Vision, Foresight, and Futures of Hawai'i

This week, we’re sharing an excerpt from the July 5th edition of Dr. Lum’s personal Friday emails we call "Doc Futures". If you'd like to get on this email list, let us know!

This is an age of visionaries and empowered actors.

This is a period of transition.

The world’s geopolitical lines and norms are being contested, renegotiated, and redrawn.  We are feverishly pushing machines to evolve and setting them loose across the vast, invisible digital landscape that governs our lives.  We are wielding biology like engineers, decoding and recoding life to the extent that entirely synthetic lifeforms and ecosystems are possible.  We are launching back into space, enlarging the geometry of our relationships and setting the stage for new domains of astropolitics and astroeconomics.  And all the while, our planet’s climate seems to be shifting.

For places like Hawai‘i, facing the future – embracing the future – has long been a challenge.

A Moment for Vision

Moving between those shifting, interacting layers of global change are actors of all sizes, busily navigating and adding to the turbulence.  Why?  Because today, more people than ever before are empowered and inspired to pursue change in the world.  Because today, virtually everyone can become an innovator, a disruptor.  Or a destroyer.

What that means is that today, in the midst of a vaunted era of big data and analytics, vision is more powerful than ever before. 

For most of human history, the ability of a single human to have a strategic impact on the future of humanity was infinitesimal to zilch.  One had to have the raw skills, life luck, and ambition of a Napoleon or a Ford to make their mark on history.  Today, a disgruntled contractor with access to classified data or a bright young kid messing around with ideas for curing a genetic illness can alter the trajectory of the world.

From a futures point of view, vision is not airy-fairy.  It is not kumbaya, accept all comers.  It is articulating the future you want to create.  It 100% needs to be aspirational, and it certainly should be rooted in the values you hold dear.

And in an era of transition, when so much change is being pursued (successfully) by so many competing ideas for the future, vision absolutely must be informed by foresight: insight into how and why the future may be different from the present.

When it comes to vision, Hawai‘i has often been the vision of something for others.  Of paradise.  Of an idyllic past that beckons more warmly than the present.  What it hasn’t had in a long time is a true inspiring vision of its own future that weaves together values, aspiration, and the emerging possibilities of tomorrow. 

In an age of empowered visionaries, not having a vision means ceding all initiative to others.

Foresight is Key

Now, long before we start talking about a genuine, compelling vision for the future of Hawai‘i, we need to develop more foresight about its futures.  About the expanding range of possibilities that is Hawai‘i’s emerging landscape of the future.  To start what needs to be a sustained and critical conversation, let’s take a quick look at just four emerging issues that may play major roles in shaping Hawai‘i’s futures.

• A redefinition of American work assumptions: What we’re wrestling with today is more than just WFH privileges.  Pressure is building that may force a redefinition of employment, affecting things like portability of benefits and the difference between employee and contractor.

• A new definition of “local”: Long-run demographic trends, amplified by disruptive events in the past decade, have accelerated a shift in who exactly does make up the people living in Hawai‘i.  That contemporary idea of “local” in Hawai‘i, which coalesced in the post-plantation, pre-millennial era, may well be succeeded by something different, though just as unique to the islands.

• The next elites of Hawai‘i: Hawai‘i has long had a relatively small and centralized politico-economic power structure, even as who those elites were changed over time.  Today, as demographic turnover ripples through Hawai‘i and as the sources of great wealth (and thus power) in America continue to change, a new elite may well emerge.

• A gentle, totalitarian machinarchy: Our daily lives are now deeply shaped by a vast, invisible, digital landscape.  Through intensive data collection, pervasive use of digital sensors and connected objects, and increasingly automated and autonomous processes, very small numbers of decision makers can govern the rhythms of our daily lives.  And we are subscribing to it all.

These four might not be what you were expecting.  They’re not, for example, talking about tourism numbers or housing, both issues of great tactical and strategic importance to the state.  Yet they represent four distinct and powerful emerging issues that, if they continue, will have very powerful influences on what Hawai‘i will actually be like in the decades to come.  And beyond these first four, there are so many more.

Foresight, of course, isn’t just, “ooh, here’s these provocative, isolated issues.”  The explorations into the emerging landscape of the future need to be much richer, much more nuanced.  How will various stakeholders respond to them?  What happens where these different emerging issues intersect?  How might the many other forces at play in the world alter how these possibilities unfold?  Doing good foresight work requires recognizing that you don’t treat trends or issues in isolation.

Because our primary concern here is, ultimately, vision, once we build better foresight, we then need to move beyond what might happen to what we want to see happen.  Moving from foresight to vision, we can start to ask fundamental questions like, what do we absolutely need to preserve into the future?  What things can we negotiate on, accepting that we will need to flex.  And finally, what do we simply need to let go?

Three simple questions that can take a lot of effort to answer thoughtfully.

It’s seldom easy, and it hasn’t been – and won’t be – for Hawai‘i.

Hawai‘i Embracing its Futures

When it comes to foresight, Hawai‘i’s challenge is that it is a place that cherishes ruminating on the past.  We obsess about the past.  The images that resonate most easily in Hawai‘i are reflections of the past.

Hawai‘i is not about the future.  It is no Singapore, ever alert to the winds of change, punching far above its weight.  It is no South Korea, continually striving to create a future and thus securing a place for itself as a technology leader and economic player.  Rather, it is a place that has come to find a sort of liminal solace by lingering in various pasts.  In Hawai‘i, we talk about the future, but our hearts dwell in the past.

Be that as it may, the unfortunate reality right now is that the world is racing away from Hawai‘i (as it is in many places).  Without a vision for its future that is properly informed by new ideas at least as much as it is by the old, Hawai‘i will continue to be the unhappy inhabitant of other people’s visions for the future.

And “muddling through” in this era of transition, this age of visionaries and empowered actors, is an awesome strategy for letting others execute their visions for the future.

If you are not pursuing a clear vision of the future, if you are not pursuing change, then you are either accepting that everyone else will drive your future, or you are fighting a doomed rearguard action against the forces of change.

The status quo is, ultimately, an untenable vision for the future.  If the status quo is your vision, then you will fail.  More than that: you are already failing.

Let’s stop failing.