Interview with Sohail Inayatullah by Jennifer Foreshew, The Australian.
http://www.metafuture.org/office-social%20centres.pdf
Category Archives: Interviews & Biographical
Last Butt Out By 2030 (2005)
By Amy Marshall
August 12, 2005
We will see the last of cigarettes in Australia by 2030, a futurist said yesterday.
Professor Sohail Inayatullah also suggested four different scenarios for the future of alcohol abuse.
He took this year’s Rural Victorian Alcohol and Drug Conference theme of Time for Change by the horns and challenged listeners to make a move.
He said if we don’t identify the future we wish for, we’ll end up with something we don’t want.
“Democracy isn’t just about voting for a councillor,” Professor Inayatullah said.
In terms of a solution to alcohol abuse, one of the possible future scenarios he identified was a `Nanny State’ whereby people would enter bars with `smart cialico.com health cards’.
The cards would identify our genetic make-up so bartenders could decide whether to serve us.
Another option was similar to the gingko and ginseng-infused `smart foods’, and low-carb, low-fat options which have flooded our supermarket shelves.
“We would change the nature of alcohol and develop smart alcohol,” Professor Inayatullah said.
“The guy from Foster’s who heard that was really excited.”
The other two options were to return to a style of moral thinking where “the good person doesn’t drink”, or to continue what is happening now, where we swing between harm minimisation and `just say no’ policies.
Oxford House resource worker Ron Blake listened to Professor Inayatullah speak yesterday and said he would be able to apply his ideas to drug and alcohol rehabilitation.
“What he’s saying is not just about drug and alcohol, but we can apply it to putting people back in charge of their own recovery,” Mr Blake said.
“He opened up a way of looking at the future where he encouraged people to have a vision for what they really want.
“We seem to be constantly in crisis management instead of having a vision for the future and identifying the way towards it.”
The Fourth Bottom Line (2004)
The 4th Bottom Line
Saturday 1 May 2004
Summary
Futurist Sohail Inayatullah argues that spirituality should be adopted as the “4th bottom line” after economic, social and environmental elements.
Alexandra de Blas: Like Mary Clark, Professor Sohail Inayatullah works with the deeper stories and worldviews underpinning the way we see the future. He’s a leading political theorist and writer in the field of future studies; and holds positions at Tamkang University in Taiwan, and the University of the Sunshine Coast and the Queensland University of Technology.
An idea he’s explored recently adopts spirituality as the fourth bottom line. You may have heard of the triple bottom line, which values the economic, social and environmental elements. But how would spirituality sit as the fourth?
Sohail Inayatullah: My sense is when I talk to people around the world, there is a sense that there’s something about spirituality and meaningful life, a notion of transcendence that has to be behind the other bottom lines, and there’s also a sense of spirituality even if crudely can be measured, asking OK, that city’s prosperous, that city is environmental, that city is socially inclusive, but what would a city that’s spiritual look like? So those are some of the questions I ask, and people actually are very interested in starting to figure out what would a spiritual country, a spiritual city, a spiritual family look like? What are the indicators, how do we actually create that?
Alexandra de Blas: Well how might it look?
Sohail Inayatullah: Well for one thing, if you look at the centre of cities, they’re all framed around finances. The CBD, the Central Business District, is not the CSD, the Central Spiritual District. So it could be that you might have more meditation centres, you might have more health centres, or the city design needs to be transformed. Even environmentally, to make sure the buildings are really green, but deeper to make sure the type of experience people have for them, at least at some level match or appeal or evoke the spiritual. I mean having at the airport a meditation and a worship centre is of course in the right step, but I think we’re trying to push the barrier beyond that.
Alexandra de Blas: How could we push the barrier?
