InnovationLabs Newsletter

April 2024

The World in 2035

 

What will the world be like in 2035?

Like the left side: dry and dead?
Like the right side: Green and healthy?

Well, if we knew that, and the detail behind it, wouldn’t we be in a position to be excellent strategists, helping our organizations to achieve amazing things?! And while we cannot know, it’s worthwhile for every leader and strategist to give this some serious thought, because it’s coming, and fast.

Many of our clients have been asking these questions, and we’ve been helping them to find answers. Along the way, we accumulated so many insights and Aha! moments that we just had to write a book.

And now it’s about done.

Hello, Future! The World in 2035
will be available on May 1, 2024.

But you can get your copy earlier than that.

Would you like to get an early review copy of the book? Sure!

We’ll send a signed, printed, review copy around April 15 to the first ten subscribers of this newsletter who email Langdon at [email protected]. And we’ll send digital PDF copies to the first thirty who ask.

The agreement we ask is …

• If you love the book (or even just like it a lot), post a 5 star review on Amazon, and tell all your friends and social media contacts to buy it. Please help us make it a thing, and create a viral energy that it’s THE book that people need to read.
• If you don’t love the book, tell us why in detail, and what needs to be done to make it better.

Did we say detailed? Here are some of the book's key stats:

470 pages
105 color illustrations
430 footnotes

Yup, detailed for sure.

•••

The main portion of the book is a detailed study of eight of the most important driving forces that are shaping our future. But rather than trying to predict what will happen, which is of course impossible, the book explores 32 different “what if” thought experiments that consider important possibilities, like these …

For geopolitics, what if there is superpower war, or peace.
For politics, what if there is autocracy, or democracy.
For climate, what if there is a total climate disaster, or merely inconvenience.
For technology, what if there is technological disruption, or total demolition (by AI for example).
For economy, what if there is boom, or bust.
Etc.

These are the big issues that are shaping our world today and tomorrow.   

If you’re interested in them (and who isn’t?) then this may be the book for you.

•••

Below is an extended excerpt which outlines the logic of the book in more detail.
We hope you find it interesting!

The Logic of Industrialism

Today we live according to the logic of industrialism, which of course has fundamental consequences for all aspects of life, including geopolitics. As industry developed during the 19^th century and was applied, as it inevitably would be, to warfare, it became clear to world leaders that the survival of any nation would depend on its capacity to develop advanced industrial capacity, and then apply that capacity to its military.

Napoleon’s victories demonstrated that a gigantic army consisting of citizens who had been mobilized on a national scale could readily overwhelm its neighbors. Half a century later the American Civil War was the first fully industrial war, and it showed decisively that any nation which did not possess modern weapons at scale was at risk of losing its sovereignty to those that did. While the American South had superior military leadership, the North had industry, and, at an enormous cost of human lives, industry triumphed.

Having seen this displayed before them in unambiguous terms, every nation that could set about to industrialize as fast as possible. And to industrialize meant developing a modern economy, for there was no such thing as a poor nation with strong industrial or military power. From 1865 on, industrialized economic productivity and military superiority were inextricably linked, and this still remains true today. Hence, economic policy, industrial policy, foreign policy, and military policy are four facets of one issue: What is our nation’s place in the world, and how can we secure it? (Figure 27)

But society also unexpectedly discovered that a modern economy by definition meant an economy in constant flux, and so the tide of history forced the structures of society to adapt to constant change at the hands of capitalism. Since then, capitalism has been the relentless driver of change not just for the economy, but socially and culturally as well. By its very nature as a source of constant change it is inherently non-static, with enormous built-in incentives to self-disrupt. Its impacts cascade from the marketplace into every other aspect of life, as types of employment come and go, skills become essential or irrelevant, industries fade to oblivion as new ones supersede them, and economies expand and recede. No wonder the ritualistic, tradition-bound monarchies could not cope with this way of living.

At the macro level an economy may be described as waves of progress, but the micro level is rent by the strong riptides of disruptions which tug at lives, families, communities, and nations. Economic change can be brutal.

