different from the one we inhabit today. Just how different is the question this book sets out to answer.
THE ART OF TRAVELLING IN TIME
The idea that we can describe the world in 2024 suggests that we can travel in time. In this chapter, we explore whether such a feat is at all possible, and, if so, what our time machine should look like, and how it should be piloted.
Academics and other analysts devote much of their time to identifying and explaining changes within countries. These diagnoses mostly deal with the past and the present, and draw on a formidable arsenal of established theory in the process. However, analysts are also often asked to comment on how the countries and economies they study may change in the future. While many try to respond, they often do so hesitantly, and without the benefit of established theories and methods similar to those for dealing with the past and the present. As a result, political scientists have a poor track record of anticipating shifts in political systems.
In fact, many of the most significant political and economic developments during the past 50 years were poorly predicted, or not predicted at all. In 1966, the American scenario planner Gill Ringland recalls, 27 leading American scientists were asked to predict what the world would need and want over the next 20 years.[1] Almost all of the 335 forecasts they generated proved to be entirely incorrect, mostly because they gave too much importance to state-driven megaprojects, which soon began to decline.
In an influential article published in 2003, the scenario planners Peter Kennedy and Charles Thomas (of the Futures Strategy Group in Glastonbury in Connecticut) cited the shock arrivals of the dot-com crisis and 9/11 terror attacks as examples of the failure of conventional political and economic forecasting.[2] Moreover, they warned that a lack of methods for dealing with future uncertainty would lead to more ‘future shocks’. Just six years later, and despite all the resources poured into political and economic forecasting, the 2009 global financial crisis took almost everyone by surprise, even though the diagnosis after the fact was relatively straightforward.
Peter Schwartz, former head of the renowned Shell scenario planning team, cites the example of a scenario called ‘The Greening of Russia’, which Royal Dutch Shell developed in 1983.[3] It held that, should Mikhail Gorbachev rise to power, this could lead to significant political and economic reforms in Russia. However, almost every Soviet expert presented with the scenario said it was entirely implausible. Even the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the United States responded by saying, ‘You really don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Of course, in the end Shell was proved right and the CIA forecasters were proved wrong.
More recently the dramatic political events in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya again took many scholars, diplomats, and journalists by surprise. During subsequent briefings to officials of the United States Department of State in Johannesburg and Washington, I made a point of asking whether the uprisings had been on their long-term political radar, to which the answer was ‘no’. I asked the same question during a meeting with representatives of the Israeli government in Jerusalem, and got the same answer.
It is extraordinary that two advanced countries with highly sophisticated intelligence services and enormous interests in the stability of the Middle East and North Africa did not know that the entire region was on the verge of fundamental change. Intelligence agencies, think-tanks and universities in those two countries invest hundreds of millions of dollars a year in research on the Middle East and North Africa, but failed to provide their governments with direct advance warning of these momentous events, which have had far-reaching implications for political and economic stability.
Therefore, both political scientists and economists seem unable to use the standard tools provided by their disciplines to accurately predict the future. As in the case of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the circumstances that gave rise to the North African upheavals were diagnosed in great detail – but only after they had occurred. Crucially, much of this after-the-fact analysis was based on trends that were already in evidence long before the events occurred. This is significant as it suggests that the information necessary to anticipate these upheavals was in fact available but was not adequately identified, analysed and interpreted.
The butterfly effect
Why have attempts to predict major political developments been so singularly unsuccessful? Should political analysts and economists abandon all hope of gaining some insight into the future? Indeed, many economists and political analysts would argue that the future is inherently unpredictable. Thus the scenario planners WK Ralston and Ian Wilson note that mankind’s efforts at divining the future, ‘from the Delphic oracle, through augury, tarot, and the crystal ball, to the methodologies of the professional forecaster’ have all failed to ‘penetrate the veil between us and what is to come’.[4]
However, giving up entirely on gaining some insight into the future – and effectively abandoning our futures to fate – would clearly be unsatisfactory. Journalists, business leaders, politicians, military planners, and ordinary people will continue to demand futures insights from economic and political analysts. There is no choice but to persist in studying the futures of political and economic systems, and to try to understand why forecasting methods do not work.
Forecasters concentrate on identifying key current factors and trends and extrapolating them into the future in order to arrive at a single prediction or forecast at a specific point in time. The problem they run into is the extreme complexity of the current trends and events that will eventually shape the future.
Consider the huge complexity underpinning the political system in South Africa today. A plethora of actors – including organisations, businesses, political parties, courts of law, diplomats, government departments, newspapers and other media, civil society organisations, and various individuals – are constantly at work trying to change the country – and often in divergent or conflicting ways. It would be impossible to identify each of these participants and gauge the likely impact of their activities in order to understand how and why the country will change in the future.
This was a massive problem I faced when conducting research for a doctoral thesis on scenario planning at North West University (NWU). I sought to develop a method capable of predicting the long-term stability or instability of political and economic systems. However, I soon realised that the extreme complexity of these systems presented a formidable obstacle. My research supervisor, Professor André Duvenhage, and I had many conversations about this, and we eventually concluded that the complexity of political and economic systems was real, and could not be avoided. Seeking to dilute this complexity would therefore result in an artificially simplistic view of reality. By contrast, our work would need to accept the degree of complexity, and then seek to overcome its implications.
We then began to draw heavily on work done in the physical sciences in the first half of the 20th century – an era in which biologists and physicists began to grapple with the extraordinary complexity of the phenomena they were studying. One example cited in a number of academic articles was how biologists became aware of the extreme complexity that underpinned the life of a plant. They realised that it was futile to break the plant down into leaves, stalks, flowers, and roots – and even further to the atomic scale – and study each of these components in isolation, in the hope that they could then reassemble the plant and understand how it could grow. Rather, they began to understand that it was the way in which the plant interacted with its environment – air, sunlight, soil, and water – that explained its life. One could not disaggregate the plant into its component pieces; one had to study it as a whole if one wanted to understand its life and growth. Put differently, the life of a plant was far greater than the sum of its parts.
Another
