CHANGE

Identifying and Monitoring Change

Being futures fluent means being actively interested in change. Most people are merely aware of change -- and often disgruntled about it. Futures fluency requires a perspective which celebrates change. Not uncritically; change can erect barricades to opportunities and often destroys much of what we value in our traditions. But it also creates wholly new opportunities and new networks of social relations. Whether negative or positive, change challenges us to learn, adapt, create, grow, and reconsider and redefine ourselves. Recognizing and reflecting on change and its implications allows us to critique not only external realities but also our own internal landscapes.

The rhythms and paces of reality are many. Braudel began his history of the Mediterranean by looking at the rhythms of events in geological time. Slightly faster paced are climatological cycles like the ice age-and-interval cycle: we are now close to the end of an interval -- "close" being "within a thousand years."

Rhythms in the planet are also linked to rhythms in the solar system. A prime example is the eleven-year sunspot cycle, critical to humanity ever since we domesticated food crops, as it disrupts accustomed weather patterns. The sunspot cycle is even more critical to the information age, as heightened sunspot activity interferes with broadcast transmissions.

Shifting perspective from massive systems with monumental inertia to smaller, more reactive systems like single separate species, the pace of the rhythms we observe quickens. The shorter cycles and more frenetic rhythms of systems such as plant and animal populations, the economy, women's fashions, and our individual bodies produce a greater amount of observable data in smaller time intervals. This aids analysis, although it does not necessarily improve our ability to forecast events along these cycles with precision.

All of these ongoing rhythms are the baseline data for the first element of futures fluency: identifying and monitoring change. In order to notice changes occurring, you must first know how things used to be. Thus the beginning of futures fluency is a wide-ranging interest in historical patterns. Identifying change requires monitoring four forms of change: cycles, trends, emerging issues, and wild card events. Each varies in shape, pace, and magnitude of change. Examples are presented in Table 1.

Table 1. Identifying and Monitoring Different Types of Change

IDENTIFY/ MONITOR	SHAPE	EXAMPLES	PACE	MAGNITUDE	LOCATION OF DATA (timeline)
cycles		ice ages rise & fall of empires sunspots El Nino/La Nina	geologic centuries decades decades	global hemispheric astronomical hemispheric	from prehistory history present
trends		global warming transport speed %age of women employed	centuries accelerating decades	global expanding varies by site	prehistory history present
emerging issues		60's:environmentalism 70's:personal computer use 80's:virtual reality	accelerating	expanding	present
wildcards		AIDS Berlin Wall Exxon Valdez Dissolution of USSR	immediate	global Europe/U.S. U.S. global	future

The American Heritage Dictionary defines a cycle as "1. A time interval in which a characteristic, esp. a regularly repeated, event or sequence of events occurs." One of the earliest understandings of the future emerges from seasonal cycles. But data exist now on a wide variety of cycles: astronomic, climatic, political, social, and economic. Cycles have unique signatures in terms of shape (wave pattern), pace at which they complete (periodicity), and magnitude of effects. Perturbations in these characteristics hallmark change occurring in a cycle. If winter in the temperate zone is longer, that is a perturbation in the seasonal cycle which might cause a perturbation in the ice age-and-interval cycle.

El Nino/La Nino events (a cycle often referred to as the "El Nino-Southern Oscillation") occur about twice a decade, and their strongest immediate effects are hemispheric in magnitude: the Pacific Basin and Rim. We have been intensively gathering data on this cycle since the 1960's. In the decades to come new high-technology observation systems will supply real-time oceanographic and atmospheric data to monitor its pattern. In an intensified effort to understand this cycle, researchers are backtracking to interpret ever-earlier anecdotal and historical data. The more we hone our understanding of this cycle, the better we will be at identifying changes to it. These changes could in turn identify other perturbations among the world's systems.

Trends, defined generally as "general inclinations or tendencies," are in analytical usage directions of change in one variable over time. Trend analysis monitors changes in chosen variables from the past into the present, focussing on the cumulative tendency of the change over and above any seasonal cycles or statistical "noise" generated by unique events. In addition, trend extrapolation -- mathematically modelling the continuation of a trend past our last current data point out into the future -- allows us to speculate on the extremes of change possible for the variable in question. Observing trends requires collecting quantifiable data: it must be possible to operationalize a phenomenon before monitoring its trend. Trend analysis is the foundation for baseline information on change.

