“We have an addiction to prediction”

With ⁠Danny Crichton⁠ and ⁠Laurence Pevsner⁠ out on holiday, this is a special episode bringing together our independent Riskgaming designer ⁠Ian Curtiss⁠ and his friend ⁠Graham Norris⁠, an organizational psychologist, futurist and speaker. They talk about the psychology of the future, why we see our future selves as strangers, and cultural perspectives on future risk.

For more of their conversation, please subscribe to the Riskgaming podcast.

Ian Curtiss:

Thanks for joining us on Riskgaming. I'm excited to chat with you and delve deeper into your world of foresight psychology, what it means, and how you're solving everybody's problems around thinking about the future. How did you get into this?

Graham Norris:

Sure. Well, it started when I was in China. I lived in Asia for about 20 years, including the last eight years in Beijing, where I met you. While I was there, I was really taken by the rapid pace of change. I had started studying various aspects of psychology. And for my doctorate, I decided to get deep into how Chinese people were managing change. So the topic of my doctorate was really on change and adaptability in Chinese knowledge workers.

Continuing that intellectual journey, looking at change and adaptability, you end up looking at foresight because you kind of realize that you don't need to wait for the change to happen before you adapt to it. The bottom line is making decisions, because all decisions are about the future. And the better and more clearly we can think about the future, the better decisions we can make.

Ian Curtiss:

I'm sitting on the Lux Capital side of things, where everything is about the future. They try to get people who aren't thinking about the future to think about it. How would you speak to that gap?

Graham Norris:

There are a lot of people, some people anyway, who can naturally cast their minds into the future, have a good feeling — though there's always going to be uncertainty there — about what could happen, where they want to put themselves in the future, and what they want to make of it.

But futurists come at it from an angle where yes, indeed, people don't necessarily think so clearly about the future. And there are various kinds of futurists, of course. There are some who are looking at existential threats to humanity, so we're talking about really long-term things here, which would include global warming and nuclear winters and all these kinds of things, meteor strikes or anything else that can see the end of humanity.

And then there are more practical professional futurists who engage more in what we describe as strategic foresight, who go into companies to try to help them think more clearly about what could happen in the future. Companies can get in some kinds of processes where everything's safe and repeatable, but that means they're becoming blind to what could happen in the future. Or you find something that's successful, you just keep iterating on that and think you've understood the future. And of course, as soon as you think you've understood what's going on, then you're probably going to get blindsided.

Ian Curtiss:

All right, so I'm married to a future. I think this is going to be the way it is. Screw anybody else who disagrees with me. This happens a lot, right? People have strong emotional reactions when you challenge their prediction. Can you break this down for me? Why do people get so emotionally involved with these predictions that they have?

Graham Norris:

To have a sense of self: that we have an existence in the world. We also want a sense of continuity: that we were a person yesterday, we are a person today, and we're going to be something tomorrow. And if you then try to start breaking this apart and saying, "Well, actually, you weren't that person yesterday, and you are not going to be that person tomorrow," then you start to eat away at that sense of identity, that sense of self. We had our beliefs yesterday, and they're still valid today, and we expect they're still going to be valid tomorrow. When we look at forecasts or predictions about the future, people will really identify with them very closely.

I would say that there are two aspects of the future we should probably distinguish. So one aspect is the elements of the future that we can control, and the other is the bits that we can't control. If you are getting dogmatic about expectations around the things outside of your control, that's pretty unhealthy. You're going to be disappointed.

I think it is okay, though, to be somewhat obsessive about what you want to happen in the future as long as you're realistic about when to quit, when it's going off the rails. So keep being flexible about what your vision of the future is, whether it's still what you really want, and whether it's still practical or not.

Ian Curtiss:

This gets to the crux of my fascination with your work: You consider yourself an organizational psychologist. So you're not just working with individuals’ perception of themselves in the future, but an entire organization and the organization sees itself in the future.

Graham Norris:

An organizational psychologist really looks at how people operate in an organizational context. And so you might distinguish that from a clinical psychologist, who looks at mental illness. But when you're talking about the collective there, then what I think is important is that everybody has a sense of what they want from the future, we can call it a vision or an objective, and that at each level there are visions or objectives that will complement the ones above it and the ones below it.

I did this with a company we both worked at, the Chamber. And so for the team, we created a vision for what we wanted that team to achieve. That wasn't just for the team's benefit, it also had to tie into the organization's objectives while also supporting the individual objectives of the team members within that department.

When we lose sense of what we're trying to achieve in the future, then we can lose motivation and drift. But with that clear sense of what we want to achieve and the direction that we're heading in, that's how we maintain productivity and value to the organization.

Ian Curtiss:

So you give a vision to a team and you say, "This is where we got to go," but you've got to create the incentives to get everybody's daily work and weekly work to build towards that. So how do you do that in a sales team? How do you connect distant visions with people's daily lives?

Graham Norris:

Well, the trick is to connect what we're doing in the present with what we want to achieve in the future, rather than just getting lost in to-do lists or emails or watching cat videos or whatever. But you're absolutely right, a company culture is not something you dictate from the top. It's something you incentivize. It's the product, in fact, of how you set up the incentives. And so if you can, being able to incentivize people's long-term goals with what they're doing in the present would be the key.

Ian Curtiss:

I want to circle back to the psychology of it. Elsewhere, you've talked about parts of the brain that engage when you think of the future and how that plays out. Can you just walk me through of how the brain works when you're thinking about yourself in the future?

