Category Archives: Interviews & Biographical

BRICS Youth: Agents of Change (2016)

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The BRICS economies are rising global powers whose young population and sheer size give them huge potential.

In 2015, a special edition of Policy in Focus, a United Nations Development Programme report, urged BRICS countries to focus on generating employment opportunities for youth as a means of meeting development projections.

While young people in these countries may face an uncertain future, China’s example shows that the youth bulge can be a positive agent for change, UNESCO Chair in Futures Studies Professor Sohail Inayatullah told The BRICS Post in an exclusive interview after attending last week’s Futures Summit at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth South Africa.

This follows the BRICS Youth Summit in early July in India, where the theme of the summit was Youth as Bridge for Intra-BRICS Exchanges.

“Either youth find purpose and become entrepreneurs or they stay unemployed and create havoc – [these] are the extremes of a continuum of potential outcomes,” Inayatullah says.

BRICS countries are encouraged to act inclusively on health, education and employment, in order to maximize this demographic dividend’s potential to inject new dynamism into their economies.

“In futures studies we explore alternatives and build in agency and uncertainty to our scenarios and visions, so we have developed four scenarios to help youth cope with an uncertain future,” he said.

Inayatullah says that three drivers of these scenarios are a move from a focus gross domestic product to a triple bottom line that includes the environment, prosperity and inclusion.

There will also be a focus on job sharing since employment opportunities may not be as available to the same extent as robots will increasingly take over functions performed by humans. This will see more flexible work times – instead of a few working seven days a week and many working far less, or remaining unemployed.

The third driver is to create platform cooperatives – in other words, creating more with shared power.

Scenario one

The first scenario is one where the youth bulge results in a demographic dividend as it did in China after 1980. New technologies, which are youth friendly, and new social structures are created by the peer-to-peer sharing economy (economic democracy, cyber cooperatives) leading to youth contributing in ensuring a more equitable, peaceful and prosperous world.

The youth bulge leads to technological innovation as we see currently in places like southern California – the youth create the new “apps” for genomic, robot, big data and peer to peer transformed worlds.

Youth mentor the elderly and the elderly mentor youth. Educational institutions from the university to the primary school create pathways for this mentoring to occur, Inayatullah says.

The other scenarios

In the second scenario, youth are not only unemployed but they feel disempowered as well. Their expectations of a better world are not met, so they take to arms or social media to voice their discontent as we saw in South Africa in the #Feesmustfall campaign. So the youth become increasingly disruptive.

In the third scenario, youth unable to gain their perceived fair share of political power create their own artificial worlds, retreating to this altered reality. Within this world, they create their own forms of currency – bitcoin today, for example – and forms of identity – avatars, for example.

In a way, this is similar to the reality of many developing nations where some youth live in traditional agrarian societies, others live in growing middle class urban environment and others in westernized enclaves in capital and commercial cities with direct links to youth from all over the world.

In the fragmented future, the inter-generational links become broken with extended families in developing nations disappearing and coming together, if at all, only for economic reasons.

Inayatullah explains that digital natives are not in conflict with the elderly – they live in different worlds. The main assumption behind this future is that the new technologies allow the creation of alternative worlds. Groups can be in similar physical spaces but different techno-mental spaces – strangers in the virtual night.

In the fourth long-term 2050 prediction, a shift in the nature of the world economy makes issues of youth and ageing far less important as we move to a post-capitalist society.

Whether this occurs because of new sharing technologies or by developments in 3D printing and other low cost manufacturing revolutions or through Big Data and the full transparent information society is not certain.

But what is clear is that in this future, the youth bulge becomes far less of an incendiary issue as jobs are far less tied to wealth.

In a post-capitalist society where technology allows for survival for all, fighting over scarce resources becomes a non-issue. Finding meaning, engaging in politics, creating new sources of wealth and exploration become far more important. With jobs and identity and jobs and survival de-linked, the real issue will become which societies can create harmony and identity.

“Teaching will be focused on preparing futures not just for the new jobs, but in a world where many traditional jobs will disappear. The focus will be on teaching flexibility as some students will have portfolio careers – what they can do, not positions held – and multiple careers (changing careers every few years),” Inayatullah says.

