Introduction

never volunteer for anything. It only gets me into trouble. So when we

were asked to volunteer for parts in a game to illustrate the virtues of
what is known as lean thinking, I stood at the back, and stared at the floor.
This was especially necessary because the other people on the course were
senior management in industries which I had read about from time to
time, but who lived on a different planet from the one I mooch about in:
aerospace, automotive, logistics, reinsurance. One of them made tanks. I
concentrated on not catching anyones eye.
What I didnt realise was that the last person to volunteeror anyone
foolhardy enough not to volunteer at allwas punished by being nominated for the job that nobody wanted.
Okay, youre the CEO.
?
Yes, you.
?
Chief Executive Officer.
?
The Boss.
No, really, Im not that ambitious.
Youre the Boss. Now, lets get a move on.
Well, they put a lot of thought and effort into designing the games they
play in business schools. And here is what they had us doing. They wanted
us to assemble little plastic coloured bricks together in a very particular
way. If you got it roughly right, that wouldnt do. If you got it almost
exactly right, that meant you had built an aeroplane that would stall on
take-off. It had to be exactand agreed to be exact by the incorruptible
referee, the lady who was making this distressing event happen.
Most of the twenty-four people on the course had sensibly volunteered
to be production workers. The remaining one third were management.
The production workers were divided into four groups, sat down at four
tables, and required to put the bricks together in subassemblies, each one
an exact replica of the model which had been placed in front of them on
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their table. Each subassembly then had to be taken to the next table to
have some more bits added to it. The object was completed by the fourth
group and handed to the referee for inspection. The task of the managers
was to make sure the workers got it right. My task was to make sure the
managers got it right.
A lot of things happened at once. Putting those little bricks together
was tricky. At each table, piles of duff subassemblies collected. Sometimes
a completed object did make it to the end of the line, only to be rejected.
Disputes broke out between the tables. There was a lot of shouting. My
team of managers were worked off their feet. I realised it is hard work
being a manager. The workers blamed the management. The management blamed me. I tried to remember how to look calm and confident.
If anyone, having lost their way to the universitys art department, had
looked in on the scene, they would reasonably have been impressed by
the sheer scale of activity. Everyone was furiously busy checking, carrying, informing, suggesting, inspecting, disagreeing. This, clearly, was a
group of highly-motivated people. If people can work with this level of
enthusiasm on the task of assembling little plastic bricks, what chance has
the competition? The world is beaten.
The problem was that not one single assembly was put together correctly. The sound and fury signified nothing. It began to become clear,
even to me, that there must surely be a better way of doing it.
After some trial and error, the tables were rearranged; they were pushed
against each other in a row. The group at each table now worked to a rule:
only one subassembly to be made at a time, then to be placed in reach of
the group at the next table, waiting to be picked up. When the next group
found that there was something wrong with it, the two groups would get
together and work out the problem. There was good reason, now, to apply
their minds. Neither table would even attempt to make another assembly
until the problem with the first one had been cracked, and only one subassembly could now be in play at the same time. Problems were revealed
quickly; people talked to each other. The shouting stopped.
And then the talking, too, got quieter. The production workers had
worked out how to get it right, every time. Something new began to come
from the tables: a sense of quiet satisfaction.
And the management? Quite suddenly, I remembered my pivotal role as
CEO, and looked round to see what the other members of my management
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team were doing. It can be easily summarised: we were standing in a

straight line, with our arms folded. We were observing the scene, and trying to make ourselves believe that we were in some way responsible for
this smoothly-running model of diligence, accuracy and intelligence.
But then we realised: we were out of work. I would have been out of
work anyway, so for me it was a lucky reprieve; I could leave with relief
and honour. But for the others in my team it was a moment of truth: if
you declutter things so that the problems become visible, and you set
things up so that people talk to each other and start to believe they can
work things out for themselves, you are calling on information-processing
power which has a tendency to be overlooked. It is there in the space right
above the nose. You need some reasonably well-defined intention in the
first place, but within that frame of reference there is freedom to invent. It
is called lean thinking.1
The lean thinking described in this book should not be taken as a comprehensive guide to how to run a railway or to make tanks. Rather, it is
about how to recruit the intelligence and purpose of the people in the
extraordinary task of inventing a future. And here is why we need to do so.

