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Where's: the next major innovation coming from? Being alert for weak signals could clue you in.
A fundamental tenet of futurists, strategists, and planners everywhere is that the future can be envisioned to a useful degree of accuracy. But even a cursory glance at forecasts and events of the recent past reveals just how poorly prognosticators are performing.
Increasingly, the quest for accurate prediction of even the short term is difficult. And the reason is that, in spite of how we believe them to be, virtually no social, political, or business systems follow straight-line paths of predictability. Rather, they behave in nonlinear ways because they are chaotic, Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS). Much has been said about chaos theory, ranging from scholarly treatises to media sound bites. Most of these discussions encourage us to think metaphorically about the world around us as chaotic. The truth is that the metaphor is not enough. If we are to improve our ability to think about and plan for the future, we must accept the reality that, ultimately, all social systems are complex adaptive systems. These systems have five primary characteristics:
* sensitivity to small change,
* adaptability to changes in the environment,
* determinism, not randomness,
* complexity, and
* short-term forecasting possibilities and long-term forecasting futility.
As a result of these characteristics and the interplay among them, not only is it imprudent to rely on tools and techniques designed for prediction within a linear system, but it is increasingly futile to predict the future by, for example, extrapolating trends forward. The complex adaptive systems we must deal with do not behave the way we were taught. As a result, we must acquire new ways of thinking about and anticipating the future.
Understanding the five important characteristics of a complex adaptive system can help those involved in the study of the future open up the possibilities, broaden the range of scenarios, and improve the odds for successful anticipation.
Discerning the Future In Complex Adaptive Systems
We are all intelligent, educated people. We have learned certain truths: That forecasts of the weather are accurate and trustworthy. That species evolve logically to equilibrate with their environment. That the geopolitical division between the East and West is permanent. That markets trend...