplies, and geopolitics. In Part I, we present four detailed scenarios, the Worldview Scenarios, which show what it might be like to live in the world in 2040. These are not simply about where today’s trends might take us, but about what the world in 2040 might be like. To formulate them, we took a number of critical questions and used the robust, resilient process of scenario planning. In Part II, we take you through how we did this. We reflect on the key factors in today’s world that helped to create our four future worlds, and examine what actions were taken, and by whom, to lead to them.

It is not our intention in this book to ‘predict the future’: we are not seeking to get it all right, as this is impossible. Rather, our aim is to prevent people from getting the future seriously wrong. This is possible, but only if individuals can think bravely and creatively. This book is intended to form part of a conversation, to open people’s minds to what is happening now, and to create meaningful debate about some of the choices we face and where some of the actions that we are choosing to perform — or allowing to happen — may lead. It is intended to alert individuals and organisations to a broad range of longer-term questions, expectations, and decisions, and to place a few of them firmly on the long-range radar for monitoring and further analysis. It’s really about challenging fundamental assumptions and reframing viewpoints, including establishing whether people are asking the right questions — as, in this context, disagreeing with and probing the received wisdom is a valuable skill.

Most of all, perhaps, we would like to liberate attitudes towards the future. In our scenario-planning projects, we have discovered that people from all kinds of professions and backgrounds want to make a difference — to generate change, as well as adapt to it. As Peter Senge, the director of the Center for Organizational Learning at the MIT Sloan School of Management, once remarked, ‘Vision becomes a living thing only when most people believe they can shape their future.’ Yes, people need to understand the opportunities and threats that lie ahead, but they can also consider the direction in which they would like to travel. For example, is mankind on the cusp of another creative renaissance, characterised by radical new ideas, scientific and technological breakthroughs, material abundance, and extraordinary opportunities for a greater proportion of the world’s people; or are we, in a sense, at the end of civilisation, facing a new world characterised by high levels of volatility, anxiety, and uncertainty? Are we entering a peaceful period where collective action will address abject poverty, infant mortality, adult literacy, physical security, and basic human rights; or are we moving towards an increasingly individualistic and selfish era, in which urban overcrowding, the high cost of energy and food, water shortages, social inequality, unemployment, nationalism, and increasingly authoritarian governments will combine to create a new age of misery and rage? Some urban economists and sociologists are predicting a future in which up to two billion people will be squatters in ‘edge cities’ attached to major conurbations such as Mexico City, Mumbai, and Beijing, while others believe in the concept of a smart planet, in which our expertise delivers a triumphal response to the drivers of change and we create local, inclusive, self-managed communities that resonate with traditional democratic values.

So just what does the future have in store for us? Where might we all be in 2040? Will life generally be better, worse, or weirder than we expect? Will we have adopted a broadly fatalistic approach to events, or will we be striving to shape the unfolding world in line with a well-defined and compellingly articulated objective? And in what ways are the seeds of this future already with us? Let’s find out.