Graham Norris:

Well, there's all kinds of research about how we think about the future and how we perceive different timeframes. Perhaps the element that you are thinking of is the fact that, when we think of ourselves, it engages certain parts of the brain. And when we think about other people, it engages different parts of the brain. And when we think about ourselves in the future, it engages the parts of the brain that we normally use to think about other people. In other words, we think about ourselves in the future in the same way as we think about strangers or other people.

And of course, if you then ask yourself, "Okay, who do I care about more? Do I care about me, or do I care about this stranger in the future," you are often going to be caring a little bit more about me because I know me here and now.

And there are other effects as well. So there's a concept in psychology I call the Magoo effect. Mr. Magoo was a cartoon character who was very short-sighted, so he could only see things right in front of him. And it's the same for us when we look at time. Things in the present or the very near future seem concrete, real, and important, whereas things further off into the future seem more abstract and less tangible and therefore less important to us.

In turn, we can really misinterpret and undervalue the future.

Ian Curtiss:

As you know, at Lux we have a Riskgaming initiative where we build out game experiences to help executives wargame out potential future scenarios. A big part of that is getting people to experience a potential future where they have to make decisions and gain a deeper understanding of the trends and the trade-offs of a scenario.

Inevitably what happens when we build these games, though, is they become these complex systems themselves where all sorts of things can happen. You get different players, they bring their own individual personalities to the game. And almost every single time there's something that happens in the game that's like, "Oh, wow, I didn't expect that. I've never seen that before." Something emerges. And so this perspective of, "I'm trying to figure out the future," even in a game scenario that I've written, even I'm surprised. And this is three-hour scenario of the future, let alone actual reality.

There are so many things that can happen. How do you go about getting people to work through that, just that complexity?

Graham Norris:

I mean, we have what I describe as a psychological allergy to uncertainty, which repels us from thinking about the long-term future. There was research that shows that we find uncertainty very, very stressful. There was a study conducted at the University College London where they gave people electric shocks. Some people knew they were going to get an electric shock, some people knew they would not, and for other people it's 50-50. Those who knew they weren't going to get a shock were pretty relaxed. The most stressed were those who didn't know if they were going to get a shock or not.

The games that you make are a fantastic way to experience uncertainty in a safe way in a safe space and try to learn from it. The learnings are the fuel for your imagination in understanding the future, and that's how you base your decisions.

I mean, what's your takeaway in how people are psychologically grappling with the uncertainties and how they're dealing with it?

Ian Curtiss:

It’s funny you ask. I'm in Tokyo right now and ran a game here in Japan, and it was the most unique game that I've seen yet. Once I gave the players read out of the outcomes and how the game went, they said, "Oh yeah, this sounds like a very Japanese experience." It was an incredibly balanced, steady game. Very thoughtful, strategic, timely investments were made, versus I've seen other games, people come in with guns blazing, throwing out investments left and right in the first scene.

So people come in to these environments of uncertainty heavily biased by their culture, the society that they're growing up in, or the silo of education that they've risen the ranks in. Consistently policy-minded folks play one way, the tech executives play another way. The British games that I've seen played are played one way, and now the Japanese games another, and Americans one another way. How have you seen that play out, the kind of cultural perspectives on the future?

Graham Norris:

Well, you make an excellent point about the different perspectives on the future. I made generalizations about the psychology, which of course those studies tend to do. But of course, there is also a massive section of psychology that talks about individual differences and how we all see the world in different ways according to our personalities.

There's quite a famous tool from foresight called the Three Horizons, which looks at different perspectives on the future. So they talk about the managerial perspective, people who like the status quo and want to maintain that. And then there's a visionary perspective, or people who want to disrupt everything and create a totally different status quo, a totally different reality in the future. And then there's an entrepreneurial perspective, people who want to change, but want to do it in a practical way to see how they can make things substantially better. And that might be to realize the visions of the visionary people, or it could also be to maintain the status that the managerial people are interested in.

The important thing about looking at these different perspectives is not that there's good or bad perspectives on the future, but that we have different perspectives on the future. So the managerial perspective can give a sense of tradition, and the visionary perspective can give us a sense of hope, and that entrepreneurial perspective can give us a sense of practical progress. That's the real value when looking at collaborative futures, as we call it, collaborative foresight, that we bring together these different perspectives so that we can get a really good sense of not just what the future could be, but also a sense of continuity.

Ian Curtiss:

What's the next thing in the foresight psychology space for you?

Graham Norris:

I've been tinkering around with this idea for quite a while, but after I give talks, people often come up to me really wanting to know another level of granularity about how to do these things, how to escape the noise of the present so that they can cast their minds into the future and stay connected with what they want to achieve, their ambitions, their objectives, their goals. I'm thinking about writing a book or something that tells people in a little bit more practical detail about how to address the psychological challenges.

Foresight has a wonderful array of tools. But they don't necessarily specifically address the challenges people are facing, so the question is how to bring these down to a very practical level. I mean, scenarios are a fantastic example. Traditionally, scenarios are something that could take weeks, even months to produce, and they're very in-depth and in a lot of detail. And of course there's a lot of value in that, but there's also a great cost.

What I really do encourage people to do is to engage in scenario thinking, which is a much quicker and dirtier way of making scenarios, but it becomes a way of thinking. So I really do encourage people to just think another minute or another day or another week or whatever into the future by constantly asking yourself, "What could happen? Not just what do I think will happen, but what are the possibilities? What are the possible scenarios there? What are the probabilities?" Just by getting in the habit of doing that constantly, you then have a much better understanding about what could happen in the future.

Ian Curtiss:

Well, Graham, thank you so much for joining us. This was awesome, and I loved the conversation.