Saying ‘yes' but doing ‘no'

Maybe I shouldn't be surprised by this initial refusal of the call to adventure. There was a precedent, an earlier red flag. We grew up in a household where Mum smoked, and Dad occasionally joined her. As kids do (evidently still to this day), we worried about the health and future prospects of our parents. So we used to pester our parents to give up smoking and their tobacco habits altogether (Dad, like most military men in Sweden up till the 1990s, was a long-time user of snus, Swedish chewing tobacco). I remember both my brother and I being convinced that our parents' habits would kill them. As a result, we staged fear-based PR campaigns and shed lots of tears in our manipulative attempts to drive changed behaviours. We used all the health information at our disposal in the early 1990s, believing that surely an evidence-based approach would work. Nope. So we used the money angle — surely the economically rational angle would work. Nope. We pointed towards our beloved Grandma Ingrid, who suffered through her life because of her 50-year relationship with cigarettes and her bouts with cancer. Finally, in the mid 1990s, Dad caved in and changed. He made a New Year resolution and had the strength of character to stick to it. Kudos and respect, Dad. Mum made the same resolution at the same time, and Gustaf and I were so relieved. Finally, our parents would lead healthier lives and so hopefully be with us for a long time.

While they both said yes, however, my parents didn't both ‘do yes'. My mum did ‘no'. The head nodded yes, but deep inside, she hadn't yet bought into the behavioural change. Of course, I wasn't initially aware of this. But I remember vividly the day when my trusting bubble was burst. I came back from school in Stockholm, and went to the bathroom. I did what us men do, and then reached for the flush, just like my mum must have done earlier that morning, and as I did, I noticed the incriminating evidence — two yellowing, bleak Marlboro Light cigarette buds in a melange of uric acid. I didn't flush. This was evidence that she had said yes, but had done no.

Of course, my mother is far from the only person to say yes but do no. In 2006, Kodak released an internal video called ‘Winds of Change'. Don't worry, I'm not about to launch into a full analysis of Kodak's failure to digitally transform in the face of digital disruption. That analysis was done in Digilogue. But one thing bears mentioning here. And that is this same evidence of saying yes, but doing no. This internal video prepared not long before the release of the first iPhone, and later released by Chief Marketing Officer Jeffrey Hayzlett to the public, spoke of the things that Kodak was going to do. The video is surprisingly futuristic as it takes us through the future of photography — we hear about shareability, facial recognition, biometrics and metaknowledge. As smart phones, Instagram, Facebook, SnapChat and GoPro have become commonplace, we realise that Kodak's internal communications team really knew what was going on. They saw the future.

In the video, the key message, delivered in a self-deprecating and humorous manner, is that ‘Kodak's back'. (If you'd like to see the video, you can check it out on YouTube — just search ‘Kodak winds of change'.) Now, we all know it didn't quite work out that way, but if you enjoy schadenfreude, check it out anyway. And I am sure, just like we have heard of a celebrity or two trying to get their ‘accidental' home porn movies removed from the internet, Kodak's executives are likely also wishing that some embarrassing moments could be eternally forgotten in the digital era. But no. This digital video will endure. In the extraordinary world of the internet, things have a capacity to live on — forever. Because, while we were promised by the video that ‘By God, you were a Kodak moment once, and by God you will be one again. Only this time it will be digital!', we are still left hanging. Kodak was invested in the past, and despite seemingly saying yes to the future in this video, the executives kept doing no. Culture, as we know, eats strategy for breakfast. And unless there is a genuine willingness to say yes, and do yes to transformation, change management programs are a fool's errand.

And so it was with my mother and her smoking. In the meantime, our Grandma Ingrid's health kept deteriorating, and between the late 1990s and early 2000s she developed cancer, leg wounds and eventually chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Grandma Ingrid gave up smoking on the advice of the medical doctors — because it was a case of life or death. For Grandma, however, it was too late. Her body wasn't able to recover fully, and eventually she passed away in 2006 with a silent last gasp for air. For my mum, it wasn't until she moved with our family to Australia in 1997 and so shifted contexts, and saw the agony that Ingrid experienced with her leg wounds, that she gave up smoking. The message from the future, which Ingrid sadly broadcast to her daughter, was the straw that broke the camel's back (no cigarette pun intended). As a family, we are incredibly grateful that our mum eventually made the change. When it comes to my mum's business survival, I knew she also needed to make a change before it was too late, like it was with Grandma Ingrid.

The antidote to futurephobia?

