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At Fast Company, Jamais Cascio unveiled a short bibliography for the general reader on Futurist thinking.

Futures Thinking: A Bibliography

As you probably picked up from earlier entries in the Futures Thinking series, foresight work is intensely information-based. If you’re going to make grounded projections of future possibilities, you have understand both what has led us to the point we’re at today, and what kinds of issues seem to be shaping up as emerging drivers. A few pieces to trigger some creative thoughts can help, too.

As I suggested in Futures Thinking: Scanning the World, a good deal of the reading you’ll be doing will be in the form of websites and journals. This isn’t surprising; part of the service provided by foresight workers is sensitivity to early warnings of big changes. It will be tempting to focus on science and technology materials, in part because there tends to be an overlap between people interested in futures work and people interested in new tech toys, and in part because the pace and pattern of change is easier to see in science and technology than it is in many other realms. It’s not necessarily more “objective,” but it’s perceived as less ambiguous.

That was the introduction, you can read the rest here. Now on to Cascio’s recommendations:

Practice

These two books are good resources for understanding methodologies of futures work. Schwartz co-founded Global Business Network, and Johansen is a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for the Future. (Disclosure: I’ve worked with Peter, and currently work with Bob.)

• Art of the Long View, Peter Schwartz
• Get There Early, Bob Johansen

History

Foresight is anticipatory history. These three books offer very different perspectives on how to think about the past — which, in turn, help to shape how we should think about the future. Polanyi is a classical theorist, looking at ideas and states; Zinn is a populist, looking at the lives of regular people; Diamond is an ecologist, looking at the intersection of culture and environment. I end up mixing these three approaches in my own work.

• The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi
• A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn
• Collapse, Jared Diamond

Analysis

Easily the largest section of my personal library, I could have made the list of Analysis books ten times longer. The ones I’ve picked here, however, offer for me a set of cogent insights into how we live with the tools we make. The ideal result from reading a book in this category should be an epiphany moment where you can see all sorts of links from the book’s ideas to other books/ideas you’ve encountered. All of these books gave me that kind of moment.

• Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs
• Everyware, Adam Greenfield
• Plan B, Lester Brown
• Radical Evolution, Joel Garreau
• Brave New War, John Robb
• No Logo, Naomi Klein

Inspiration

The highest compliment I can give a science fiction book is that it’s “plausibly surreal” — it manages to feel like a relentless extrapolation from today even as it overwhelms with unexpected consequences of that extrapolation. I’ve read each of these are books multiple times, and I still get a giddy feeling of discovery every time.

• Accelerando, Charlie Stross
• Transmetropolitan series, Warren Ellis & Darrick Roberts
• Holy Fire, Bruce Sterling
• The Bohr Maker, Linda Nagata
• Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge
• Red Mars/Green Mars/Blue Mars trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson

I am not familiar with all of these books. The Art of the Long View is considered to be a classic and I will give a very strong recommendation to Brave New War and Smart Mobs.

What would I add to this list?:

Practice:

Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision by Roberta Wohlstetter

The Next Two Hundred Years: A Scenario for America and the World by William Morle Brown and Herman Kahn

History:

From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present by Jacques Barzun

A History of Knowledge: Past, Present, and Future by Charles van Doren

Analysis:

Masks of the Universe: Changing Ideas on the Nature of the Cosmos by Edward Robert Harrison

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson

Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century by Alvin Toffler

I’m not a frequent enough consumer of science fiction to have noteworthy recommendations for “Inspiration”. There are obvious authors who come to mind - Asimov, Dick, Heinlein, Gibson, Clarke - but I’ll leave it to readers here to nominate titles in the comments section.

From the Strategy Conference…..

Two items:

RAND emeritus David Ronfeldt called my attention today (thanks David!) to this article by futurist David Brin:

Forgetting our American tradition:The folly of relying exclusively on a professional protector caste

Today we face (but largely ignore) a major historical anomaly. From our nation’s birth all the way until the end of the Vietnam War, America’s chief approach to dealing with danger — both anticipated threats and those that took us by surprise — was to rely upon a robust citizenry to quickly supplement, augment and reinforce the thin veneer of professionals in a relatively small peacetime warrior-protector caste.  Toward this end, society relied primarily upon concepts of robustness and resilience, rather than attempting to anticipate and forestall every conceivable danger. 

This emphasis changed, dramatically, starting with the Second World War, but accelerating after Vietnam. Some reasons for the shift toward professionalism were excellent and even overdue.  Nevertheless, it is clearly long past-time for a little perspective and reflection.

Over the course of the last two decades, while doing “future threats” consultations for DoD, DTRA, NRO, CIA, the Navy, Air Force, etc., I have watched this distinction grow ever-more stark — contrasting an older American reflex that relied on citizen-level resilience vs. the more recent emphasis on anticipation and the surgical removal of threats.  Inexorably, the Protector Class has increasingly come to consider itself wholly separate from the Protected.  In fact, our military, security and intelligence services have reached a point where - even when they engage in self-critical introspection - they seem unable to even ask questions that ponder resilience issues.

