Causal Texture of the Future

Too many senior managers cannot actually think or plan very well with their aging brains, which brains are stuck in a pattern of obsolete knowledge and experience that is only good for playing the game of corporate politics well enough to maintain their position more easily than their competence.

This may sound harsh, but many of the younger, fresher and more competent brains in the organization will privately agree with this cognitive assessment.  Learners and thinkers always know who can and cannot learn and think, and capable strategic planners often have to realize that those most capable of planning often lack the power or the budget to help the organization become more strategically viable.  Take, for instance, Scenario Planning, which has been around a long time and is supposed to be a big deal done magnificently at companies like Royal Dutch/Shell.  Scenario Planning is still not done fully and effectively even where there is a history of attempting to do it.  Why is this?

We know why: dinosaur-brained senior managers. So, there is this resistance to organizational learning, thinking and planning in high places.  This inevitably ruins the future of the organization while the parachutes of retiring senior managers are ever more heavily gold-plated.  But of course we are never supposed to voice that awful word: incompetence. It might cost us our position.  So there is now this increasing rage of denigrating thoughtful planning as a kind of irrelevance, as if things like Scenario Planning or System Dynamics are old management "fads" that faded away to be replaced by "practical action".  What will be the results of thoughtless, blind surging forward with "practical action" that was designed for yesterday's global environment? Nasty surprises that can be very hard to adjust to indeed.

Fools go forward blindly and inflexibly as "men of action", whereas the wise go forward thoughtfully and flexibly as "men of strategic competence".  All those who speak of "practical action" as somehow overruling thoughtful planning, or who imagine that thoughtful planning is against necessary and urgent action, are destructive idiots.  Enough of them with enough power in any organization will ruin the future of the organization and probably help contribute to increasing global problems as well.  To give such people respect--whatever their level of seeming importance and power--is organizational self-destruction.  The fact is, and this should be an acknowledged principle shared by all: The greater the level of responsibility, the more crucial the degree of competence in planning.

We all need to be absolutely clear that the purpose of any organization in doing Multiple Scenario Planning is to stop adhering stupidly and foolishly to single track strategic and organizational plans that are all too easily derailed by unforeseen events and challenges. It is also a most unfortunate fact that present organizations that skirmish with utilizing Scenario Planning, do it with relatively superficial scenarios within such narrow bandwidths so lacking in causal texture that they probably do not even know what "causal texture" might even mean.  The very scenarios that are built are thus built to uphold certain rigid mindsets and political priorities.  Instead of getting competent extended thinking and planning, all that happens is something like a Bilderberger meeting where the powers that be decide how to make their agreed misgovernance into a successfully self-justified plan of abusing the bewildered masses of humanity.  However high the level of thoughtless incompetence and lack of genuine full-blown Scenario Planning, it is stupid and wrong and without excuse--and in the end it only brings down destruction and pain upon those who would perpetuate a corrupt status quo.  The new Neros still fiddle while the new Romes burn, and it is not going to help either them or the organizations they are responsible for.  The right message for the leaders of any nation or international company or any other organization is: Do real wide-bandwidth Scenario Planning without diluting the causal texture of the future or resign your post and turn it over to some ethical, younger people of genuine thinking, planning and learning ability.

What then, you may ask, is "causal texture of the future" and how does it work? Well, to begin with, it is the conscious employment of a fourfold logic to the trends of the future rather than a onefold predictive logic or a mere binary logic of optimism versus pessimism.  But such a fourfold logic, while simple enough in principle, is socially and psychologically difficult in practice. Why is this? Because most people live in a cognitive trap of one or another Socially Constructed Reality, whether through religious or scientific training and conditioning or through the force of government propaganda and political conditioning. This cognitive trap creates tremendous brain resistance to the acceptance of unpopular and unwanted information or emergent facts that threaten to overwhelm the prevailing belief/disbelief system in the human brain.  Decision-makers find it very hard to suspend belief/disbelief and thus make themselves incapable of doing real thinking with urgent new information about crucially emergent trends in our world that will drastically affect the future of our world, which includes our economic and organizational prospects.  To get out of this trap is to recognize current trends in four causal categories.

1- Negative Causal Texture of the Future:

This should be a scenario built for planning purposes that takes an investigative look at certain negative trends in the world without automatically rejecting them over the fact that that they are difficult or politically incorrect.  For instance, the trend of growing unchecked business monopolies under a doctrine of privatization that rejects healthy and ethical competition or true capitalism.  Another trend is the way the American and British governments are utilizing threats of terrorism to promote going to war in the Middle East or to destroy civil liberties in an increasing surveillance police state approach to governance. Then there is the obvious emergence of Global Warming, which is an increasingly dangerous state of the global climate.  Oxygen depletion is taking place also at a tremendous rate with deforestation and failures of fire-fighting on a massive scale.  And then there is the massive proliferation of highly questionable GM food supplies, coupled with even more dubious drives at mass inoculation of everybody against some threat of smallpox that has been cooked-up to make everybody want the shot, or even to force it on whole populations against their will.  All these sorts of deliberately fostered global problems have become undiscussables for managers in Scenario Planning, even though they are incredibly dangerous possible threats to our future, including our economic health. It is as if all managers want to block out all information about such negative trends as if they are nothing but "conspiracy theories".  They seem to imagine that building a scenario with negative trends is the same as being asked to believe in the negative trends rather than to simply suspend disbelief, which is an entirely different cognitive position.  In genuine Scenario Planning, we are simply asking, "If some of these negative trends turn out to be real and critical, what should we be doing both now and in the near future to minimize the possible damage?" Wouldn't it be wonderful if all negative global trends were indeed nothing but silly conspiracy theories of marginalized cranks and crackpots? Wouldn't it be wonderful if the future never had Negative Causal Texture? Then no organization ever would have experienced a massive critical failure, and no organization ever would.