If you listen to the news, you'd think that we — you, me, the species, our planet — are headed straight for disaster. The volatility of the share market, Brexit, jobless recoveries, terrorist attacks, religious fundamentalism, extinction, robots taking our jobs, immigrants challenging some people's sense of national identity, the latest PISA education scores, ADHD, diabetes, the divorce rate, civil war, global warming, polar bears, ebola, cybercrime, starvation, school shootings, racist attacks, the Kardashians. Yes, it is a scary world. Anything from the preceding list will definitely raise your blood pressure during the 17.30 news. You'd be forgiven for thinking that Armageddon is nigh. You'd also be forgiven for thinking that now is not the ‘good old days', and that the future will be even worse. If you listen to the short news and the drama. Read the clickable news items and the headlines that spike adrenaline. The news stories that give you a rush of blood to the head. That trigger your lizard brain, and fear-based reactions. If you do this, it's very tempting to become a futurephobe.

Media contains a lot of noise, and very little signal. And as people we tend to get carried away by the noise — we don't see the forest for the trees, as it were. We focus on the short news, and of course this is in the interest of the media, because they are reliant on clicks, interest, engagement and reactivity. However, the effect of these stimuli is to stupefy us, to paralyse us, and diminish our cognition that the long news is usually good news. (We will return to this idea of the long news later.)

For the moment, let us explore this idea of ‘futurephobia', because it is seemingly all around us at the moment. But let us start by acknowledging that this term is not strictly a scientific term for a known phobia (I made it up). As Wikipedia tells us, a phobia is a type of anxiety disorder, usually defined as a persistent fear of an object or situation that the sufferer goes to great lengths in avoiding, typically disproportional to the actual danger posed, often being recognised as irrational. Rather, let me use this term in a pop-psychology fashion, for those people who seemingly have a misplaced fear about the future, which in turn hampers their actions in the present, and results in them living their lives looking through the rear-view mirror of nostalgia. The definition of nostalgia, on the other hand, from dictionary.com is that it is ‘a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one's life, to one's home or homeland, or to one's family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time'. Futurephobia, in the way we will use it for the purpose of this book, is also distinct from ‘chronophobia' — the fear of time — which is, in fact, a diagnosed phobia. In her book Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s, Pamela Lee describes chronophobia as ‘an experience of unease and anxiety about time, a feeling that events are moving too fast and are thus hard to make sense of'. This is an experience you can perhaps relate to. Have you got kids? Are they growing up too quickly? Are you an octogenarian? Do you feel like more of your life is behind you than in front of you? Perhaps you're a technophobe? Is the world of digital devices spinning you out? I am not trying to diagnose you here; rather, I am just saying we probably have all had an experience of feeling like time is moving too fast at times.

A chronophobe, if you'll indulge me further, is distinct from a ‘chronomentrophobe', which is someone who has an irrational fear of clocks and watches. This would not be a popular condition for Swiss timepiece manufacturers, in other words. A Disney version of a chronophobe would be kind of like Captain Hook, who was constantly tormented by Tick-Tock the Crocodile, who had swallowed an alarm clock and would torment Hook, seeking his second, delicious arm. Luckily for Hook, his own paranoia, combined with the constant ticking in the crocodile, would alert him to the impending danger of potential future encounters. So, in other words, Hook might have well been a ‘chronomentrophobe', or at least had a Pavlovian response to the ticking stimulus.

Nostalgia and Ostalgia

The 2003 movie Good Bye, Lenin! provides us with a good example of resisting the future. The narrative is set in East Berlin around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is a tragicomic film that focuses on a family's efforts not to upset the family matriarch, an ardent supporter of East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany who suffers a heart attack and lapses into a coma prior to the fall of the wall. Alex (played by Daniel Bruehl) lives with his sister, Ariane (Maria Simon), his mother, Christiane (Katrin Saß), and Ariane's infant daughter, Paula. During Christiane's coma, the wall falls, Erich Honecker resigns from office, the East German police start to lose their power, and Western norms and capitalism infiltrate East Berlin. After an eight-month coma, Christiane awakes, but her doctor warns the family that she is severely weakened and that sudden news of the recent disruptive events might cause another, possibly fatal, heart attack. As a result, the family decides to carry out a well-meaning deception that nothing has changed, and to retain the ‘Ostalgia' (which was one of the inspirations for the film and is a fusion of ‘Ost', German for east, and ‘nostalgia'). They retro-fit their apartment with drab East German interiors to sooth their mum's delusion, throw out their new Western clothes in favour of their old Eastern garb, and repackage new Western food in old East German jars.