Instead, the question always boils down to: “How can we better anticipate, cover, and overcome all conceivable or plausible threat envelopes?”

While this is a worthy and admirable emphasis for protectors to take, it is also profoundly and narrowly overspecialized.  It reflects a counterfactual assumption that, given sufficient funding, these communities can not only anticipate all future shocks, but prepare adequately to deal with them on a strictly in-house basis, through the application of fiercely effective professional action…..

Read the rest here.

Secondly, I wanted to highlight that Don Vandergriff, a student of John Boyd’s strategic philosophy and the pioneer of adaptive leadership training , recently received a glowing mention in Fast Company magazine:

How to Buck the System the Right Way

….What GM is doing is mining the talent of its leaders in the middle. To lead up effectively, there are three characteristics you need to leverage.

Credibility. You must know your stuff especially when you are not the one in charge. When you are seeking to make a case to senior manager, or even to colleagues, what you know must be grounded in reality. At the same time, so often, as is the case at GM, you need to be able to think and act differently. So your track record reinforces your credibility. That is, what you have done before gives credence to what you want to do in the future.

Influence. Knowing how to persuade others is critical for someone seeking to effect change. If you do not have line authority, how else but through influence can you succeed? Your influence is based on credibility, but also on your proven ability to get things done. Sometimes persuasion comes down to an ability to sweet talk the higher ups as well as put a bit of muscle on colleagues (nicely of course) in order push your initiative through.

Respect. Mavericks, which GM said it was looking for, may not always be the most easiest people to get along with on a daily basis. After all, they are ones seeking to buck the system. But mavericks who succeed are ones who have the best interests of the organization at heart and in time earn the respect of thier colleagues.

One maverick I know who has been pushing to change the way the U.S. Army trains and promotes its officer corps is Don Vandergriff. A former Army major and twice named ROTC instructor of the year while at Georgetown, Vandergriff has tirelessly badgered the Army’s senior leadership to institute changes that would recognize and promote officers who knew how to lead from the middle.

And now, after more than a decade of his writing and teaching, it is paying off. West Point has become the latest but perhaps the most prestigious Army institution to teach principles of adaptive decision making that Don developed. Many of Don’s students have implemented such lessons successfully under combat situations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Read the rest here. 

Don’s methods excel at getting students to think creatively under the constraints of limited information, situational uncertainty and time pressure ( making the cognitive effect somewhat akin to the effects produced by the Socratic method and complex game playing).

ADDENDUM:

This would also be a suitable post to remind readers that Dr. Chet Richards has moved his blogging operations to a new site, Fast Transients.

Adjust your favorites and blogrolls accordingly.

The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism by Howard Bloom

Reviewed by J. Scott Shipman

Mr. Bloom may have a modern-day classic in his third book, The Genius of the Beast, A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism. Bloom delivers a tour-de-force with obvious and not-so-obvious evidence supporting the power of capitalism to deliver a better quality of life, a better world, and he does so with passion and vigor. 

The Beast is a very quotable book and Bloom’s voice has a messianic quality. From the beginning he admits that his book is “designed to give you pleasure.” In my estimation he succeeds on multiple levels, but I must admit as a newcomer to Bloom’s writing, I was scratching my head during the first portion when he used phrases like “transcendence engine,” “secular genesis machine,” and “evolutionary search engine” which to my way of thinking smacked of new-age hype but I pressed-on and am glad I did. Bloom’s successful use of these “metaphors” (which will probably find their way into our language) helped him to explain the crisis facing Western Culture and his common sense solutions. He writes:

“Our civilization is under attack. But many of us don’t want to defend it. Why? There’s a void in our sense of meaning. We’ve been told that the “the Western system” is one in which the rich stoke artificial needs to suck money, blood, and spirit from the rest of us. We’ve been told that the barons of industry work overtime to turn us from sensitive humans into consumers–mindless buyers listlessly watching TV while growing obese on the artificial flavors, chemical preservatives, and the cheap sugars of junk food. And some of that it is true.

But the problem does not lie in the turbines of the Western way of life–it does not lie in industrialism, capitalism, pluralism, free speech, and democracy. The problem lies in the lens through which we see.”

The Beast is delivered in 78 bite-sized chapters (with 82 pages of notes) in prose accessible to the average reader. However, the large number of small chapters doesn’t scrimp on content; Bloom sets the stage with a review the phenomena of economic booms and crashes through the lens of manic-depressive economies of the past and present. He offers evidence that even without a World Wide Web and the modern notion of globalization, our current situation is not unique and economies have suffered worse crashes than our recent 2007/08 meltdown. 