Sohail Inayatullah: I’m not really sure. Living a healthier life, being in touch with our deeper meanings, those two keep on coming up. Something about inclusion, something about what does it all really mean. Those issues come out both in a society that’s under attack, in the sense that scarcity, so when there’s so much scarcity you go to what’s deepest, but also it’s very true for societies that are post-scarcity; they’ve actually done very well in terms of basic needs, housing and the economy, and the spiritual interest comes out much more. So then it’s asking, OK, you’ve done this project and it did well financially, it’s green, it’s socially inclusive, but was there a spiritual dimension to it, something that really sparked people’s hopes. I know this sounds strange, when I do a lecture or have a workshop, or a meeting, people say, Oh, you look slightly disappointed at the end. I say Well for me, it’s not just that the audience liked it, but I’m happiest when there’s a sense that angels are in the room. And angels for me of course, that’s metaphorical. But something else happens, and there’s different civilisations from the Indian view, something called micro-vita that what is, there’s some energy in the room, in traditional religions there’s some sense of notion of transcendence.
Alexandra de Blas: What are some of the ways in which you could measure spirituality?
Sohail Inayatullah: First it’s contested space. So I’m very happy with that. I don’t want the official measure out there, I want this to be a way for people to talk about it and then eventually to come up with some measures. Positive measures are easy, wellbeing, happiness, we know how to have indicators of that. Negative measures, hate, crime, bullying in schools, cigarette consumption, treatment of animals, that’s I think quite easy. Now the larger categories I would say No.1 is your organisation society, what I would call near-humanistic, going beyond nation, religion and state, and moving towards an expanded sense of the planet. That’s the first measure. And we all know when we’re seeing people as humans on the planet, versus ‘Oh, that person’s part of that religion, race or country.’ That’s measure No.1.
No.2 is, is there a link between highest and lowest? That’s the spiritual, economic link that of course we want an economy that’s dynamic and prospering, but the highest income should be linked to the lowest income. If the highest income is building up, I would want the lowest income to be moving up, too.
Three, is it really socially inclusive beyond just genders and minorities being better represented, but there are ways of thinking about time, significance also being part of how we design society. So I would say deep social inclusion. And fourth, consistently what I see in organisations is the issue of example. Are leaders of the organisation, the country, in the fourth bottom line in fact showing that? If they’re not, then I may as well, so I’ll do what I want. So I would look at those four, the new humanistic issue, the economy being linked, the deep representation and the issue of leadership.
Alexandra de Blas: When you start working in this way, you have actually pioneered a model which is called Causal Layered Analysis, which is a way of looking to the future, and working out what possible future one may wish to have. Tell me about this process, how does it work?
Sohail Inayatullah: Causal Layered is a method and theory of futures that I use as part of the futures workshop, and the idea with CLA, is that you want to unpack the future. So if someone says, Here’s the future, you want to say, Well what’s the systems behind that? So the future we give, the image, the newspaper headline, that’s the future we normally think of as the future, so that’s to me the litany. If you think about icebergs, that’s the superficial part. Underneath the iceberg is the system, the politics, the economics, the environment, the technology. So most people want to convince you that the litany, which is isolated to individuals, actually connected to community to a system. That’s a huge jump in thinking. And the environmental movement has been very strong in that. Don’t see yourself as isolated, don’t see your actions as isolated, they’re part of a larger system. So your pollution in one city actually impacts pollution somewhere else. But underneath the systemic level of world views are deeply held positions of the nature of life, of time, of society, or love, of what the city looks like, or what a country looks like. So that’s where most people stop it, they don’t get to that worldview level. And the last part is the myth of metaphor, the story. So underneath that even is an unconscious story. If you’re in a company, ask What story are you living? Someone might say, Well I’m living Cinderella. Then who’s your Prince Charming? And do you want to live that story? Who’s the stepsister? So what it’s identifying, what unconscious story are you living? And each culture has its own stories. Some cultures, the way you say Hello is to say My back hurts, and you say My back also hurts, that’s how you make friends. Does that friendship making in fact impact your health? So that’s one that was to challenge the https://disabilityarts.online/levitra-20mg/ story. The second level is to look at what are the alternative worldviews.
Alexandra de Blas: If we look at an issue like climate change in Australia, how would you attack that one?