Yet change has continued and it has accelerated, sometimes through violent economic shifts or national revolutions, sometimes peacefully, but in every case revolutions of all types have brought forth new orders of things for some significant set of people, the citizens of a nation, the followers of a region, the inhabitants of a continent.

Following World War I, the economic system convulsed itself into the Great Depression which brought widespread fear and suffering, and with them the seeds of World War II.

World War II gave us the phenomenon of total war far beyond even the vision of Napoleon, without regard for any difference between soldiers and civilians, casualties in the millions, and then even worse, the bomb and the fear of total annihilation.

World War II also delivered the definitive end of colonialism, India became independent as Britain’s empire disintegrated, China was transformed by civil war and then reawakened as a global economic and then military power, all the world a constant swirl of change.

Underlying it all was the logic of advancing technology, which brought subsequent generations of capabilities operating in a capitalist economic systems and with them wave after wave of disruptions, with still no end in sight. Indeed, economic, technological, and political revolutions have had enduring impact that remains inescapable, and none is finished. And now we know that they can never finish. Inherent in capitalism is the search for disruption, so by definition it will never stop its revolutionizing impetus, as that is its very essence. Likewise, politics and government, which we might define as a constant process of negotiating who comes to power, cannot ever reach a stable state if nothing else in society is stable either.

Hence, we must conclude that any sort of world order which may exist at any given time in the modern era is temporary, and will inevitably be swept aside by change – in society, in culture, in science, in technology, in attitudes, in expectations, in living conditions, in food supplies, in climatic conditions, in laws, in values …. 

Sometimes change arrives insidiously, largely unnoticed; sometimes it arrives with a roaring crash. But as long as modern society perseveres, revolutionary change is inevitable.

Six Centuries

​​​​​​​​​​​​​We get a glimpse of how things have changed from a geopolitical perspective simply by listing which nation was the dominant world power at the turn of each century, 1500 to tomorrow:

The message is clear enough … things change. And any apparently stable set of relations that we may observe at any given moment probably isn’t really durable at all. The list also suggests that while creating an empire is a difficult problem of economics and governance, sustaining one in the competitive global system is possibly unachievable; it has not been done successfully for half a millennium.

And as we are determined here to see into the future, so we must inevitably ask which nation will dominate in 2100, but then we realize that it’s impossible to say with confidence, as seven decades into a tomorrow that will endure continual change makes it simply unknowable.

Certainly we can guess, speculate, and even find evidence to support our preferences or opinions, but the answer will come only with time. The Chinese are currently mounting an impressive effort at a major comeback, but the Americans are putting up a stiff resistance, and so we will have to wait, impatiently, and see.

But if we have to wait to find out, then why bother with futurism?

As I have emphasized, its essential value lies in helping us to make better choices in the present, right now, today, because it is our choices that set the course for the future. Hence, we look forward to gain insight into what’s coming both so that we can better prepare, and also so that we can influence the future that arrives. For if the future is not predestined, but rather is created through the choices that we make day by day, year by year, then we must choose well. The conditions in which we are living and the goals toward which we aspire will shape the choices we make, and so we can strive to shape the inevitable revolutions of the future to create a better world for ourselves and our descendants, or by poor choices, to make it worse.

Tomorrow: More Revolutions … But Which Ones?

When we observe the pattern of change that the Industrial Era delivered we become aware that the turbulence we experience today is nothing other than the next phase in a nearly unbroken chain of upheaval going back 250 years. Indeed, a key lesson is that we should expect change, upheaval, disruption, and full-on revolutions to occur frequently, because that’s what history has been offering to us as a steady diet for more than two centuries. Decade by decade, revolutionary change spread across all dimensions of society, the norm for the last 250 years and certainly the norm for the next ten, and for the 50 after that, etc., etc.