Their deception plan is successful, but becomes more complex with the continuing changes, such as the unveiling of a huge Coca-Cola sign outside their mother's window, and with Christiane's wish to watch television, which results in Alex editing old East German propaganda newscasts that he plays from a VCR in a neighbouring room to bring his mum the ‘latest' news. Things become even more complicated as Christiane regains strength and ventures outside the apartment block and sees her neighbours throwing away their old Eastern furniture. Alex tries lovingly to cover up these developments by recruiting a taxi driver who he believes looks like the famous Sigmund Jähn — a German astronaut and pilot who in 1978 became the first German to fly in space as part of the Soviet Union's Interkosmos program — to say that he is the new leader of East Germany and will be opening the borders to West German refugees. The movie is a heartening account of a son's attempts to look after what he believes is his mum's best interests. It is also a powerful reminder that we cannot hide away from the present or the future, and that being nostalgic is not very strategic in a world of constant change and upheaval. And that, perhaps, disruption is only really disruptive if we are not mentally adaptive. And yet around the world, wherever we turn, we meet people who long for the ‘good old days', which is a fact-resistant way of viewing present reality and future developments. This nostalgia is also a strong reason these sorts of people refuse the call to adventure when it is offered to them.

It's not that I am an optimist. I am factivist. And while I am as much of a romantic as much as the next Bollywood tragic, nostalgia, or ‘Ostalgia' in the case of Germany, doesn't provide me any comfort for creating better futures. The reunification of Germany made a strong impression on me as a youth, and I remember the excitement we, as young people, felt at the time. As a student from 1988 of the Deutsche Schule (German School) Stockholm, my classmates and I vividly lived through the end of the Cold War through our immersion in this microcosm of Germany at Karlavägen in my native city. I recall the bomb threats, the security guards, and the general sense of change that swept through the school in the late 1980s and early 1990s. My school class included children and friends from both sides of the wall, both sides of the Iron Curtain in Europe. I grew up with refugees from Latvia (the children of anti-Soviet activists), the kids of Polish refugees and Eastern bloc capitalists (read into that whatever you like), the offspring of alleged Stasi (East German secret police) deserters, as well as next-generation West German car magnates. In a class of 27 I was one of only two kids who had two Swedish parents. We read news reports of East German families smuggling their children in rolled up carpets across the border into West Germany, and my first girlfriend, Therese, had lived at the Swedish Embassy in Berlin during the divided era, telling me vivid tales of life in Berlin from the mid-1980s. The sense of joy and predestination was strong within us as we watched the Berlin Wall come down, and as the reunification of families and a nation unfolded in front of our young, innocent eyes. We had a hunch, a strong sense, an intuition, that the past was not good, and was instead divisive, backward — even evil — and that the future, guided by integrative thinking, promised something better.

Everywhere around us we felt like the future was in the air. And we knew, instinctively, with more future ahead of us than time behind us, that what had just occurred was of historical significance, and that this momentous event was laying the groundwork for a better future. Of course, change always has winners and losers. And the incumbents who prefer the status quo, who refuse the call to adventure, have the most to lose. The winners are those who are curious and ambitious, who are thirsty, who have an appetite for the future. It is not just a matter of being optimistic or pessimistic. How we view the future also comes down to our level of objectivity and whether we are factivists or fact-resistant. (For further proof on how the future is better than the past — and why we all need to be futurephiles — see figure 3.1, and 3.2, overleaf.)

Futurephobia and Daesh/ISIL/ISIS

Progress and development is too much for some people. The radical Islamic death cult of Daesh belongs squarely in the category of futurephobes. Inspired by misplaced seventh-century ideas of the Caliphate, their barbaric ways have been partly enabled, ironically, by modern weaponry and digital media. In a similar vein to people who voted for Brexit, the world has moved too quickly and in a direction they don't like. Daesh, also called ISIL or ISIS, is not merely a bunch of psychopaths who throw homosexuals from towers, stone non-believers to death, and film executions of burning journalists. According to Graeme Wood in the article ‘What ISIS really want' from The Atlantic, it is a ‘group with carefully considered beliefs, amongst them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse'. Wood goes on to say we can gather that

... Its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of — and headline player in — the imminent end of the world.

This group aims for the realisation of a dystopian alternative reality where they wield power over a population almost as big as Sweden's. Its nature is medieval religious, and its philosophy highly regressive. In his article, Wood continues that ‘... in fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse'. Truth is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Some pundits in their political correctness would doubt that this barbarian crew is religious, but, as Wood notes, they often literally follow a historic text, and most major decisions and law promulgated by the Islamic State follow what it calls ‘Prophetic methodology', which means applying the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in ‘punctilious detail'. As a result Western leaders like Major General Michael Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, concludes that ‘we have not defeated the idea … we don't even understand the idea'.

