Signals: Bamboo Bike... Charitable Incentives... Futurists At Work... and more

Vol. 1, No. 6 | January 15, 2015 | AAI Foresight

Inside Foresight SIGNALS

> Power Pedaling with Bamboo Bike

> Philanthropy and Productivity

> Why Some Fossil Fuels Need to Stay in the Ground

> Book Note: Toward a Freakier Mind-Set

> Futurists at Work, Foresight in the News

Power Pedaling with Bamboo Bike

A bamboo bicycle under development in Mexico promises to be tougher, lighter, and less prone to heat, and thus an innovative way to replace metal parts with natural materials. But wait, there’s more: The bamboo bike will also generate energy.

Pedaling a bike creates kinetic energy, so the goal of the Bambootec consortium is to capture that energy through circuits in the rims and run it to converters and regulators in the system’s core under the seat. The energy is converted to electricity—about 10 volts—which can recharge mobile devices and a smartphone battery, and power a navigation dashboard on the handlebars, connected via Bluetooth.

The team’s goals now are to accelerate the charging process and to develop the machinery to scale the bamboo bike up for mass production. Bambootec, located in Yucatán, is a participant in Cleantech Challenge Mexico, a contest that promotes the development of green enterprises.

Source: Investigación y Desarrollo [in Spanish].

Signals: appropriate technology, bicycles, green energy, Mexico, renewable resources, sustainability, transportation

Philanthropy and Productivity

Encouraging workers to give at the office may turn out to be a good way to boost their productivity. A study at Britain’s University of Southampton found that, when subjects could choose the amount of performance-based pay they would share with charity, their performance increased considerably.

“A lot of studies have shown how financial incentives, like bonuses and stock options, can improve performance,” said the study’s lead author, University of Southampton economist Mirco Tonin, in a press statement. “But our results provide empirical support for the growing recognition that some workers are also motivated by advancing social causes through their efforts.”

While financial incentives like bonuses are still more effective at motivating workers, the difference is not as wide as many believe, suggests the study, to be published in Management Science. Tonin concludes that “firms willing to introduce corporate giving programs may want to consider giving employees the opportunity to ‘opt in.’”

Reference: “Corporate Philanthropy and Productivity: Evidence from an Online Real Effort Experiment,” Mirco Tonin and Michael Vlassopoulos, Management Science, DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2014.1985

Signals: business, philanthropy, productivity

Why Some Fossil Fuels Need to Stay in the Ground

A large portion of the world’s untapped coal, oil, and natural gas needs to stay in the ground through 2050 in order to keep global warming from exceeding the internationally agreed limit of 2°C, warns a new study from University College London’s Institute for Sustainable Resources.

The study, published in the journal Nature, recommends that the Middle East leave 65% of its gas in the ground, and that 80% of the coal in China, Russia, and the United States remain undisturbed through the next 35 years, along with 260 billion barrels of petroleum reserves—the equivalent of all of Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves.

How do we avoid either an economic catastrophe or an environmental one? Energy companies (and their investors) should divert the search for more fossil fuels to more alternatives, according to the study’s co-author, environmental policy professor Paul Ekins.

“The greater global attention to climate policy … means that fossil fuel companies are becoming increasingly risky for investors in terms of the delivery of long-term returns,”says Ekins. “I would expect prudent investors in energy to shift increasingly towards low-carbon energy sources.”

Reference: C. McGlade and P. Ekins, “The geographical distribution of fossil fuels unused when limiting global warming to 2°C,” Nature (January 7, 2015). DOI: 10.1038/nature14016 

Signals: climate change, energy, fossil fuels, global warming, low-carbon fuels

Book Note: Toward a Freakier Mind-Set

Finding and interpreting signals or outliers in the landscape is part of the job for foresight professionals. It requires us to think differently about what we see, and even about what we seek, which may be why many of us self-identify as geeks or freaks.