Sohail Inayatullah: In terms of greenhouse one, now that’s become a litany, right, that’s on the newspaper all the time, then I would look at the system that creates that knowledge. Who were the scientists doing it, research institutes, and how that knowledge is circulated throughout the world. Now underneath that, we know there’s a big debate and there are real worldviews here. We have at most scientists saying it is a problem and here’s the research, then we have conservative think-tanks saying It’s not a problem, that in fact it’s too costly to actually have greenhouse cuts etc. And so here you actually have a struggle foundation of different world views, it comes across as meaning it’s a struggle about science, we don’t know the full data, but my sense that’s what’s going on, it’s actually a foundational perspective on science, nature, technology, population. And to get sides to have a conversation about that, it’s not easy. So what tends to happen then is one worldview ends up dominating. And that may be the right way to go, that you actually develop a preferred vision and move towards that, and in this sense though, CLA is mapping out what the problem is, what the system is, what the competing sciences are, and what the stories are, because underneath is, they are different stories, right. Story No.1 is the world is ending because corporations are evil, so we have to change. Story No.2 is these are just green whingers all the time, and we just have to stay with the progress forever. And there’s also some third, fourth, other stories. But the first step for me as a researcher interested in the futures of what are is to actually map it out. Once you can map it out, then you can say OK, here’s the preferred future, or Here’s my preferred future, and here’s what I need to do.
Health-bots and the Rights of Robots (2004)
Will health-bots monitor your caloric intake, warning you when you’ve eaten too much or not exercised enough? Will a strategically placed health-bot make the toilet smart, giving instant feedback on potential diseases brewing?
“Will we use up-to-the-minute information to create the world we want, purchasing health and other products that match the futures we want to create? For example, will values-oriented consumers buy only products that follow ethical guidelines focused on people (social justice, women’s and labour rights); planet (environment, and future generations); and acceptable profits?
“And as robots like this get smarter, as artificial intelligence develops, will robots gain legal rights? Who will represent them? What type of world will result as we merge with new information and genetic technologies?
These were just a few of the provocative questions raised by Professor Sohail Inayatullah, a member of the Futures Foundation’s professional advisory board, when he spoke to journalists at a Science Forum on artificial intelligence hosted by UTS with the support of the Department of Industry, Science and Resources.
“As the web and artificial intelligence develop, we can anticipate health-bots or health coaches, that is, always-on wearable computers,” he said. “They will provide individualised and immediate feedback, letting us know for example our caloric intake or the amount of exercise needed to burn off the pizza we just ate.
“They will also let us know the make-up of each product we care considering purchasing, helping us to identify allergies, for example.
“These intelligence computer systems would be reflexive knowledge systems, learning about us and our preferred and not-so-preferred external environment.
“They will be powerful health coaches provided by your health-care provider, which will not only aid diagnosis but also reinforce pursuit of your chosen health goals. These expert systems, or electronic personal guides, will tailor the information to your own knowledge level, interest level and learning style, as well as those of your family members, each of whom would have a personal electronic ‘health coach’. If you are genetically or otherwise inclined to heart disease, your coach will encourage specific preventive measures.
“This is the health professional on a wrist.
“What is crucial is that these bots will be customised, immediate and reflexive.”
Professor Inayatullah argues that in the long run, this means that there will be smarter consumers who will check on research studies and be able to manoeuvre in a world of conflicting data and conflicting paradigms.
“Smarter and more empowered consumers should make the jobs of health and other professionals easier. And as smart cards and health bots continue to evolve, their intelligence will certainly reduce doctors’ visits, saving money to the health system but also forcing GPs to reconsider their role in the health system. GPs and other professionals will need to quickly become net-savvy, seeing it as a way to communicate with patients, especially younger patients raised on the net – the .com generation and the emerging double helix generation.”
Dr Inayatullah argues that standards are changing swiftly, with consumers shifting their attention upstream — from the functional use of a product to its cost/benefit, from there to the way it confers identity or status on the user, and on to consideration of the type of future that the buyer’s choice of product will create. For example, he quotes the dramatic shift to ethical investment funds as more and more people recognise the impacts of the investment choices they are making.