Bloom contends  “emotional flows” have powered our past and will power our future, but until now, we have not had the tools or the awareness to “bring them into view.” The Beast, in Bloom’s words, “attempts to show you how and why.”

Like the great John Boyd, Bloom, a scientist-turned-rock band promoter, is a consilient thinker—he weaves the theory of evolution, neurology, entomology, bacteriology, public policy, economics, and crowd-psychology (just to name a few) into an uplifting view of capitalism and how we interact within our culture, and the importance of staying on the edge of exploration. Importantly, he lays bare the truth about Marxism, demonstrating that Marx was what he complained of: a capitalist peddling a murderous utopian view of the world that led to at least 80M deaths in the twentieth century. Contrary to what many modern critics of capitalism would have us believe, Bloom asserts that where “Religions and ideologies promise to raise the poor and the oppressed. But only The Western system {capitalism} delivers on that promise century after century.” And he backs up his assertion with facts.

Bloom’s clear-eyed enthusiasm for Western culture does not spare the reader the excesses and tragedies of capitalism; he leaves no stone unturned in his critical assessments or in his heart-felt endorsements. He provides not only reasons for hope, but proven tools and methods to get things done and for the right reasons. Bloom used competitive and cooperative examples in nature (birds, bees, and fish) to explain our environment and culture and made for excellent examples of what works and does not work in nature. Bloom takes Plato to task for “what he didn’t tell us,” how capitalism created the alphabet, why “flash isn’t frivolous,” the importance of vanity, and how as a scientist in the business world he used two rules of science he learned as a kid that were invaluable to his success:

“(1) The truth at any price including the price of your life, and (2) look at things right under your nose as if you’ve never seen them before, then proceed from there.” 

For some, Bloom’s descriptions of his success may smack of immodesty, but given the passion flowing from each page, it is difficult to fault him for saying essentially, “Hey, this isn’t just theory! I’ve tried it and it works and you can do it, too!”

Blooms “transcendence engine” revs into high-gear as he walks the reader from Marco Polo, to Prince Henry The Navigator, to Christopher Columbus, and how “the world is fed using Mesoamerican agrotechnology;” and how none of this would have been possible without dreamers dreaming and then acting, and searching…exploring.

The insanity of reliance on pure reason is laid bare; he states plainly “reason without intuition is cripple.” Leaders and would-be leaders could take a lesson from Bloom’s guidance to use our “instrument of empathy” (which is something literally “right under our nose”) to find emotions within that are attuned to the people you want to serve. He encourages the deliberate act of “learning” more about our customers in order to “learn to care about them more deeply.” He used a lovely analogy in the form of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s masterpiece “Renascence” to illustrate the depth of truly knowing those we serve: “It said that to see the infinite in every grain of sand, you have to feel all the pains, the pleasures, the extremes, and the day-to-day emotions of every conceivable sort of person sharing this planet with you, of every living human being.” In our narcissistic age, this appeal may have an odd ring, but history and Bloom offer examples of how “learning” about customers works, and Bloom doesn’t mean the institutional research as much as the personal benefits of having first-hand knowledge and empathy for those we serve. (His observations on focus groups were spot-on as well.) 

Bloom wraps up with a genuinely passionate entreaty that may sound odd without more background, but inspiring and thought-provoking just the same:

“Help others grow selfish on behalf of others, too. Ask what your fixations and your private passions can contribute to the lives of others. Get fervent about it. Crusade! If it’s a better art-directed envelope for the mail room, one that will light up the people who find it in their mail box, if it’s a service that will give your customers the honest sense that you care for their security, no matter what it is, do it! Forget the horse-pucky about lean and mean. Meanness is punished in the long run by the capitalist system. It’s socked by a dive in long range profits and in long-range value, long-range capitalization. It’s rocked by the hatred of meanness makers generate. Profit, value, and longevity come from caring, not from ruthless savagery. You are here—at your job forty or sixty hours a week—not to plunder but to please. You are here to give eight hours of meaning to those you work for, to those who work for you, and most of all to your public, to your audience, to the tens of millions or hundreds of millions who you would like to reach and bring into your fold.”

Those are big numbers, but he’s right—even in our small world; we’re ambassadors for something bigger—-so the “crusade!” comment seems appropriate.

Get this book and read it. Bloom’s assessments are thoughtful and inspiring. Thank you, Howard Bloom, you have bridged generations and thoughts and tied together facts that otherwise would have gone unnoticed.

About the Reviewer:

Based in the suburbs of Washington, DC, Scott is the father of three, the husband of one, former submarine sailor and arms control inspector, and the founder of a boutique consulting firm specializing in strategic thought leadership.  As an admirer of the late Colonel John Boyd, Scott’s passion centers around a presentation titled  “To Be, or To DO: A Challenge To Action With Integrity.” Scott is pleased, but not surprised that Boyd has so many devotees and is glad to have found Zen and Co. 

Is coming.