The future has always held ugly surprises for various groupings. Is your organization, society or nation an exception? What makes it an exception? Do you really believe the status quo will hold up and that nothing could go terribly wrong?  If something wrong is trying to emerge, how do you know it is not giving you signals that would help you to cope with it and survive it, even prosper in spite of it, if only you would do a proper Scenario Planning exercise about it?

2- Positive Causal Texture of the Future:

It may seem absurd at first that most managers also reject consideration of any scenario with positive causal texture.  One solid reason for this is that positive trends are there to correct negative trends which are supposed to not exist.  For instance, there are increasingly powerful networks of people engaging in bringing learning and better planning into organizations in spite of prevailing political misgovernance and incompetence.  But all too often these networks are identified with "touchy feely" New Age idealism, fanatical Environmentalism, and a variety of self-improvement or personal evolution systems such as Zen, Yoga, Meditation and so on.  Even Scenario Planning and System Dynamics are often treated as if they were some sort of Cults-for-Managers. Strangely, it is indeed hard to imagine a form of "organizational" learning without human individuals participating as adults renewing their personal ability to learn.  So, there is indeed a self-developmental factor in learning competent planning and decision-making.  Oh my yes, it is a genuine self-improvement! Why are so many people afraid of increasing their learning ability or their competence in decision-making? Why are so many managers deludedly imagining they are already some optimum state of consciousness and education that requires nothing now but to keep very, very busy and try to avoid meetings where people need to think things out together? All personal and group evolutionary trends are indeed positive. So it is that truly positive scenarios do not get built, for they are trends of human learning, development and evolution that could potentially correct and compensate for all those who deny such trends and promote global problems.  There is a lot of prejudice and personal stagnation in those who deny positive trends, just as there is often a lot of gullibility and mass hypnosis in those who deny negative trends.

3- Ambiguous Causal Texture of the Future:

This is where there is an admixture of the equally denied negative and positive trends creating irregular and unpredictable ups, downs and emergent situations in accordance with various System Dynamics of the situations in question on various scales of system behaviour.  It is impossible to plan for the Ambiguous Scenario without System Dynamics and Complexity Theory thinking. But as one typical senior manager in a major oil company recently said, "Such thinking is too daunting for most senior managers." Or words to that affect.  One thing he meant, of course, is "too daunting" for him as well, as his stupid company does not do either Scenario Planning or Systems Thinking.  Let's face it: Most managers think that ambiguity of the future could not possibly be about anything other than rising and falling values of currencies or vicissitudes of stock markets.  Of course it is an issue as to how much abuse of pension funds and valuation of company share-prices might take place. But even those things are not looked at with either Scenario Planning or System Dynamics, which would prevent a great deal of the shocks and ugliness.  Also, few are willing to acquire the cognitive skills that would allow for this kind of ambiguous causal texture that would necessitate a new kind of thinking altogether to be able to plan properly and for real.

4- Indeterminate Casual Texture of the Future:

This kind of causal texture has the strangest, most unbelievable and yet potentially dangerous trends of all, but also with great hidden potential for good if handled properly.  It has to do with such outlandish trends as an accelerated realization of Nanotechnology, the ability to harness and utilize Hot Fusion, or the suspected secret American government back-engineering of captured or otherwise acquired Extraterrestrial Technology. Most decision-makers would like to imagine that neither their world in general nor their organization specifically could be dramatically affected in the near future by such strange and outlandish things.  So, yet again, cognitive dissonance comes to the front to make it impossible to suspend belief and disbelief.  Indeterminate scenarios can be incredibly fruitful and promote extremely creative thinking and far-sightedness, but we managers and leaders cannot have such things becoming too plausible in our pathetic little frog-in-the-well cognitive system, can we? Anyone who mentions such outlandish things is treated as either mad or dangerous or both.

If we think carefully about causal texture of the future, we can see that all four causal textures are generally eliminated or watered-down to the point of the humdrum status quo respectable heads-in-the-sand thinking which is not thinking at all.  What really happens in almost all supposed "scenario planning" is slightly differentiated stories of the future that reinforce the status quo so as to not "shock" the senior managers in their self-enclosed ignorance or learning disabilities brought on from either aging or pride-of-position and probably both. Therefore, they find a way to either render Scenario Planning unnecessary or to keep it ineffectual if it is deemed in a slight panic about the future to be perhaps somehow valuable, at least to give a slight budget to a handful people on the planning staff to play with and offer a report or presentation that is not too alarming or somehow offensive to the senior managers who do not want to do real planning themselves.  Naturally, the more real and potentially useful the Scenario Planning done by intelligent planners, the more incomprehensible and shocking their scenarios and recommendations will be.  Senior managers want to be told things by their planners that will not rock the politics of the circles in which they dwell.  They are not there, after all, to be intelligent, but rather to maintain their position, which means that they only want information and strategic or organizational suggestions that uphold current policies and manoeuvres that have nothing whatsoever to do with the future viability of the company or organization.

Scenario Planning is beyond politics, just as it is beyond pitiful little Socially Constructed Realities like Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Technological Atheism, Eyes Wide Shut Satanism or the One Only Big Bang Universe.  Scenario Planning has to do with unprejudiced wisdom and intelligence creating flexible options and initiatives in dealing with emergently unusual and highly unpredictable trends based on too easily rejected solid information virtually no one on our planet wants to truly investigate and learn from.  What this means is that the future is a learning situation for those who are prepared to learn and a hellish problem for those who are trying to avoid having to learn.  Think about it.