T h e S tory
When long-established systems break down, they often do so in many
different ways at the same time. Our economy and society depend on a lot
of things working right, all the time: cheap and reliable flows of energy,
a stable climate, fertile soils, abundant fresh water, productive oceans, an
intact, diverse ecology, high levels of employment and a cohesive culture.
These are all in trouble.
How should we respond to this? Well, with care, application and references, no doubt, and we shall come to that, but for now: four kinds of
response are possiblethat is, four paths which lead off in their different
directions, each of which counts as the most enticing and delightful one,
depending on who is looking at them.
Growth. Market economies, like bicycles, are only stable when they are
moving forwardand that, for an economy, means growth. Growth
keeps unemployment down and governments solvent. These are
extremely good reasons to keep it going: how could any responsible
government and business establishment contemplate anything else?
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The snag is that growth destroys the foundations on which it relies.

This is the double-bind of growth: we are damned if we do, and
damned if we dont.
Continuity. Could we not reform the economyto protect those
foundations from further damage or, better still, repair them? For
instance, why not work out how to achieve the double delight of
growth and repair? The snag here is that there is no sign whatsoever
of that being possible. Alternatively, we might try continuing while
calling a halt to growth itself. But there are problems with that, too.
It would do nothing to reduce the accumulated damage, which is
already more than the Earth can bear. And the lack of growth would
break the economy.
Descent. This is a steep winding-down of the size of the industrial
economy. It strips away its burdens and complications, nurses the
human ecology back to health, builds local competence and discovers
a sense of place. It thinks afresh about how to get out of the aforementioned double-bind. The descent itself is inevitable, as is the breakage
that follows, and yet, this is managed descent, in contrast with descent
that forces itself on an economy blindly straining for growth. The
shock is as gentle and as survivable as foresight can make it.
Collapse. This future sees events moving out of our grasp.
Surviving the Future is about Descent. It is the path that has both reality
and hope.
The ways in which the descent could develop are so varied that there
is a risk of being paralysed by the uncertainty, so Surviving the Future
focuses on a particular aspect of itan aspect that matters intensely to all
of us. As the industrial economy descends, unemployment will rise, and
there will come a point when government revenues are so deeply reduced
that funds are not there to support the unemployed or to pay for such
fundamentals as education, health and law and order. Households and
communities will find it hard, bordering on impossible, to pay their way.
Such necessities as food and even water supplies could be hard to get.
Communities will therefore have to provide these things for themselves,
or do without. They will need to rediscover their locality and local skills,
rebuild a culture, and apply the power of lean thinking; sharply focused,
widely shared.
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The shocks of descent converging into our cultures climacteric will

leave nothing in our lives unchanged. We cannot now avoid it, but it
can be managed, mitigated, made survivable, recognised as our species
toughest, but greatest, opportunity.

