Chapter 9: Learning to Unlearn

The Future Means Never Saying Never

The Wall Street Journal has a chilling article on bioterrorism in today’s paper. At the end of the article, one analyst tries to make everyone feel better by saying, “The idea that four guys in a cave are going to create bioterrorism from scratch--that will be never, ever, ever.”

And, of course, he is right ... until he is wrong! History tells us that things which sound impossible today have a way of becoming possible tomorrow.

Don’t believe me? Who would have believed 10 years ago that four guys in a cave could mastermind a plot to send airplanes into the World Trade Center and, in the process, wreak havoc on the global economy.

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Helping Businesses Unlearn

As a leader you must nurture an organization that can rapidly adapt. Unlearning can help.

Unlearning can also help you innovate. In fact, unlearning can even assure you and your organization survive.

After years of work, I am pleased to report that I have now developed both a half and a full-day seminar designed to help organizations unlearn—and thus adapt, innovate and survive.

Below is a short 9-minute video overview of the program. If you are interested in how “unlearning” can help your organization, please contact me at jack@unlearning101.com or 612.267.1212.

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Futurist Jack Uldrich Keynotes Conference

In the past year, I have given dozens of keynote presentations to a variety of clients. Below is a short 10-minute speaking demo. If you are looking for an engaging, entertaining and informative keynote speaker for your conference or event, please contact either Mimi Hair or Ryan Foltz at Leading Authorities.

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To Understand the Future See Things From a New Perspective

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Jaywalking into the Future

Did you know that more pedestrians die in crosswalks than when jaywalking. The reason is because people have a false sense of security in crosswalks and are less likely to look both ways.

This is a wonderful metaphor for how you should think about the future. I know most people believe there is safety in doing what you did yesterday and the day before yesterday. Alas, the paradox of the future is that playing it safe is, in fact, the riskiest thing to do.

The future is racing ahead at breakneck speed and a number of trends—in information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and social networking—are about to smash into our “crosswalks.” If you want to survive the future my advice is to “unlearn” safety and jaywalk a new path into the future. It may feel riskier but it isn’t.

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Someone else’s Wrong Doesn’t Make You Right

I am preparing to speak to a major public power association early next week on the impact of disruptive technologies. Among other things, I will be discussing breakthroughs in solar, wind, biofuels, wave power, energy demand managment, and fuel cell technology. I will also being mentioning possible breakthroughs in the field of “cold fusion.”

The field has been held in very low regard since 1989 when other scientists could not reproduce the results of Martin Fleishmann and Stanley Pons. Humiliated by the scientific establishment, Fleishmann and Pons were forced to close their labs, flee the country and, basically, drop out of sight.

This was unfortunate because it highlights a behavior many of us must unlearn: Proving another person wrong does not prove us right. To wit, just because Fleishmann and Pons were not successful in achieving nuclear fusion at room temperature does not mean that it can’t or won’t be done sometime in the future.

Today, scores of researchers have now picked up the mantle of Fleishmann and Pons and are working on cold fusion. I don’t know enough about the field to say with any certainty if they will be successful but I’d remind skeptics that someone else’s wrong doesn’t necessarily make you right.

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Tic-Tac-Toe: The Future is Unknowable

Take a look at the familiar tic-tac-toe grid to the right. In how many different ways could you make the journey? It is not common for people to guess 27, 81 or even 243. The answer, however, is 362,800. This is because 9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1=362,800. (The actual number of winning or draw games is 255,168. For a more complete explanation click here.) My point is that either number is significantly larger than most people expect.

The same is true when thinking of the future. It is comforting to believe we can predict future with great certainty but as a professionalist futurist--and you may find this ironic, counter-intuitive, paradoxical or even disturbing--I make no claim to be able to predict the future.

Here’s why.

Consider almost any issue. What factors are involved? In my work as a professional futurist and forecaster, I regularly speak about 1) technology; 2) competitors; 3) customers; 4) employees; 5) money; 6) demographic characteristics; 7) politics; 8) regulatory issues; and 9) human behavior.

In many ways these characteristics are analogous to the X’s and O’s in a tic-tac-toe game and they can play out in hundreds or thousands of ways. In fact, the real number is so astronomical as to be incalcuable because there isn’t just one technology, one competitor or one employee to be concerned with in each circumstance. There are many and each one adds exponentially to the number of new possible outcomes.

All of this is not to say that forecasting isn’t valuable and worthwhile. It is. (I wouldn’t be a professional futurist if I didn’t believe this.) Rather, I merely want you to unlearn the idea that the future can be predicted with great clarity. It can’t.

Counter-intuitively, though, you can gain a better feel for the range of future possibilities but only if you first think and long about all of the variables which can affect your future.

P.S. But, as the post below suggests, don’t forget about Black Swans.

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Nanotech, Google & Unlearning

As a professional futurist who has written two books on the topic of nanotechnology, including The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business, but is now interested in how the skill of unlearning can help society better prepare for the future, I couldn’t but help notice this article: Does Google Alter How We Think About Nanotech.

According to the research, people searching the term “nanotechnology” on Google are being directed toward more healthcare-related searches. Now there are legitimate questions about the relationship between nanoparticles and human health and these concerns shouldn’t be dismissed, but it is equally problematic that people’s perceptions about nanotechnology are being based on popularity. As the article states: “Sergey Brin and Larry Page created Google to sort search results, in part, based on how popular particular sites were. For science information, that means that surfers may be offered the most popular results rather than the ones that best represent the current state of science”.

As I wrote earlier today, exposing yourself to unlearning is difficult, and it isn’t made any easier if search engines are steering people toward “popular” information as opposed to the most scientifically valid information.

To this end, it is worth keeping in mind this wonderful quote from Galileo: “In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”

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The Future is on the Fringe

Take a look at the image to the right. It is a visual display of Everett Roger’s famous model of diffusion. I, however, want you to look at it differently. Consider it, instead, “an unlearning curve.” Conventional wisdom tells us that it is safe in the middle. Advertising and marketers frequently target their message toward the “early majority” and the “late majority” in the middle. What they are really doing is focusing on the “average” person.  I say screw that! The future is on the fringe!

The true innovators go after the fringes. If you have a cool new product target it toward the “innovators” or the “early adopters.” Those are the people who really care about your product. If they love it, they will tell their friends and anybody who will listen. They may even improve it for you.

Alternatively, if you want to innovate try looking at the laggards. That’s exactly what Nintendo did when they began considering video games for the elderly. The result was the Wii remote and guess what? Not only did seniors love the easy-to-use hand-held stick so did middle-age parents and even younger kids.

If you want to embrace the future, screw the majority. Focus on the fringes!

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New Keynote Speech: The Future Requires Unlearning

As long-time readers know, I have been focused on the concept of “unlearning” for some time now. I dedicated an entire chapter to the idea in my book, Jump the Curve and have also developed a separate website that is serving as a notebook for my forthcoming books on the topic—the first of which will be released later this year.

