Workshop for sensemaking and decision making for the NAWB Forum 2016.

1. What’s Next for the
Future?
Making Sense of the Signals and Making Decisions
The Forum 2016
Washington Hilton, 3/15/16

2. Richard Kaipo Lum, PhD
Vision Foresight Strategy LLC
“Reframing the future.”
Foresight and Strategic Analysis
www.visionforesightstrategy.com
richard@visionforesightstrategy.com
@kikilo
Available now on Amazon

3. FUTURES STUDIES
Understanding and anticipating change in society

4. Understand and anticipate change in society…
and then help others reframe their expectations and
preferences for the future.

5. Two Complementary Aspects
Analytic:
understanding
and anticipating
change
Synthetic:
reframing
expectations and
preferences

6. Foresight:
Insight into how and why the future
could be different from the present.

7. Elements of Our Work
Historical analysis
Images of the future
Theories of change and stability Trends & emerging issues
Forecasting
Preferred futures
Innovation & creativity

8. Futures Thinking is…
…critical thinking about the future,
both in terms of what could happen and
what we want to see happen.

9. • Identify critical blind spots
• Reduce uncertainty about the future
• Map new opportunities for growth and
innovation
• Create shared understanding about possibilities
and changes
What Does Futures Thinking Get Us?

10. KEYNOTE TAKEAWAYS
The compelling forecasts and comments about the future

11. • Exponential development of technologies
• Coming disruption to many old industries
• New rules for work and for success
• Anyone can be an innovator today
Vivek Wadhwa: “Crash Course on the Future”

12. 1. New Behaviors: we are much more comfortable
living a public life
2. Technologies: cloud, collaborative tech, big data,
IoT
3. The Millennial Workforce: new attitudes,
expectations, and ways of working
4. Mobility: work anytime, anywhere, and on any
device
5. Globalization: no boundaries
Jacob Morgan: “Employee Experience”

13. • Human talent and labor as the “economic
engine” vs. the rapidly rising capabilities and
productivity of machines
• Millennials are basically all adults now; “youth”
is now about the Homeland Generation
Tensions and Uncertainties

14. KEY FUTURE UNCERTAINTIES
Some critical pivot points for the futures of workforce development

15. Local/state politics
Federal workforce
regulations
Future nature of the economy and the
American workforce
“Standing” Uncertainties

16. SEEING THE WHOLE PICTURE
Beginning to use systems thinking to draw the map

17. • The system is greater than the sum of it parts
• You cannot understand the whole by focusing
on individual parts
• Relationships are more important than parts:
it’s about connections, flow, and feedback
• Archetypes can be useful starting points
Thinking in Systems

18. Systems
Facilities
People
Practices
Products
Regulations
Urban design
Chemicals
Equipment
Shifts in
societal values
Training
technologies
Broader labor
market
Smart materials Synthetic biology
Automation
Robotics
Adaptive learning
Nanotech

19. The Local Workforce Ecosystem

20. The Broader Environment

21. SEEING AHEAD
Beginning to use futures thinking to map farther horizons

22. Trends Emerging Issues
Trends and Emerging Issues

23. Mapping the Road Ahead

24. Some Emerging Issues
Employer/industry-based
credentialing $
Smart Contracts
Distributed
Autonomous
Organizations
Universal Basic Income
Rewriting Employment-
Based Social Contracts
Adaptive Learning

25. MAKING PLANS AND DECISIONS
Prioritizing and Sorting Action Amidst Uncertainty

26. • What are your goals for 2016? 2021? 2030?
• How will the trends, emerging issues, and
uncertainties alter those goals?
• How might those same things pose new
opportunities and specific threats?
Goals, Opportunities, and Risks

27. Dealing with Uncertainty: A Strategic Portfolio

28. Now let’s play with some of these ideas…

29. Cynefin
https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making/

30. • Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards).
• The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows.
• The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks, population age structures).
• The lengths of delays, relative to the rate of system change.
• The strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against.
• The gain around driving positive feedback loops.
• The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to information).
• The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints).
• The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure.
• The goals of the system.
• The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters
— arises.
• The power to transcend paradigms.
Intervening in a System (Donella Meadows)
http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/

31. Mahalo.