And so, this is Christmas...

Another year over and a new one just begun. Well, about to begin. What happened? And what does the new year hold?

Grieving for Christmas

I couldn’t write this post until I had finished grieving for Christmas. I know that sounds melodramatic but Christmas is a big thing for me. I haven’t missed a family Christmas in my entire life. Though we’re very close, we don’t actually see each other that much. We live a couple of hours apart. We all have busy lives. But every year without fail, we gather for Christmas. Drink too much bubbly. Eat too much of my aunt’s amazing trifle. Dance around the kitchen to Springsteen. Catch up with the neighbours and extended family. It’s just all the normal Christmas stuff, but it means a huge amount to me.The thought of missing Christmas has been hurting me for weeks. And my wife. So much so that we put off discussing it over and over again because when we tried, we both just got a bit teary. But eventually, we had to have the conversation. Make the decision. And get over it. In my case, with the aid of half a bottle of red. OK, three quarters.I know it’s the right decision, logically. One that perhaps should have been enforced, given the way the figures are going. And I recognise how lucky I am for this to be the sort of thing I have to grieve over. Many have faced much worse this year. Nonetheless, it hurt me.So, now that crappy cap has been sat on the head of what has been - some notable personal high points notwithstanding - a fairly crappy year all round, what can we expect from the year ahead?

Intersections

2020 was a powerful validation of my theory of change/foresight methodology, Intersections (find it in my book!). This theory says that the starting point for future change can usually be found by uncovering existing pressure points. Dramatic, disruptive change tends to come from the widening of cracks that already exist, rather than completely new fissures in an enterprise, organisation, or culture. Find those cracks and understand the pressures that might widen them, and you can see what’s coming.And so it was in 2020. Take retail: 47% of retailers were already facing financial difficulties according to the Grimsey review at the start of the year. Trends towards digital goods and ecommerce were already widening that crack. It was no surprise when COVID-19 stuck a crowbar in that crack and cleaved the industry apart.Or care: we knew our system was creaking. Understaffed. Underfunded. Under pressure from an ageing population. The cracks were there for all to see. They were already widening. COVID-19 just accelerated the process and brought about an early end for many as a result.

The COVID catalyst

This is the catalysing effect that so many experts have talked of this year. It does add a layer of complexity to the Intersections model. As I have written about before, the challenge with futurism is often not seeing what will happen, but when. Accelerants like a global pandemic can bring about years of expected change in a matter of months.But this is why I preach agility. If you can see what’s coming but not when, your only choice is to be ready to move when it arrives.

Trends and pressures 2021

So what can we expect next year? In many ways, more of the same. We have not yet seen the full effects of the acceleration of trends on pressures in business or society. We’re clearly going into a period of financial turmoil. But what else? These are some of the talking points I’ve been using with clients and for media interviews:

Timeshifted lives

I’ve been talking about extended adolescence for a while now. In the last 20 years, many of the key markers of adulthood have been pushed later and later. We now don't learn to drive until about 27 on average. We find partners, get married and have kids well into our 30s. Likewise with buying a home. Thanks to COVID-19, in 2021 we'll likely see all these things pushed back by a year, meaning people start careers later, live at home later, and have an even longer adolescence. This might be visible in the birth rate with maybe 100,000 fewer children born next year (based on some *very* simple maths extrapolating from a US study).

Robots rise (ahead of schedule)

While I’ve long believed that automation presents a material risk to employment across many categories, I’ve also believed its effects would be slower than many feared. But the pandemic has created an increased incentive for robots in a number of contexts. We may see more automation sooner rather than later.Co-op recently increased its use of delivery drones, adding Northampton to the area covered by the Starship rolling drone. Retailers and logistics firms now have an increased incentive to shift to 'dark warehouses', replacing human workers with machines. And in the office, lots of companies are being forced to document and systematise things that used to be invisible when workers were just sat next to each other - a great opportunity to automate a lot of the drudgery of work. Lots of professional services firms (for example) are likely to stick with lower levels of staff as a result.It doesn't create a pretty picture for employment overall. But...

