Developing a futures landscape for Aotearoa
An crucial step for developing better futures scenarios here may be in first having a more insightful view of the landscape of drivers of change.
Going from environmental scanning to scenarios is a large step in futures projects – both cognitively and in terms of time. Is it worth the effort? As I’ve discussed previously, in New Zealand organisations have often developed simplistic scenarios based on two uncertainties. These typically are minimalistic scenarios, lacking nuance and insightful appraisals.
There is plenty of discussion about the utility and effectiveness of scenarios. Good ones are provocative, challenge current assumptions, and deeply engage their audiences, especially if they haven’t been involved in their creation. But scenarios are just one output from a futures project. Those who benefit the most are usually those involved in the process.
Prior to developing scenarios you need a good understanding of what’s influencing change (or the lack of change). This requires more than just a light touch environmental scan, or a recitation of megatrends (artificial intelligence, climate change, population ageing, etc). It involves a deeper cross-cutting analysis of themes.
Andrew Curry calls this the “Futures Landscape”, and describing this landscape well is often critical to get senior leaders and decision-makers engaged in long-term thinking and strategic implications. The landscape helps you move from sense-making to assessing implications. It is also a “showing your workings” step, helping the audience understand how you arrived at the scenarios even if they reject them.
The landscape gives them a foundation to better interrogate and interpret the offered scenarios, and perhaps formulate alternatives. At a minimum a futures landscape should provide insights, rather than just lists or themes. Andrew talks about the futures landscape on Victoria Mulligan’s The Futures Workshop podcast.
A futures landscape can also be seen as a step in developing what Richard Rumelt calls “Good strategy”: a “diagnosis” where current complexities are simplified (but not oversimplified), and fundamentals (not just symptoms) are identified. Or distilling the essence of an issue, as I illustrated with Picasso’s abstractions of a bull.
Many futures projects discuss implications from environmental scans, but don’t really construct a “landscape.” For example, Sport NZ’s “Identifying the drivers and implications of change”, which I was involved in, identifies some themes from the scanning. However, as Curry defines it, a futures landscape has more rigour. It explicitly looks at sub-systems within the system of interest and includes some analyses of positive and negative causal loops within the sub-systems, or “domains.” Four to seven domains is probably feasible for a futures project.
In this post I start developing a landscape for Aotearoa, focusing on key drivers of change. In the next post, I’ll build on that to develop a tentative futures landscape.
A UK example of a futures landscape
A recent example of a futures landscape that Curry points to is a UK report that looked at domains associated with influencing more healthy eating. The positive and negative loops in one of the domains “Climate ready foods” is shown below, with negative feedback loops tending to reinforce the current situation, and positive loops facilitating a more desirable future.
It isn’t a detailed systems analysis (especially since the report doesn’t show how the different domains interact with each other). But it helps to show how some of the drivers influence (or don’t) others, so participants and readers can develop more insightful implications.
The “Climate ready foods” domain that came out of this sub-system analysis was:
“As environmental pressures come to a head, will the food system adapt to be more resilient to shocks in an equitable way? Or will households with lower incomes face reduced access to fresh food, and be left behind in the transition to nutritious meat alternatives and sustainable fresh food?”
Probable and preferred food futures were then developed based on this and the five other domains.
Aotearoa is lacking in futures landscapes
For Aotearoa New Zealand, as far as I can tell we don’t have good publicly available futures landscapes. Which is a contributor, I think, to having limited and relatively simple scenarios. In much of the futures discussion here we are quick to jump to a particular issue - productivity, the environment, farming, population, etc - or look at that issue too narrowly. It would be useful to take a broader and deeper look at the terrain so we can develop, and stimulate, better quality scenarios.
So, how does part of the futures landscape look for Aotearoa? In this post I make a preliminary effort at defining some of the domains. Though more aptly they could be called “terrains” to keep to the landscape metaphor. Rather than focusing on a specific sector or topic, I’ve taken a high-level view of trends, developments, and other factors that could influence how the country generally develops over the next few decades, for better or worse. My focus question is:
For a nation that aspires to be wealthy (economically, socially, and environmentally), equitable, sustainable, and a great place to live and work, what needs our attention in a more systemic way, rather than fiddling at the edges or on fragments of the whole?
