This week FutureMonitor™ begins to go "live" with invitations extended to the 1400 respondents to the Inaugural FM Global Trends Survey. The site and community remain in highly experimental, beta form--if you've visited before, you'll notice numerous revisions this week, and will see many more in weeks and months to come.

Beta, of course, means we get a lot of excellent feedback and hear a lot of great questions. One question we get asked often is, "Where did you get the idea for FutureMonitor in the first place?" Or, posed differently: How did the idea end up turning into what we see? The question isn't surprising. Wisely, people love origins stories, partly for what they explain about the specific thing being invented, but mostly because they always tell us something about how all things get invented--about how their birth involves both serendipity and deliberation. They help explain to us how new things get made.

Here, then, is how this particular new thing got made. (Or started getting made, anyway, since the "making" continues at full throttle.) Chris Meyer, chief executive of Monitor Networks, is the first mover in FutureMonitor's history--the man whose idea it is. So we asked him to describe what led to the inspiration. This is what he wrote:

Why Future Monitor?

 

In 1990, I had a boss, Walker Lewis, who wanted to fire me. (Before he could, though, he left Mercer Management Consulting to become CEO of Avon, where he wanted to fire all the Avon ladies—until the Board chose them over him. Now he’s an independent investor, with no one to fire.) I was running the consulting practice I had founded at Mercer to address strategic challenges in the information industries. Walker didn't think I was good enough at foreseeing how telecom deregulation, the growth of the internet, the development of wireless networks, the consolidation of media companies, the deployment of digital technologies, the explosive growth of data traffic, the creation of a new bottleneck (the set-top box),  and the battle between telcos and cable companies were going to interact and play out in the next few years, so he'd concluded I had no vision for my business. He explained to me that while he thought I did great analysis of the next move, and  had good insights into the long-term future, I was limited by my inability to understand the future's most critical period--the intermediate one.

 

Seven years later, in 1997, I was directing Ernst & Young’s Center for Business Innovation (CBI), which identified and analyzed trends in the business world to help E&Y develop the right new consulting capabilities to meet future client needs. The leader of E&Y’s  North American consulting practice came to me and said something like, “It’s great having these long term ideas, and I’m sure the services will be powerful, but if only our account teams had something about what’s going to be important 24 months from now, well then we could really get our clients’ attention.” I promised him that we’d produce something for him--I figured if we were producing ideas with a 5-year horizon, we just had to look at what we’d said 3 years earlier to give him the 2-year forecast.

 

Just kidding. What we really did was to harness the conversations that our 20 or so researchers were having all the time. Each of them was in contact with a wide variety of business practitioners, academics, writers, and specialized experts, discussing what they were seeing.  We’d get ourselves together, nominate candidate trends and argue about which of them were plausible, which were the most important, which would really make a difference in two years’ time. The ideas would morph and recombine and over about six weeks we’d develop a list of half a dozen or a dozen, research them to provide supporting data, and post on our website the resulting presentation.  We did this every six months, and the material became popular—the presentations were downloaded tens of thousands of times.

 

These two stories say the same thing: understanding the near-term future in times of rapid change is both supremely difficult and crucially valuable. Describing the immediate future is easy: not too much can change, and the disciplines economists call “comparative statics”—if this factor changes x percent, something else will change y percent—work pretty well. The distant future, too, is easier to project than some think, because you can confidently see how powerful forces will have their way--China will become the world’s largest economy, overcapacity in the auto industry will lead to industry consolidation. But the path by which the incremental adjustments add up to long-term changes is a chaotic system, and in its detail unpredictable. So, what’s the best you can do?

 

In the past five years a lot has been learned about the idea that, in many cases, the best estimate of reality is obtained by combining the opinions of a diverse, distributed, independent group of people.  Hewlett-Packard has been using “prediction markets” to provide sales forecasts of printers superior to what they had been able to develop by the usual methods; the Iowa Electronic Market has been using similar techniques to predict the outcomes of Congressional races better than politicos have been able to do; and Jim Surowiecki, in his book “The Wisdom of Crowds,”*  describes group successes ranging from estimating the number of jelly beans in a Brobdingnagian jar to locating a sunken submarine. 

