"Future Think" - Review of an Intriguing Book on How to Adapt to Change

As we wrap up 2008 and prepare to enter 2009, lots of things are on our minds - from presents under the Christmas tree and holiday meals with family and friends, to making our New Year's resolutions - and the challenge of keeping them!One thing about the future that is the same for all of us, though, is that we live in a changing world, and in order to make the most of these changes we need to learn to understand them and how best to respond to them. The book "Future Think: How to Think Clearly in a Time of Change," by Edie Wiener and Arnold Brown, is an excellent user guide to this process.Wiener and Brown are futurists who not only predict the trends and events of the future, but teach people techniques for thinking about change and how to respond to it effectively. Their goal is to help the reader control the impact of change, rather than be victimized by it.The book is broken into four main parts. A brief description and highlight of each part follows.Part I is about the
personal biases that we each have, that may prevent us from seeing change or understanding it. These biases are a natural consequence of the experience and knowledge we gain as we go through life. How do we shed ourselves of this baggage? The authors describe four thinking techniques: Looking Through Alien Eyes, Trend/Countertrend, Substituting the Spiral for the Pendulum, and The Extremes Inform the Middle. The authors provide multiple examples for each of these techniques.Looking Through Alien Eyes refers to seeing something with the perspective of someone who is totally unfamiliar with what they are observing. For examples, aliens may think that cars rule the world and that humans are their slaves - as the cars spend all day socializing in a club - the parking lot - while the humans spend all day at their jobs to support their cars!Wiener and Brown provide an example of the able/challenged using this technique. They state that to an alien, most of the world is made up of
physically challenged people, rather than physically able people - when you consider all those who have asthma or are obese, have chronic pain or a broken limb, are pregnant, are elderly, are arthritic, have diminishing eyesight, etc. When looking with alien eyes, physically able people are the exception, rather than the norm.When products are designed with alien eyes, they would be designed with the physically challenged in mind - such as large bathroom stalls for wheelchairs. However, the larger stalls are also preferred by physically able people - especially those with luggage at the airport!The purpose of the alien eyes thinking technique is to help you shift your perspective. Try to think about an issue (such as the changes in our economy due to the plunging stock market and credit crisis), as someone with no preconceived notions or knowledge about the issue would. How would that impact your thoughts and actions?How would thinking with alien eyes impact the way you thin
k about your business or the decisions you make about it?In each of the next three articles, we will explore the final three sections of the book, in order to learn how to think and adapt most effectively to the changing world we live in: Part II- overcoming organizational biases, Part III- understanding the big picture, and Part IV- using metaphors to free your mind.Until then - practice looking at the world with alien eyes!

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