Thinking in the Future Tense

SKILL 1 Seeing with New Eyes

—MARCEL PROUST The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes.

I MAGINE YOURSELF ON THE roof of a building. A spaceship is descending toward you, the white, glowing saucer of science fiction. As the ship hovers in the air, a stairway is lowered to your feet. An ethereal arm beckons you into the craft. What do you do? Are you ready to enter the spaceship and meet the extraterrestrials? How curious are you? Do you want to know what they look like? They might need your product or services. Are you going to wait and see what happens to others who accept the invitation while you are still trying to decide? Or are you going to close your eyes and wish they would go away?

What if I posed these questions to a group of tenyear-olds? How do you think they would react? Even though they have been warned about strangers, I suspect that most would climb into the spaceship. What are the differences between you and ten-year-olds? Most people would answer Experience. But have you actually had experience with an extraterrestrial? In fact, we tend to generalize our beliefs from past experiences. Your response to aliens would probably depend on preconceived beliefs about our universe and who inhabits it. What did your parents tell you about new groups that moved to your town?

We face the same dilemma when we think about the future. We cannot experience it until it becomes the present. We have to keep our mind and our eyes open. That is why the core skill for understanding the future is the willingness to see it—and to see it in perspective. Perspective enables us to think clearly. It is essential to sorting out the positives and negatives of an issue or a situation. It allows us to perceive how the pieces or parts relate to each other and to the whole. It enables us to accurately interpret change and adapt to it. It lets us weave new possibilities. A clear perspective is the linchpin in any process of change.

A closed mind narrows our view of reality, making change difficult. Trying to make sense of an event or a problem, we fall back on what is familiar. When we cannot put change in perspective, we are predisposed to reject any new information that conflicts with the familiar. We are fearful of the future because we do not know how to explore uncertainty and unpredictability.

Our perspective is shaped by everything from childhood experiences and old habits to race and gender. It invariably influences our reaction to change. When change speeds up and becomes more complex, as it has in the 1990s, the situation only worsens. We may lose our perspective altogether when there is too much information, too much complexity. We find it difficult to extract knowledge from raw information, to synthesize, or to strategize.

Losing perspective can make us crazy. The body will automatically react if it senses danger, but the mind may freeze. We hear words and we fail to comprehend them. We read a report and remember nothing. Some new high-tech machine appears at the office and we won’t learn how it works. We have difficulty seeing what seems obvious to others. We fail to notice key events and we make avoidable mistakes. We lose our common sense. We feel blindsided. We feel like victims. But it is the loss of perspective—our inability to understand the past, comprehend the present, and envision the future—that makes us so vulnerable.

When the leaders of a company or an organization lose perspective, the results can be serious and longlasting. IBM is an obvious example, but there are many more, from the automakers of the 1960s and 1970s to the timber workers of the 1980s and the American Medical Association (AMA) of the 1990s.

IBM never saw the implications for the future posed by Microsoft DOS because the company operated in a self-sealing culture that dealt with hardware, not software, and shut out soft information.

When I was working with Simpson Timber and Boise Cascade in the 1980s the workers told me they were unwilling to give up timber work as their way of life. They were not interested in being nerds. Many believed there were enough trees for their lifetime, if not their children’s. They thought the environmental movement was misguided and would pass as the hippies had passed.

The AMA complained that it was not invited to the table when the Clinton administration was developing its health-care plan. But the organization is a perfect example of a professional brotherhood that by its very nature is resistant to change. It could not read the writing on the wall in time to come up with its own proposals for reforming the health-care system. The competitive advantage rests with organizations or individuals who are not only aware of current trends but are able to adapt to and lead them.

But how can we lead when most of us have the feeling of overload in our brains? Do you sometimes walk across a room and forget why you are there? Do you ever have trouble spelling familiar words? Have you noticed people coming down the hall and you know you know them but have no idea who they are? Don’t worry! There is nothing wrong with your brain. It’s just that you are using it very differently than your ancestors did. Your short-term memory neurons are receiving data at four hundred times the rate of a Renaissance-era man. Imagine yourself a farmer one hundred years ago, riding around your land for a day. What data would you absorb, compared with driving to work now for half an hour, listening to the radio?

