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Improve Foresight Efforts Through Fiction

  • Writer: Christopher Owens
    Christopher Owens
  • 2 hours ago
  • 9 min read
Image created using tinywow.com
Image created using tinywow.com

Foresight and scenario-based planning models develop plausible future scenarios using the relationship of multiple drivers. This task does not portend a certain future, but rather map out plausible futures. Then an organization can build resilience, by proposing “If this future — or one like it — were to come to fruition, what opportunities or risks would develop?”


STEEPLE:


SOCIAL


TECHNOLOGICAL


ECONOMIC


ETHICAL


POLITICAL OR POLICY


LEGAL


ENVIRONMENTAL


Many strategic planning models, like Scenario-Based Planning, start by developing a set of critical uncertainties that fall into of the STEEPLE categories. For instance, a global clothing brand might want to examine CONSUMER ADOPTION OF DIGITAL CURRENCY, FASHION PERIODICALS, SOCIAL INFLUENCERS, and SUPPLY CHAIN STABILITY as critical uncertainties that could impact their business within the next decade. The poles or extremes of those uncertainties would also be defined. Consumer adoption of digital currency could be ‘ubiquitous’ or ‘non-existent.’ Supply chain stability could be ‘High’ or ‘Low,’ or Fashion Periodicals could be ‘print only’ versus ‘digital only.’ These extremes would be characterized based on a level of threat or opportunity to your industry or company.


Using a horizon, say, ten or twenty years, a set of plausible futures are developed. The next step would be to place two critical uncertainties and place them in a 2x2 matrix, thereby creating four potential future scenarios with differing characteristics where the global clothing brand would consider the threats and opportunities that reside in each. Some take the added challenge of intersection three critical uncertainties and create a cube with eight potential future scenarios. Studying trends, or critical uncertainties, means building an understanding of it and then extrapolate how that trend might continue or change based on intersections of other trends. Even in a 2 x 2 matrix, this gets complex. These models are effective in identifying scenarios useful to build resilience and preparation. By design, they apply at the upper echelon — the industry, organization, or possibly the departmental levels.


The Rudimentary Scenario-Based Planning Model
The Rudimentary Scenario-Based Planning Model

Strategic planning and foresight work is not a one-size-fits all endeavor. Threatcasting, for instance, is a methodology that looks ten years out into the future based on interdisciplinary inputs, models a range of potential futures — sometimes up to thirty vignettes in a single workshop — and then examines how to disrupt, mitigate, and recover from the identified threats. Rather than focus on two or three critical uncertainties, models like this allow contributors to bring expertise from multiple perspectives. In this way, they allow any or all STEEPLE themes to be mixed into any of the scenarios.


MAKE THE PLAUSIBLE INTO THE COMPELLING


The team has done great work, leveraged collaborators and SMEs, and identified plausible threats. Then what? It is not uncommon to see very complex ideas reduced to a few presentation slides with bulletized information. Senior leaders and decision-makers have been trained to be briefed. I argue that in some cases we need to do more for decision-makers. Also, we should stimulate solutions not just from the c-suite, but everyone who could be impacted by the threat and everyone who would be relied upon enact the recovery from the threat. We need all of them to become more than informed. We need them to become invested.


How do we turn the plausible into the compelling? I’m not sure yet, but I’ve been experimenting. I think potential futures — and threats — can be presented more convincingly than the basic spreadsheet or slide deck offers. There is often enough data from a workshop to create a realistic and compelling story akin to a foresight biosphere (a term I’m playing with) where many critical uncertainties influence one another. The same scenario could be presented as a future news article, a simulated government or corporate position paper, or fictitious future industry journal. Each of these formats create different opportunities to present the plausible as compelling. Some formats would resonate more with government agencies, private industries, or consulting firms — depending on their relationship to the topic.


To demonstrate this, consider the below hypothesized news article constructed of trends — critical uncertainties — tracked from multiple sources. Suspend any assumptions about likelihood, plausibility or predictiveness and instead consider implications. Further, watch how STEEPLE categories integrate and are influenced by each other. And then consider how you as an individual or organization would need to adapt to the demands of that environment.


Article downloaded from foodsecurity.org on October 13, 2036:


Despite National Food Shortages, One State Becomes the Unwitting Center of AI Angst.

Last week, Texas formalized into law a sweeping requirement that 65% of food production conducted by any farm, company, or small business must be accomplished by human workers. In doing so, Texas joins other states in regulating AI in food production, but unlike other states, Texas has unfairly become the social media focal point for a complex issue.

Some states, like Alabama on the other hand, have strategically made no such regulation. For the past ten years companies that use up to 100% AI and robotic technology in their processing have been migrating to Alabama and similar states in anticipation of these regulations. Based on policy and business trends of the last decade, industry leaders and economists anticipate the growing fissure between employment and efficiency will spread to other domains.

Banning together in 2027, eight states including Texas, made an initial anti-automation stance by passing some version of Work Safety Program Regulations (WSPR) — sarcastically called ‘whisper laws’ on social media posts that claim they were discretely passed through corporate pressures and are only ‘soft restrictions.’ WSPRs hyper-tax the import of “non-compliant food production” from any other state. WSPR regulations were created before AI-driven food production took hold anywhere in the U.S. As AI developed throughout the 2020’s, regulation language created complexities in the supply chains.. For instance, some state WSPR regulations require extra inspections for AI-produced food. Corporations complain that states have been known to delay inspections to intentionally disrupt supply chains and even spoil fresh food.

The U.S. has long been a leader in AI and robotics development; however, the use of non-human production work has created one more split between federal and state interests. It is no surprise that competing ideologies are fought in legislative chambers. “Lawmakers have been creating a legislative battlefront along state lines for years,” says professor and economist John Fernando, “and here we see laws that may shield states from less-than-desirable federal initiatives. In this case, however, national food security is impacted.”