To this end, I am happy to announce that I have developed a corresponding keynote presentation on the topic and will be partnering with one of America’s top speakers bureaus, Leading Authorities, to bring the talk to the public. It is a perfect motivational or keynote speech for any business, organization or institution that knows it must drive change in order to survive ... but is running into resistance from those “leaders,” managers, employees or customers who refuse to unlearn the old ways of doing business.

Below is a brief description:

The pace of technological change is accelerating. Today’s organizations are living in a world where “constant change is the only constant.” New advances in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and information technology are bringing forth exciting and unexpected discoveries every day, while the expansive and growing power of the Internet, social networking and the open-source movement are fueling the fires which threaten to consume much of today’s existing business landscape.

Life-long learning will obviously be more essential than ever in this chaotic and churning environment; but often lost in this new emerging reality of exponential change is the fact that before an organization can seize tomorrow’s opportunities it must first unlearn old, obsolete knowledge as well as unlearn the old ways of doing business.

In this fascinating, informative, entertaining, interactive and enlightening presentation, noted global futurist and best-selling author, Jack Uldrich—who has been hailed by BusinessWeek as “America’s Chief Unlearning Officer”—will not only explain why unlearning is a critical skill for your company or an organization’s employees, he will also demonstrate how unlearning can help:

-- Successfully navigate a future where the pace of scientific and technological knowledge is doubling every seven years;
-- Prepare for competition that doesn’t yet exist; and
-- Seize opportunities which are, today, only on the periphery of their imagination.

If you are interested in learning more about the presentation, I invite you to contact Leading Authorities directly at 1-800-SPEAKER or 1-202-783-0300.

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The Future is Black and White

The future won’t be either black or white—it will be black and white. In the field of architecture and design, people are often use to choosing between form or function. In the future, as a result of advances in nanotechnology, this age-old debate will become less relevant. As proof, I submit this article discussing a new technological advance that will allow the roof of the future to be both black or white—depending upon the temperature outside. (On cold days it will be black to absorb sunlight and on hot days it will turn white to reflect sunlight and keep the building cooler.)

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The Future of the Internet Requires Unlearning

”If this is the information age, what are we so well-informed about?” So asks David Gelernter is this excellent essay in Edge entitled, Time to Start Taking the Internet Seriously.

Rather than rehash Gelernter’s entire article, I just want to highlight a few key concepts:

1. To date, the Internet has been about increasing the quantity of information. To get to the next level, it must concern itself with the quality of information.

2. To do this, Gelernter suggests “turning Cyberspace on its side, so that time instead of space is the main axis.” As a metaphor, he likens today’s websites to a stained-glass window which has many panels leaded together. What the Internet must become is a rushing flow of fresh information that can nurture new ways of thinking.

3. To this end, Gelertner argues the Internet of the future “can help us change our ways of thinking.”

4. In order to do this, however, the Internet move from away from it’s “culture of nowness.” As Gelertner suggests the Internet’s ability to focus like a laser on the “now” has a couple of unhealthy implications. First, a focus on “now” prevents many people from learning more about “then.” The current Internet is also “a machine for reinforcing our prejudices.” Sure, people can use it to find ten different perspectives on a story but, instead, many of us use it to review the same story from ten like-minded people.

Before Gelernter concludes with an optimistic vision of the Internet (which he says is “The best is yet to be"), he reminds his audience that “We would be fools to doubt our ignorance.”

As someone who is focused on unlearning, I think it is wonderful reminder that we must all have some intellectual humility. Or, as John Brockman writes in the introduction to the article, “Many of the people that desperately need to know, don’t even know that they don’t know.”

What don’t you know about the Internet of the future and what might you have to unlearn in order to embrace the fullness of its future potential?

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The Future of Science Accelerates

”Researchers don’t publish negative results, they only publish positive results. But the negative results can lead to positive results.”

The following quote might not appear revolutionary but I’d argue that is, in fact, quite extraordinary. According to this VentureBeat article researchers have now created a new website, www.researchgate.net, which has been dubbed a “FaceBook for Scientists.” As a professional futurist, I’m excited because the advance will facilitate and accelerate the discovery of new scientific advances by helping scientists understand and see what isn’t there.

As a self-described unlearning fanatic, I’m even more excited by the power of the tool because I think it is the type of thing that will allow new and younger scientists to challenge conventional wisdom; help people see new patterns; and maybe even break down old scientific paradigms by “getting more eyes” and new brains on an old topic.

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The Future Doesn’t Alway Require the “Big Fix”

Big problems such as health care, feeding the world and addressing climate change don’t necessarily require big solutions. In the 19th century, Ignaz Semmelweis helped save the lives of hundreds of thousands of women by getting doctors to wash their hands prior to assisting in the delivery of a new-born child. (Unfortunately, however, it still required the medical community nearly two decades to unlearn their stubborn and unhealthy habits.)

Alas, in the 21st century, the number of infections in hospitals remains unacceptably high. Why? Many healthcare professionals still aren’t employing good hygiene. If they were better at the simple act of washing their hands, the results would be impressive—on the order of saving thousands of lives annually and preventing billions of dollars in unnecessary costs.

In the field of agriculture, it was the addition of ammonium nitrate—a cheap but effective crop fertilizer—which allowed the world’s farmers to feed billions more people with the same land.

Continued advances in the field of genomics may also continue to increase the yield of corn, wheat and rice by making these crops more efficient in terms of how they utilize water and fertilizer. The result: More people can be fed using the same amount of land but with less impact on the environment.

In the automotive industry, it was the installation of the seat belt that saved the lives of thousands of motorists—even though the device was at first ridiculed as “inconvenient, costly, and just a bunch of damn nonsense” by auto executives. The next life-saving advance could be the introduction of super-strong, super-light nanomaterials.

As strange as it may sound, the problem of hurricanes may also just need a simple fix. As Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner outline in their delightful new book, Super Freakonomics, in may be possible to prevent costly hurricanes (which, since 2005, have inflicted an estimated $153 billion in damage to the United States alone) by deploying a few thousand “hydraulic heads” in those areas where hurricanes start. The devices work by bringing cooler water from the bottom of the ocean to the top thus cooling the surface temperature of the ocean water and preventing hurricanes from forming in the first place. The estimated cost: $1 billion.

On the bigger problem of climate change, Levitt and Dubner also outline the logic behind “Budyko’s Blanket”—a super high hose which would spew sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere—which could theoretically cool the planet for a mere $250 million.

Now, to be fair, both the “hydraulic heads” and “Budyko Blanket” may not work and serious questions remain on both ideas. But the broader point is that when faced with big problems there is absolutely no reason why we must first look to “big answers” as the solution. Often, big problems can be solved with small solutions. After all, as a child, how many of your cuts and bruises were solved with a tender kiss from your mother?

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The Future of Paradigm Shifts

In his book, The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil states that “the rate of paradigm shifts is accelerating” and, at the current rate, “doubling about every decade.” This is an extraordinary development.

To help put some perspective on the matter, consider the opening paragraph from L. Gordon Crovitz’s article (From the Roman Codex to the iPad) in today’s Wall Street Journal:

How’s this for human progress? It took about 4,000 years from the invention of writing to the Roman-era codex of bound pages replacing scrolls, 1,000 years from the codex to movable type creating printed books, 500 years from the printing press to the Internet--and only 25 years to the launch of the iPad.