Some will stay focused in one area, but many will wander innovating to create new types of work. Technology will create new categories of jobs, some unimaginable through today’s lenses,” he said.

“If developments in robotics continue at their current pace and universal basic income becomes the planetary norm, we would enter a post-scarcity world, where current ways of acting and being would be disadvantageous. Believing that tomorrow will be like today is a precursor to obsolescence,” he concluded.

Helmo Preuss for The BRICS Post in Pretoria

Published on August 23, 2013

http://thebricspost.com/brics-youth-agents-of-change/#.WD5fmrl3CUl

 

Futurist Advocates for ‘Strategic Foresight’ in Corporate Planning (2015)

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By: Natalie Greve, Creamer Media Contributing Editor Online

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation chair in futures studies Professor Sohail Inayatullah has touted the adoption of “transformative and strategic foresight” by companies in future scenario planning, telling a workshop that this approach creates flexibility in decision-making by moving from a focus on one inevitable future to an analysis of several alternative ones.

This methodology was used by organisations such as the World Economic Forum, which used it to reframe challenges, analyse assumptions about existing organisational challenges and clarify future options for strategic decision-making.

The foresight approach, Inayatullah explained, encouraged a shift from focusing on the day-to-day operational considerations of management to the longer-term transformative dimensions of leadership, introducing broader systematic and transdisciplinarian perspectives and solutions.

“This approach allows [companies] to anticipate emerging issues and weak signals that may derail strategic plans and policies. Through environmental scanning, strategic foresight intends to solve tomorrow’s problems today and discover opportunities early on,” the futurist outlined.

Importantly, the foresight approach changed the temporal horizon of planning from the short term to the medium and long term, while reducing risk by emphasising the positions of multiple stakeholders.

“Often, strategies fail not because of an inaccurate assessment of alternative futures, but as a result of a lack of understanding of deep culture”.

“Blind spots – which are always built into the knowledge framework of each person and organisation – are addressed by including difference. This makes implementation far easier,” said Inayatullah.

Future-based studies and transformative insight in organisations were based on six pillars, the first of which involved the mapping of the past, present and future.

Mapping sought to identify the historical factors and patterns that had created the present, which was itself mapped through environmental scans.

The second pillar saw the anticipation of the future through the identification of emerging issues, while the third pillar sought to “time the future” through an analysis of previous patterns in history.

Inayatullah’s fourth pillar was based on “deepening” the future through an analysis of the deeper myths and world views present beneath the data of the “official” future using causal layered analysis.

A series of alternative possible futures were then created through scenario-planning and an analysis of the critical uncertainties driving the future as well as the archetypes of personal and societal change.

Lastly, through the application of backcasting, visioning and action learning, the future was then “transformed” through the articulation of a preferred future and the development of critical pathways.

Edited by: Chanel de Bruyn Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor Online

http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/futurist-advocates-for-strategic-foresight-in-corporate-planning-2015-12-04

Global Award for Sunshine Coast Academic (2011)

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A UNIVERSITY of the Sunshine Coast adjunct professor who works to educate business, not-for-profit and government organisations on what the future holds has received a global award.

Professor Sohail Inayatullah received one of four 2010 Laurel Awards for all-time best futurists, after a vote by almost 3000 of his colleagues in the global Foresight Network.

Professor Sohail Inayatullah received one of four 2010 Laurel Awards for all-time best futurists, after a vote by almost 3000 of his colleagues in the global Foresight Network.

Professor Inayatullah, who has lived at Mooloolaba for the past decade but spends several months a year working internationally, recently consulted for a global cola drink company about changing health paradigms. This year, he will work with bodies including Australian Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and the Pakistan Ministry of Commerce.

At USC, Professor Inayatullah has supervised PhD students on topics ranging from the futures of Queensland’s public service to foresight in Maroochy Shire to the changing nature of intelligence.

Futures studies involve activism, research and citizen visioning and intends to facilitate discussion between people who are experts in their fields about possible future outcomes and how these can be altered.

“It’s about empowering people in organisations to create better futures,” Professor Inayatullah said.

The Foresight Network membership includes future thinkers, strategists, change agents and policy makers from commercial, not-for-profit and governmental organisations.