In Think Like a Freak (Morrow, 2014), University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner share techniques for training your mind to think differently, a prerequisite for foresight.

The process is both rewarding and humbling. Why “humbling”? Because you’ll need to learn to say “I don’t know” more often (faking it could have higher social consequences), to think about problems as a child would (ask naïve questions; break things into smaller bits), and to permit yourself to quit when your efforts are futile: Let it go.

Think Like a Freak is well-populated with case studies for freaky thinking in business, which should prove of value to futurists and foresight professionals working with business trends and clients.

Excerpted from Foresight SIGNALS Blog. Read the review.  More information.

Signals: business, creative thinking, Freakonomics, futurist methodologies, strategies, trends

Futurists at Work, Foresight in the News

Islam, Islamism, and Islamaphobia: “We have to liberate ourselves from the phobia of being accused of Islamaphobia,” strategic futurist Tsvi Bisk told Israeli television i24 News, responding to a series of lone-wolf terror attacks in France in December. The war, he said, is not on terrorism, which he described as a strategy (like a flanking maneuver), nor on Islam, but rather on Islamism—“a totalitarian ideology whose aim is to conquer the world.” However, he continued, “that does not mean one iota that you tolerate discrimination against law-abiding Muslims. In other words, it’s a two-pronged attack. You respect and integrate law-abiding Muslims and you uncompromisingly fight against radical Islamism. I don’t see why that’s such a crazy thing to think about.” Watch the interview. Contact Tsvi Bisk, Center for Strategic Futurist Thinking.

 

Futurist in Government: Bulgarian futures researcher and strategic planner Mariana Todorova is now a Member of Parliament, joining the National Assembly of the Republic of Bulgaria in November 2014. She previously served as an adviser to the president (2008-2014) and now has joined the Parliament’s committees for Education and Science and for Labor, Social, and Demographic Policy. Formerly an assistant professor at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, she has worked toward developing a new methodology of scientific forecasting that combines counterfactual analysis and scenario building. Details. 

Redrawing the Global Language Map: A new, omnidisciplinary look at the present state and future of language is being planned by University of Kentucky geographer Stanley D. Brunn. The multivolume collection, tentatively titled The Changing World Language Map, proposes to cover the intersection of language and geography, with chapters contributed by scholars from all over the world and from different backgrounds. Scholars interested in contributing should contact Dr. Brunn at Brunn@uky.edu

Signal of the Month: Trees and Housing. In his monthly e-newsletter, financial adviser and futurist James Lee offers several wise tips for your 2015 financial resolutions; number 7 is saving for a new home. If your goal is to move to a better, safer neighborhood, Lee recommends going to Google Maps and looking for neighborhoods with more trees. “This is simple, but it works!” he writes in his January 9 newsletter for StratFi, The Forward View. Sign up for the free monthly e-newsletter at StratFi. 

Send us your signals! News about your work or other tips are welcome. Contact Cynthia G. Wagner, consulting editor.  

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Feel free to share Foresight SIGNALS with your networks and to submit any stories, tips, or “signals” of trends emerging on the horizon that we can share with other stakeholders and the foresight community. And if you’re interested in becoming a blogger for FS, please contact Cindy Wagner, our consulting editor, at CynthiaGWagner@gmail.com

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Review: Think Like a Freak

Toward a Freakier Mind-Set

Finding and interpreting signals or outliers in the landscape is not simply a matter of visual prowess, but of thinking differently about what is seen or even sought. It is part of the job for foresight professionals, which may be why many of us self-identify as geeks or freaks.

The authors of Freakonomics (2005) and SuperFreakonomics (2011) now share techniques for training your mind to think differently, a prerequisite for foresight. The process is at first humbling, then rewarding, promise University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner.

Why humbling? Because one of the first things that anyone doing any kind of research needs to be able to say is “I don’t know.” And it is this very phrase that most professionals are reluctant to utter, whether to a supervisor, a client, or a child.