 

While I was at the CBI I wrote a book, It’s Alive, that discussed the application of evolution algorithms to business. It turns out that these models have a lot to do with collective intelligence. As we learned about these techniques, we realized that the way we’d created our two-year forecast at the CBI was incorporating these ideas in an informal way--each of the 20 contributors was gathering independent, distributed information from a diverse group, and then we were collectively recombining the ideas to get our result.  Note: “recombining,” not “averaging.”  An important element of success is the opportunity for members of the crowd to learn from one another, evaluate the community’s ideas, and watch the areas of agreement and disagreement.

 

In hindsight, it turns out the process worked pretty well. But we have some new and better ideas.  First, we’ve codified the It’s Alive  thinking about how the conversation works to produce a good collective result: it depends on three factors:

• The diversity of the inputs--the wider the pool in terms of experience, geography, education, profession, age, point of view, etc., the better chance the community has of not missing developments that could be important
• The opportunity for recombination--the more members of the community can learn from one another, the more the conversation will simulate what will happen in the real world as the the long term forces shaping the future interact
• The presence of selective pressure--a diverse community has the ability to identify the strengths and weaknesses of a given idea from an infinite set of angles, and the stature of each idea rises and falls as a result, whether the evaluation is conversational or, as in prediction markets, quantitative.

Second, as we considered how best to implement these abstractions, two things happened—the task got harder, but the tools got better and more available. I understood the magnitude of the challenge when I was invited to speak at the 2003 APEC CEO Conference in Bangkok—this is the business side of the APEC summit, at which the leaders of the 26 Asia-Pacific nations sign trade pacts, and take time out to talk to the CEO group. (This, I must tell you, is the right way to visit Bangkok—the famous traffic and pollution were ameliorated by the closing of schools and government offices so, you know, motorcades can get around.)  Surprise number one: I’d been to Asia more than a few times, to Singapore, Beijing, KL, Bangkok, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand--not an old hand, but, I thought, not naïve.  Imagine my surprise to notice that Chile is a Pacific-rim country. And Russia. Canada. Peru. Who knew?  The thought occurred to me: who’s not here?  Answer: Europe, located diametrically through the core of the earth.  Surprise number two: Hu Jintao shows up and talks about trade. Vladimir Putin shows up and talks about trade. George Bush doesn’t show up—though he’s in town—and Colin Powell, who does, doesn’t talk about trade; he talks about container security.

 

So: where is the future coming from? Not the G8 countries. The sources of the new ideas that will change the path of the global economy are clearly far from the economies we at Monitor Networks know best.  FutureMonitor cannot include the diversity of thinking it needs to work without reaching a broad global audience. Happily, the technologies of connectivity have become so widespread (nowhere more than in Asia) can make it practical to do so.

 

So the design of FutureMonitor pays attention to diversity, recombination, and selective pressure in ways that have not been practical before. First, we are maximizing diversity by creating a Global Sensing Network, inviting people from all over the world to contribute their thinking on line.  Instead of the 20 CBI researchers, we will have at least 20 partners, nodes on our network who will spread the request to join the FutureMonitor community all over the world. The Financial Times is collaborating with us in this effort, as are regional nodes like the Management Center of Turkey.

 

Second, we are taking advantage of a variety of web-based technologies that have become much more readily available, including predictive markets, webcasts, surveys, and newer capabilities like parsers and graphical interfaces to help the community see quickly what’s going on in a broad and complicated conversation.  This is all designed to increase participation and hence recombination of ideas, and then, in later stages, to enable community-based evolution--selective pressure applied by the Global Sensing Network.

 

Third, we don’t believe that we understand the process or the community well enough to think that it can be totally self-organized. So we’ve begun building an editorial and design capability to moderate the overall conversation and program the experience of belonging to the FutureMonitor community.

 

And finally, we recognize that the development of effective web-based communities is a phenomenon advancing at amazing speed right now, marked by exciting novelty and steady progress.  We have a challenge to monitor what’s new and adopt what can help with the task at hand--the creed of WorkNets is that the design of the network stems from the work, not the technology--without getting distracted by new and fascinating capabilities. We hope that participants in FutureMonitor will not only contribute to and benefit from the best way yet devised to understand the near-term future, but, secondarily, will see first hand the power of well-managed human networks as network technologies evolve.

 

And if it doesn’t work, I can still be an Avon Lady.

