Imagining the future can be difficult. This isn't to say that we can't imagine it to be whatever we want, full of radical change, sweeping waves of disruption, step-changes in technology, unforeseen behaviors, sci-fi innovation etc.  And given the opportunity to devise scenarios depicting the future, many scenario authors, "professional" and layperson alike, tend to want to go for the gold, taking the opportunity to pack storylines with massive change. As Jamais Cascio wrote a few months back in a meditation on this issue, even futurists create pictures of a future that has "Changed Your Life Forever."

Personas, essentially the personal form of a scenario when used in a futuring context, frequently suffer from overcooking. Whether created by bright and well-meaning designers or strategists or an ad-pitch team looking to convince a client, they often depict lives of the perfect user/consumer, whose average day is an unending sequence of early adopter behaviors or optimal use cases, complete with flawless experiences of new products.

Driving to pick up my children the other day, I was reminded what the future is really going to be like. I happened to catch the top of the hour news on BBC World Service, one of the benefits of satellite radio. As I listened to the top headlines, I was reminded of a conversation with Bruce Sterling some months ago about how strange the world is right now, even without adding any "juice" to the plotline. Our consensus was that it's harder every day to do what we do in foresight, or even in the more creative field of science fiction writing, because, as the saying goes, truth is frequently stranger than fiction these days. In a period of accelerated change, whatever the drivers, we are seeing the unusual play out daily at the moment, right before our eyes.

What's the connection to BBC headlines? Stories about the current price of oil ($145 at the time I heard the news report), an African-American presumptive presidential nominee (Barack Obama), a pocket-sized, touchscreen computing device (iPhone), and a major bank failure (IndyMac), all rolled by, sprinkled alongside the mundane stories of human interest, crime, politics as usual, and other usual suspects of a newscast. Despite a few interesting nuggets and some top headlines that would have sounded outlandish and breathtaking a decade ago, it wasn't a breathtaking litany of staggering disruptions or earthshattering advances in science, and my day wasn't much different than the day or week or month before.

There is a purpose to depicting radical scenarios--they help us decide what we might do in the face of very different circumstances, and therefore be somewhat better prepared should they come to pass. But increasingly the tendency among both their authors and users alike is to veer too far to the absolute - focusing on total disruption without worrying about the legacy relationships, investments, commitments, etc. that are still in place. When this happens, they become the strategic equivalent of escapism. 

While an average day doesn't sell scenarios as well, it does present a normal context against which alternatives, be they product concepts, government policies, or what have you, can be considered. The world remains a mix of the chaotic, surprising, and just plain bland, even if the mix does occasionally get slightly out of balance. We have very, very few moments that "Change Your Life Forever." We have many more where we live through very incremental change, just like today. It's a pretty safe bet that, in the big scheme of things, tomorrow, and probably next year, is going to be to a high degree just like the one described on the radio last week. Painting this picture should be the easy part. The hard part is identifying which of these very incremental points of change in the near term may become major drivers of our world's evolution in the long term.

Ever wonder how the future is proactively created? One great example of applying an understanding of human behavior and interaction to development of future products--so that new products meet emerging needs just at the right moment in the near future--is featured prominently in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine. The Times followed Nokia's Jan Chipchase, Duncan Burns and other designers from the company as they spent time in Accra, Ghana observing and gently interrogating the everyday lives of people in a case-study developing market, and probing their reactions to designs that pair fresh insights about their use of communication technology with equally fresh prototypes.

Chipchase and his colleagues at Nokia, some of whom I have had the pleasure of working with, do a fantastic job of bringing these two critical streams--emerging behaviors and emerging technology--together at just the right time, or you might say just in time. His anthropologist, designer and ethnographer peers in many similar companies are also working diligently to better understand this process, people, and methods to create the future as and when it's needed, not simply to build their own version and push it out the door, hoping consumers' behaviors can be force fit to a design. Fortunately, these ideas and practices are spreading, and the benefits are beginning to be measurable in better lives, better opportunities, and success for the companies who see the light, as the article describes.

