What Comes After the Great Recession?

My year as a consulting futurist and speaker began on January 8, 2009 with a speech on future trends for Cobalt, a company that does websites and other marketing and computer services for the auto-dealer community, historically General Motors dealerships. They obviously face some big challenges in 2009.

In that speech I said, for the first time, “This is not your father’s recession, but it could be your children’s renaissance.” Since that time most observers have suggested that when we come out of this recession the world economy, national economies, and our personal economic outlooks, will be different. As one friend, formerly a city manager, now CEO of a municipal development corporation put it, people hoping to get back to normal are going to be surprised the learn that the next normal does not look like the old normal.

So, here is my question. If what emerges on the other side of this economic chasm is something new, what does it look like? I hope SNS blog readers will weigh in on this via comments.

In the video interview below, I suggest some preliminary thoughts. The interview was conducted by Brenda Cooper, futurist, science fiction writer, and technology executive. Brenda happens to be a featured speaker at FiRe 2009 in the program slot on the final day, where we look “further ahead.” (I will be interviewing Brenda on-stage.)

We live in a time where exaggeration of all things is the norm, and thus it is easy to become caught up in the idea that “everything is going to change,” (a familiar phrase, no?) because of the economic meltdown. We need to be cautious with our forecasts. But a few things seem likely – a less debt-driven consumer culture which translates to slower growth in consumer spending, a financial culture focused more, for a while at least, on investing in innovation and productive capacity rather than merely manipulating digitized money in the global casino, a more cautious corporate culture when it comes to debt financing, ditto for the construction industry. Most of all, a shift in societal values toward sustainability and back to thrift as admirable habits. These value shifts may manifest most of all in the newest generation, the Millennials, if we believe what they say they want. Admittedly, we will have to see if these value-shifts hold and become long lasting as the long climb out of the recession continues.

The video interview also explores what keeps me up at night: the chance of a run-away negative feedback loop if Arctic methane meltgets out of control and we get a quick spike in global warming, and also the deep political divides in this nation that lead people to prefer to be right rather than happy. The latter shows up especially when people express a hope that certain economic remedies fail, and fail spectacularly, so that a particular point of view can be proven right, never mind the consequences for communities.

And finally, in the interview with Brenda I discuss the concept of optimism, about which I am asked all the time. To be optimistic is to believe, as I think Mark Anderson once said, that human beings have the capacity, when it matters, to choose the right problems and apply workable solutions to them. This is not guaranteed, but always an option.

Let’s hear from some of you: If the world on the other side of this recession is actually different from what came before, what are a few of its new features?

Here is the video interview of Glen Hiemstra on the future and what comes after this recession.

[This blog entry is cross-posted at the Strategic News Service blog site.]

More on possible pandemic flu and the future

An hour or two ago the World Health Organization raised the pandemic alert level for the Swine Flu from level 4 to level 5 (out of 6), meaning the WHO now believes a pandemic is imminent and that nations should now implement their pandemic preparedness plans.

Let's clarify what a pandemic is - technically the term simply means that a new infectuous disease has appeared that has spread more quickly than normal across a wide geographic region. It is not necessary that large numbers of people be killed by the disease to be considered a pandemic, only that the infection be widespread. By this definition the Swine Flu is likely to become, or already is, a pandemic, though its impacts may be contained and it may not be unusually deadly. Keep in mind that the normal, seasonal flu kills about 36,000 in the U.S. alone, each year, according the the Centers for Disease Control, and no pandemic warnings are issued about the normal flu.

Once again we are witnessing the value of the global communications network and its ability to keep the world informed during health emergencies as well as the ability to use this communication network to mobilize the government and scientific communities.

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist speaker, consultant, blogger, internet video host and founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech contact Futurist.com.

Economic Turn-Around Leads to Slow Recovery

Yesterday, on April 1, 2009, not as an April Fools Day gag but as a serious forecast I posted my Quarterly Forecast for 2009 Q2, titled "Economic Turn-Around Leads to Slow Recovery." As far back as my 2009 annual Outlook article and video for 2009, I have run counter to the prevailing wisdom on the length of the current global recession, by suggesting that it will bottom out sooner than most expect, and that by year's end we will be on the recovery.