A nation of freelancers

In the last recession we saw a 10% jump in the numbers of self-employed. Over the last 20 years there has been a 50% increase in the total numbers of people working for themselves (it's now around 15%). I think we're going to see another big spike in 2021. A combination of people seeking work after redundancy, and people using the time they've gained from working at home to start up a 'side hustle' that goes on to become their career.Some of these new ventures might be acts of desperation. But I do think there are new markets opening up to be served. Changes to our lifestyles accelerated by the pandemic will shift our needs. Efforts to jumpstart the economy should make both space and capital available. And with so much of our lives spent online, I think there will be a huge market for things that break us out of that digital life and give us a real, physical world experience. Everything from crafts and personalised goods to holidays and adrenalin sports.

Merry Christmas

Whatever you are doing this Christmas, I do hope you get to have a proper rest. I think we all need some time to reflect and recharge. And prepare ourselves to enter 2021 afresh.Merry Christmas. And here's to a happy new year.

A race between the four horsemen

In a recent post for for Locus Magazine, Cory Doctorow laid out his scepticism about general AI in a piece entitled 'Full Employment'. He argued that there is no sign that a general AI - one that can replicate human adaptability in tasks - is on the horizon. And that the work required to address climate change is so great that we are much more likely to see full employment than the AI-driven unemployment that many have predicted.I disagree with Doctorow's analysis of AI. Right now, I don't believe that we are close to a general AI. I am more open minded than Doctorow about the idea that current AI systems have the capability to 'evolve' into something more generally capable, but the gap remains large.My criticism is that I just don't think AI has to be very sophisticated in order to replace humans in the workplace. It's an argument that I have made many times on this blog, so I won't repeat it in too much detail here. Suffice to say that if you break any job down into its component tasks, today's machines are eminently capable of handling many of them. If you accept that machines take work - tasks, rather than jobs - then you can see that the remaining work can be redistributed among a smaller number of humans.Where I don't disagree with Doctorow is on the scale of the challenge presented by climate change. I have little doubt that large portions of humanity will be involved with the mitigation response. But the idea that this will offset any job losses due to automation brings me back to one of the most difficult parts of futurism: seeing not what, but when.

Four horsemen

Even before the pandemic, I was concerned about our prospects for the next 20-30 years. While it's not quite the apocalypse, there are four modern horsemen of disaster racing to cause us problems.

• Climate: In this period, directly or indirectly, climate change will start to affect the more moderate climates. Changes in weather patterns, disruption to agriculture, sea level rises. Until this point climate change has been something most people could ignore, should they so choose. This choice is going away in the next few decades.
• Technology: The prospect of technological disruption to employment and the economy is another major issue. Whether you want to generously call it AI, or prefer the perhaps more accurate 'machine learning and robotics', there is the potential for swathes of workers to be displaced by machines in the next three decades, from administrative, customer service, logistics and manual roles.
• Politics: We are in a rancorous period of global relations. Violence so far has been primarily inside borders rather than between them. But our international trading relationships are collapsing and our diplomatic ties being strained.  And domestic leaders in many countries seem to be incompetent, mad, corrupt, vicious, or some combination of all of these.
• Disease: The latest addition to the line-up is the global pandemic, spreading effortlessly through our international connections, strained as they are. It's unlikely to end quickly and we are likely to see more of its type.

The horsemen analogy falls down when it comes to timing. This isn't about which of these potential challenges will win a race to reach us. All four are here already. The question is the speed and scale at which their effects will be felt.