One of the things I get asked at conferences, after "What do you do?" is "Where are you based?" This in itself is an improvement on the assumption that where you live is where you work, but my answer, which is typically something along the lines of "These days, I'm based in North Carolina, but my colleagues, partners and I travel quite a bit," sometimes leads to a second follow-up question, such as "Why aren't you based in New York or LA?" Those who ask this type of question assume (I believe) that to be in the insights business you have to sit geographically at the "leading edge," culturally, socially, economically, technologically. While there, you are supposed to observe a parade of new products, fashion trends, designs, etc. either in person or in the pages of trendsetting magazines.

I'll let other people hash out what trendsetting is or isn't, but contrary to conventional wisdom the pipeline does not always start in New York, London, Paris, Tokyo or in whatever superurban post code advertisers, product developers, etc. believe the cutting edge gets its mail. Nor has it just moved on to New Delhi, Shanghai, or Sao Paolo for a few seasons or even decades. Truth be told, influence is a densely meshed network with bits of culture, aesthetics, needs, ideas, innovations, with constantly changes sources, reflectors, signal boosters, black boxes, caches and so on spinning things around. Reading that sentence, it sounds a bit like the Internet, and maybe that's one simple revelation--alongside the rise of this now commonplace utility, the idea of a "leading edge" seems quaint. A network has no "true" edge. There may still be a bit of a pipeline, but it has a lot of holes where things enter and escape.

But there is some benefit to being away from some of big network hubs and routers, where the noise of the traffic being generated and recirculated from these points of power drowns out what is happening elsewhere, in places where the traffic flows can seem a little light. Importantly, the rest of the world is out here. Companies that produce our favorite goods and services spend a lot of money to hire others to listen out on these elusive edges. This is perhaps why commercial ethnography has become so popular lately. Like the military, companies have decided to hire local guides to help them read the cultural signs in the field. The benefit of being "embedded" out here in the field is that we can see, through the miracle of media, what signals are flashed from the big hubs and, using our own powers of observation, what happens when they make it here, or, more often, don't. Some new products shine so brightly and become such instant icons that they stay fairly intact in their potency and form when they get "here". Some leave the warehouse of origin and are never seen again. Some, like the Coke bottle in The God's Must Be Crazy, get reinterpreted and used differently. That's called bottom-up innovation now.

So, while it can be important and useful to tour a new museum exhibit, visit an experience store, or get a hot product when it is released in a metropolitan retailer, it's also important to spend some balance of time slowly walking the aisles of a Target or the big, regional grocery chain, poke around the sporting goods store or watch people checking out at a discount superclub, just as it is to walk through a market in a third-tier Malaysian town or take an extra moment to observe what's going on in a train station in Spain.

Insights can come from anywhere, and often take many shapes. More often than not, they don't perch in the pages of a glossy industry magazine, waiting to jump in your lap. I find more things of importance in the third paragraph of a news story, or in the background of an image more often than in someone else's blog or under the heading "Trends to Watch." Honestly, it probably takes a bit of all approaches, but not an overdose of one at the expense of others.

So, it's important to have a flexible, broad approach to looking for insights to help drive forecasts (not just to support ones you like after the fact).  But most of all, make sure you watch both ends of the pipe--tracing the world map of the average person as well as the grand plans of the hot designer or so-called tastemaker. What goes in the pipe at one end may not be what comes out the other.

A article in the Washington Post this weekend on Japan's gradual, possibly inexorable economic decline touches on some topics I have been looking at for a while--how an aging population puts a drag on a country's power, and what industries are the next to rise as economic engines globally. Not only have economists and leaders of industry been worried about this over the past two decades, but even Japanese consumers seems to have bought into the storyline as far back as the mid-1990s (and were prescient enough to tag China as the probably successor even then).

The article points out that as Japan's population gets older, and more comfortable based on years of economic success, the country's ability to grow and thrive seems to be tracking along the same path. Japan barely came out of recession before it now seems to be stagnating and sliding backwards. Overall, manufacturing, consumer technology and automotive industries have peaked and Japan's strength on the world stage not only as an economic giant but as an influencer of other markets seems to be waning.

