ROCKETS, BOTS, SWOTS, AND EARLY WARNINGS

Published: Thu, 02/22/24

InnovationLabs Newsletter

February 2024

Rockets, Bots, Swots, And Early Warnings

AI BOTS 

Yes, here comes the future, rockets and all.

And AI is coming, but of course you already know that.
So have you started working with it to learn how it works?
You probably ought to, given how important it’s likely to be in the very near future.

(For example, we made the rocket image in Microsoft’s AI tool called Copilot. Or more accurately, the AI made it to our prompt.) 

And now our partner firm FutureLab has developed an AI add-on for Slack called BrainstormBot. 

It’s an AI-powered tool to improve your innovativeness by helping you run better brainstorming activities. And as you can see, it’s really cute, too!

Are you interested in trying it out?

They’ve given us ten free trials so you can. (Wow!)

What we ask in return is the following:

Either you love it and you give us a nice endorsement, and maybe even you want to sign on as a paid user (you don’t have to sign up, you only have to want to …)

or

You tell us why you don’t like it, in detail, so we can improve it so that you want to use it more.

The free trials have to commence by the end of April.

Here’s a short excerpt from our forthcoming book Hello, Future! which explains in more detail why getting smart about AI right now may be important:

One of the most important qualities of the forward-looking, early-warned observer, the capacity to recognize even the tiny messages that the environment may send us from time to time regarding the future. Louis Pasteur’s very important point is that if we prepare ourselves by becoming familiar with the key trends, principles, theories, and facts of a given field, if, that is, we become experts and learn more or less where the gaps are in present knowledge, then when nature chooses to reveal herself, or when history exposes a new development, or when technology suddenly develops a new capability (like AI), we may be properly prepared to recognize its significance. 

Conversely, if we are not aware of the state of the art in a given field, then it’s nearly impossible for us to recognize the significance of any key discovery or breakthrough innovation, and we probably would not even notice the early signals of its arrival until much later, when it’s become mainstream news or a mass phenomenon. And that is far too late to begin preparing.

(The full chapter from which this bit was taken is below.)

Are you prepared, or preparing now? Experimenting with Brainstorm Bot is a good way to begin, or to advance further in developing a capability that is sure to be an essential skill in the very near future.

The first 10 people to ping him will get the freebies, so if you’re interested don’t delay. Contact Langdon at [email protected].

 

SWOTs and BABRs

We recently led a super successful scenario planning workshop in which the participants were exploring the future, and then coming up with “imperatives,” that is, identifying what they need to do in their own organizations to assure that they can meet their mission requirements in our rapidly-changing and tumultuous world.

So we needed to give them a way to assess their ideas.

Our first idea was to use a SWOT analysis – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

But then we noticed that SWOT is really a good tool for “situation analysis,” but not so good for assessing ideas. Still, we liked the 2x2 framework of inside-outside and favorable-unfavorable that SWOT provides.


So we came up with a variant we call “BABR.”  

  • Benefits
  • Actions
  • Barriers
  • Risks

The participants reported that it was very helpful.

We also provided all the participants with a 50 page workbook that included a lot of very useful tool for scenario planning and imperative design, and it included the BABR template as well.  


 


EARLY WARNINGS

Our next book, Hello, Future!, is nearly done, and should be available around the end of March. (You’ll definitely want to get 5 copies, or 10 …!)

It’s a detailed study of the next ten years that looks across eight critical forces that are driving society forward at an ever-faster rate.

We’ve included excerpts in our last few newsletters, and here we present Chapter 3 (from which we excerpted above).
 

Hello, Future!
The Next Ten Years
exerpt


Chapter 3: Early Warning

During the 1950s, the fear of nuclear war was a source of constant and nagging anxiety for many people all over the world. In my primary school in the U.S., I remember that even in first grade we did “duck and cover” drills each week, when the piercing wail of the giant, yellow neighborhood siren went off for its weekly doom reminder. It was on Wednesdays at noon, I think. We would all crouch under our tiny desks and cower in fear of the giant bomb blast that the siren’s shriek announced. Even at age 6 it was clear that this was really an exercise in futility, as our classroom had an impossibly high ceiling and enormous windows all the way up, and even as little kids it was obvious that brutally sharp shards of exploded glass would surely doom us. And so the drill merely provided a weekly dose of terror, perhaps useful for keeping us obedient, but otherwise provoking in us mostly the same fear and dread that our adults felt.

So how to protect ourselves from annihilation? During that era the U.S. and Canada constructed a network of radar stations across the remote far northern Arctic and called it the DEW line, for Distant Early Warning. Its purpose was to alert us to our impending doom, so that someone could turn on the sirens and tell us to hide under our desks, or maybe run to bomb shelters if we were lucky enough to be near to one. Many suburbanites did install them under the gracious, green lawns of their back yards. Meanwhile, the steely-eyed rocket men would launch a suitable retaliatory strike to annihilate the Soviets in return. Small wonder that an accepted nuclear strategy during that era was called MAD, for Mutually Assured Destruction.

DEW was dismantled in the early 1990s, made obsolete by the much better early warning technology of satellite surveillance, and around the same time the collapse of the USSR relieved many anxieties about nuclear annihilation, and did indeed lead to significant reductions in the number of deployed ultimate weapons worldwide.