What’s next? My personal opinion is that continue advances in flexible electronics will further change both how information is conveyed and how it is consumed.

But the broader point is that almost every other industry, including health care, energy, and manufacturing, will also experience faster changes in the rate of paradigm shifts. The really important question is this: Are you and your industry prepared?

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Think About the Future—By Asking Questions Today

As a professional futurist, I think about the future all the time. I realize that most people don’t have this luxury but I also don’t really believe that this trait is a “luxury.” If you want to succeed in the future, you must think about the future today.

I recently watched a wonderful 6-minute video on Seth Godin’s new book, Linchpin. The video consists of nothing more than a series of questions but many of them can be used to prompt your thinking about the future.

Here, for reading—and thinking—enjoyment, are some of the more pertinent questions:

1. What will you do when gas is $10 a gallon? (I would add the following question as well: What will you do when it is $1 a gallon?)
2. What will you do when electricity is free?
3. What will you do when computational power is a 1000 times more powerful?
4. Is it likely your organization will have the same products as bestsellers in 10 years?
5. Where will the replacements come from, and when?
6. If we got rid of textbooks, what would be the best way to replace them?
7. If you discovered your biggest competitor was successfully developing a product that reinvents the rules of your industry, what would you do?
8. Could you do the same thing if the competitor wasn’t about to do this?

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Evolution Requires Unlearning

I am not an evolutionary biologist. I do not play one on television and, even though this is the Internet, I won’t try to pretend I am one. Nevertheless, I have come to the conclusion that unlearning will be an essential skill in the future because I am of the opinion that human evolution is an exponential trend.

Let me put it another way. Until about 200 years ago the average person could expect two constants in his or her life. First, life didn’t change much. If your grandfather was a farmer (or peasant) it was likely that your father was also a farmer or peasant and so were you. Moreover, you all lived life in much the same way and used the same tools and equipment.

The second constant was that your life was short. Assuming you successfully survived the first few years of your life (and this, by the way, was no easy task), you could expect to live until the rip old age of 50.

Under such conditions it was appropriate to put a premium on learning because whatever you learned you could expect to utilize the remainder of your life.

In today’s era of accelerating technological change, however, the equation has been flipped on its head. The shelf life of knowledge is growing ever shorter and we must realize that much of what we will learn will need to be unlearned shortly thereafter.

Society has not yet fully recognized the extent of this shift but it will have profound implications for how we educate ourselves and our children. I’d love to hear your ideas about: 1) Whether you agree with my premise; and 2) How you’d try to help society deal with this change. (One idea I have is that we must teach unlearning beginning in kindergarten.)

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The Hospital of the Future

For the past two days I have been in California working with a well-known construction company and architectural firm designing the hospital of the future. Due to the proprietary nature of project, I can’t go into specifics with this post but I always begin such projects from the premise: What must we unlearn? 

For example, perhaps, we should unlearn the idea of who the customer is. Every hospital claims it wants to “serve the community.” If they are serious about this idea than they must also focus on non-customers. in other words, a true community hospital needs to continuously look for ways to “push” preventative information medicine out into the broader community so that its citizens never need to visit the hospital in the first place.

Hospitals must also unlearn the idea of the doctor-patient relationship. Today, patients and their social networking often know just as much—if not a lot more—about their disease than the doctor. The hospital of the future must acknowledge this reality and be designed in such a way that information can flow freely between all parties.

Another thing hospitals must unlearn is the waiting room. One strategy to think differently about the hospital of the future is to focus on the “exit” room. What information does the patient need so that he or she doesn’t need to return to the hospital?

I have a lot more ideas but I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject.

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The Future of Education is Short

A college education is typically four years. Is there any reason why this length must remain the norm? The answer is a resounding “no.” Last year, I suggested the future of college may be $99 a month.

A few innovators are now offering college courses using a new, “all you can consume” model. In other words, instead of paying for courses individually (and by the credit hour), some on-line institutions are allowing students to take as many courses as they want within a specified time frame. This model allows students to finish college much sooner and on their own timeframe—rather than some artificial schedule.

There is an another reason why I believe this model is closer to what the future of education will look like. This past weekend the New York Times ran an interesting article entitled The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s.

The gist of the article is that technology is now moving so fast that it is creating “mini-generations.” For example, a college student who grew up in the FaceBook era now looks hopelessly outdated to her Twittering high school brother. And, not too soon, the brother will look equally clueless to his 7th grade sibling who is sure to adopt Kindle or whatever the next, new innovation may be.

One huge implication of technology acceleration is that the shelf life of some (but not all) knowledge is getting shorter and shorter. Why then spend a semester—or worse four years—learning something which will soon be obsolete?

Many courses will, by necessity, need to become shorter and high schools, colleges and universities must acknowledge this reality by offering courses more in tune with the future. This means shorter—but likely more intense—courses.

Rhetoric aside, education will also become a truly life-long endeavor; and unlearning will become just as critical as learning in the future.

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10 Quotes on Unlearning

I have said before that the future will require unlearning and that unlearning will be one of the most critical skills for successfully navigating the future. With this thought in mind, here then are 10 quotes to consider:

#1. “The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” --Alvin Toffler

#2: “The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.”—President John F. Kennedy

#3: “In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists”. --Eric Hoffer

#4: “In some sense our ability to open the future will depend not on how well we learn anymore but on how well we are able to unlearn”.—Alan Kay

#5: “Two things seemed pretty apparent to me. One was that in order to be a pilot a man had to learn more than any one man ought to learn; and the other was that he must learn it all over again in a different way every 24 hours.”—Mark Twain

#6: “Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out.” --Thomas Cardinal Wolsey

#7: “The most important lessons lay not in what I needed to learn, but in what I first needed to unlearn.” Jim Collins

#8: “Strange about learning; the farther I go the more I see that I never knew even existed. A short while ago I foolishly thought I could learn everything--all the knowledge in the world. Now I hope only to be able to know of its existence, and to understand one grain of it.”—Charly in Flowers for Algernon

#9: “The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.”—Antisthenes

#10: “The difficulty lies, not in new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of have been, into the corners of our minds.”—John Maynard Keynes

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A Futurist’s Future

Earlier this month, as a professional futurist, I put together a list of my top 20 technology-based predictions for 2010. Earlier this week, futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted how technology will change humanity by 2020. (It’s a great read and you can access it here.)

Among the highlights, by 2020:

1. Memory devices will be integrated into our clothing;
2. People will have ways to touch each other virtually;
3. Solar energy will continue to grow exponentially; and
4. Advances in genomics will address the problem of obestity.

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Is this the Future of Magazines and Newspapers?

Does Sports Illustrated have its pulse on the future of magazines and newspapers? I believe it does. I encourage you to watch this three minute video demonstration of what the company is working on:

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Is the Future of College $99 a Month?

Last August, I shared with you the story of the young woman who is suing her Alma Mater for $72,000 because she has failed to land a job. While opposed to the woman’s decision on political and philosophical grounds, I said at the time that it was a harbinger of things to come for colleges and universities because I’m convinced more and more young people will begin to question the wisdom of spending an increasingly exorbitant sum for an undergraduate education.