So, these two questions stand out: who fills the vacuum that Japan leaves as the pace- and trendsetter in areas such as technology, and what industries could the country turn to to provide some revival. Korea, China, India are all putting their unique stamps on the global consumer technology market, and all are beginning to export their own internal markets' tastes and values in the same way Japan did from the 1960s to the late 1990s. While Japan can still influence global tastes through projection of its cultural power, even this is becoming softer and is still rooted in the same industries that made it a worldbeater, represented in technologies such as media-- think Nintendo Wii--and  transportation--think hybrid cars. While these are influential areas, they are kinder, gentler products. While China and India will pick up the slack Japan leaves in these markets, they know they will only grow by bringing something new to the world, some industry that is derived from their own particular challenges and strengths: think about the intersections of cheap labor, available production capacity, and the need for resource management, food production, environmental management. Efficient, macro-scale infrastructure management will be one areas these countries can step into, for example.

On the last question, some experts point to robotics and biotechnology as possible lifelines, taking what the country develops for its own shrinking population and exporting it. While Japan is ahead in robotics, and also has a growing biotech industry, Korea is racing ahead in robotics and the biotech sector is stymied by a bureaucratic national R&D structure, putting it behind the US still by some ways. Perhaps Japan's real expertise is in niche specialization, managing small, delicate, unique processes that other nations bring to scale. Think bio/nanotech meets sushi. Just at a conceptual level, the mind boggles.

The US and Europe would do well to pay attention to Japan's path. As in the past 30 years, where Japan goes, they may also follow. Both are becoming gradually less powerful on the world stage, and while they have much larger populations, both should redouble their efforts to find new economic engines now rather than waking up well down the road with an aging population and an outdated innovation model.

About three years ago, having returned from living in the UK for almost four years, I began thinking about the contrasts between different national cultures' acceptance of new technologies. In my lifetime in the US, and probably in the lifetimes of several generations before me, "new" has been perceived as a good thing. A steady flow of new technologies have been viewed as one of the engines of the economy. Capital systems, manufacturing, advertising, and many other sectors of the economy have been driven by it. My experiences in the UK, Scandinavia, Asia and elsewhere have shown me that different countries and cultures seem to have quite different attitudes toward innovation--seeing this has been one of the benefits of looking at technology uptake on a global basis for the past decade or more.

Being an analytical person, my thoughts at the time focused on whether one could create an index to measure receptivity to innovation on a national basis. Finally, someone has attempted to do this: a group called the Institute for Innovation & Information Productivity (IIIP) last week released the initial findings of a study of 12 countries in which it probed receptivity to new technologies, perception of benefits and intent to purchase new products.

The results, which the IIIP say it has not fully analyzed, are interesting. According to the IIIP Innovation Confidence Index, rapidly developing economies such as the United Arab Emirates, India, Brazil and China rank as more receptive economies to innovation than European nations such as Finland and the Netherlands, with the US sitting somewhere in the middle. One driving factor in higher confidence seems to be the growth rate of the national economy and probably the related openness of younger, more globally aware populations to progress and innovation, paraphrasing the study's authors. By contrast, countries where several generations have become accustomed to innovation and have perhaps slowed their pace of uptake, or simply have a more educated filter for measuring progress vs. payoff, ranked lower.

Measuring innovation confidence is a delicate and difficult operations. The IIIP has approached it thus far by asking a few simple questions. Hopefully they or another group will take this line of inquiry deeper to get to the cultural triggers that determine receptivity. One trigger has to be experience with innovation and confidence that investing financially and emotionally in the "new" is worth the time and effort. British consumers have discovered this not to be the case by and large over the past few decades, and therefore they have little confidence when invited to embrace it again. Japan and Korea have entrenched cultures of quality and trust which support their consumers' decisions. It will be interesting to see if, after 10 or 20 years of experience, Chinese or Indian consumers maintain their levels of confidence in innovations.