FUTURE AS POSSIBILlTY

Time, in the Western world, has been as an arrow going from a past into a future. This directionality of time suggests a relationship between the past and the future which enable us to forecast and plan. Like most of the scientific ideas of our heritage, this one is useful for a certain scale of things. Also like most of this scientific heritage, we are discovering that there are scales and conditions where the linear idea is not so useful. In most of the past century or more, the pace of change has been so slow that seeing time as a linear directional flow could be sufficiently useful. The extension of the past into the future with variation was sufficient for effective strategy.

The corporate giants of America remained dominant by betting that more of the same only better and cheaper would succeed. And it did. IBM need only continue to refine its product and its service. Avon only needed more sales people and the constant application of its formula of success. The only requirement of Sears was to continue to sell basic goods to middle America. Midas Muffler only needed to keep manufacturing. IBM, Avon and Sears required negative results to consider significant change and each is still largely trapped in old interpretations of its environment and its business. Midas saw the structure of the future and changed its major form of doing business-into a franchise system-long before the idea was thought of by others. Midas transformed from thinking of itself as a manufacturer to thinking of itself as a marketing business.

In the historically predictable environment of recent decades, strategy became an exercise in prediction and planning. It was not always so. In other times and other views of time, strategy was a matter of knowing the questions to ask and a matter of answering questions at a depth which provided unique understanding of what was occurring. Strategists of the past were required to be profound thinkers. Having information was not enough. Planning was peripheral. Depth of understanding was everything.

Strategy is returning to its former position of importance and demanding rigour. The rate of change in the world is destroying the ability to predict by casting forward from the past. The kind of change is demanding new ways of looking, new ways of thinking and new ways of understanding temporality and change. Visa International, Connor Peripherals, Microsoft and that handful of companies which have come from nowhere to dominance did not arrive there by strategies which depended on a corporate past nor the accepted strategies of their industries. Nor did Japan burst on the scene based on strategies which were extensions of the past.

To understand the rate of change that is occurring, we must understand something of the history of ideas that are the source of the technology that is changing so rapidly. The rate of change in human affairs is the result of new thinking. The rate of change of new technology and the changes it is causing are not merely a faster version of what has always been occurring. Technology changes are what have been happening all along but our ideas of change itself have changed along with the thinking that is at the heart of the explosion of the technology change. Lyotard said that society is now a "society of computers, information, scientific knowledge, and rapid change due to new advances in science and technology."²

The cause and effect of linearity is giving way to a new cause and effect. Even the multi-linear cause and effect of dynamic systems theory is insufficient. Emergence is the cause and effect of complex adaptive systems ³ where time is a function of possibility rather than a mere extension of the past. We thought, consistent with a linear time and the linear cause and effect that goes with it, that if we had enough information about the past then we could predict the future. Foresight was a matter of quantity and quality of information.

The past, however, is an interpretation with an ever widening cone of variation extended back from the present moment. This cone is constituted of events and interpretations which expands backwards from the current moment or current interpretation. The future is an ever widening cone of possibility extended forward from the present moment. There is no future waiting to happen. There are probabilities which are related to other current moments for which we cannot have total information but the further "ahead" we project, the more of these are likely to dramatically disrupt any extension of our own current moment and our extensions of the past. The greater influence on the future that will happen are those other interpretations being made right now by other entities similar to ourselves.

You can project your own life ahead for a short time with great confidence except for the possibility that some event-a bomb planted in the next room without your knowledge or a driver already on the way who will crash into you or a loved one or an undiagnosed health condition that is about to activate - -already in motion will affect that projection. The affairs of nature and society are no less disruptive. The Chinese and the ex-Soviets were not prepared for what happened. The Bosnians and the Serbs couldn't see what was going to happen. IBM didn't see the potential impact of the PC. GM didn't predict the Honda. America didn't see the Japanese as competitors. In each of these cases, there was no shortage of strategists present- at least in American corporate and political life.

What can be predicted in a linear cause and effect approach is an extension of the past. In other words, we can predict with accuracy what will persist and the kinds of relatively minor changes that can be expected in those things that we expect to persist. The kind of change that we can predict is alterations of existing things or the end of the existence of a thing. The end of the serial on radio was predictable as competing mediums were developed. The end of the hula hoop was predictable as a trivial item. The improvements in technology for radios, engines, automobiles, aeroplanes and kitchen appliances were all predictable in time. Those things that are predictable by "anybody"-even though many fail to see them in time-are because the structure of the future is more or less obvious at all times.

I once saw an interview with a typesetter who had just lost his job to a computer based system. He was angry, hurt and bewildered. His genuine surprise tugged emotion from the hardest heart. Yet, it took nothing more than a small awareness to know that computers had been taking over jobs such as his for about 10 years. The source of his bewilderment was his lack of connection to the structures of the future that were in place long before the first typesetting job was lost let alone his own job.

The explosion of computers, FAX, Internet and fibre optics was not predictable. Even less predictable was their impact on areas previously little affected by information and communication. The huge losses of IBM and Sears as well as the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin wall were not predictable. Neither the strategists and executives of these companies and countries nor the CIA managed to predict the events. Those concerned-those whose real commitments made it imperative to predict-failed to predict what in hindsight were predictable. (Saying these were not predictable is a pragmatic statement. That is, in retrospect they were predictable, a few people did predict them, but the fact was that the predictors could not be heard and the normal means of prediction failed to produce successful action.) The foresight to predict these things existed but was so little shared that those who possessed it could not get listened to.

A major challenge of prediction for the day is to identify what organizational forms will dominate the next few decades and what forms will arise from those. New organizational forms are now being generated at a pace that has never been seen in the past and we cannot predict what forms will come to dominate corporate life. Yet our survival depends on successful action in this area.

The structure of the future for new organizational principles and forms is partially already here in the technologies of computers and communication. It is also in theories and research being done in interpretative philosophy and complexity. The strategic advantage of the next couple of decades will turn out to have been gained by those who say that the major questions have to do with organization. And the time for action in that arena is now.

© 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd, International Journal of Strategic Management, Long Range Planning