Faced with ever-shorter cycles of change, communities, governments, and businesses increasingly recognize the need to prepare for a broad spectrum of possible futures. Figuring out what this means and how to accomplish it, however, has proven consistently challenging.
Since 2002, Arup’s Foresight group has been tasked with exploring these issues both within the company and for clients. Made up of scientists, designers, strategists, and more, it works on projects ranging from exhibitions to reports.
One of the team’s newest members, Dr. Gereon Uerz, joined Arup’s Berlin office after working in academia, consulting, and the automotive industry. I asked him a few questions about his experiences with the future.
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How would you define corporate foresight?
Corporate foresight provides evidence-based ideas about possible future developments based on ongoing trends. It gathers and analyzes information about things going on within a society and on a global level, then uses this information for business operations, especially in the fields of innovation, strategy, change management, and risk analysis.
Getting companies to make decisions based on possible futures seems like a daunting task. What are the challenges involved?
They are huge, and they have not grown smaller, for a couple of reasons.
One of the most important might be that most huge multinational organizations and corporations are shareholder driven. They need to deliver every three months; they need to do complex financial reporting; they depend on stock markets; they are only interested in growing revenue, in conquering new markets. This is very short term, and if you don’t deliver in management, especially as the CEO, you’re gone. So there’s no incentive to look beyond your current business model.
Another thing is that people tend to look inward rather than outward. They try to optimize existing processes, to sell the same product to different markets. There’s aversion not just towards risk, but towards new things in general. If you are a traditional business, not Google or Facebook or Apple, your keenness to look outward and ask yourself questions is very underdeveloped.
Google’s driverless car
If you do foresight, you are not just exceeding the usual time horizon of a company, but challenging some of its core assumptions. You’re not there to provide answers; you’re there to address the most relevant questions. You do a good job if the people who commissioned you end up with one more question than they had before. If they have one more answer, it’s what they want and expect, but I don’t think you’ve done a good job. Because when you’re talking about tomorrow, well, they’re not there yet, and you’re just groping in the dark. If you shine light on some areas that are just emerging and ask “What could that mean for you?” you’re doing a good job.
You do a good job if the people who commissioned you end up with one more question than they had before
Is there anything different about practicing foresight in the context of the AEC industry?
Yes, the most important thing is that the built environment is very durable, very long-term. It has direct and immediate impact on quality of life. It structures our world. The built environment has long planning cycles, there’s a huge investment that goes into it, and almost all ongoing megatrends — demographic change, urbanization, digitization, sustainability — are highly relevant. The leverage that you have is much bigger than in the consumer goods industry or others that operate on very short cycles.
I think it’s one of the most, if not the most, interesting and attractive industries for corporate foresight, and that’s what attracted me to Arup
What do you see as the most pressing issues for cities and infrastructure today?
That differs according to geography. If you are talking about emerging economies, there’s the urbanization race and consumerism, in which everyone longs to own a car, for example. The challenges and opportunities there are very different from “old” Europe, and from the saturated economies in general.
Traffic in China
Enabling sustainable growth in emerging and developing economies — growth that learns from mistakes that have been made in the past 200 years in the developed economies — needs to be a priority. Otherwise it’s a catastrophe.
In the saturated economies, the most urgent challenges are the aging infrastructure and the aging population. Actually, demographic change is something that unites the emerging and the saturated economies, because China is going to have the same age structure in 30 or 40 years. This is really a very fast development. So we need to find solutions for accessibility in the built environment with respect to the older population.
Demographic change is something that unites the emerging and the saturated economies
At the same time, we need to find new solutions for our infrastructure — buildings, bridges, highways. We need minimally invasive ways to repair them, because we can’t build from scratch.
What role do you think innovation plays at Arup, and what do you see coming up for the company?
Innovation plays a big role, but it could play a bigger role in the future. Innovation is one of the main goals of foresight research. Asking the right questions — are we really as good as we claim? — can help us become more innovative.
You have a PhD in sociology. How does your academic background relate to corporate foresight?
I studied sociology, history, and linguistics, and later on decided to really focus on sociology. It was originally just my minor, since I was graduating with a Master’s degree in linguistics. Linguistics set the ground for some interesting questions related to the future, because at the time I was specializing in neurolinguistics, which dealt with the connection between speech and thought. The ’90s was the decade of the brain, and I came in touch with really far-ranging visions related to simulating and mimicking human speech behavior with computers.
That pushed me toward artificial intelligence, because the people involved at that time included Marvin Minsky of MIT, Ray Kurzweil, and Hans Moravec, who were just laying out their vision of a future without humankind. We were all going to be substituted by computers.
I then started to pursue a PhD in sociology thinking about images of the future. The question was, how did people like Moravec, Minsky, and Kurzweil end up with the longing to be substituted by intelligent machines? What’s the origin of that idea? Why would we want that? For six or seven years I researched the different cultural and historic manifestations of future-related thinking. That was the starting point for my interest in the future.