And today, although we have already entered the era that comes after industrialism we are still struggling to understand it. For example, we don’t yet know what to name it, although we do know that digital technology will be at its core. Thus, in 1968 the top ten firms on the global Fortune 500 list were four oil companies, three carmakers, two conglomerate manufacturers, and one triumphant technology firm, IBM. By 2023 digitalization has fully taken over the expectations of investors, and none of those ten are at the top. Six of today’s top ten are American computer hardware and software companies, and a seventh that might as well be, Tesla. The other three are the giant Saudi oil company, a pharmaceutical company, and an investment conglomerate. IBM itself has unintentionally demonstrated the power of creative destruction by slipping to 38^th place, as it has been unable to keep up with revolutionary change in the technology industry.

Fifty years from now the list will be different. How will we get there?

Tomorrow’s Driving Forces

Clearly we’ll get there by traversing a tumultuous landscape of massive change. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that we hope we will get there, and we hope that we’ll traverse successfully. But what will that landscape be like?

The approach we take here is to consider the driving forces and deep structures, to examine how they may interact, and then to attempt to define possible and plausible outcomes resulting from all their interactions. The underlying insight is that while the future is entirely unpredictable and we never know from day to day or year to year what events will occur, the driving forces and deep structures behind events are based on recognizable patterns. When we can discern the patterns then we gain a nice window toward the future.

Hence it’s necessary to choose the driving forces upon which to focus. These are the eight that, as of now, seem to be essential (but of course we’ll never know for sure until afterwards).

Geopolitics
Politics
Climate
Energy
Technology
Economy
Demographics
and Culture.

Here I will introduce each of them briefly, and then we will explore them in detail, one by one, in the subsequent chapters.

Geopolitics: War or Peace?

The ambitions of nations and their leaders, and the choice between war and peace, define the course of geopolitics. The consequences of war are decisive in shaping the course of all human affairs, and thus the question as to whether we will have war or peace is the first fundamental issue that we have to address. From this nearly everything else results.

Politics:  Democracy or Autocracy?

While geopolitics concerns power relations between nations, politics is about power relations within them. Indeed, the central concern of all politics is the quest for power, and the purpose of fomenting a political revolution is to seize it, so then to be able to deploy it differently, i.e., in your own favor. Today’s long-running political saga is the planet-wide struggle for dominance between two very different political forms that offer two deeply contrasting images of what the future should be: Will the future look more like the democratic systems, or the autocratic ones?

Climate and Energy: Inconvenience or Collapse?

Climate change is a slow-motion disaster of our own making, one that has come about as a consequence of the ways that the human economy exploits the resources and systems of the natural world. Even though it has been at the forefront of our concerns for the last 50 years, a century ago it was not a common topic for discussion. Today we consider it one of the most critical issues facing humanity and we discuss it incessantly. Will we develop resilience to the changing climate and adapt to its rigorous demands, or will we experience widespread economic and social collapse as nations and regions succumb to the mounting challenges of the changes?

Our climate challenge has necessitated a response, which some refer to as the “energy transition.” The energy transition describes the end of fossil fuel era, and therefore involves everyone and affects everything. Because of the increasing unexpectedness of climate change and the central role that we think carbon emissions play in warming the planet, we are embarking on what is likely to be the most significant and most expensive project ever undertaken in a unified manner by humanity. It will cost something on the order of $100 trillion to develop a worldwide clean energy infrastructure, but that amount of money is just a guess, and anyway the figure is itself so enormous as to be effectively incomprehensible. As the choice we face is to transition away from fossil fuels or to cook our planet (and thus ourselves) to death, we can be reasonably sure that the transition is going to happen in some form. So the key questions concern how fast the energy transition will occur, how it will impact on the economy, how much social disruption will result along the way, and what sort of energy system we end up with. These questions are in addition to those pressing ones about the continuing consequences of climate change, the storms, floods, rising oceans, refugees, food shortages, etc.

Science and Technology: Ever More Knowledge, but for Better or Worse?

Science is organized as a quest driven by the power of knowledge to explain and exploit the characteristics of the universe in which we find ourselves. It progresses as new knowledge is obtained through the core of the scientific endeavor, the fundamental process of research.
And when science is applied in the form of technology, it inevitably brings change. The question, of course, is whether this change will be for the better or the worse. Or, in a more elaborate form: Will the increasingly powerful technologies create a dystopian landscape of ultra-surveillance and totalitarian control, or will technology enable even more widespread abundance? Or perhaps it will do both.