Innovations and modernity flies in the face of these ‘pious forefathers' (who are adherents of Salafism, after the Arabic al salaf al salih, meaning exactly ‘pious forefathers'). Today's versions of extremist Sunnis model themselves on the prophet and his early crew when it comes to all behaviour. As a result, they have made proclamations of takfir, which is an edict against people who they view as apostates because of their sins. Behaviours like selling alcohol, wearing Western clothes, shaving one's beard or voting in an election all qualify one for apostasy, and consequently death, which purifies the world according to the Islamic State. As I have committed three of the above sins, I am an apostate. Equally though, Shiites are also apostates in the eyes of these Sunnis, because they are an innovation on the origins of Prophet's teachings, and to innovate on the Koran is to deny its initial, supposed seamlessness (as in supposed perfection). Talk about futurephobia. Wood points out that this means that 200 million Shia Muslims are thus marked for death by the Islamic State, as is any willing Muslim participant in democratic elections, because this stands in contrast to laws made by Allah.

George Orwell once said about fascism in Nazi Germany, that it is:

Psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life … Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time', Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger, and death', and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet … We ought not to underestimate its emotional appeal.

Many Islamists have answered the call to this novel version of preposterous adventure, to the great dismay of the thousands of fellow Muslims and other citizens around the world who have innocently lost their lives to pave the way for the Islamic State's futurephobic vision of apocalypse (which means the end of time as we know it). Futurephobia — whether in the sense of ISIS' attempt to bring us a seventh-century caliphate, ‘Ostalgics' wanting a return to the ‘magnificence' of the Iron Curtain, or business leaders espousing that ‘we have always done it this way' — denies the virtues of futurephilia, development and innovation. Worse, futurephobia is blatantly dangerous, for the proponents, the people willing to listen and the broader world. Thus, it is critical to differentiate between positive tradition, and mere mouldy remnants or leftovers. Train your critical mind, and have faith in developing a future that is better than the present, as well as the past. Every day you create the evidence that the future can be a better place. You decide, just like my mum, every day, whether you want to wake up a futurephobe or a futurephile.

The real antidote to futurephobia — the long view

Plenty of good news is available. If we look beyond the trees we can see a magnificent, enchanted forest of possibilities. We don't have to be stuck in the woods if we don't want to. Yet most people chose to live in fear. I am guilty of this, too, on occasion. For example, I live on the magnificent Pittwater on Sydney's Northern Beaches. It is an enchanted place and, courtesy of the fact that I live in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, the wildlife is rich. We have our own jetty and, in summer, I use it to jump in for a dip each morning. I love it. It's like the best of the Swedish summer and the Stockholm archipelago, but for nine months of the year, courtesy of the Australian climate. In Sweden, at my parents' house outside of Stockholm, I like to spend my days in the water at Lake Malaren, true to my Piscean nature. It's aquatic bliss. And no sea creatures to think about.

So now, at Elvina Bay, I have the chance to have extended ‘Swedish summers' (which are only a few, intense weeks in length), in a place that is reminiscent of my Swedish youth's summer holidays. Yet my cousin Daniel and my brother, Gustaf, love to alert me to the dangers of Australian wildlife. They like to remind me of the presence of bull sharks in my local waters. Do you think this, combined with a certain Steven Spielberg soundtrack, is a spoiler? You bet. Yet, it's statistically irrational, right? Fewer people die each year globally as a result of shark attacks than from bee stings, champagne corks, cows and falling out of bed (individually, not combined). Yet, I am not as relaxed in the water as I would be in Stockholm. Despite the data.

The data does show us, however, if we step back for a moment, that we are living in historically great times, and that things, on balance, are likely to get even better, by many measures. A directional movement indicates that the future will be much better than the past for a great proportion of people in the world. My Swedish colleague, Dr Hans Rosling, does a fantastic job around the world helping people move away from being futurephobes to being futurephiles by pointing to and visualising data. And the data today shows that, for example, poverty in the United States has halved in the last twenty years, that more girls go to school now (and stay for longer) than at any time in history internationally, that childhood mortality is at a historical low, our life expectancy is higher than it has ever been, and that despite the spikes in media interest (and my thoughts, of course, go out to the victims and their families of woeful terrorist attacks) fewer people are dying in international or civil conflict than at any time during the twentieth century (see figure 3.3).

But if we are constantly living in the moment, tuning in to the short and sensationalised news each night, getting caught up in quarterly reports and profit warnings, and following the short-termism of democratic election cycles, our vision is likely to get distorted, and this can prevent us from implementing better, long-term decision-making. We need to zoom out, and look at data from a longer term perspective. We need to embrace the ‘long now', on our individual hero's journeys into the future.