Events of this very day, April 2, 2009 are already supporting this forecast, events such as the G-20 agreement, an increase in factory orders, and a recovering stock market.

At the same time, I encourage you to read the full article, or the press release that went out over PRWeb, because I explain how the situation is more complicated than a simple headline suggests.

A recovery will begin sooner than most experts thought because of three interrelated factors - a build up of available cash via increased savings and months of withdrawals from the equity markets, national and international economic stimulus efforts beginning just now to have an impact (which will grow over the next six months), and a growing understanding by investors, with available cash, that investing in new technologies and business models is the way forward. Check out a recent Business Week for an exploration of game changing ideas for business.

The downside, which I explain in the article, is that to say we will begin a recovery does not imply that we will snap back to some kind of old normal. On the other side of a turn-around is something new, a revised economy will take a long time to develop. To understand this, you must begin to grasp how the current deep economic recession is not caused by the financial crisis - rather the financial crisis is a symptom of deeper causes, which include disruptive trends in energy, technology, and global culture that have been building for decades, and converged in the global casino we have called the financial system. We can fix the financial mess, difficult though that may be, but the disruptive trends remain - ever more expensive energy and technology developments capable of disrupting traditional industries and global culture.

The bottom line in my Q2 2009 Forecast is this:

We have entered a new energy era, in which global economic growth is necessary to fix the debt problem, but the same growth will drive up energy prices, which will lead to a new bust, in a probable cycle of rinse and repeat for the near future.

In addition, Internet and wireless technologies have developed and spread globally to the point that their long-forecast disruptive effect on publishing, music, sales activities of all kinds, as well as organization structures, are now coming to a bifurcation point.

On the other side of this recession will emerge different ways of conducting business and pursuing economic development.

Read the full Forecast, here. Read the press release here, or at PRWeb.

While you are at it, check out this slide deck from a recent speech on the Future of Technology, receiving good viewership at SlideShare.

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist speaker, consultant, blogger, internet video host and founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech contact Futurist.com.

Economic Turn-Around Leads to Slow Recovery: Glen Hiemstra Quarterly Forecast Q2 2009

By Glen Hiemstra, March 31, 2009

The world economy, mired in recession, will reach a turn-around point sooner than expected. However, anyone waiting to get back to doing what they were doing before the recession will be disappointed.

As I said in my first speech this year, on January 8, 2009, to the Cobalt company, “This is not our father’s recession, but will become our children’s renaissance.” This prediction is coming true.

Economic Turn-Around, but Long Recovery
Current consensus views are that the recession will be deep and long-lasting. This view is overly pessimistic. Instead, the downward spiral of economic production will bottom-out between late third quarter 2009 and late fourth quarter 2009. By the end of the fourth quarter global economic growth, and U.S. national economic growth will shift to neutral or positive territory. However, this turn in direction, while a relief, will not signal a mere return to a former way of doing business.

Rather, the recovery will be a long and challenging one because it involves adjustments to disruptive technological and energy developments, and adjustments to a new global value infrastructure. The recession is, in other words, about more than financial market mistakes or regular business cycles.

A more rapid than expected turn-around is probable because of three related factors: pent up cash accumulating from increased savings and massive withdrawals from the equity markets, a shift to opportunity thinking that can occur when investors see that innovation will be necessary to drive a recovery, and effective government interventions beginning to take hold now.

However, a long and uneven recovery is probable because a new reality has emerged that is not directly related to the debt crisis.

Disruptive Technology and Energy Developments
Observers believing that financial markets caused the current recession are missing the whole picture. The mortgage and derivatives markets were symptoms of the core problem, which will not be solved simply by returning a sense of normalcy to the credit markets. The root causes of the current economic downturn lie more in volatile energy prices that have disrupted both manufacturing and auto-based development patterns. We have entered a new energy era, in which global economic growth is necessary to fix the debt problem, but the same growth will drive up energy prices, which will lead to a new bust, in a probable cycle of rinse and repeat for the near future.