The Sunshine Coast Daily
http://www.sunshinecoastdaily.com.au/news/futurist-group-awards-prize-to-coast-academic/750975/

Expert Predicts Virtual Future for Queenslanders (2008)

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Alex Dickinson
August 29, 2008 http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,24255674-3102,00.html

QUEENSLANDERS in 2083 will be moving in virtual worlds, living up to 100 years of age and may have done away with the state government.
That is the opinion of leading Queensland futurist Sohail Inayatullah, who says the state’s future hinges on our decisions over the next few years.

“Where we are headed can be broken down to the challenges facing the world and Queensland, and the trends that have already begun,” he said.

While he maintains the future is always uncertain, Mr Inayatullah agreed with most scientists that Queensland’s future would be shaped by climate change.

“Will the Gold Coast be Australia’s Venice? This is a possibility,” he said.

“We know the water level is going to rise so people with inland houses may own beachfront property by then.”

In a scenario Mr Inayatullah terms a “green, healthy Queensland”, the state’s resources boom eventually will transform into an energy boom.

“There will be a transition from coal to solar and wind energy which some experts believe will be the cheapest, assuming a global carbon emission regime is in place,” he said.

On the political stage, our state government could disappear if Australia eventually joins an Asia/Australian Pacific union.

“There will be very little need for one as our ties become stronger with China and India, which have already began to become Asian powers,” Mr Inayatullah said.

“There will be a strong local community and if trends continue we might see the phasing out of local representatives altogether.”

“E-government” is a distinct possibility with every citizen able to take part in day-to-day law making.

“There is every indication that a new form of direct democracy comes in where everyone would all get an SMS asking them to vote yes or no for a law. Everyone votes and the law is made.”

What about the day-to-day lives of every Queenslander?

Mr Inayatullah said the ideal scenario would see a redesign of cities and other environments into ones that were “healthier, greener, and more spiritual”.

“The trend is heading away from the nuclear family so we’ll see a lot more single, denser-living arrangements with greener rooftops and lots of robotics,” he said.

“But by then we won’t mind because we’ll be able to step into virtual worlds.”

Mr Inayatullah said Artificial Intelligence would penetrate every aspect of our lives by 2083.

By that year, we will not be able to tell the difference between the physical world and the world in cyber space.

“This is 75 years we’re talking about,” he said. “We’ll be able to transport from our dingy unit to a sunlit beach in the blink of an eye.

“We will physically live inside those virtual worlds.”

But these are just the positive scenarios.

Mr Inayatullah also warned the state could crumble into oblivion if we failed to adapt to the world around us.

“If we begin to build highrises and highways wherever we want, then Brisbane will just become another Los Angeles,” he said.

“Crime will go up, social equality will go down and all the things that make Queensland special will disappear.

“At the moment we are seeing trends that mean we will most likely live to be 100 years of age. So let’s continue it.”

And the question on everyone’s lips: Will The Courier-Mail celebrate its 150th birthday?

“In one form or another.”

Sohail Inayatullah On The Future, Forbes (2007)

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What’s one thing you were sure would happen, but didn’t?

When I first started as a student of futures studies in the 1970s, I did think by the time I was in my late 40s that space travel would have progressed dramatically–there would be humans on Mars and beyond.

I’ve also been surprised by the slow speed of global governance institutions. They are spreading, helping deal with social problems, but far slower than I anticipated.

I’ve been surprised that China has not imploded. I do think China will be a major Buddhist, religious nation by 2050. They resist it too strongly; I am sure there will be a pendulum reversal.

What’s something that totally surprised you?

I was surprised by the willingness of the international community to take steps to stop genocide in Bosnia.

I’ve also been deeply surprised by food providers in primary schools agreeing to serve healthy meals–and by moves like Los Angeles County banning Coca-Cola from schools.

Sohail Inayatullah is a professor of political science at Tamkang University in Taipei. He is co-editor of the Journal of Futures Studies, associate editor of New Renaissance and the author of more than 300 journal articles and books including The Causal Layered Analysis Reader and Globalization and World Systems.

http://www.forbes.com/2007/10/13/sohail-inayatullah-prediction-tech-future07-cx_1015Inayatullah.html