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    NEXT: Perpendicular Change

    If the experience of the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that change is perpendicular. The pandemic changed everything overnight, upending our beliefs about how the future was going to progress. From early reports of a new respiratory illness in Wuhan in January 2020, all of a sudden the economy was shut down by April. Change at a right angle to the trendline: that is perpendicular change. What we have learned over the last two years is that the unexpected deviation from the trendline is not the exception, but the rule: the way the world actually operates.  

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    Alvin Toffler popularized the concept of “future shock” in the 1970s, meaning the stress caused by experiencing “too much change in too short a time,” and ever since we are accustomed to describing the future as one of “rapid change.” According to a recent book, the future is one of “exponential change.” Both of these views assume that the path toward the future is a straight line, the difference being either its speed, acceleration or velocity, but a smooth line of progress nevertheless.  

    But if the pandemic and the recent Russo-Ukrainian war has taught us anything, it is that change is best understood as being unexpected and context-altering. Events seem to be moving along a predictable trend line, when suddenly those events move at a right angle to the expected direction of change. The economy was humming along at a brisk pace: until it wasn’t. China was the great geopolitical concern for the U.S., until it wasn’t.  

    Thus, it is not the pace of change or the acceleration of change that we must prepare for: it is the unexpected change that must guide our strategic thinking.  

    Graph provided by David Staley

    I’ve developed a tool called “scenario space” that I use in my futuring work. Along one axis is an assessment of the probability of a given scenario occurring. Along the other axis, a measure of the impact of that scenario. This is a tool for ordering one’s perceptions about the future. As such, a given scenario can move around the scenario space given new information or changes in our assessment of that information.  

    Graph provided by David Staley

    In 2003, Muqtada al-Sadr founded the Mahdi Army, considered by the US Army to be one of the most dangerous groups in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. Imagine at the time I had written a scenario like this:

    “The Mahdi Army will lay down its arms, will be guided by Shiite spirituality instead of anti-American militancy, and will focus on education and social programs.”  

    Such a scenario would have been located in the upper left of the scenario space: very high impact, but very low probability of the scenario actually occurring. Indeed, such a scenario of the future would have appeared absurd to most observers.

    And yet, that is precisely what did occur in 2008. That is, the scenario moved perpendicularly in the scenario space, from the upper left to the upper right of the diagram. The direction of change was orthogonal to what was expected.   

    In 2004, the Pew Research Center found that 60% of Americans opposed same-sex marriage, compared to 31% who supported it. But by 2019, those numbers had flipped, with 61% supporting same sex marriage and 31% opposing it, representing a dramatic shift in public opinion. Perpendicular change need not be driven by technology: indeed, social mood can also exhibit this unexpected and divergent shift in the direction of change.  

    Perpendicular change is not the same thing as a Black Swan event, the concept developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. A Black Swan is an unforeseen scenario, usually one with dramatic consequences. A Black Swan is unforeseen because it is inconceivable, beyond our experience and thus incapable of even being imagined. The term comes from the European encounter with an actual black swan for the first time in the 17th century, when European colonists first encountered one in Australia. At the time, Europeans understood all swans to be white in color, and indeed had an ancient expression—”a rare bird in the lands and very much like a black swan”—that showed that Europeans could not even conceive that there could exist such a thing as a black swan.  

    Perpendicular change is not the same as a Black Swan because the scenario can be conceived—all good futurists have this capacity to imagine the seemingly unimaginable—but what is being imagined is the unexpected. Imagine if I were to write this scenario:  

    “By 2030 the world’s governments, multinational corporations and NGOs have coordinated their response to climate change such that CO2 levels have started dropping.”  

    At present, that scenario reads as hopeful, quixotic maybe, but ultimately improbable, not unlike the Mahdi Army scenario. This is not to say that the scenario will happen, or that there isn’t significant work that must accomplished for the scenario to have a chance of occurring. It is to say, however, that unexpected change on the order of solving climate change might be more common than we might imagine.   

    How do we go about anticipating perpendicular change? First, listen for the common narratives we tell about the future, and especially the unexamined assumptions upon which these narratives are based. Then, write a scenario that alters this narrative about the future.  Residents of Central Ohio are already anticipating the arrival of the Intel chip plant, and are considering future scenarios about the beneficial economic impact for the region. Thinking in terms of perpendicular change would mean imagining a scenario where Intel scraps their plans. I am not, of course, wishing for such a scenario to occur, far from it. I am, rather, practicing the imaginative capacity necessary to avoid being blindsided by change. Thinking perpendicularly means never having to say “I didn’t see that coming!”  

    The point is not to be lulled by a false sense of certainty about the future. The goal of thinking perpendicularly is not to generate more accurate predictions, but rather to develop the capacity to anticipate and be prepared for the unexpected.  

    David Staley is an associate professor of history, design, and educational studies at The Ohio State University. He is host of the “Voices of Excellence” podcast and is president of Columbus Futurists. 

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    David Staley
    David Staley
    David Staley is president of Columbus Futurists and a professor of history, design and educational studies at The Ohio State University. He is the host of CreativeMornings Columbus.
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