A race to the finish

Doctorow might be right. Our climate mitigation efforts might start well before we adopt robotics and ML technologies to a level that severely disrupts the labour market. Or he might not. The scale of job losses in the retail sector right now are pretty dramatic. We could attribute these to the pandemic, but really this is just the acceleration a trend towards automation and self-service that has been rolling for years. The pandemic may accelerate the adoption of automation technologies in the retail supply chain and logistics. It might also accelerate their adoption in other fields - administration, customer service, finance, law... Once people are out of the office, perhaps we will be less squeamish about replacing them with machines?Even if you ignore the technological effects, the pandemic has clearly had a terrible effect on our economy. Many are bracing themselves for  job losses in the coming months. During lockdown almost 150,000 people have been made redundant and over 9m have been furloughed. This doesn't even include the many self-employed who sit outside the support schemes or many not be counted as having lost their jobs, despite their income having collapsed. Full employment feels like a long way from here.This is especially true in the current turbulent political environment where it is hard to see coordinated efforts to restore global prosperity. Or for that matter, a coherent effort to address climate change. If we were to start that process now, I can see the creation of an enormous number of jobs that might redress the losses currently being experienced. But it feels more likely to me that these efforts won't start until the effects really start to bite. That is the nature of our politics right now: always focused on today not tomorrow.In the meantime, it is going to be a difficult few years, whichever of the horsemen is leading the race.

How I can help you if your event is cancelled due to coronavirus

Lots of my clients are calling and mailing to cancel upcoming events, for obvious reasons. Everyone wants to postpone but let's be frank, that won't always be possible. We won't have twice as many people to attend events in the second half of the year, or twice as many venues. So while postponing is obviously the ideal situation, it is worth considering alternatives. Here are a couple of suggestions based on my recent experiences.

Do it digitally

Yesterday I was due to speak to an audience at a local authority as part of their internal strategic and management development programme. I had created a 90 minute workshop covering the basics of applied futurism, athletic organisations, and the critical future skills. This is content that I have only ever delivered face to face. But for obvious reasons, they had to cancel the big gathering. Rather than try to postpone though, they moved the session to one that was all digital.Everyone dialled into a session run on GoToTraining that I delivered from my workshop at home in Manchester. I confess this was a little daunting at first. I'm used to feedback from the crowd. I couldn't quite see how it would work without that face to face interaction.Do you know what? It was brilliant. For a start, more people turned up than had been expected for the face to face event. And throughout the session, the engagement on chat was amazing! Not only could the participants chat to me, but they could chat to each other, sharing ideas as the session spurred them. The client told me afterwards that in the 15 years she had been working with that leadership team, she had never seen them so engaged!Obviously I would like to take some of the credit, but I think the format can really work as well. And at much bigger scales than I expected. We had 72 people in this session and they could all participate if they wanted to, whether that was on chat, polls, or in the exercises I set them as we went through.A week ago I would have been very sceptical about delivering talks and workshops down the line, but now I am a confirmed fan.

One to few or one to many

My session was interactive with a medium-sized group, but there's no reason you couldn't live stream to many more. If you're organising an event for a corporate or conference and want to talk about my experience of doing it digitally, then drop me a line. Happy to share what I can of what worked.

Turn it into a content programme

Events are just one form of content. If you can't get people together, and you don't think digital will work, then maybe turn your event into another form of content. Especially if it is for something time-sensitive, like a product launch.I have worked on a few incredible content marketing programmes recently, including Auto Trader's Future Car project and the Future Pizza project to launch the Big Bang Fair.The Future Car project combined an in-depth analysis of the future of the car over the next three decades, backed with a round of broadcast interviews that I gave to support it. (There are advantages to having 14 years and a few thousand appearances behind the microphone). The story went truly global with coverage in Nigeria, Malaysia and Portugal as well as on BBC News and in many of the national papers. You can find more information at https://www.autotrader.co.uk/content/features/cars-of-the-futureThe Future Pizza project was slightly different. I was commissioned to work out what the future pizza might look like, with our recipe (involving insects) turned into a video and a PR campaign. This again caught attention around the world, including from Germany's biggest science show, Galileo, who came to Manchester to film me making the future pizza. Again, the story was picked up by many of the national press. You can watch the original video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEJpSLyUQsM

Get the message out

If you are worried that your marketing campaign is going to suffer because of the event shutdowns, maybe think about a future-focused content campaign? Drop me a line if you would like to chat through some ideas.