Trends occur in several basic "families": 1) things stay the same; 2) things increase; 3) things increase and then level out or decrease; 4) things decrease; and 5) things decrease and then level out or increase. Economists develop sophisticated, complex arrangements of algorithms which direct computers to manipulate data such that charts portraying one or another of these results emerge from printers. For the sake of imaging alternative possible futures, magic markers and graph paper work just as well.

Identifying and monitoring trends of change requires us to investigate the current and past states of any phenomenon whose possible futures we wish to consider. Not forecast; none of the varieties of trend extrapolation can "predict the future." But all of them can augment how well and widely we question patterns of change:

What will be the consequences if a given trend continues? if it plateaus or accelerates? What forces contribute to the trend, and how might those forces change? Can we influence this trend, and if so, how?

Trend analysis links our ability to observe change with our ability to plan it.

In order to plan intended change we must have room to respond to unintended change. The further into the future we look, the greater the uncertainty -- but the greater the possibilities for anticipatory action. Thus spotting nascent forces of change when their effects are yet small is critical. The technique which best enables a 50-year stare into the future is emerging issues analysis.

Emerging issues are nascent trends: trends that very few people have yet recognized as such. With each example of an emerging issue, Table 1 identifies the decade in which the change was emerging, but had not yet attracted widespread public attention. Rachel Carson and Lester Brown sounded an academic alarm regarding the environment in the late fifties. Environmentalism was a watchword on the pages of Ramparts and Mother Jones in the sixties. But it did not reach the pages of Time and Newsweek, and America's living rooms, until the second anniversary of Earth Day in April 1989. In contrast, personal computer use and virtual reality took only a decade each to emerge onto newsprint.

Emerging issues analysis assumes first of all that change is rooted in the innovative and the extraordinary. Extraordinary in the statistical sense: outliers produce change -- geniuses, visionaries, and lunatics in science, engineering, the arts, politics, philosophy or religion. And outliers are the first to spot change, to feel the shifts in the frequencies with which society or the environment resonates. The precursors of change may thus be searched out among fringe groups, in esoteric literature, within marginalized populations. The process of reviewing a wide variety of specialized or esoteric sources to sift out the spores of change is also sometimes called environmental scanning. The insight which identifies an emerging issue may come either at the prompting of a single item, or as an intuitive recognition of a pattern of events or references spread across many outlier groups.

Wild card events are system breaks: sudden, disjunctive changes whose causes are several interlinked variables which produce no obvious change until a threshold of some kind is met. They are system watersheds, after which disequilibrium reigns until the system reorganizes and establishes a new equilibrium. Technically, futures researchers define a "wild card" as an event with a low probability of occurrence, which if it did occur, would produce high magnitude impacts. The fall of the Berlin Wall is a perfect example of a wild card event; the economies of the two Germanies are still in the throes of reorganizing to establish equilibrium across the newly formed larger system.

Wild card events are very easy to recognize after the fact: their pace, or speed of impact, is usually immediate. Their magnitude usually depends on the reach of the system in which they occur. Forecasting wildcard events is a conjuring trick based on intuition and good imagination: all the data is located within the forecaster's image of a possible future. Computer models of interacting trend lines can suggest possible wildcard events if the results are sufficiently counterintuitive. However, computer models offer output in systemic terms, where wild card events are characterized by specificity: a particular [person, country, geological feature, microbe] does something unexpected. Wild card events are useful in identifying change because they prompt close observation of trends and cycles that might support their occurrence.

Identifying and monitoring change involves collecting and analyzing data related to cycles, trends, emerging issues, and possible wild card events. Does anything exist unchanging? No. Tectonic plates shift; mountains move; stone erodes. Seasonal cycles may change, and with them the global climate: El Nino events could perturb North American winters and accelerate the onset of glaciation. Even cycles may not be classified as "unchanging change," because they may alter in pace or magnitude: within a futures fluent perspective, wild cards may crop up anywhere.