Military spending then declined significantly, bringing a so-called “peace dividend” which provided funds that could be redirected instead toward health care, education, and pension payments.

For a short while it seemed that the world was making progress toward peace, but it was not long before jihadist violence and American overreach inflamed the Middle East, and we slid backwards again.

The Russian invasion in 2022, an escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War that began in 2014, marked a lurch backwards, and a turning point. Now trust is again in decline, and we have regressed to the fearful mindset of the 1950s and 60s, the world is re-militarizing, and the devolving geopolitical situation has even brought our annihilation anxieties back. People are afraid that Putin will use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, China is building bombs in larger quantities to back up its expansive geopolitical ambitions such as its threats toward Taiwan, the U.S. is busy with upgrades to its own nuclear arsenal, North Korea is launching test and warning missiles, and Iran steadily moves closer to nuclear capability. Military spending globally is climbing by hundreds of billions of dollars per year, the peace dividend thus evaporated and national budgets are instead imposing a war tax, with commensurate cuts to social services.

Against this backdrop, a highly relevant future theme among many that we need to explore is the possibility of a new Distant Early Warning system, not so we might know about incoming missiles (or Jewish space lasers?), but to identify the incoming shocks of the broader future more clearly. And this is the role of the futurist, to help define the characteristics and patterns that are most influential in shaping the future, to give us a sort of distant early warning about incoming factors shaping all sorts of important things, the future of the economy, technology, climate, culture, and society. 

French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur gives us an important part of the necessary approach. Remembered today because the process of pasteurization was named for him, he also made many scientific advances in germ theory and vaccination in addition to discovering pasteurization. On the occasion of his installation as a member of the university faculty at Lille, France in 1854, he made a resonant comment when he noted that, “dans les champs de l'observation, le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés,” which we may translate as, “In the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.”

This advice addresses one of the most important qualities of the forward-looking, early-warned observer, the capacity to recognize even the tiny messages that the environment may send us from time to time regarding the future. Pasteur’s very important point is that if we prepare ourselves by becoming familiar with the key trends, principles, theories, and facts of a given field, if, that is, we become experts and learn more or less where the gaps are in present knowledge, then when nature chooses to reveal herself, or when history exposes a new development, or when technology suddenly develops a new capability (like AI), we may be properly prepared to recognize its significance. 

Conversely, if we are not aware of the state of the art in a given field, then it’s nearly impossible for us to recognize the significance of any key discovery or breakthrough innovation, and we probably would not even notice the early signals of its arrival until much later, when it’s become mainstream news or a mass phenomenon. And that is far too late to begin preparing.

Thus, domain expertise is critical for success for would-be innovators in any field of study and any competitive marketplace. It is they who make it their job to find or create whatever is new. It is equally critical for leaders of every type of organization, public and private, for it’s the leader’s job to ensure that their organization is well prepared to adapt to changing conditions and requirements, and the sooner they receive early warning about what may be coming, the better they can prepare for it.

The complexity of our world and the acceleration of change, which are two of its major characteristics, put great demands on the foresight of leaders. Their ability to understand emerging conditions, articulate relevant future goals, and then to get things organized to achieve them will likely determine their personal success or failure, and the success or failure of their organizations and nations. 

Given all that, the sooner we get a glimpse of the future, the better off we are, which therefore tells us that early warning is highly desirable. That’s actually a serious understatement; in fact it is absolutely essential.

By studying the future as we do here, our goal is to grasp the patterns of change unfolding in time to do something about them in a useful way. We will, that is, prepare our minds to be better futurists, thus enabling us to prepare our organizations to cope with the ongoing and still-emerging tumult surrounding us.
 

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As always, thanks for reading!
We love hearing from you, so please email at [email protected] with any comments.




== Here’s the source for the Pasteur quote:
L. Pasteur, "Discours prononcé à Douai, le 7 décembre 1854, à l'occasion de l'installation solennelle de la Faculté des lettres de Douai et de la Faculté des sciences de Lille." Speech delivered at Douai on 7 December 1854 on the occasion of his formal inauguration to the Faculty of Letters of Douai and the Faculty of Sciences of Lille, as reprinted in: Pasteur Vallery-Radot, ed., Oeuvres de Pasteur. Masson and Co., 1939, vol. 7, p. 131. Archived 9 January 2012 at the Wayback Machine.



Yours,
~ Langdon

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If you’re too excited to wait for Hello, Future!, there are 16 other excellent volumes in the Innovation Mastery library to keep you informed and entertained!



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About InnovationLabs

InnovationLabs is recognized worldwide as one of the most helpful and important innovation consulting firms. We help our clients achieve world-class innovation prowess by designing innovation systems and tools, implementing innovation programs and departments, and providing fun and enlightening innovation trainings. If it’s got anything to do with innovation, we’re your key resource.


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Click here to download our brochure on InnovationLabs

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 Langdon Morris is Senior Partner of InnovationLabs, one of the world’s leading consulting firms working in the areas of strategy and innovation. He is author or coauthor of more than ten books on innovation. To learn more please visit www.innovationlabs.com/

 

 
 


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