 

Chris Meyer

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*Book citation

(w/apologies to W. Churchill and gratitude to FM network charter members)

It’s probably just us, but we’re incapable of getting any long project off the ground without those famous words of Churchill’s looping in our head—“This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” And here at FutureMonitor we can’t help looking for that marker, that end of the beginning. That’s where we are, right? The end of the beginning?

But then we look around and realize, Nah, it’s only the beginning of the beginning, friends. Just the start. We’re not even sure what the end of the beginning will look like.

Good thing, then, that we love beginnings. We love the bit that our pal, poet Billy Collins, calls “the first part / where the wheels begin to turn / where the elevator begins its ascent / before the doors lurch apart.”*

Friends, we sure hope you like beginnings, too. Especially since you’ve joined us now, in full-on, open-kimono, beta mode. You’re looking at an ambitious experiment. Your participation and feedback over this stretch (wide launch of FutureMonitor will come in early 2006), will go far toward helping us all improve what’s here and build the community we can all benefit from.

There’s much written elsewhere on the site about what FutureMonitor is and what it aims to provide to members (see especially the “User’s Guide to FutureMonitor” discussion forum and the “About FutureMonitor” page accessible through a link at the top of every page). But here is the core idea:

WHAT FUTUREMONITOR IS FOR

FutureMonitor is an attempt to do two things simultaneously and interdependently:

     1) Identify and make sense of the trends that will most powerfully affect business in the near-term future, in order to help managers and leaders make more confident strategic decisions; and,

     2) Identify and explore those trends by capitalizing on the predictive acumen of collective, network intelligence—the wisdom of crowds. (In the process, FutureMonitor will push the art and science of applied collective intelligence—how to prompt it, how to aggregate and distill it—so that managers can see how to make use of it in their own organizations.)

From FutureMonitor you can expect to get ideas and insights about what business will be facing in the near-term future—threats, opportunities, risks, new conditions in the business environment. Also you’ll get the chance to enter discussions and shape them—testing your own ideas maybe, or posing questions that concern you. Lastly, you’ll get to see the networked collective intelligence experiment underway, and learn as we do what works, what doesn’t, and how network approaches can be applied.

How can you join in? Besides just reading and learning, which should be benefit enough, you can help build the FutureMonitor discussion (and thus improve its output) by thinking about what you can offer in four ways:

     1) Think in terms of raw, unanalyzed “evidence” of change, and post what you notice. You can think in terms of looming problems or opportunities, or simply in terms of phenomena that raise questions in your mind. Evidence of all kinds—from all points of view—is exactly what the sensing network needs in order to be effective. It is the fuel.

     2) Contribute ideas/questions that are more synthesized. Post your notions of what business will face—even maybe, how business might capitalize on coming changes or solve coming problems. Call on, and draw attention to, whatever information you have that can add to the stew. Then others will have intelligence to respond to and debate (and learn from).

     3) Think very specifically about your own business/organization and post notes about its/your experience. What problems and/or opportunities do you think it will be facing soon? In response to the observations posted by others about what they’re seeing/encountering, how might your experience offer new light or potential actions and solutions?

     4) Contribute and post in some fourth way that we haven’t even imagined yet (but you will). There are no rules, except for the obvious ones about how to conduct a civil, useful discussion.

A LAST THING: HOW BETA WILL BE DIFFERENT

If FutureMonitor is an experiment—and it is—it’s really an experiment right now during the beta launch period. (The wide launch to some 10,000 selected invitees won’t occur until later in the winter.) FutureMonitor is designed to be fueled by its members—by the observations and insights of the widespread sensing network. Since the network hasn’t been active yet, the content at launch is not always a good reflection of what the site’s content later will be. Much of what you’ll find for now is derived from the FM Trend Survey (not a bad stand-in for the kind of participation that the site as whole will eventually host), and it’s interesting and provocative. It’s just not adequately representative of the robustness that will come with activity.

We’re laying our experiment wide open, inviting charter network members and beta-period visitors into it transparently. It’s the best way, we think, for us all to grow FutureMonitor and make it do what we need.

SO, PLEASE do give us feedback either here in the blog comment space or over in the “Beta” forum. Or email us. We love mail.

Complain, suggest, criticize, question. We, as well as your fellow network members, will be grateful.

Thank you for joining us.

Michael Hopkins

* From the extraordinary poem, “Aristotle,” by former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins. If you’d like you can read the entire poem here.