In addition, Internet and wireless technologies have developed and spread globally to the point that their long-forecast disruptive effect on publishing, music, sales activities of all kinds, as well as organization structures, are now coming to a bifurcation point.

On the other side of this recession will emerge different ways of conducting business and pursuing economic development.

New Energy, Transportation, and Developments Needed
In order to recover, on the long time line that I am predicting, three related areas must be the subject of new discovery, new investment, and new models. First is a shift to intensive sustainable energy development, something we have waited too long to accomplish in a painless way. Second is a shift toward transportation technologies and most of all systems that are integrated, less auto-centered, and reliant on renewable energy, primarily electricity. Third is a new model for community development that shifts away from an auto-centric to a people-centric focus, and which captures the need for rethinking basic local agriculture. Each of these is a revolution its own. Together they would lay for the foundation for the renaissance of at the beginning of the year.

For additional information on an alternative view of the future of the economy, as predicted in Glen Hiemstra’s Quarterly Forecast, please contact us .

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist speaker, author, consultant, blogger, internet video host and Founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech contact Futurist.com.

What a Futurist Does

At his blog (take a look) Richard Leyland provides a very good summation of Black Swan theory, narrative fallacy, and complex systems. Just a thought to add, about "futurism" and futurists. There is a popular misconception by those outside this profession that the goal of a futurist must be to make some kind of accurate prediction of the future. People do love to hear about trends. But this does not actually describe how we approach trends and future predictions.

Because "black swans" (unpredictable events) do occur, we know that the future is not perfectly or even largely predictable. But professional futurists avoid the popular logical fallacy that seems to follow - if the future is not perfectly predictable, then it is not predictable at all, and thus there is no utility to looking at the future. I hear this all the time, and Richard’s article implies that it is best to ignore the future and concentrate on being flexible and agile, steering your organization moment by moment.

However, what a good futurist does, and what I do is this: we say, look, the future is more knowable than you think, though not perfectly predictable. For example, we know that, barring a “black swan event” like an asteroid strike or pandemic, the population over age 65 is going to more than double by 2025, until up to one-third of many national populations will be that old. For many people, this is a complete surprise, even though with just a tiny effort at examining the future it is quite obvious. It surprises people because they are told, over and over again, that the future is unpredictable (meaning not perfectly predictable) and thus there is no reason to look ahead. Instead, one should just adjust minute to minute to whatever happens.

In other words, I encourage people, and organizations, to learn what we can know about the future, while increasing our flexibility and agility to respond to the inevitable surprises that will occur no matter how skilled we are at seeing ahead. In the next decade, it is more than likely that the most important thing that happens – a war, a technology invention, a natural disaster – will “surprise” everyone when it happens. That is true. But, there are many things that are very likely to characterize the future playing field, that we can know, and we ought to make an effort to see what they are.

The most knowable future of all is the future you prefer. And you can decide now on actions that will point you in that direction, so long as you remember that the destination will change as you move toward it, and that at any moment a surprising event may occur that changes your direction altogether. This is not a problem, it is just how the world works.

Really good work, Richard. Check out his blog.

Future of Technology – Twitter and a webcast archive

Yesterday I enjoyed speaking to the Woods Creek Consulting Technology Executive roundtable group. My assignment as a futurist speaker was to share news of the leading edge of technology development. We also did a live webcast, which was announced here, a link that also takes you to the webcast archive and to the slide show as well.

What did I address? I literally looked at updates to technology trends that I have heard of only in this year. So, I used a video-heavy program to illustrate, nano-muscles, nano-energy, 6th sense IT, and Intrago future transportation systems. The most interest discussion focused on social network trends like Twitter - about what they suggest about the future of communication.