How did people like Moravec, Minsky, and Kurzweil end up with the longing to be substituted by intelligent machines? Why would we want that?
How did you decide to move from the academic world into the business world?
The strongest motivation was really the unwillingness to make my claim on a certain piece of research at the beginning of my career, then elaborate on that for the rest of my life, which is what my colleagues in academia had to do when fighting for professorships. I wanted to connect the very theoretical, concept-driven, even philosophical work that I had been doing for years to the business world. That’s when I approached the leading consultancy in Germany, Z-punkt The Foresight Company.
You’ve been instrumental in building corporate foresight in Europe. What was the state of the discipline before you entered the field?
It was in a stage of professionalizing. Corporate foresight, or strategic foresight, was something that was already known and practiced, but there was still a lot to do in terms of taking it to the next level. Z-punkt was a really good playground to do that. It was a very small business that originated from the public foresight domain which was very influential in the 1960s and 1970s with Robert Jungk’s and Ossip K. Flechtheim’s work on peace studies, conflict studies. The company wanted to develop into more than a business think tank, to become a strategy consultancy.
We wanted to learn and develop methods, tools, and approaches to serve the needs of huge multinational organizations. There were examples like Shell, who pioneered scenario thinking and had a dedicated foresight and scenario group that kind of faded away.
It was an interesting time for connecting academic foresight, future studies, and the consulting approach that came from the McKinseys and the Boston Consultings, trying to combine best out of the two worlds. We always tried to know what was going on in future studies and at the same time ask ourselves, “How can we make these ideas available within a business and consulting context?”
At the end of the four years that I was with Z-punkt, we were shifting from doing only qualitative scenarios to mixing qualitative and quantitative approaches; not just laying out very broad, generic ideas, but putting numbers on them, because that’s what the top management of the companies were expecting.
You brought up the ties between foresight and cognitive science, neuroscience, even some strains of cybernetics. Is the field still connected to this intellectual lineage? What are the challenges of this approach?
This lineage is more relevant than ever. One of the most important trends that we have been seeing for last 30 years is, of course, digitization: the Internet of Everything, advanced artificial intelligence, robotics, and so forth. Two ongoing research projects are trying to repeat the Human Genome Project, but for the brain: to map all parts and functions of the human brain in order to develop advanced applications for artificial intelligence. That’s one connection.
Another is that the people I started my sociology research on — Moravec, Minsky, and Kurzweil — have become the most popular futurists themselves. Kurzweil is now one of the most famous and expensive futurists, all coming from that background idea that we’re doomed to disappear someday and that we should embrace that vision. That’s the research direction at DARPA in the US, or perhaps even with certain professorships at MIT or Stanford. So things related to human capabilities, human intelligence, are more relevant than ever.
What have you been working on since you joined the foresight team in October?
We are currently ending a project for a company who commissioned us to provide the groundwork for a new market segmentation for its construction and building business. They had a workshop in London before I joined to see how good Arup’s experts in the built environment are. They liked it, and then they approached us to see whether the future building and construction market might be segmented better by looking at functions, needs, and demands for different types of buildings or regions, instead of at performance requirements.
Buildings and infrastructure can provide ecosystem services just like nature does, but we don’t know to what extent, where it is applicable, and what solutions are already available
So we reached out to the global networks and the business networks within Arup to ask, what are the things in your projects where you cannot perfectly serve the needs of a client? Or where existing solutions are not living up to your expectations? We used this information to provide the company with insights about future growth fields.
We’ve also been creating a research agenda for Arup’s European region. We identified two topics that we want to encourage research in. One is ecosystem services in the built environment. We think that buildings and infrastructure can provide ecosystem services just like nature does, but we don’t know to what extent, where it is applicable, and what solutions are already available. Green facades and blue roofs — to us that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s much more you can do to cool down cities or provide better climates, to absorb particulate matter from the atmosphere.
Green roof at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco
Recently we briefed the government of a state in Switzerland on megatrends relevant to their future. That was very well received.
What’s next for the Arup foresight team?
Our job as a think tank is to future-proof the organization. I think that we could benefit from improving our capabilities on big data, analytics, and issues in that space.
The second issue, again, is ecosystem services in the built environment. I think that foresight can play a role in making the business case for solutions that increase the quality of life within buildings, neighborhoods, the city, and, in the end, the whole planet.
There’s a lot of talk about issues like air quality and daylight within rooms, which are tremendously important because the strongest asset we have in advanced economies is people. What we can do is provide the best conditions for people to come with up new smart ideas. The quality of your immediate surroundings, where you spend all day working, thinking, doing things, is really important.
Daylighting at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission
Since we aren’t going to stop covering the earth’s surface with infrastructure and buildings, we need to think really hard about how to make this beneficial in terms of services. If the built environment does nothing other than just accommodate people or host cars, it’s a missed opportunity.