The largest company to move into a friendlier area was Kerry Foods, who previously converted their $2.1B San Antonio canning production line to AI-powered analytics and robotics. Aside from physically unloading trucks of product by hand, vegetables were sorted, inspected, trimmed, cleaned, re-inspected, and packaged by smart-tech machines that troubleshoot and monitor production at incredibly high speed — faster and more accurately than humans. Citing increasing financial hurdles in San Antonio, Kerry Foods invested billions to relocate and took with them millions of dollars of state tax revenue when they moved to nearby Arkansas. Since the move, their distribution and sales beat competitors with ease.

Texas voters have been the most vocal, executing social media campaigns shared around the world. The state has been the ‘canary in the coalmine,’ demonstrating how states will continue to suffer food shortages while the food production industries slowly migrate to states that adopt Nutrition Innovation Subsidy Programs (NISP). NISP regulations provide financial incentives to companies who develop carbon-responsible processes and lower human injuries by rolling out robotics and AI-driven automation in the most hazardous areas of production. Economists agree that by the end of 2035, food prices are predicted to skyrocket out of control in affected regions of the US, while food prices will remain stable or drop elsewhere.

At the 2028 “4M Conference” seafood manufacturers from Maine, Mississippi, Massachusetts, and Maryland considered lobbying for similar laws related to coastal and deep-sea fishing and shellfish. As countries like China and North Korea continually add AI-technologies to their global (and illegal) fishing fleets, American seafood companies are falling behind. Citing privately funded research by universities, they determined the marriage of AI and robotics applications rarely impact employment rates. Industry and state leaders reached compromises; their regulations now apply only to shore-side processing and packaging facilities. So as early adopters of automation in those states watched unemployment rise, the displaced workforce was absorbed by other waterfront industries or by worker migration to other areas of the U.S.

This is not solely an American issue. European nations like France, Germany and Spain have adopted national agricultural and meat processing automation without regional polarizing regulations. Removing humans from direct contact with pesticides in fields and animal bodily fluids, it is argued, lowers risk of birth defects and transmission of viruses between animals and humans. EU health ministers and WHO support this through decades of data from multiple research findings across the globe. Citing 2020 COVID mutations in Denmark mink farms and the rapid 2026 mutation of viruses in meat processing plants in the US, Brazil, and France, NSIP laws are designed to help people, not hurt them, it is argued.

The rise of AI is an economic opportunity for some companies. Monsanto, for instance, once the unloved poster child of poisonous agriculture across Europe, is now expanding sales in nations that promote robotic farming, thereby making pesticides less of a threat to the health of field workers. U.S. States and other nations that promote WSPR initiatives claim that the widespread automation of physical labor in the production of food is symptomatic of societies that, according to a TikTok posting that reached over 2 billion shares, “abdicate regulators from promoting safe food” and “allow humans to be distanced from the realities of industrial meat and poultry production.” Prominent political and religious leaders around the globe have been critical of the replacement of humans — and by extension, our humanity — by AI and automation.

It was a surprise to many when Pope Hubert joined an international consortium of writers, social movement leaders, and various retired politicians to speak out about the immorality and inhumanity of relying on machines to care for — and now feed — people. The world’s daily awareness of failures in AI applications in French law enforcement, Israeli intelligence gathering, and Japan’s hyper-advanced rail and air transportation systems only gives rise to skepticism. Public opinion provides not just a metric to measure risk or success, but as South African musician, actress, and influencer-activist Jenna G recently called the “unethical replacement of humans from nourishing humanity.”

Back in the U.S., growing industrial automation was challenged before Congress by 15 union organizations who successfully lobbied federal lawmakers to ban automated shipping on all interstate highways and railways one year ago (see peoplebeforerobots.org for more). NSIP proponents agree the rise in black market food distributors, the resurgence in backyard gardening (our great-great-grandparents called it subsistence farming and our great-grandparents had Victory Gardens), online food shopping, and desperate consumers engaging in illegal border food shopping continues to weaken their stance.

The rise in illegal food trafficking into Texas from Mexico is now exacerbated into a federal law enforcement issue, drawing DC lawmakers into yet another division on the Senate and Congress floors. An unnamed source within U.S. Customs and Border Patrol was recently quoted on social media stating, “Black Market food has been so successful that drug cartels are now diversifying their operations.” He also quipped, “It’s not like the old days when drug mules carried bags of cocaine instead of almonds and wheat.” State and Federal governments are struggling to reach consensus on what legal authorities or agencies will enforce illegal cross-state food sales.

So as Texas weathers the American public’s scrutiny, the disparity between state regulations in the U.S. is attracting attention of nations around the world as internet outlets report competing stories from the federal, state, local and personal narrative. Most recently, the UN High Commission on Sustainable Development released an unexpected and equally inflammatory statement comparing regional U.S. food production shortages to what “three African nations experienced in the 1980s and early 1990s.” As nations like Canada, Sweden, Russia, and China prepare for their environmental summit, key financial, technical, and pharmaceutical leaders are beginning to wonder if their economic partnerships with the U.S. will be pressured by this emerging issue.

Put yourself into the scenario and consider your role as a performer in the above story.

· How would your industry or company be impacted in this plausible future?

· What does this look like to you as an employee? How would you help your company be resilient?

· What does this look like to you as a citizen? Are you thriving in this plausible future? Are you at risk as an individual?

Image created Using Painnt
Image created Using Painnt

Just a few of the dozens of articles and reports that influenced the above fictious article include the following:


 
 
 

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