Climacteric
A climacteric is a stage in the life of a system in which it is especially exposed
to a profound change in health or fortune. One theory in early medical thinking was that climacterics occurred in the human life at intervals of seven
years; a variant was that they occurred at odd multiples of seven years (7, 21,
35, 49, etc.), and this survives in the use of climacteric as a name for mid-life
hormonal changes. Climacterics for human society could be taken to include
the end of the last ice age, and the beginnings of agriculture and of industry.2
The climacteric considered in Surviving the Future is the convergence of
events which can be expected in the period 20102040. They include deep
deficits in energy, water and food, along with climate change, a shrinking
land area as the seas rise, and heat, drought and storm affecting the land
that remains. There is also the prospect of acidic oceans which neither provide food nor remove carbon; ecologies degraded by introduced plants
and animals; the failure of keystone species such as bees and plankton;
and the depletion of minerals, including the phosphates on which we
depend for a fertile soil.
This could be followed by economic and social fracture, taking law and
order with it, and the breakdown of education systems able to pass on the
essentials of culture and competence. And these events may be expected to
lead to large movements of refugees and to steep reductions in population
comparable with those associated with the climacterics of previous civilisations. The large infrastructures, such as those that transport energy, are likely
to be out of commission. The constant supply of water, energy, money, security and professional skills needed to prevent stores of high-level nuclear
waste from leaking and catching fire may not be available. Justicewhich,
in an affluent society, is seen as the only defensible criterion for judgment
will be open to new interpretations. This is deep, interconnected, planetary
tragedy; grief reaches out to grief: one deep calleth another.3
At such moments of discontinuity, with sharp changes of direction,
societiesor at least the technologies they usecan slip back, not by years,
but by ages: when the Romans arrived in Britain, they found a thriving,
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technically advanced Celtic Iron Age society; when they left, it retreated,
not to the Iron Age, but another 2,000 years further, to the Bronze Age,
without such simple artefacts as potters wheels. To sustain even a technology as basic as pottery you need a supply chain to provide clay, wheels
and kilns, some assurance of stability and peace, and customers who can
payor who can at least be expected to be around long enough to keep
their side of the barter agreement or reciprocal obligation. To crawl back
towards this level of material comfort in post-Roman Britain took some
four centuries. Small communities made those conditions survivable.4
Surviving the Future argues that community holds out at least a possibility of supporting social cohesion, engagement, shared cultural
depthand survival. In other words, the climacteric could be one of those
rare historical turning points when society switches into a new mode
of productioninto a radically different way of using its resources; its
labour, capital and landchanging its expectations and values. The shift
could be partly voluntary and partly an involuntary reaction to circumstances. Potentially, this could be an opportunity, for it is at such turning
points that it is practical to make deep, radical breakthroughs, before new
conditions settle in which we can do little to change. We do not know, of
course: the climacteric may be so severe that opportunity is the last thing
on anyones mind; this hinge of history may turn out to be just dust and
grief, but if rational judgment is to be salvaged from the depths where it
has lain for so long, the coming climacteric could be the moment for it.
It is unknown how fast the climacteric will develop. One view is that
it will unfold as a slow deteriorationa long descentwith periods of
respite allowing time for intelligent responses to be worked out and
applied.5 Another view is that, because our civilisation is so connected,
urbanised, and equipped with complex and fully-functioning energy and
distribution systemsalong with the property rights and financial systems that support themthe downturn will be more delayed than some
expect: there is, as Adam Smith observed, a great deal of ruin in a nation.6
But when it comes, those tightly-connected dependencies will likely
make it more abrupt. This is a typical pattern. The archaeologist Joseph
Tainter summarises his review of the life and death of civilisations,
Collapse is a fundamentally sudden, pronounced loss of an
established level of sociopolitical complexity.7
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Core elements such as food provision depend on the whole sequence

of cultivation and delivery working properly, all the time, from a benign
climate and reliable supplies of oil, gas and electricity to transport and
distribution infrastructures, peace and social order, banking services and
incomes. Yet when complex systems break down, one failure can trigger
more failures so fast that it seems almost instantaneous: shifts in the planets climate between icy and temperate have been abrupt; the financial
crisis of 20082009 arrived in a flash, and the impact was crueller still
because the rumblings we had been hearing for a few years had become
so much part of life that we tended to discount them.8 The timing of the
climacteric is uncertain.
In 2009, John Beddington, the chief scientific advisor to the UK government, forecast a perfect storm of food, energy and water shortages
in 2030. Jonathon Porritt, chairman of the UKs Sustainable Development
Commission, wrote that 2020 is more likely.9 Richard Heinberg, the prolific commentator on energy and economics, proposed 2016 as his most
optimistic (furthest postponed) date, but added,
... the whole conversation makes sense only as a way of
motivating coordinated action prior to the crunch. Once the
unwinding has begun, no more preparation is possible. Our
strategy must change from crisis prevention to crisis management. Thats where we are now, in my view.10
Previous civic societies, having experienced their breakages, have
typicallyin the case, for instance, of the Roman civilisation of Western
Europeemerged in due course with a much reduced population to build
decentralised, low-cost, local, lean economies; communities which have
proved to be durable. The breakdown of the Chaco culturewhich, until
the early years of the twelfth century, lived in what is now the US state of
New Mexicofollowed many years of experiment with what we would
now call sustainable development: improvements in the eco-efficiency of
agriculture and economics in response to resource depletion (especially
water and wood) and regional climate change. In this case, the shock
took place quickly, shortly after the societys peak of wealth and artistic
accomplishment. What followed was the Pueblo economy; the surviving
remnant following the collapse. Jared Diamond writes,
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It took many centuries to discover that, among those economies, only the Pueblo economy was sustainable in the long
run, i.e., for at least a thousand years.11
In our own case, the crash, when it comes, is likely to be greater than
those on previous occasions, with the joining up of all the elements
extending beyond the regional shocks that have been experienced in the
past. The regional climate changes that have affected our predecessors
will, in our case, be global.12
There are no certainties here. It is not certain that the climacteric as outlined here will happen. Some sustainable technologies are moving ahead
rapidly; renewable energy is on course to transform the worlds energy
economies. The likelihood, however, is that the energy gap will open up
as fossil fuels deplete, well before the renewables have had a chance to fill
it, and that a solution to the energy problem on its own will fall far short
of holding off the other events whose combined weight can be expected
quite abruptly, and quite soonto deintensify our economy. Our social
and economic order may be out of time.13
And yet, the question about what the future holds does not really make
any difference to what we decide now: there is just one way forward, and
that is to build the sequel, to draw on inspiration which has lain dormant,
like the seed beneath the snow. The focus now should be on preparing
with the aim of building a social order for the probably diminished population of the future. That aim stands, whether it is realistic or not; and it
stands, too, even if it is seen as an operation to prevent the shock, rather
than to cope with its consequences.
The question to consider, therefore, is not whether the crash will happen, but how to develop the skills, the will and the resources necessary
to recapture the initiative and build the resilient sequel to our present
society. It will be the decentralised, low-impact human ecology which has
always taken the human story forward from the closing down of civilisations: small-scale community, closed-loop systems, and a strong culture.14