A multitude of factors influencing change in Aotearoa
Before developing the landscape, we need to consider relevant drivers (and resistors) of change. These are what we presume will have important influences on how the future emerges. For Aotearoa New Zealand there are many potential ones. I’ve identified over 50, based on my ongoing scanning and previous work for clients. A selection of these is shown below. Depending on your specific futures focus, some may be more or less relevant, and additional ones introduced. There can be debate about which category to include drivers in, but it’s more important to capture influential ones than fret too much over categorisation.
Some fundamental features of Aotearoa
Important general influences on our country’s future are linked to our geography, population, culture, economic productivity, education, and political structures and practice.
For example, geography has always shaped our lifestyles, outlook, and activities. Aotearoa has two geographic realities: we are quite isolated from the rest of the world, and we mostly inhabit two long narrow mountainous islands.
The former makes international engagement and trade more expensive and/or difficult (eg, through long supply chains and distance to and from key markets). The latter has resulted in a dispersed population (with a few relatively high density areas), poor connectivity between some regions, and expensive infrastructure.
On the other hand, our relative isolation makes border protection and security easier in comparison with other nations. Our southerly latitude and expansive oceans mean that we’ll be unlikely to experience the weather extremes of other places.
Some have suggested that our isolation made us more resourceful and self-reliant, exemplified by the “number eight wire” mentality. Our isolation may have also contributed to us becoming too attached to “make do” approaches and a focus on small local problems, ignoring more innovative and economically successful larger opportunities.
A make do approach seems less dominant now though, with innovative and globally successful companies like Animation Research, Wētā Workshop, Rocket Lab, Dawn Aerospace, Space Operations NZ Ltd, Alstef Group, and America’s Cup Team NZ boat designers & builders.
Two decades ago Phil McCann highlighted the opportunities and challenges such “economic geography” creates for the country:
“New Zealand has a rather unusual geographical and social structure which can be turned to its own competitive advantage. New Zealand has both a highly educated labour force and low population level. Potentially, this combination provides for a much higher level of inter-personal connectedness than is possible in high population societies where individuals are largely anonymous. This can allow local economic growth to be fostered via slightly different mechanisms than orthodox agglomeration arguments would imply.”
Hendy & Sissons also later re-emphasised the importance of improving connectivity across the population so we act like a virtual “city of 5 million” to approach the scale of more innovative regions elsewhere. Not much has yet been done to meaningfully address this opportunity.
New Zealand’s economic productivity has fallen for decades and we lag behind our former equals. Numerous reports into the issue, and a Productivity Commission (now shut down), have highlighted over the years various contributors to this poor performance. But still we fall.
The latest report, from the International Monetary Fund, concludes that a big part of our economic underperformance is not an accident. Financial incentives favour start-up firms that are less capital intensive as they grow - such as real estate and financial companies. Whereas more productive countries make it easier for more innovative higher performing companies in IT and professional & technical services to mature and flourish.
The importance of culture can be easily overlooked, and harder to change than financial incentives. A shared culture creates a set of common beliefs, values, behaviours and practices that help connect and motivate people. The scale and rapid pace of social, technological, and environmental challenges and changes risks further fracturing our communities into siloed and intolerant sub-cultures. Despite the concept of Aotearoa becoming a “bicultural nation” having strong support (though perhaps with a lack of clarity or consistency of what is meant), there is also a significant faction opposing that and (as elsewhere) what are viewed as more progressive values.
Our central and local politics and political structures are at increasing risk of failing to serve the populace and local communities. Journalist Andrea Vance opines that central government politics is polarising quickly, shifting away from consensus and compromise. Central government is dictating more to Councils about what they should be focused on, often without providing the resources and processes to undertake this well. Local government remains chronically underfunded, and their collective voice is weakening as some councils pull out of Local Government NZ because of political differences.
Developing a tentative landscape
In the next post I’ll make a start in describing some of the terrains that may make up our futures landscape.