“Bots will be able to reflect these changing standards and provide us with information for our individual and social consumption needs. Already websites such as www.lead.org/leadnet/footprint/intro.htm help us to determine our footprint on the Earth: www.consumerlab.com provides product information on which to base value-driven buying decisions.”
The Apocalypse Never Need Be Nigh (2000)
So assert Australia’s leading futurists Dr Peter Ellyard and Dr Sohail Inayatullah following gloom’n’doom predictions from futurists of the northern hemisphere.
London School of Economics professor Ian Angel has written that there simply will not be a human race by the year 3000 because the world already is overpopulated. Geoff Jenkins, head of Britain’s Hadley Centre of climate predictions has offered the gloomy prospect of melted ice sheets flooding out whole countries if the world continues to use fossil fuels.
Dr Ellyard, Executive director of Preferred Futures, Melbourne, chairman of the Universal Greening Group, former Executive director of the Australian Commission of the Future refuses to stoop to such grim prognoses. “What’s the point of being a futurist if you cannot be positive?” he says.
One day he thinks that people will be taking degrees in futurism. Meanwhile, this abstract occupation which melds economics, conservation, politics and philosophy, suddenly has found a footing in the world realisation that the future has arrived and it is called 2000.
Perhaps the first sign of global cohesion emerged in the New Year’s Eve celebrations of the world, beamed instantly through satellite communications from and to every corner of the globe.
Suddenly, it was the global village party.
According to Dr Ellyard, such phenomena are just beginning and, if humanity plays its cards right, we can not only treat our global ills but create a new“planetary culture”.
It will not be simple, but it is achievable.
This now is “the century of the planet” and it heralds the time for many major changes of the ways in which we do things.
“Dr Ellyard calls the new path “Planetism” which, he says, succeeds Post Modernism. “The Earth is becoming more interdependent and co-operative,” he asserts. “This new planetary culture is being moulded by a combination of political, economic, technological and ecological forces of great power which are all working synergistically to create it. “My grandparents grew up identifying themselves with Western Australian and New South Wales rather than Australia. My grandchildren will identify themselves with their planet as much as their nation.”
Thus does Dr Ellyard, former director of the South Australian department for the Environment and director of the State’s now defunct Ministry of Technology, speak of a global trading system, one which has learned from the protests of Seattle’s World Trade Conference. He sees a positive in the United Nations which, while still imperfect, has potential in the role of planetary peacemaker and peacekeeper.
“The world is also being united by ecologically driven fear, fear of global ecological disaster,” he says.
“For centuries fear has divided humanity, now is beginning to unite it … fear of unpredictable climatic change and an ozone-depleted atmosphere is forcing people to think 40 years ahead, and to co-operate on an unprecedented level.”
Dr Ellyard, who has worked as a senior consultant to the United National Environment Program, says Australia’s stand on emissions has been shameful and that priorities should move away from working with the coal industry to developing alternative energy.
He thinks the world has been too much concerned with survival and not with what he calls “thrival” , which has higher aspirations. “We are a means-to-an-end society but we must really focus on our destination because if you know the destination you may find other means of transportation.”
Dr Ellyard believes in the division of an old“cowboy culture” of individualism, independence, autocracy, patriarchy, unsustainable lifestyles, conflict resolution through confrontation, reliance on defence and a sense of humanity against nature and a new “spaceship culture” which is based on communication, interdependence, democracy, sustainable lifestyle, gender equality, conflict resolution through negotiation and reliance on security. We must leave cowboys behind and board the spaceship for a successful transition to 3000.
Author Dr Sohail Inayatullah, of Tamkang University and a visiting academic at Queensland University of Technology, sympathises with such thinking, commenting that while the year 2000 represents hope because humanity has survived nuclear accidents, biological warfare and asteroids, it also has been an era of immense growth, albeitwith failures in distribution which have the world’s richest 225 people with assets exceeding the combined income of over the poorest 47 per cent of the world’s population.
Both futurists look to solutions based on education and communication and lifelong learning as opposed to the pressure cooker education of children being just one strategy. Both believe that some form of world governance is likely.
