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| The Role of Plausible Reasoning in Futures Work |
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| Written by Joseph Coates | |
| Sunday, 13 April 2008 | |
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Two core characteristics of effective futures thinking are being systemic and relying heavily on plausible reasoning. Any topic whose future is worth exploring is a system, that is, a complex of things, factors, and forces linked together in interactive ways. Therefore, defining the system under study is a basic early step. In my experience, the only successful way to do this to create a diagram or a figure which gives a position to every component of the system and connects them by lines that are unidirection or bidirectional. The diagram alone has a value, being a gestalt of the factors to be considered, rather than a mere list in serial order. Another basic component of all good futures thinking is plausible reasoning, which is seldom written about and, as far as my experience goes, never discussed. One must wonder why this neglect. The general desire among futurists is to be seen as scientific and serious in all regards, which seems to hinge upon the ability to marshal numbers in their analyses. Unfortunately, many of those numbers are, themselves, misleading, but they do provide psychological comfort. Number-based modeling certainly has a great deal to say with regard to demography, and particularly strong in technological forecasting where frequently there are well developed mathematical models, experience, and tools for using numbers. See, for example, the standard textbook by Joe Martino. The third area where numbers play a crucial role is in the short-term forecasting that is associated with business, industry, and government, where there is rarely focus beyond three years and often intense focus on only three months. For these short term forecasts, there are available well developed quantitative models, enormous amounts of data, and great experience in using them. This kind of short-term forecasting is not what I am writing about here. I am rather writing about strategic futures that attempt to serve a client by looking out 10-30 or more years. There is a fuzzy boundary; some strategic futures consider as close as the next five years and, in other cases, including a project I am now engaged in, go forward to a hundred years or more. On another project looking forward a thousand years, I am an advisor. In the case of strategic forecasting, there is usually no significant corpus of numbers and few or no models that one can use, but more on that in another column. In concentrating on the strategic future, we can easily get caught up in several tools that are quantitative and seem to bring numbers into significant play, but in fact, all they do is put a false face on plausible reasoning. Take the most significant example of that - the Delphi. I am sure every reader has read many Delphis and most of us have created and used them. What they quantify are the judgments and opinions of a panel of people. The person running the Delphi has no idea of what method, technique, or tool a respondent uses in developing his or her numerical answers to the questions posed. My experience in talking with people who respond to Delphis is that they spend little time developing answers to the questions, but rather draw responses out of professional experience, i.e., plausible reasoning. When asked questions like “When will we have the first gay president” or “What is the most important socio-economic need in Paraguay, to put it in good economic condition in the next 20 years,” the respondent is pushed to plausible reasoning, assembling what he or she knows and seeing how it might come together in some future state of change. The same steps happen when one is asked any Delphi questions. We haven’t the slightest idea how the answers are derived. But the quantification only enters into organizing the answers. Not into the basic thinking. Remember that Delphi was developed as a substitute for face-to-face participation in a group meeting. For anyone who has ever worked with a live panel, it should be clear that what goes on is a large amount of plausible reasoning under the label of discussion and group interaction - no models, no quantification, and generally no significant use of numbers. Consider another common tool, cross impact analysis. It makes a set of judgments about how variables A through X will be influenced by each other if each continues along the present line of development. Anyone who has ever used the technique knows that it depends primarily on plausible reasoning about relationships and may prove valuable in heightening attention to a relationship that had been ignored previously in the study, or in highlighting a place where there is great uncertainty, where one should search for data. Fundamentally, cross impact analysis is an exercise in plausible reasoning. At best, and in general, we do not know what the reasoning is in the creation of a cross-impact analysis. Further along in its development and use, it may highlight the search for quantitative data or even for quantitative models, but that is not the cross-impact itself, that is a successor to it. Another valuable use of cross-impact is being the conceptual core in setting up any systems dynamic model. Scenarios, as they are now largely practiced, are highly complex activities in plausible reasoning. In a well thought out and presented scenario, one can often see, and should be able to see, all the bases of the linkages between the variables that enter into the scenario, and how they interact. Formal quantitative judgments usually play a small part. In earlier times futurists often called scenarios mere lists of five to ten statements of change. I take the scenario now to be a complex integrated picture of a future state, reflecting the forces for change and the consequences of their interaction in interesting, useful, and plausible detail - a rational brief story. Other techniques less widely used, but valuable, are the various “mock” tools such as a mock jury or a mock congressional hearing. The extreme level of the mock activity is the war game. War games are so valuable to national security that, at least for the military, performance in a war game is entered into one’s official dossier and becomes an important part of one’s credentials, which will or will not promote one in the system. The war games are nothing but exercises in plausible reasoning. In the war game, the central control acts in the role of God in each wave of the changing game. God hits the group everyday, with what He sees as the implications of the total responses given on that previous day. Another feature pushing further plausible reasoning, is that each of the participants in the game has only partial information. Only God knows the whole story. That situation forces one to plausible reasoning in which one has to engage not only one’s own reasoning, but also anticipate the plausible reasoning of the other actors in the game. To the best of my knowledge, no group of futurist graduate students are taught plausible reasoning. Why is that? It is because it probably hinges on intelligence, of a more than common sort. I checked one of the standard works, a classic on human intelligence, the handbook by Robert J. Sternberg, which says almost everything there was to say about its subject, up to the time of publication. The phrase “plausible reasoning” is not used. It obviously would fall into the category, inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning is worked on in many psychological experiments and usually involves topics that are convenient to handle experimentally, but have virtually no relationship to the complex matters that concern us futurists. Going to a different general source, I looked at some books under the rubric “critical thinking,” where the emphasis is on Aristotelian logic. But when they come to inductive reasoning, which is largely what is done in futures work, there is virtually nothing of any value to futurists. To give the readers deeper insight into the importance of plausible reasoning and its woeful neglect in formal training, let me suggest that you do the following exercise. Take one of the following three topics and work for about an hour and a half, in 10 to 15 minute blocks, to describe the selected topic 25 years in the future. Make no references to any books, almanacs, printed information, or discussion. Just sit down and do it yourself. Then review your work the next day by adding, deleting, and modifying. While you are doing the exercise, pay conscious attention to the intellectual processes that you are going through. My three candidates from which you should choose one, are such that you know little of the formal literature on the subject, and yet have a great deal of personal or common knowledge, awareness, or experience, from which to jump off. The first topic is high school, the second, pornography and prostitution, and the third is museums — each in 2035. Do this exercise by using three separate sheets of paper. On the first page, cover the situation today, by making a list of 25 to 30 sentences. On a separate second page, list forces and factors driving for change. Fifteen to thirty drivers would be a good start. On the third page, list the changes in the topic you selected, 25 years in the future, nominally 2035, based on the interactions of page one and page two. Twenty or more items on your third list would be a good start. Thirty would be better. You will have just finished an exercise in plausible reasoning, and should be surprised and gratified by what you’ve come up with. The editor and I would welcome your observations on plausible reasoning. |
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