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

One of Aesops Fables is the story of the boy whose job was to look after
the sheep but, having a nervous disposition, he was forever crying wolf
when no wolf was there. One day the wolf really did come, and he cried
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wolf again, but nobody believed him, and the wolf was able to dine off
the sheep, and the boy, at leisure.
There are two morals to the story. The first is: avoid giving false alarms.
The second is: in the end, the wolf came, so do not be misled by previous
false alarms into thinking that the latest alarm is false, too. Of these two,
the second one is more significantit highlights a key logical fallacy.
Believing false alarms wastes time, but it can lead to some helpful advice
for apprentice shepherds; disbelieving all alarms can lead to a local lad
being eaten, for starters.
We have an example of this Fallacy of the Wolf in the case of supplies
of oil. A century or so ago, there were some false alarms about how little
oil remained; the art of forecasting oil supplies earned a bad reputation.
However, estimates of the quantity remaining in the worldand of the
turning point (the peak) at which oil production would start to decline
steadily improved and, in the 1970s, estimates of the potentially-accessible
liquid oil which had been in place at the start of the industrial era settled
at, or around, 2,000 billion barrels, and that estimate has held.
The expected peak was estimated to be around the year 2000later
extended into the new century thanks to the slower growth in demand following the oil shocks of 19731979. The 2000:2000 warning, starting with
a report by Esso in 1967, was independently confirmed by official sources,
such as the UKs Department of Energy (1976), the Global 2000 Report to the
President (1980), the World Bank (1981), and by numerous independent studies such as Hubbert (1977), Petroconsultants (1995), Ivanhoe (1996), Campbell
(1997), Bentley (2002), and so on through the first decade of the new century.
Analysts have also pointed to the regrettable consequences of a breakdown
in oil supplies on a global market which has neglected to make any serious
preparation. Here is a wolf that gave more than forty years notice of its
arrival, and has been thoughtfully issuing reminders ever since.15
The market, however, relies on price signals which cannot be picked up
until the prices in question actually move. In the case of oil their appearance only indicates that radical action should have begun decades ago.
Until then, the sceptics tend to carry the day. There is always a series of
geologists who are concerned about imminent depletion of world supplies, an energy economist reassured a House of Lords Select Committee
on Energy Supply in 2001. They have been wrong for 100 years and I
would be confident they will be wrong in the future.16
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So thats all right then: the anguished warnings are nothing more than
that new kid trying to draw attention to himself. Aesop might be tempted
to revise his fable slightly. Here we have the apprentice shepherd growing
mature and experienced in the job. He has been giving precise fixes of the
wolfs approach for as long as anyone can remember. He is specific and
credible about the action that must be taken to save the village. And still
he is disbelieved.17

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