Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 132! Innovating “Future Backwards” Closes the Future...
Good morning uplannable becomings,
We hope that you had a wonderful time celebrating Nowruz (Persian New Year) on Tuesday – which is also what some of us might call the spring equinox – or the first day of spring (we will do our fire jumping this weekend). Coming up this week on the 25th is Holi – the Hindu festival of light and spring – we are very sorry to be missing our dear friend Khanjan’s Holi party just down the road in PA!
Here on the North-West coast of the Atlantic – spring has come with some freezing weather, and the embers of last night's fire are still smoldering in the fireplace this morning. This weather is keeping us guessing in what will certainly be the hottest year on record.
For us, it was another week of travel – this time out to the North-East edge of the vast Pacific—San Diego. We were presenting at the annual VentureWell Open conference with some dear friends and colleagues: Khanjan Mehta, Mari Luz Zapata-Ramos and Jose E. Lugo, in one of those scaleless, placeless hotels that conferences perplexingly seem to gravitate towards (that aside, it was highly engaging).
We presented a two-part session, first a workshop and then a discussion. The whole thing was titled “Fuck Prototyping," a title that followed our session presented at last year’s Open: “Fuck Ideas.” The titles are definitely over the top – they are meant to be polemic and act as a rallying point in the world of researching and teaching innovation. For us it is a call to strongly move away from the existing linear idea driven models towards highly engaged co-emergent approaches. For us, arguing for such a fundamental shift away from historical, Ideation driven logic to creativity and innovation is a long standing interest.
Challenging both Ideation driven models of innovation and prototyping processes ultimately go hand-in-hand. The “ideation first” model of Ideate-Plan-Make, has a long history in the West:
…and it can be found in variation at the core of most contemporary Western innovation approaches (a case in point is that the VentureWell organization’s logo is “From Ideas to Impact”):
Given this, it makes sense to critique ideation, but, one might ask, why also critique prototyping? Prototyping—the making of a basic and testable version of the idea so as to evolve it towards one's goal—is a fundamentally critical part of the ideational logic:
Prototyping is what takes us from an idea and a plan towards a final outcome.
By focusing on prototyping, we can see that this model is not simply about “ideating” in a loose sense of the term. Implicit in its logic is the development of a clear idea—really, a “model” of what should be the outcome. The “idea” that one is conceiving at the beginning of the process is designed to be an outcome that will act as the goal. Then one makes a plan to get there. And finally, one is executing this plan via prototyping (see above diagram).
But laying it out in this manner can give one a false sense of its openness, where one step can lead in any direction prior to the next step. This “open” conception misses how the process works. The “Ideation First” approach is ultimately a “Future Backwards” process:
It is a process by which we first ideate a clear idea/concept of what we wish to do, and then we project our idea into the future as our goal. From this, we work “backwards”: we develop a plan that will transform our ideas into the actualization of our goal. And at the core of executing this plan is the prototyping process:
The “plan” is never a nebulous thing; it too has a series of well codified general steps: the idea turns into a model, then the model is prototyped, and finally, when the details and issues are worked out, the idea is made (see above).
Now obviously, this process in reality is executed in a very iterative manner with many loopings of the process:
But this does not make it any less of a future backwards approach: Once we have an ideational project that casts a goal into the future, we have a linear and pregiven outcome approach. This is equally true of more classical design approaches and more recent variations like Design Thinking. It too is a projective approach—casting a goal out into the future and then leaning heavily into a prototyping process to get there.
What is never explicitly articulated is this step of “goal projection” that is at the heart of all ideation first approaches: to have an ideation approach is to project a goal—why else would you ideate a solution? Once this move is made, no matter how iterative the process is, we are following a linear model.
Perhaps before going any further, we need to clearly answer the question: Why is any of this a problem? Why are ideation, goal projection, working “future backwards,” and having a linear causal methodology a problem for innovation?
Well, it is a problem if you are trying to be disruptively innovative. And it is a problem if you live in a reality that is fundamentally non-linear (which is what our reality is, except in the most circumscribed of processes).
From the perspective of radical innovation, the question is: how do we participate in the emergence of qualitatively new outcomes? – the fundamental issue is that we cannot ideate what has never existed, and the radically new does not exist. Ideation is inherently conservative. Ideation rests upon existing language, concepts, images, and logics. And if what we want is something qualitatively distinct from these, then we need a qualitatively different approach. And such an approach will need to differ in pretty much every aspect: concepts, environments, practices, and sensibility:
And this brings us to the next and perhaps most critical problem: ideation models are inherently built upon the logic of linear causality, and linear causality does not have the capacity to exceed and disrupt the incremental.