I recently came across a fascinating article in the Washington Monthly entitled ”College for $99 a Month.” It profiles the rise of a relatively new company, StraightLine, which is delivering introductory college courses for a flat, monthly fee of $99. Students of Clayton Christensen’s “Disruptive Innovation” model will immediately recognize how dangerous Straightline is to traditional colleges and universities—especially non-elite, middle-of-the-road 4-year institutions.

If those institutions hope to survive and still be around in 10 to 15-years time, I’d suggest they “jump the curve” and begin radically transforming their existing educational models for the 21st Century. At the same time, politicians and community leaders would do well to heed the warning implicit in the article which states that traditional colleges and universities still add a great deal of value—in terms of scientific research and transferring knowledge from generation to generation—to local communities, and that this is at risk of being lost because undergraduate programs (which are the “cash cow” of many colleges) will no longer be around to subsidize other programs and goals which have societal worth.

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To Prepare for the Future: Study at an Anti-Library

“There is a huge difference between what people actually know and how much they think they know.”—Nassim Taleb

Question: Which of these animals is more likely to kill you: A shark or a deer?

If you said a shark you are not alone. The right answer, however, is the deer. Even if you answered the question correctly the odds of being killed by a deer instead of a shark may surprise you. You are 300-times more likely to be killed at the hands—or the “hoof” if you will—of a deer.

The reason the vast majority of people incorrectly answer this question is because shark attacks, although quite rare, are both vividly recalled and easy to imagine. It is not uncommon for television news stories to report shark attacks even when those attacks occur thousands of miles away; and, if you are over the age of 40, you will likely recall the movie “Jaws.” The former leaves the impression shark attacks are more common than they really are, while the latter ensures those rare attacks are “felt” at a deep, visceral level.

Instances of drivers striking deer on remote country roads and dying in the resulting collision, on the other hand, are much more common. They are so common, in fact, that they rarely warrant even a passing mention on the local news.

The discrepancy between the relative danger of sharks and deer is a poignant reminder of that old adage: What we don’t know is more important than what we do know. Or as Henry David Thoreau more elegantly framed the issue: ”How can we remember our ignorance, which our growth requires, when we are using our knowledge all the time?”

One of the better ways to remind of ourselves of our ignorance—and to remain open to the concept of unlearning—is to keep our ignorance top-of-mind. One of the more effective tools to do this is to create an anti-library. As Nassim Taleb recounts in his provocative and insightful book, The Black Swan, an anti-library is a collection of books that one hasn’t read.

Unlike a shelf or bookcase filled with previously read books, an anti-library houses unread books that contain valuable information but which you haven’t had a chance to access. With an estimated 3,000 new books being published daily and the rate of scientific knowledge purported to be doubling every seven years, it is safe to assume that there is a growing body of knowledge which is relevant to you and your business.

Unfortunately, you won’t often know what this missing knowledge is! The best you can do in such a deplorable situation is to stay intellectually humble by reminding yourself of your growing ignorance and the need to remain open to unlearning.

You are free to ignore this advice but remember this: What you don’t know can kill you—almost as easily as a deer.

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Detroit’s Driver-less Future?

This past week I had an opportunity to address the Detroit Economic Forum on the topic of “Leading in an Era of Exponential Change.” As a professional futurist, one of my responsibilities is to help people envision future scenarios which may be fundamentally at odds with their current thinking. (As I wrote in this piece, however, my job is not to predict the future. Rather, I lay out a range of future scenarios.)

To this end, I encouraged my audience to give serious consideration to the idea that within a decade’s time driver-less cars could be a fast growing niche within the automotive sector.

Here are just a few reasons why such a scenario is possible. First, younger people are growing increasingly dependent on being connected. To the extent that the car of the future becomes a hyper-connected, wireless platform (and I believe it will), younger people may more easily relinquish control of the steering wheel to a robotic-driven car because they will prefer to stay connected with their friends and social networks rather than concentrate on the road.

Secondly, the fastest growing segment of the population within a decade’s time will be people 85 years and older. To the degree that these seniors want to maintain their independence but are unable to drive (due to poor eyesight, early-stage dementia, etc.), they may be forced to rely on driver-less vehicles.

Third, the U.S. Military has made it clear that it would prefer to rely on driver-less vehicles for many of the dangerous transportation jobs our soldiers must currently undertake in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result of this mandate, the military may expedite advances in driver-less vehicles which could eventually find their way into the commercial marketplace. Finally, I also think it possible that farmers who are faced with growing labor shortages may come to rely more on driver-less tractors, and these advances could similarly translate into the broader automotive commercial marketplace.

Now, I understand all the legal, regulatory and political roadblocks to driver-less cars but I also foresee a number of major trends pushing society in this direction. My only point with this post is to encourage you not to dismiss the idea simply because it falls outside of today’s norms. The future has a funny way of changing on us.

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The Seven Deadly Habits of Ineffective Teachers

”Habits are useful but they can also be deadly. They are useful when the conditions in which they work are predictable and stable. But what happens if and when the bottom falls out of the stable social world in and for which we learn? Is it possible that learning itself—learning as we have come to enact it habitually—may no longer be particularly useful? Could it be that the very habits that have served us so well in stable times might actually become impediments to social success, even to social survival?”

The above quote was taken from this outstanding article, ”Unlearning Pedagogy,” which appeared in the Journal of Learning Design and was written by Erica McWilliam.

As a professional futurist, I have said repeatedly that “unlearning” will be one of the most critical skills for successfully navigating the future. In fact, I have become so enamored with the idea of unlearning that I have a website, www.unlearning101.com, dedicated exclusively to the topic.

If you don’t have time to read the McWilliam’s entire article, below are a list of the seven deadly habits teachers (and society) may want to unlearn:

1. The more learning the better
2. Teachers should know more than students
3. Teachers lead, students follow
4. Teachers assess, students are assessed
5. Curriculum must be set in advance
6. The more we know our students, the better
7. Our disciplines can save the world

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To Be Persuasive, Unlearn

Writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Mark Bowden has an excellent commentary entitled ”The lost art of influence.” At one point he writes, ”Being persuasive is hard, because it demands you consider that you might be wrong. To refute opposing points of view capably (and winningly) you must first really hear opposing points of view.”

Admitting that you might be wrong and really listening—the two traits (or skills) are also integral components of unlearning. Therefore, I’d argue, that if you want to enhance your skills of persuasion it would also behoove you to enhance your unlearning skills. 

Of course, I’m open to your ideas and I promise I’ll really listen if you disagree with me.

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Black Swans & The Future of Energy

The Wall Street Journal, yesterday, had a nice article on ”Five technologies that could change everything” for the energy industry. I’m in general agreement that the five technologies mentioned—advanced car batteries, carbon capture and storage, space-based solar power, utility storage and next-generation biofuels—all hold great promise.

Nevertheless, as a professional futurist who is also an avid student of history, it pays to be humble when handicapping the future. Specifically, I remind investors and interested parties in the energy sector to beware of “Black Swans”—low probability events (or technology breakthroughs) which, if they occur, could have a huge impact. In the energy sector, I would include such things as synthetic biology; cold fusion; solar paint; and “sustainable" carbon technologies.