Dr Inayatullah sees four possible structures for future governance: a world empire run by one national or civilisation, a dominant religious system creating a world temple, church or mosque, a world economy or localist mini-systems devoted to retaining regional language, culture, environment and economy.
“A world economy, in a nation state context, is our current model,” he says. “However, since the nation-state is increasingly porous, the world economy/nation state model is now unstable. It appears that the latter alternative, a world government with mini-cultural systems, is quite possible in the mid-term.”
Dr Inayatullah notes that with the USA set to become the second largest Spanish speaking nation in the world and with immigration the only likely savior to the rapidly ageing West, multiculturalism appears to be here to stay.
“The US Army also will be dramatically muslim in 30or so years (and with many senior US government posts coming from Army leaders, we can well imagine a shift in US foreign policy around 2025,” he says.
“The long-term net result of multiculturalism maybe an entirely new set of identity arrangements,” While information technology is offering us a single, highly-networked world, everyone on earth soon will be able to participate in global events. “Teleconferencing, e-mail, multi-media workstations and faxes are only some of the new tools of planetary co-operation and dialogue,” says Dr Ellyard.
“New computer software is now assisting cooperative dialogue and decision-making independent of space and time.”
“We know more about what is going on all over the planet than ever before. John Donne’s famous of the year 1620 has never been more true.
Donne wrote:
No man is an Island, entire of itself;
Every man is part of the continent, a part of the main;
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
As well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were;
Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind;
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
Dr Inyatullah cites future images wherein genetic engineering and human cloning may be things of great beauty and achievement, correctly applied. He cites a world where not only humans and animals roam, but also chimeras, cyborgs, robots. “The key issue is how will we treat them.”
The future, therefore, is not so much “given” or created by God or nature, but made by human intervention in evolution and in the creation of new forms of life.
Reflects Dr Inayatullah: “Our future generations may look back at us and find us distant relatives.”
Samela Harris
The Advertiser, January 4, Adelaide, 2000
Major Changes Foreseen in Religious Expression (1999)
By Larry Witham, The Washington Times, Friday, December 31, 1999.
New Learning Curve Sends Planners Back to the Future (1999)
Anticipatory Action Learning
Byline: Julie Macken
Australian Financial Review
January 1, 1999
The accepted strategies for forward planning have lost credence, forcing corporations to rethink and re-arm
Typical. Just as corporate Australia is finally getting into the swing of strategic planning, along come some of the country’s foremost futurists and declare that the reign of strategic planning is over . The catchcry now is Anticipatory Action Learning (AAL), a transformative approach to negotiating the future that incorporates then transcends strategic thinking.
Scenario and strategic planning grew in popularity after the apparent success of the Dutch Shell Corporation in the early 1970s. Having developed a number of future scenarios, Shell was able to utilise its forward thinking when the OPEC crisis hit a few months later. The company turned the emergency into an opportunity and went from seventh to second in the world of oil production in the process.
But according to futurist Sohail Inayatullah, who spent the 1980s as the strategic planner for the Justice Department of Hawaii and is now a senior research fellow at the Queensland University of Technology, the same story also offers a perfect example of the limited nature of strategic and scenario planning.
“Shell’s planning helped them turn a crisis into an opportunity,” says Inayatullah. “But because it was so superficial, it didn’t prevent them from creating their own crisis in the 1980s in Nigeria and then the Brent Spar debacle – both of which cost them dearly.
“Strategic planning is a useful tool in the short-term, but any company that thinks it offers a way into the future is deluding themselves.”
Unfortunately – from the futurist’s point of view – the human response to a world that’s spinning faster than ever before, with financial and geo-political realities changing moment to moment, is to contract and lock down the hatches. Just like the body does when it feels pain. The fact that this contraction and resistance actually makes the pain get worse is often overlooked.
Strategic planning, whatever its shortcomings, at least offers the illusion of control and security. Sitting back and rehearsing various scenarios and preparing alternate responses to them while planning the next Great Leap Forward can be a momentarily galvanising experience.
But despite living and working in an increasingly global market with its roots buried in a number of diverse cultures, most of these strategies are devised by white, upper-middle class men unused to imagining how the other half live.