The essence of futurephilia is a love for the future. A belief that things can be better tomorrow, and that decisions today can create more fruitful futures. I am a proud futurephile. And as such I am a member of a foundation called the Long Now Foundation. This organisation seeks to create a counterbalance to what it believes is a ‘faster/cheaper' mindset, and to promote ‘slower/better' thinking. The Long Now Foundation takes a long-term perspective, into the next 10 000 years, and has abandoned four-digit dates in favour of five-digit dates to address long-term challenges and opportunities. Try this on for a moment. What would happen if you were able to focus twenty, forty, 125 or 1000 years into the future? How would this affect your decisions? On the foundation's website, Stewart Brand, one of the founders of the movement, has the following to say about the inspiration behind the Long Now:

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed — some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where ‘long-term' is measured at least in centuries. Long Now proposes both a mechanism and a myth.

On the website, co-founder Danny Hillis also reflects on what he calls ‘an ever-shortening future' proposing a new clock, one that moves people's focus beyond this ever-shortening future:

I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.

Unlike Captain Hook, the members of the Long Now foundation are not chronomentrophobes. Their project to build the Clock of the Long Now consists of building a timepiece that will operate without human interference for ten millennia. The first prototype of the clock began working on 31 December 1999, just in time to display the transition to the year 2000 — or to show the date change from 01999 to 02000. Since then, the two-metre prototype has been on display at the Science Museum in London, and the first full-scale prototype is being funded by Jeff Bezos and located on Bezos' land in Texas. The purpose of the clock, in the words of Stewart Brand, is to ‘embody deep time' for people, reframing the way people think in the same way as seeing photographs of the Earth taken from space helped people change the way they thought about the environment.

On the death of my grandfather Per, of Georg Sörman fame, in 2003, my grandmother gave me a gift. It was my grandfather's gold Movado watch. A beautiful Swiss timepiece. For me this watch signifies something enduring, something timeless. A longer term perspective. Cross-generational heritage. For me it also signified that some day, the baton of restoring the brand Georg Sörman to its former glory would be in my (and my mother's) hands (or at least on the wrist). My grandmother had one complaint, though. And the complaint was with my grandfather. Per liked wearing this watch on special occasions in the latter stages of his life (and when the downward spiral of business fortunes had begun). So, by the time I inherited this watch, it was neither accurate nor (when it actually did wind up), would it keep running for very long.

Since then, to restore it to working condition (and probably imbuing the mechanics and engineering of the Movado's movement with a deep business symbolism) I have been on a search globally for the missing piece that led to its mechanical breakdown. Given that the watch is from the 1950s, suffice to say it has been an odyssey to find this missing piece — a 90M movement/setting lever — which seemed to have disappeared from the archives and tool sheds of horologists and watchmakers in Europe and Australia. It wasn't until December 2015 that I managed to find a watchmaker who was able to fix the issue at the core of the watch. As a horophile, I am pleased to say that the mechanics of the timepiece are now working again. And this timepiece, mentally, emotionally and symbolically, connects me with my past, present and future. And in this sense, I believe the project of the 10 000 Year Watch, with a cuckoo that comes out every millennium, can hopefully make an impact on our collective thinking about time and the future as well. There is something quite meditative about this longer term perspective, isn't there? The design principles certainly have a horizon that is liberating, and ­de-stressing. (Check out the Wikipedia page for the ‘Clock of the Long Now' for a rundown of some of the design and maintenance considerations.)

What if we all thought about our businesses, services and products in this way? And how might this longer term, futurephilic perspective shape how we deal with global problems, or view every day events? What things might we want to create or focus on preserving because of their inherent qualities? For example, the Long Now Foundation goes beyond time, clocks and expanded perspectives, and in their educational programs focus on long-term policy (beyond three-year electoral cycles), scenario planning (which we at Thinque are big believers and practitioners in) and the idea of singularity (which I cover in chapter 5). It has also taken an interest in the preservation of world languages in its Rosetta project, because it sees language loss (discussed in chapter 2) from a long-term perspective. The Rosetta project focuses on preserving languages with a high likelihood of extinction over the period 2000 to 2100, with samples of such languages being inscribed onto a disc of nickel alloy. And, while the future of the language of our family business is still in jeopardy, its history, its brand and its values can still be preserved in writing, audio, visualisations and in modern media. This is worth preserving in a multitude of forms — including in book format, as in the lines you are reading now — for future generations and other heroes who may learn from the road less travelled.