If you have possibilities that should be included in my “black swan” list, I’d love to hear from you.

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Future Headline: Teenager Controls Mars Rover from Home

Yesterday, on the front page of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, there was this article: Flying deep into the Middle East, from a cockpit in Fargo. The piece, which documented how Air Force personnel are controlling drones over Iraq and Afghanistan, was likely met with a collective yawn by most of the reading public. However, if you stop and think about it for a moment, the idea would probably have been dismissed as preposterous as recently as a few years ago. I mean think about it: Kids in North Dakota using their computer to control flying robots half a world away.

Alas, such is the nature of technological progress. To get your creative futuristic juices flowing let me offer another possible headline from the future: Teenager Controls Mars Rover from Home. As NASA gets more serious about using robots to explore space, I think the agency may some day have a glut of robotic devices on the “Red Planet” and it won’t know what to do with them all. In an effort to tap into the “open-source” ethos as well as get kids excited about science, technology and space exploration, NASA will then allow students (thorough a secure satellite connection) to conduct their own exploration using older robots.

Impossible? No. Unlikely? Perhaps, but then again how many people would have dismissed the idea of North Dakota teenagers using a video game-like joy stick to control and drop and bombs in Afghanistan as recently as a decade ago?

Interested in other headlines from the future? Check out this old post:

Worldwide Solar Farm Construction Forces Coal Plants to Shutter

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The Future of Urban Planning?

Forbes has an interesting article discussing South Korea’s new $35 billion planned city, Songdo. The article attempts to portray the city as a vision of “future cities,” yet after reading the article I am less than convinced. I’m sure the main planners, Gale International, are doing a great many things which are not discussed in the article but it seems as though much of the technology discussed will soon be rendered obsolete by new technology. It was—and still is—unclear to me how the city planners are thinking about incorporating future technologies into the planning process.

Obviously, this is extremely tricky, since no one—and I mean no one—knows what such future technologies will be but, at a minimum, I would argue that “flexibility” must be an important principle. For example, how can buildings change function as the average age of the community grows older or new industries come into existence? Or how will hospitals change as the city’s emphasis on preventative medicine takes root or how will schools be transformed if virtual reality technologies become more prominent?

Furthermore, fuel cell buses and water canels are all fine and well but what happens if battery technologies grow exponentially better and electric vehicles become the norm? Alternatively how might the city’s energy infratsructure change if tidal power becomes more viable?

The bottomline, I guess, is this: future cities are likely to look much different than Songdo because, if for no other reason, cities and technologies are constantly changing. Beware of anyone who claims to know what the vision of “future” cities will look like.

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Hospitals Offer a Glimpse of Future Computers

Often, when we think of technology, we like to imagine how it will transform different industries. It is less easy to imagine how certain industries will transform technology. Luckily, this fine articlefrom The New Scientist -- which is based on a new report from IT Analysts Gartner—takes a look at how voice recognition, eye tracking, virtual reality and brain-neural technology are being transformed by their early adoption in hospitals.

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Beware of Future Statistics

This past Friday Bjorn Lomborg had a thoughtful editorial entitled Technology Can Fight Global Warming. As a professional technologist and futurist, I couldn’t agree more and I have written about this idea frequently. Nevertheless, I find Lomborg’s use of statistics highly unprofessional. To wit, as the basis for his argument, he claims that a high CO2 tax “will reduce world GDP a staggering 12.9% in 2100--the equivalent of $40 trillion a year.”

It is amazing to me that the editors of the Wall Street Journal allow such drivel to be published. No one—and I mean no one—can predict what the future will be like in 91 years. (To understand why see my recent article The Future is Unpredictable). It is even more ridiculous that Lomborg pinpoints the figure at 12.9%. I mean, really, if you are going to guess what impact a future tax is going to have on the economy why not have a little intellectual humility and give yourself some leeway by suggesting the economy will drop by a more rounded figure such as 13%.

There is a famous quote by Andrew Lang that bears repeating here: ”An unsophisticated forecaster uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts—for support rather than illumination.”

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The Future of Social Media is Now

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The Future of College Education?

CNN is reporting about a Monroe College graduate who is suing her Alma Mater for $72,000 because she has been unable to land job. In many ways, I find the article disturbing because not only does the student appear unwilling to accept any responsibility for her own plight, but also because I don’t believe people should use our courts to address every ill (real or perceived) that afflicts society.

Nevertheless, as a futurist, I find the report fascinating because I believe a number of students are going to begin questioning the wisdom of spending $50,000; $75,000 and upwards of $200,000 for a college education that offers—in many cases—marginal value.

I have written about the future of college before (here and here) and I remain convinced that in the future it will matter far less where students receive their degrees. What will matter is a student’s ability to demonstrate knowledge. The reality is that the world is awash in free knowledge and the future belongs to those who can assimilate it and apply it in meaningful ways—regardless of whether they received it for free or, as in the case of the suing student, $72,000.

Now, I am not saying that college and university will go away. I am merely implying that savvy and self-motivated students (and their parents) will no longer be willing to pay exorbitant tuition fees. Colleges and universities, if they wish to stay relevant in the future, must address the issue of rising tuition costs.

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The Future of the Utility Industry

Over the past year, I have addressed a great many organizations involved in the utility industry. Part of my message has focused on how technology is transforming many aspects of their business. Another part of my message focuses on how advances in solar, wind, clean coal, fuel cell technology, geothermal, marine power and demand-management technologies—which I covered in my latest book, Green Investing -- will change their business.

The biggest part of my message, however, centers on how industry leaders need to “jump the curve” and begin thinking much differently about the future.

To this end, there is a wonderful article in this month’s Fast Company entitled ”Beyond the Grid.” From my perspective, the operative quote is this one, ”Distributed energy is happening.”

Let me repeated that: ”Distributed energy is happening.” It is a message everyone involved in the utility business should take to heart—immediately. Due to politics, the regulatory environment, as well as the inertia of human behavior, distributed energy and the micro-grid won’t arrive tomorrow but innovative utilities need to begin planning now—not in 5 or 10 years—for this new future.

Many utilities will argue that due to economies of scale that they can continue to produce and transmit electricity better and cheaper. And this is true—today.

As long-time readers know, I am a huge fan of history and years ago executives in the railroad industry laughed off competition from the airline industry because their consultants argued that rail would always be cheaper than flight. These consultants failed to recognize that customers would value time and convenience more than price. In much the same way, the microgrid will yield benefits beyond price.

In much the same way, executives at Ma Bell also laughed off the idea that their exulted status could be challenged. Today, as we know, things are much different in the telecommunications arena. Could the same happen in the utility industry? Sure. Wind and solar power are not price-competitive with coal and nuclear power today, but they are improving quickly and grid-parity is on the horizon.

If one studies the trends and the technologies affecting the utility industry as I do, it is easy to imagine a much different future for the utility industry than the one that exists today.

The prudent utility companies should be planning today for how they intend to first survive and, then, how they might even thrive in this new environment.