“Shell’s disaster in Nigeria would never have happened if they had involved the local Nigerian community in the planning stages,” says Inayatullah.
“Likewise, if they had been talking to a range of stakeholders like environmentalists, Brent Spar would never have happened. One of the problems is that strategic planning forces you to use only one or two sources of information and those sources invariably look a lot like the dominant culture of the organisation. Closed systems like these rarely survive change.”
During the ’80s and early ’90s the corporate sector, particularly in North America and Europe, poured resources into strategic planning. They worked on the theory that the more information they had about the future, the more research they did on modelling, the better equipped they would be in uncertain times.
Yet very few anticipated the ascendancy of the hedge funds, the Asian crisis or the current shift to deflation. And the bad news, says Tony Stevenson, president of the World Futures Federation and director of the Communication Centre at QUT, is that they’re never going to be able to.
“If we’ve learnt anything over the last 12 months it’s that change comes out of left field and comes fast,” he says. “The reason these things caught corporations and countries off-guard is because they were busy looking straight down the pipeline rather than around the world.”
In a global marketplace it’s no longer safe to assume the rest of the world shares the same value system, vision or priorities as Australia’s corporate sector. According to Stevenson, few Australian companies are aware of the logic trap inherent in their future projections. He says: “Even in their scenario planning they fail to acknowledge that their vision is one that is culturally bound and informed by a male Judaic-Christian tradition.
“Nothing wrong with these traditions except that they are very different from Confucian, Islamic, indigenous and Hindu world views. And they often don’t translate across cultures or genders for that matter.”
It’s this presumption of sameness that brings many companies undone. While strategists may argue that they cater for differences by looking at four or five different scenarios, because they all operate from the same flawed premise – that is that their world view is the dominant one – they fail to keep an open mind.
Having experienced the failure and humiliation that comes from taking such an arrogant position, Dutch Shell had the willingness of the drowning when it came to finding another way of operating in the world.
It turned to a system called Action Learning (AL), the precursor to Anticipatory Action Learning. AL provided it with a way of de-layering management levels, introducing self-managed teams with a focus on empowerment, and removing formal lines of communication and hierarchy, relying instead on individuals and teams to form the networks that help their work.
According to Robert Burke, CEO of Innovation Management at the International Management Centre, the process of AL alters the usual priorities from action to one where practitioners can reflect and assess strategies as they evolve.
“The process of AL is: plan, act, observe, reflect, revise,” he says. “It’s a continuous cycle and because of that it removes the idea that it’s possible to make a plan, set your sights and just power through without ever having to change course.”
While most companies and senior management are comfortable with the ideas of planning and action, observation, reflection and revision are a little – or lot – more difficult. ln Burke’s opinion, this is where good leadership becomes critical.
He says: “A lot of companies fail because their internal features generate inertia that seduces senior management to opt for maintaining the status quo, favouring established directions that proved successful in the past. Mainly because their activities embed them in business communities that shield them from the wider community.
“It’s clear that if an organisation is genuinely interested in change and in becoming a learning organisation, then it’s imperative the CEO lead the way and allow all team members to become leaders in their own right.”
In Burke’s opinion, the issue of empowerment has become more critical as the speed of change accelerates. Like the human body, corporations need more than a good brain. They also need every organ and nervous system to be fluid, functioning and able to operate, even when the brain is resting.
While acknowledging the short-term boost to productivity that fear provides – particularly fear generated by out-sourcing and down-sizing – Burke believes that as a long-term strategy it’s guaranteed to strip the workplace of meaning or care. And once that happens only the most desperate will want to be there.
Anticipatory Action Learning brings together the tenets of Action Learning and post-strategic work that when operating together create fundamental principles of respect, open-mindedness and integrity that can translate across crises and cultures, according to Inayatullah.
“Strategy is part of the problem because it only uses the intellect and limits chaos and complexity,” says Inayatullah. “Therefore it also limits all the other ways in which we know and understand the world – intuition, instincts and through relationships.”