My twitter slide was headlined: "Twitter: The Next Big Thing, or Tipping Point to a Meaning-free Future." Think about it. If you are following, or being followed by 500-5000 people at a Twitter account, as many now are, and if each of those followers "tweets" 5 times a day (many tweet more often than that), then you are supposedly going to scan between 1500 and 25,000 additional new messages each day. Even at just 140 characters per message, no one is going to do that. In addition, a majority of messages contain a link to a web-page being referred to, and thus you have thousands of webpages that you may also expect to review. There are filters and search tools to narrow that load, but my sense of Twitter at the moment is this: millions of "messages" being sent into the ether each day, but only a small percentage actually being read, or even noticed, by anyone. Is this communication? I don't know. It is building an archive of links that I presume will be stored for a while, and as a new library it may be interesting.

On the other hand, as Twitter is supposed to be the most immediate of information tools, if one were to treat it only as a searchable but historical data base then it does not add much value to what we already have. As a data base of the immediate moment - who is saying what on what topic, right now, perhaps there is utility. Still, like the proverbial tree falling in a deserted wood, if millions of tweets are produced but few are read, do they make a sound?

The webcast was done by Tim Reha. You can access the webcast archive (clips) of this program here.

Live Webcast: Future Trends in Technology

At 4:00 PM Pacific time (U.S.) I will be presenting a program on interesting future technology for a Technology Executive Roundtable, coordinated by Nancy Truitt Pierce and her company, Woods Creek Consulting,

You can tune into the Webcast in the viewer here, or by linking to our "futurist" channel at the webcast host, UsStream TV.

Webcast begins at 4:00 PM Pacific Daylight Time.

The program slide deck is now available at slide share. The program is video-intensive, and sorry that you cannot see the videos in the slide program here.

How Long Will the Recession Last?

A topic on everyone's mind is how long the current recession will last? That this recession is steeper and deeper than any since the early 1980's, and it looks now like any since the Depression, is becoming fact. But when do we turn around?

I have been addressing this question and the economic meltdown for some time, here, and in my Outlook 2009. Recently I discussed the question with media futurist Gerd Leonhard in a video we produced for our ongoing series, whereisitgoing.com.

Gerd, based in Europe, believes as of now that we have a long way to go before a recovery begins. I argue in the video, as I have here at Futurist.com, that a turn-around is coming sooner. The amplifying effect of the 24-hour news cycle and mostly the Internet has had several effects - exaggerating our sense of what is happening, and speeding up the down cycle. This amplifying effect will work on the up cycle as well, and while this is not the only factor, it is one of the factors that will lead us to turn-around by year's end. A turn-around does not mean we have recovered, but that the bottom has been reached and a recovery has begun.

Now, what comes out the other end is not the same economy as we had prior to this recession. Gerd makes the case in the video that the recession is partly the culmination of several disruptive changes, the Internet chief among them, now deeply impacting business models. On the other side of this recession is a changed set of business rules, and a new cultural outlook. Watch our conversation, recorded via Skype video, below.

Behavioral Targeting, Advertising, Google and the Future

Behavioral targeting of advertising has been around for a long time. The seriousness of this game was increased when Google bought Double-Click a couple of years ago. In the last two weeks there was a flurry of news as Google announced an escalation of this approach to advertising. Google is testing enhanced tracking of individual browser activity, and the use of that information to better target ads to the individual at Google partner sites and at YouTube.

This news once again raised public issues about privacy and transparency. Gerd Leonhard, media futurist, and I discussed these issues recently in a new video we made for our joint project, whereisitgoing.com. My concern, long term, is how the world works when the experience that each individual has is, well, so individual? This may be a good thing, but without some common threads, will the cultural fabric unravel?

Future Careers and Aging

Not long ago I had the opportunity to interview Jan Reha, whose company is Career Discovery, Inc. We talked about the challenge of career adjustment in the current economy. Jan aims her practice at people in transition, as well as a wider clientele, and I asked her specifically what she is advising older workers, as they look ahead. Her advice?

1. People have to change their mindsets, about retirement at 65, an "artifact of the manufacturing age."

2. If you have a job, hold on to it.

3. Downsize your life-style and expectations, hard though that us,

4. Go back and get some training.

We are in a time of of a transition. Time to keep changing folks. Watch the interview below.

(Jan also interviewed me, about Futurist.com, and you can see that video here.)

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist speaker, consultant, blogger, internet video host and founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech contact Futurist.com.