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A Future of Black Swans … or Unlearning the Future

”Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.” Lao Tzu

This famous quote was uttered over 2500 years ago and may strike some people as odd that, as a professional futurist, I have chosen to highlight it.

My rationale is two-fold. First, as I have said many times before, the chief responsibility of a futurist is not to “predict” the future but rather outline a range of future possibilities. Second, and more important, I have highlighted the quote because it is true.

If you have not already read Nassim Taleb’s outstanding book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, do so as soon as possible. On Page 177 of the book, Taleb has an illustration of the scattering effect which artfully explains why predicting the future—especially for longer time frames—is virtually impossible.

Because I can’t reprint the figure here, I am left with Taleb’s analogy for understanding the scattering effect: the prediction of a billiard ball.

Assuming one has knowledge of the location of every ball and the speed and accuracy of the cue ball, it is relatively easy to predict the expected movement of the ball after the first shot. A person might even expect that second, third and fourth degree movements can be estimated with great accuracy due to the growing computational power of computers. The problem, however, grows increasingly complex with each subsequent movement. This is because after the ninth movement the gravitational pull of a person standing at the next pool table exerts enough of an effect to alter the trajectory of the ball. And after 56 movements even the smallest particle on the outer edge of the universe will effect the trajectory!

The bottom line is this: There are simply too many factors to consider when contemplating the future 20, 30, 50 or 100 years out. (Even a small effect today can have outsized implications 50 years hence). The situation, of course, becomes even more complicated because of Taleb’s main thesis which is that “Black Swans”—described as “high impact, low probability” events—tend to shape the future more than “expected” trends.

Therefore, whether a future “Black Swan” takes the shape of a pandemic, an asteroid, an E-bomb, a rogue terrorist attack, a North Korean or Iranian nuclear attack, an unexpected breakthrough in quantum computing or synthetic biology, or, more likely, some “unknown unknown;” the future will be difficult too predict because we don’t have—and won’t ever have—enough knowledge about the future.

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To Succeed in the Future: Unlearn Information

Unlearning information. It’s sounds paradoxical, right? After all, who in their right mind, would want less information? Well, you might if you want to succeed in the future.

Consider this quote which I came across in Jonah Lerner’s informative new book, “How We Decide”:

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

It is counter-intuitive but often having access to too much information can lead people to make worse decisions.

For example, in a classic study, one group of MIT graduate students were given access to a steady stream of financial information—CNBC, Barron’s, The Wall Street Journal, etc—while a second group was only given information on the changing price of a stock.

Given this disparity which group do you think did a better job in selecting stocks? Most people would assume the first group. After all isn’t this why people read the Wall Street Journal and watch the analysts on CNBC? Well, you would be wrong. The second group—the group with less information—performed better.

Various versions of this experiment have been conducted with other groups, including college counselors who were asked to predict the future success of different students. One group was provided high school transcripts, SAT/ACT test scores, application essays and were even allowed personal interviews with the students. The second group was only given access to transcripts and SAT scores.

Again, the group with less information performed better. One big reason why this occurs is because when people are inundated with too much information they tend to think of all information as being equal. In the process, they lose track of what information is really important. More problematic is the finding that with more information people increasingly confident of their bad decisions!

The bottom line is not just as Jonah Lerner says that “Knowledge has diminishing returns,” but rather as Nassim Taleb wrote in the Black Swan that “Additional knowledge of the minutiae of daily business can be useless, even toxic.”

So there you go. De-toxify your system. Unlearn. Put down the newspapers and blogs; stop watching TV news programs; and quit following everyone on Twitter—you’ll make better decisions because of it.

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To Survive the Future, The Publishing Industry Must Unlearn the Past

On August 5, 1949 Wag Dodge and a team of fire-fighters went into the Mann Gulch in Montana to battle a fire. The conditions were hot and dry. As evening approached, the fire changed directions and hot embers flew over the crew cutting off access to the Missouri River. It was soon apparent to everyone that they could not contain the fire.

Dodge and his fellow team members did the most logical thing and sprinted toward the top of the closest ridge. Soon the winds grew faster and the fire began advancing at a rate of 600 feet a minute. The crew dropped their gear and 50-pound packs in an attempt to run even faster.

Feeling the heat now pressing upon his back, it was clear to Dodge that he and his team weren’t going to make it to the ridge. He yelled at his men to stop. Either not hearing Dodge over the din of the roaring fire or thinking he had lost his mind, the men continued running. Dodge then did something even more incredible. He lit a fire.

As expected the dry brush quickly ignited and raced aheadof Dodge. With the larger fire still roaring down upon him, Dodge doused his handkerchief with water from his canteen, stepped into the still smoldering embers of his self-ignited fire, and laid down and began sucking up what little oxygen remained as the larger fire leapfrogged over the small patch of burnt land.

Amazingly, Dodge survived. Unfortunately, thirteen members of his crew did not. They couldn’t outrun the powerful fire.

Out of this disaster was born something positive. On that fateful day, Dodge inadvertently invented the escape fire—a tactic that is today standard operating procedure among forest firefighters—but which was created, literally, “in the heat of the moment.”

The story is relevant to the publishing world because, like a raging forest fire, continued exponential advances from the world of technology are going to continue to wreak havoc on the industry. For example, the first edition of the Amazon Kindle held 250 books. The second version—1500! It’s not going to stop there. Data storage capability is doubling roughly every 6 months. In other words, when Kindle 3.0 comes out, it will store 6,000 books. At this point, it is foolish for K-12 and post-secondary administrators not to use this technology.

Because of continued advances in bandwidth, it is already possible to download an electronic book in a minute. What this implies for textbook publishers is that rather than publishing annual updates, their authors can modify textbooks on the fly as new knowledge becomes available. Of course, this makes eminent sense because scientific and technical knowledge is now doubling every two years.

The changes won’t stop here. Advances in flexible electronics will make e-books easier and more enjoyable to use. The addition of color “digital” ink will make it feasible to include visual animations into books. The net impact is that books can become multi-media in nature. Is there really any reason why the printed word must stay confined to the printed word? No!

Another exciting technological advance I have written about before is Live Ink. The current paradigm for reading the printed word—in straight lines read from left to right (as you are doing right now)—was created because historically paper was a limited commodity. When the written word transfers to an electronic format, however, a new paradigm—such as Live Ink—can emerge.

Wikis, crowd-sourcing and collaboration will also continue to transform the publishing world; as will other unexpected advances in other areas. For a example, consider the following paragraph:

”Dave Striver loved the university--its ivy-covered clock towers, its ancient and sturdy brick, and its sun-splashed verdant greens and eager youth. The university, contrary to popular opinion, is far from free of the stark unforgiving trials of the business world: academia has its own tests, and some are as merciless as any in the marketplace of ideas. A prime example is the dissertation defense: to earn the Ph.D., to become a doctor, one must pass an oral examination on one’s dissertation. This was the test Professor Edward Hart enjoyed giving.”

As a writer, I think it is a fine piece of work and, like most good fiction, it seems to possess an aura of real- world experience. Here’s the problem--especially if you’re in the publishing world or if you are a writer like me—the paragraph was written by a computer program, dubbed StoryBook.