Stevenson and Inayatullah believe that while strategic planning gives an organisation the feeling of having control over the events, people and the future, AAL offers the opposite.
“AAL teaches people and corporations how to let go and let things happen,” says Stevenson. “With the winds of change blowing so strong and erratically right now, survival means learning how to bend with the wind. To do that you need flexibility and humility. Unfortunately, I’m not sure corporate Australia yet recognises the value of those two attributes.”
BBC Interview (1999)
Visionaries, Week 6, Programme 3:
Education
Breaking Down the Barriers –
Towards International Understanding and Tolerance
Visionary: SOHAIL INAYUTULLAH – PAKISTAN
We’ve started to move in a situation where post moderns say, yes, we can have many cultures, we can allow them in the doors of official knowledge of European civilisation. But it’s still within the terms of the centre of the West. So over the long run, my vision is that in fact we’ll have many cultures and some type of authentic encounter with each other.
Now, that authentic encounter isn’t going to come around for all of us just eating in a Pakistani restaurant or a Chinese restaurant. It’s moving away from the commodity view of education, but it’s essentially about conversation, communication, and about trauma, where you meet them and they scare you, you hate them, they hate you, there is some struggle.
And the issue is, how do you deal with that struggle? Do you run away and kill them, which is one way, or do you ask, what is it about them that I don’t understand? How can I learn more about them? What is it about me that’s also wrong, that they don’t like?
When I start to think about the future of knowledge, the future of subjects, or how causes interact with each other, one of my favourite examples is of the library. Now, most of us think that the library is a political institution, but if you look at the structure of a library, it’s going to be government documents, social sciences, sciences, then on the top floor you might have ethnic studies, woman studies, Pacific studies, or whatever is the latest type of group vying for rights.
Now, that division seems to be universal, but if you ask Hawaiians, how would they construct it, they would have it quite dramatically – genealogy, where the ancestors sat, the Ina, the relationship with the land, the gods, those become your floors. If you ask the Indian, the floors become the first layers of the body. The second layer is the intellect, the third layer is intuition. The fourth layer is the supra-causal mind, transcendence, discrimination.
So within each of those layers, you would get books. So science would be just one floor. You’d have floors and floors dealing with other notions of reality. Even something as simple as a library, which we see as multicultural, becomes in fact quite unicultural.
So better schooling is not just saying, well we need more teachers from other perspectives, or we need the official female teacher or brown teacher etc., or we need better representation. It’s also about asking, what are the world views that go into how we teach? Every text is not just neutral. So that partly means, how do we create children’s stories that are more multicultural? If you look at children’s stories, it’s always about, if you’re a feminist, why is the witch always evil? It’s very clear who’s the good guy, who’s the evil person.
These stereotypes of who we are are ones that have to be challenged. There are not ones that help you learn about the other. Now, let me give you one example. There’s one cartoon called “Kimbo, the White Lion”. I watched it today with my three and five year olds. It’s about a white lion that lives in a jungle. And he sat there puzzled. And he said, “What do I do, basically, about human evolution?” And his monkey friend, the baboon, said, “Well, you can’t change human evolution, it’s a cycle of life. Grass eaters eat grass, and then meat eaters eat those animals and we keep on going.” And Kimbo said, “No, I think we should stop eating meat.” And the animals said, “How can we do that?” And so he said, “No, we have to challenge evolution. We have to create a new circle of life, where we’re not killing other animals.”
And this became quite dramatic. Suddenly, he started to challenge official views of culture. And he started also to challenge official views of evolution. And I watched my kids watching that. So suddenly that’s one of the first shows I’ve seen, where suddenly vegetarianism ceases to be something that hippies do, or something that’s done in India, but it became part of a common cartoon.
If I start to think about the future of education, going on a hundred years, two dimensions come to me. One is about authentic multiplicity, that other cultures, their texts, their visions become part of how we learn about each other, not just one culture’s text. Now, the other part of that is that it is not just about multiculturalism but about new humanism, meaning the rights of humans, but also of plants and animals. The new humanism part is crucial, because it becomes the cardinal human values. We can have multiplicities, but we have to ask, what is there that we embrace that’s basic? And that’s our common humanity.