“That’s a shame,” write Levitt and Dubner, “for until you can admit what you don’t yet know, it’s virtually impossible to learn what you need to.”

Forecasters who rely on extrapolating trends into the future, without regard to alternative possibilities, may simply be bluffing—or, worse, imposing their own dogma onto the projected landscape, the authors warn. But which is worse, admitting up front that you don’t know, or ultimately being proven wrong? As in the case of Iraq’s possession (or not) of weapons of mass destruction, sometimes “the societal costs of faking it can be huge,” the authors note.

Another humbling technique for freakier thinking is to think as a child would. Magicians know that children are harder to trick than grownups are, because magic, or illusion, is based on diverting the audience’s attention with social cues: When they point to the hand that does not have the ball, grownups follow the cue while children follow the ball. As grownups, we need to unlearn some of these social cues in order to think like a freak—er, child.

Childlike thinking also involves breaking down big problems into smaller ones. For instance, with the big problem of improving academic achievement, the big, grownup solution is to overhaul education systems. But as Levitt and Dubner point out, “One in four children, it turns out, has subpar eyesight, while a whopping 60 percent of ‘problem learners’ have trouble seeing.” So a smaller solution to our big problem might be to improve vision screening.

Think Like a Freak is well-populated with case studies for freaky thinking in business, which should prove of value to futurists and foresight professionals working with business trends and clients. Much of this relates to developing persuasiveness, clearly a key trait to success in any endeavor.

Finding the right incentives, for instance, has enabled Zappos, the online shoe sales company, to attract outstanding talent to its team and give customers more than an easy way to buy shoes. What Zappos offers customers besides shoes, according to Levitt and Dubner, is friendliness, turning its customer representatives into talk therapists.

Wouldn’t that cost more? Rather than higher salaries, Zappos offers its reps more power, more authority to resolve customers’ problems; it also makes work more fun.

“Thinking like a freak may sometimes sound like an exercise in using clever means to get exactly what you want, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” the authors write. But “the best way to get what you want is to treat other people with decency. Decency can push almost any interaction into the cooperative frame.”

Persuading those who do not want to be persuaded is another tough act of freaky thinking. For example, not everyone buys into the trendy idea that Driverless cars are the future! Clearly, professional drivers whose jobs would be in jeopardy are not persuaded about this vision, nor are environmentalists who foresee more cars being put on the roads, exacerbating congestion and pollution. But rather than insulting such critics, calling them luddites, proponents of driverless cars should acknowledge the strength of the arguments, Levitt and Dubner suggest.

Finally, the bravest act of freaky thinking may very well be admitting failure. We certainly value fortitude and determination, but not obsessiveness in the face of futility. Quitting isn’t failure, the authors remind us; failing is failure. The upside to quitting—to recognizing a brick wall before you hit it—is reserving resources and resilience for finding a way around, over, or even under that brick wall.

“Think about all the time, brain power, and social or political capital you continued to spend on some commitment only because you didn’t like the idea of quitting,” write Levitt and Dubner. “Resources are not infinite: you cannot solve tomorrow’s problem if you aren’t willing to abandon today’s dud.”

Of course, we don’t want future Edisons to abandon their light bulbs before they get to the eleven-thousand-and-first experiment that finally succeeds. So how do you predict failure before it happens? One freaky idea is to use “pre-mortem” (as opposed to post-mortem) analysis, in the terminology of psychologist Gary Klein, offering team members on a project the opportunity to (anonymously) imagine everything that could go wrong and the reasons behind a potential failure.

And if the word “quitting” still unnerves you, borrow the currently popular girls’ anthem from Frozen: “Let it go.”

Basically, thinking like a freak is about thinking “a bit differently, a bit harder, a bit more freely,” write Levitt and Dubner. And these are activities we surely ought not to quit.

Cynthia G. Wagner  (@CynWag1)  is the consulting editor of Foresight SIGNALS.

Photos via Amazon.com authors’ pages.