Change is coming to the publishing world and it is unlikely anyone is going to be able to outrun the technological winds fueling the conflagration. Like Wag Dodge, the best strategy is to take a match to your own industry and start thinking of an entirely new strategies for surviving. To do so, it will help if you can first unlearn.

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Want to Understand the Future? Study History.

In his famous speech at Rice University where he declared that it was America’s intention to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, President Kennedy said “the greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds,” adding that “the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far outstrip our collective comprehension.”

Kennedy went on to offer a historical perspective for the magnitude of change society had experienced over the short course of human history. He asked his audience to condense the 50,000 years of man’s recorded history into the span of fifty years. Under this scenario, Kennedy noted that not much happened for the first forty years. Ten years ago, man emerged from his cave, and only five years ago did he learned to write. Christianity appeared two years ago, the printing press this year, and just two months ago the steam engine appeared. Last month electric lights, telephones, automobiles, and airplanes became available, and only last week did we develop penicillin, television, and nuclear weapons. To reach “the stars before midnight tonight,” Kennedy then poignantly added that Americans would have to “dispel old [and] new ignorance.”

Since achieving Kennedy’s goal in 1969, progress has continued exponentially. (Ironically, perhaps, with the exception of space exploration which, as Monday’s 40th aniversary of the moon landing reminds us, has not made much progress.) Taking his historical analogy a little further, however, in the last proverbial “day” computers, biotechnology, the Internet, and the sequencing of the human genome have all appeared on the scene.

What Kennedy’s analogy reminds us it that will need to continue to ‘dispel old ignorance”—or continuously unlearn if you will—only on a faster scale because the future is about to change in the “blink of an eye.”.

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To Prepare for the Future Take a Course on Unlearning

At the end of yesterday’s post on learning to unlearning (on my other website, Unlearning101.com), I posed the following question: How does one learn a new gestalt? To begin a person must start by unlearning some things. But what things do we unlearn? For our purposes, a good place to start might be to imagine what a course on unlearning what might look like.

One place to start is to imagine where the course would take place. Initially it will be--and already is--online. In 2007 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it was putting all of its courses online for free--for anyone in the world to access.

And let’s remember, the online, virtual classroom of the future is only going to get better. The Internet of the future will be streaming incredible amounts of data-rich information anywhere in the world, students will be capable of wirelessly downloading the latest information from flexible electronic books that display both the written word and video files, and new software programs will be capable of translating text from Mandarin Chinese, French, or Farsi into English--and vice versa. (See ”The Future of Reading.")

Another place a course on unlearning might gravitate toward is 3-D virtual-reality environments such as Linden Labs’ Second Life--a site where anyone can create a personal avatar of himself, meet other virtual avatars, and engage in online training sessions. As of this writing IBM, Dell, Intel, Circuit City, and Sears have all created a virtual presence in Second Life.

Interestingly, one of the initial motives of this move was not to create a stronger presence on the Internet (although that is certainly a factor), it was to achieve cost savings on employee education.

What is more interesting from the perspective of unlearning is how Second Life and other virtual-reality sites can be exploited to provide people with different perspectives. In a virtual environment, people can take on any appearance they want. While some people will undoubtedly use it for escapist fantasies, it could also be a powerful tool to help people unlearn certain habits. Imagine, for example, customer service representatives or managers being required to act as customers in one of their own online stores. The experience could provide a unique and refreshing perspective. (And, as I recently wrote, we could all benefit on occasion from unlearning everything from your perspective of color to your view of a stranger standing across the street.)

Longer term, the classroom of unlearning will likely become even more immersive. Perhaps Second Life will morph into Third Life. Among the technologies this environment are likely to incorporate will be enhanced visual, auditory, voice and speech recognition, and haptic technologies. Doctors and service technicians could use these tools to practice operations and repairs in silico before being allowed to ply their trade in the real world.

These tools will also be a boon for learning, unlearning, and relearning. People are often classified into one of three broad categories of learning: visual, auditory, or kinesthetic. Visual people learn by seeing or reading something, auditory learners by hearing it, and kinesthetic learners learn by doing it with their hands and muscles. (It is not quite this simple. Many people use a combination of different techniques for different things, but in general, most people tend to favor one of the three methods over the other two.)

A course on unlearning could exploit these natural tendencies and help people absorb new ways of doing things. For instance, instead of just reading about how a new drug works on a cancer patient, doctors could watch how it interacts with and disables a cancer cell. Other businesses could use such immersive technology to gain a deeper appreciation of what an elderly person experiences and create products that better address their needs. (See ”Unlearning Your Age.")

Many courses on unlearning won’t have a teacher. They will rather be open source in nature, and the content will not be provided by a single “expert” but rather it will be continually added to and improved upon by a vast collection of people. To this end, a relatively new wiki called Curriki has recently been created. Its goal is to support the development and free distribution of world-class educational material to anyone who needs it--anywhere in the world.

But far from being a shoddy collection of disjointed or inferior ideas, the result of these wikis will be vastly superior to anything a single expert could pull together. In the case of business wikis, they will contain advice and insights from employees, suppliers, and customers.

Among the adjustments this will require is that managers will need to unlearn their own reliance on experts. People will need to unlearn the idea that money and quality are synonymous. In the future, many of the best products will be the creation of open-source methods and wikis.

Another thing people will have to unlearn is that there isn’t always an answer. This is because so many fields are constantly evolving. An admission of one’s own ignorance may well be the first step most people will need to take upon entering the unlearning classroom of the future. Exponential executives may even have to go a step farther and accept that ignorance will be the largest element in their future educational needs.

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The Future of Manufacturing

“If you’re in the manufacturing business and you’re not worried, really concerned about what the future will do to your company, you’re not really cognizant of what’s going to be coming down the pike.” Peter Diamandis, Co-founder of Singularity University

I love the above quote. It is a message that I constantly emphasis with my corporate clients and it is why I recently put together this short 4-minute video explaining why business leaders need to unlearn their worldview. For additional information on how fast the manufacturing world is changing, I refer you to the articles below.

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When the “Unusual” Becomes Usual

It was recently reported that US life expectancy topped 78 years as a variety of diseases—including heart disease, diabetes and flu—decreased this past year.

More interestingly, life expectancy—which has been increasing about two or three months from year to year—jumped an impressive four months this year. This caused one demographer to note that the increase was “an unusually rapid improvement.”

It was “an usually rapid improvement,” but I’d like to argue that such rapid improvements will become “usual” for the foreseeable future. If one tracks the amazing rate of progress in biotechnology, genomics, stem cell research and nanotechnology; it is hard—barring a devastating calamity that kills thousands or millions of people—to envision how life expectancy will do anything but continue to increase at an accelerating rate.

At a minimum, given the existing pressure on such social programs as Social Security and Medicare, it seems only prudent that we should at least begin preparing for life expectancies in the neighborhood of 100 within the next few decades.

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Adopt a New Mind-Set

One of my favorite columnists, Janet Rae-Dupree, had an insightful article in her column a while back in theNew York Times. In it, she explained the difference between people with a “fixed mind-set” and those with a “growth mind-set.”