When we pointed this out in the discussion at the conference, especially in regards to Design Thinking, we got a lot of pushback: “No! Design Thinking is not linear! It is iterative, loopy, and ultimately circular.” But that answer reveals the confusion and mistake being made: The opposite of a linear causal system is not a circular or iterative system; such a system can still be fully linear. What is at issue is the form of causality that is being engaged, and circular systems are simply linear systems that repeat (loop). The “opposite” of a linear causal logic is a non-linear causal logic:
It is worth reading the above chart closely; notice the linkages in non-linear systems to the discussion in the last few newsletters in regards to emergent fields of virtual possibilities.
Another way to talk of non-linear systems in regards to disruptive innovation is that they are always emergent – they exhibit the quality of emergent processes. And such processes exhibit “system causality,” where the emergent processes can shape the component parts that gave rise to the emergent processes in the first place. Thus, the emergent process gives rise to "itself," and it is this process that allows for qualitatively new outcomes (as patterns) to emerge without being directly caused by anyone or any one part of the system.
In our workshop at VentureWell, we did not go so far into all these details, as we only had 60-minutes. The above discussion was said simply and quickly—in about five minutes. And we ended our introduction with this conclusion:
Disruptive innovation requires a co-emergent approach, not an ideational approach.
In the simplest of languages, this entails a process where the “path is made in the walking.”
But obviously, all of this can sound highly esoteric and ungraspable.
This would be a terrible outcome for a workshop empowering participants with an effective alternative, and so, at this point in the workshop, we introduced a game we like to play to get groups to experientially sense the logic of co-emergence as an alternative to ideation. Here is our transition slide:
It is a game where we “reinvent the cup.” And in this game, we do not start by trying to generate an idea of what the new cup should look like as a clear goal. There is no need for this. Rather, we can start with an area of interest, engage with it, then disclose and block certain key aspects of how things work, while developing as starting question to “follow” in an emergent manner as a general heading:
After a brief discussion with participants, here is what we disclosed and decided to “block” about cups and what we decided to follow:
To make the game work, we pre-placed at each table a stack of heavy duty photo paper and a pitcher of water. And so it was time to begin probing.
To begin, we gave some very simple instructions:
And so the fun began—crushing, bending, twisting, folding, and testing with the water—and after two minutes, astonishing, strange and perplexing forms emerged.
Followed by a quick analysis:
After a brief period of analysis of our first probes, we honed in on some “differences that could make a difference.” It was time to repeat the process, but this time we added to the instructions: “follow and evolve the most surprising of the unintended affordances that had emerged and move the design in the general heading of our questions.”
And after three rounds of this, we paused the fun and joyous experimentation to ask:
And the answer was—absolutely not. And participants were genuinely surprised, pleased, and had a new awareness—another way was indeed possible.
In the room we had, via a series of probes, began a process of co-emerging with a genuinely novel set of qualitatively different approaches to a "cup.”
And all of this was without ideation of a novel concept at the beginning to drive the process towards a goal. After these fast three rounds, we had come to a point where we did have an emergent novel approach, new skills, novel concepts, and qualitatively new practices of drinking.
Now the goal of this short exercise was modest, we had no ambitions beyond getting participants to (1) sense that they did not need to start with clear ideas and a future backwards logic to begin an innovation process. And (2) that “co-emergence” and “probing” were not some impossibly esoteric concepts that had little tangible pragmatic utility, but were rather graspable, usable, pragmatic techniques and approaches. And at the end of that hour, that is precisely where we all were.
Now it might seem like a trivial exercise for such a lofty topic, but we encourage you to try it. After our last few newsletters that have gotten deep into these processes at an abstract level, it is good to do something very tangible.
If you do not have heavyweight photo paper, you can just glue tinfoil to a sheet of regular paper (you will need four or five of these sheets). The idea is to have waterproof paper that can hold a shape. It is even better to do it as a group, as novel patterns will emerge.
Co-emergence, probing, and the logics we have introduced in the last set of newsletters are not meant to remain simply intellectual concepts. To be effectively activated in a real world setting, we have found that they need to be first grasped in a very direct and embodied manner. This game does a really wonderful job at doing this. So, please get a little messy and co-emerge with your probing.
As always, we would be really interested to hear from you. If you do play this fun probing game, drop us an email with your experiences. If you have other similar games or experiences of highly embodied co-emergent innovation processes, we would also love to hear from you.
And like VentureWell, ultimately we are also interested in "impact.” For us, the wonderful and hopeful conclusion is that we do not need to generate ideas, plans, and “future backward” goals to have this impact. There are better and more effective approaches.
So here's to a wonderful first week spring co-emerging with the qualitatively new via fun, skillful probing...
Till next volume 133,
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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