It would be amazing if your brain didn’t feel overloaded. The average person’s short-term memory can hold only five to seven bits of data at any one moment. If you put more items in, others fall out. The older you are, the more you have crammed into those memory circuits. Twenty-five-year-olds can remember things because they still have empty space. Some of us take our children to the supermarket in the hope they will remember why we are there.

But don’t despair. Memory is rapidly becoming a far less important function. Gone are the days when we sat in animal skins around campfires, when the person who could name the medicinal plants or recite the oral history of the tribe was vital to the culture’s well-being. Now we have computers—electronic memories, if you will. Already, surgeons wear headsets that retrieve information from their clinical data bank during operations. Rescue for the rest of us is on the way. I call it a sidebrain, and somebody is making one right now. A big step past the Newton, Marco, or Envoy, it will clip on your belt like a pager and be voice-activated. It will answer your questions about spelling, math, scheduling, navigation, and other data. It will have a recognition beam, so that when someone is walking toward you, you can ask, Do I know that person? It will answer, in a whisper, Yes, you do, and quickly tell you who that person is. As this book went to press, Parrot S.A. of Paris, France, debuted with a voice-driven handheld organizer/scheduler called Parrot.

Right now, we are all caught in the trough between increased demands on our brains and the arrival of the technology that promises at least a measure of relief. So while you wait, relax, keep your sense of humor—and write everything down.

PERSPECTIVE AND MEMORY

Our perspective on a behavior or event depends heavily on what we store in our memory about it. But memory, like perspective itself, can be very selective. We remember that which is satisfying or seems important to our survival. We especially remember anything that has to do with sensing danger or avoiding conflict. Personal stories stay in our memories because they engage our emotions. We forget that which seems to have no special meaning or relevance to us.

Memory provides a context for our perceptions. The environment in which we experience new information has a strong influence on our actions and reactions to that information. Here are some familiar examples:

The power context: I’d better concentrate now because this is my supervisor talking to me.

The internal context: How afraid or anxious am I about this situation?

The cultural context: What have I been taught to think this is?

The self-interest context: How can I get what’s best for me?

The situation context: Where did I first meet this person?

If we lack a frame of reference—if there is no familiar memory or personal experience that we can draw on as we try to process new information—then our ability to compose an accurate picture of reality is limited. Without, for example, a frame of reference such as tree, it is difficult to remember pine or maple. Try remembering miscellaneous, unrelated objects that you glimpsed on a table and the limits become obvious. When our short-term memory is in overload, the challenge is even more difficult.

The memory likes a familiar context, the one that generated the thought in the first place. Walk back across the room to where an idea originated and it will probably pop back into your consciousness. Those brilliant ideas you had while swimming or having a drink, which you cannot remember when you are dry or sober, will come back if you return to the water or have another drink. Context can be everything. When we are especially comfortable with the context, we do better at remembering. That is why we remember things we agree with more easily than things with which we disagree.

Intense emotions will generate vivid contexts. You are likely to remember the most minute details of a lifethreatening accident. Athletes remember the plays of a long-ago game because of the adrenaline rush that accompanied them. When you are cut off from your feelings it is far more difficult to make mental connections or accurately assess events. Your sense of self affects memory. A criticism in an evaluation by your employer might be remembered, while a compliment is not.

We remember far more in a rich, stimulating environment than in an impoverished or static one. The artists Monet and Gauguin sought environments that would expand their perception. Marketers who travel in other countries find that their minds retain far more detail in international negotiations than in local ones. They also pick up more new product ideas.

If our perspective is influenced by what is stored in our memory, so too is our memory influenced by the degree to which we can see things in perspective. Perspective enhances memory because it gives our brains the resilience and flexibility needed to stretch into the future. Remember the comic book hero Plastic Man. He could change shape to solve problems. With perspective, we can be alert to distortion and we can change the shape of our memories and our