The difference can be summed up in how a person views the issue of talent. People with a “fixed mind-set” view talent as innate. Those with a “growth” perspective see talent as something that can grow over time.

What I found interesting was this paragraph:

”People who believe in the power of talent tend not to fulfill their potential because they’re so concerned with looking smart and not making mistakes. But people who believe that talent can be developed are the ones who really push, stretch, confront their own mistakes and learn from them.”

In a sense, the former are less likely to unlearn; while the latter have a more open perspective and are receptive to the idea that yesterday’s knowledge or dogma is no longer sufficient to address the new challenges of today.

The distinction is especially critical in hiring decisions. If you want to position your organization to compete successfully in today’s ever-changing and ever-accelerating world, you would do well to look not necessarily for the most talented but instead for those who are willing to unlearn and grow.

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Study Carneades

”I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another and that is: I say that I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the argument against my position better than the people who support it. I think only when I’ve reached that state am I qualified to speak.”

The above quote is from Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right-hand man for more than 40 years, and it offers wonderful advice for anyone wishing to stay open to the importance of—as well as the need for—unlearning.

Munger’s practice of arguing opposite sides of an issue is a practice that dates back thousands of years. As Nassim Taleb recounts in his wonderful book, Fooled by Randomness, in 155 B.C. the Greek philosopher, Carneades, traveled to Rome to argue against a fine which had been levied upon the Athenians.

With unmatched eloquence, Carneades sang the praises of Roman justice and convincingly swayed his audience to the merits of his position. Alas, that was not the point he was trying to make. The very next day Carneades dissected his previous arguments and proceeded to persuasively convince the same audience that the opposite was true.

So where did Carneades really stand on the issue? We don’t know. But that doesn’t matter because what he wanted to advocate was a doctrine of ‘uncertainty of knowledge.” Carneades, you see, was a “radical skeptic” and believed that all knowledge is impossible to know, except for the knowledge that all knowledge is impossible. Or, as Taleb writes, “[h]e stood all his life against arrogant dogma and belief in one sole truth.”

Carneades, though, recognized he lived in the real world and realized such a philosophy would not be readily accepted—or easily tolerated—by a society in need of rules and structure. He, therefore, advocated the idea that “probabilities of truth” could be established, and that these probabilities of truth might reasonably guide society.

The philosophy calls to mind a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald who once said: “The test of a first rate mind is the ability to hold two diametrically opposed ideas at the same time and still function.”

The ability to deal with ambiguity is not, however, a luxury reserved only for ancient philosophers and poets. In 1988, a study by the American Management Association found that the leadership characteristic most essential for steering organizations through troubled and complex times was “the ability to deal with ambiguity.”

One strategy for preparing for such ambiguity is, like Carneades, to know the opposing side of an argument was well as the supporting arguments. In this way, whenever new—and perhaps contradictory information—becomes available, the holder of the opinion (or position) can assimilate that information into their decision-making process. This, in turn, might make it easier to reverse a position in spite of having voiced support for it in the past. Why might this be so? Because the previous work in understanding the opposite view will have tilled and loosened the soil in which unlearning may take place.

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The Future of Reading

Reading. Most of us do it every day and it is so ingrained from such an early age that it is difficult to imagine that there is another way of doing it. Yet, there is.

Last summer, I had the opportunity to sit down with Adam Gordon, the vice president of marketing for Live Ink, to discuss his company’s revolutionary new technology—Live Ink.

Before explaining the technology, however, have you ever wondered why we read the way we do? That is, why do we read words in block text—such as you are doing at this very moment.

I am no historical scholar but I suspect the answer goes back thousands of years and it is partly dependent on writers need to make efficient use of limited resources. First, stone tablets; then papyrus and, ultimately, pulp-based paper.

In much the same way that the QWERTY keyboard has become the de facto way we write on computers —even though it has been demonstrated that there are more efficient and faster methods of typing -- the same can be said for how we read. But instead of dealing with one hundred years of established tradition—as in the case of QWERTY keyboard—printed text in block form has been around since Johannes Gutenberg printed off his first bible.

In the near future, however, the resistance to this long-held paradigm will begin to fade. I am not suggesting that printed block text will fade away overnight, but a convergence of technologies has now created an environment in which a different method of how we access the written word has been created.

Before I go any further let me first invite you to view a visual demonstration of Live Ink’s technology here. In its simpliest form, Live Ink displays text in shorter lines; breaks the text into grammatically meaningful segments; and then indents the text to cue the brain to key phrases within a given sentence.

What immediately appealed to me about Live Ink’s technology was the notion that written text as it was historically formatted was not optimized for the human mind. In other words, while it is true that we can read long line-by-line text that does not imply that it is necessarily the best way for the human eye to operate or for the human mind to comprehend written information.

Until recently there wasn’t much that could be done about this shortcoming. To make books compact and conserve limited resources, it helped to cram as many words onto a page as possible. Today, however, as ever more people access digital information on the Web; from their cellphones; Kindle-like electronic books; and, soon, other flexible electronic media, it will make sense to display information not as “we have always done it,” but rather in a manner that is easiest, fastest and allows us to retain the most information.

Company executives don’t make any claims that their technology improves the rate at which people read; they have, however, documented how their technology dramatically increases reading comprehension rates and eases strain on the eye.

I cannot often say with a strong conviction that I have seen the future; but, in the case of Live Ink, I truly believe I have seen the future of reading. Within a year or so, I fully expect my website—and thousands of others—to begin placing a widget on their site that will allow readers to access written information in a new, faster and more efficient manner.

(For the record, I am in no way involved with or have a financial interest in Live Ink.)

Related Posts by Jack Uldrich:

Paper Industry Needs to Turn a New Page

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A Final Lesson in Unlearning

”We simply do not know what the future holds.”—Peter Bernstein

Peter Bernstein, a best-selling author and risk management pioneer, passed away earlier this month. On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal ran a nice remembrance. I especially liked the final paragraph which read:

“Asked in 2004 to name the most important lesson he had to unlearn, he said: “That I knew what the future held, that you can figure this thing out. I’ve become increasingly humble about it over time and comfortable with that. You have to understand that being wrong is part of the [investing] process.”

It is a wonderful reminder of both the importance of unlearning—and the need to maintain some intellectual humility.

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The Future of Your Organs is in Mint-Condition

I was born in 1964. I tell you this because the other day I happened to see a 1964 Mustang in mint-condition. Perhaps because I had just gone out for a long-run and was feeling my age afterwards, I found myself wishing my body could be maintained at the same level as the ‘64 Mustang.

Well, I invite you to read this fascinating article on how much progress is being made in the field of tissue engineering because such a vision of “body” maintenance may soon be possible. Today, researchers are making new bladders and within a few years it is expected that it will be possible to grow new kidneys, livers, arteries and eventually even new hearts.

I don’t dismiss the societal, moral or ethical considerations of this technology but, as a professional futurist, I envision a day in the near future when many of us will be able to exchange body parts as easily as auto mechanics are today able to replace engine parts on a ‘64 Mustang—and keep that baby humming well down the road and into the future.

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