Metaphors and the Future (1995)
Sohail Inayatullah
By Anna Smith (1995)
Futurist Sohail Inayatullah challenges managers to create structures which allow you to respond to what you can’t foresee.
It takes a different sort of futurist to say you can’t predict the future. But Sohail Inayatullah is up-front about the perils of gazing too intently into crystall balls.
“I believe you can predict trends, I’ve seen that time after time. But no-one can get the specific right”. And if they get it right once, it was that they were lucky. If you look at (Alvin) Toffler’s stuff, or other famous futurists, he got a few trends right, the rest he didn’t.
The irreverence of Pakistan-born Inayatullah, who was in New Zealand in June (1995) to conduct a workshop for the Futures Trust, is refreshing.
He is also honest about the times he has got it wrong himself. Along with seven other futurists, he was invited by Hawaiian electrical company Hawaiian Electric to a two-day workshop with senior managers. Each talked for an hour about the key trends which would affect the company in the future. The one event they didn’t take into consideration was the likelihood of a hurricane. A few months later the company took a loss of US$300 million when a hurricane left it overexposed to a local insurance company.
“The real challenge,” Inayatullah says with hindsight, “is to ask how do you create structures which allow you to respond to what you can’t foresee?”
Perhaps because he was born in Pakistan and educated in Malaysia and Hawaii, Inayatullah looks at the future through the eyes of different cultures. Business would do well to do the same, he suggests.
He dismisses linear forecasting as just the early phase of futures thinking, but he has done his share of it. For years he worked for the Hawaiian state judiciary and in 1980 concluded, to people’s disbelief, that the next big trend for the state would be Hawaiian sovereignty.
Ten years later he was proved right leading him to conclude forecasters can get the general parameters of the future right. “But the issue for us was frustrating. We were trying to tell people what the future was when deep down we knew that really the future was mysterious,” he says. Coupled with that, every time a market forecaster becomes famous, he or she starts to change the market and people change their behaviour as a result, Inayatullah adds, “If the future is interaction between our actions, our beliefs and our images then the issue becomes less what will the future be like and more what do we want, what’s our vision of the future?”
Enter the business schools with corporate vision workshops and mission statements.
Inayatullah, who is currently based at the Queensland University of Technology, believes vision workshops can be useful as long as managers do not use them simply to gain allegiance from the troops. Used properly, they can help define a “preferred possibility”. “The future becomes a possibility to create different types of businesses and different types of people,”he says.
The best business are the ones that know who they are and in a crisis can go back to their basic sense of identity. Take IBM’s line that it is in the business of providing solutions. “That is saying we cannot forecast the future but we have a sense of what people really want at some deeper level and that becomes a way to create the future,” he says. “There’s always uncertainty so you have to have an organisation which use metaphors of itself which are flexible and fluid.”
Myths and metaphors are among Inayatullah’s favourite mechanisms for making sense of the future. The Japanese, for instance, draw on old Confucian metaphors of harmony. “It’s therefore obvious to them that if you live in harmony you have state and business working together.”
“Indians in contrast evoke the onion,” he says. “It is the unveiling of the self that is crucial, for them.”
Other metaphors include the idea of a fork in the road giving you two directions to choose. Or there’s the dice – you can’t predict the future so you may as well roll the dice. Or there’s the American idea of total choice – the future is an ocean and a company can go wherever it pleases. “In contrast, for example, is the metaphor some Fijians use: being a passenger in a car driven by a blindfolded driver.” “What a perfect metaphor for their dependency on international capital.”
Or take the popular idea that the future is a stream with hidden rocks to be watched for. All of these are culturally specific, Inayatullah says, and must be derived from how people inside an organisation see themselves.
“The key (for a company or society) is to find out what their own metaphor is and to ask whether that helps or hurts their mission.”
“Of course you can’t only exist in metaphorical space. Metaphors have to be translated into day-to-day activities.” “The future has to help transform today.”
A version of this interview originally appeared in Management. September 1995, 35. Thanks to Anna Smith for permission to reproduce it.