Economy and Demographics: Boom or Bust?

Technological change is the underlying cause of most economic revolutions. At the macro scale, the shifts from the hunter-gatherer era to agriculture, from agriculture to industry, and from the industrial to the digital eras are easy to recognize as changes that have come about due to the adoption of new technologies. Each in turn redefined the macro structures of economic activity while they also reshaped the rhythms and patterns of daily life.

One of the most significant factors in the development of the economy is the people who populate it, and the study of humanity as a matter of population dynamics is the field of demographics. Demographics is central to our discussion because we are entering the transition period from an era of rapid population growth to one of significant population shrinkage. One question, at least, is thus answered – the population explosion is over, and now we’re settling into implosion. This will have deep and long-lasting consequences throughout society, and indeed it is already impacting enormously on all aspects of the economy, as well on society, politics, and geopolitics. We need to understand this pattern because its impact will also be enormous.

Culture and Counter-Culture: Can we all just get along?

Significant change in any of the factors I have just mentioned – geopolitics, politics, climate, energy, science, technology, economy, and demographics – shows up sooner or later (usually sooner) in changes to economic well-being, often manifesting as the creation or destruction of wealth and the cascading impact of wealth throughout society. It will therefore, of course, have direct impact on lives and lifestyles, on social attitudes and expectations, on values and standards of behavior, and then in governmental policies, in the course of how business is done, and in the lives of individuals and families. This is how, and why, culture evolves.

We can thus say that the state of society and culture at any given time is a reflection of and a consequence of all the other structures, forces, and events. Understood in this way, we see that the current condition, the status of culture in our time, has emerged as a consequence of a complex web of disruptive changes that have occurred during the past few centuries. Clearly the tumult is going to continue, so what impact will this have on our culture? Will we fight, or cooperate? Or, more simply, can we just all get along?

Patterns of Change

These, then, are the driving forces that we will now begin exploring in detail, and through which we will arrive at some conclusions regarding the fundamental questions that this book is intended to address:

• How are these forces connected to each other?
• What will happen during the next decade?
• Are we destined, in the provocative title of Buckminster Fuller’s book, toward a warmly welcomed Utopia, or will we cast ourselves into a tortured Oblivion?
• As we aspire to the one, how then shall we go about creating a future that’s more of the better and less of the worse?

You certainly noticed that each driving force was stated as a simple binary choice, as with geopolitics, the choice between war and peace. This binary perspective is obviously a simplification of a much more complex situation, but still it has proven to be very useful way to look at the future, as it is intended to frame future possibilities in the clearest of terms, and thus to help us grasp the essence of what may be coming.

These six pairs will thus yield a rich set of base possibilities, and we will also take many side visits wherein we will explore interesting tangents that also allow us to recombine them into more complex sets, all of which will yield many further insights. The underlying technique of these thought experiments is called scenario planning, an approach that has proven to be quite insightful across a very wide range of themes and topics for many decades. I’ll describe it in more detail in Part 3.

We engage in scenario planning when we focus on understanding the driving forces and deep structures to examine “What if....” As we will consider 32 “what if…” possibilities about and combinations of these driving forces and deep structures, we will gain a much better understanding about how the future may unfold. We do not wish to make predictions, but rather to see patterns of change. And when we find the patterns, we find the key to unlocking a much more useful understanding of the future.

The general format of the chapters that follow consists of a theme discussion and problem statement, followed by a discussion of key features related to the problem, and concluding with the exploration of the various alternative what if possibilities that the discussion has led us to.
We begin, as I mentioned, with the question which is essential to every era: Will there be war or peace?

•••

Sounds fascinating, right?
Contact Langdon today about your copy …
 

As always, thank you for your interest in our work.
Please share any feedback or comments.

* Illustration in the masthead by Microsoft Copilot.

•••

Check out 16 other excellent volumes in the Innovation Mastery library which will keep you informed and entertained!

•••
 

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