Focus On The Future (Day Two)

How do you focus on the future anyway?

Today marks day two of the annual Focus on the Future conference in San Francisco.

Most of the attendees seemed to survive the long night of private functions, even though some went on well past midnight. Or so I heard –  as the father of two toddlers I enjoyed a “night off” and the hidden pleasure of falling asleep before 10pm (and thank you so much to my wife Ellie Morrissey for taking care of the kids without me!).

This morning the keynote speaker was Jonathan Miranda, director of strategy for Salesforce.com. I know you’ve heard of Salesforce. Mr. Miranda presented on the topic of planning for the future. Like me, you might have wondered why someone from a software company was presenting to consultants, elected officials and public sector employees on planning for the future... I quickly learned why.

Mr. Miranda opened his presentation by talking about how it is easier for people to think negatively about the future. In fact he described a Stanford University study that shows people don’t even recognize themselves when they try to think of their lives three years in the future. So just as you don’t want to give money to a stranger, people are reluctant to save money for the future when that person they may be is a complete stranger to them.

Mr. Miranda then asked “what’s the purpose of scenario planning and strategic planning?” He then answered the question – the purpose of scenario planning is to:

• Make better decisions today! Determine what are the questions we need to have answered today to be more informed.
• "Think of the unthinkable… no errors!" Answer how do I do things now today that prepare me in the long term.
• Act in advance – because acting in advance is better than acting in response.

Mr. Miranda then went on to describe scenario planning further, noting that a good scenario is not right or wrong. He said it is all about making better decisions, pointing out that scenario planning is rooted in the concept of having multiple future outcomes.

To do better scenario planning Mr. Miranda offered the following advice:

“Don’t fall victim to overconfidence and systematic blindness. Bring in other people. Think from outside the company, outside your industry. Think of the whole story – think of the bigger picture. The biggest thing we’ve always learned about talking about the future is that you want to have a very diverse makeup of people thinking and talking about it. Everyone should have a different point of view to ensure diversity.”

When doing scenario planning, Mr. Miranda recommended that people look at indicators and signposts – things you can see today and things that might turn up. He advised attendees to know those numbers when you think about future scenarios, so that you can track progress and make changes.

Mr. Miranda then went through some examples of scenario planning when thinking about the San Francisco Bay Area in the year 2050. He covered a number of trends that could affect scenario planning, from climate change, population growth, distribution of wealth and income disparity, housing, to global trends. Most interesting to me were his points about autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence.

Autonomous Vehicles

On autonomous vehicles Mr. Miranda made the following points: This area of innovation is going to massively change our lives. Every major OEM is working on an autonomous electric vehicle. How will this platform [the human-driven car] completely change? The efficiency of traffic may completely re-map our cities. Safety and accessibility challenges will become apparent — how do we get past these challenges? Last, he provided the example of a company in Chicago that is developing autonomous RVs which could provide a door-to-door trip from home to a national park,with no stopping at rest stops and no overnight hotels. He cited this example to make the point that we still don’t know about how AVs will completely change transportation and mobility.

Artificial Intelligence

On artificial intelligence Mr. Miranda stated that it will be a game changer. He said recent research indicates roughly 40 years before AI can be at “human intelligence” levels. In the meantime augmented and virtual reality will evolve and change education and social connectivity. As an example, he talked about a Stanford Medical Research Lab project called Autism Glass, where Google glasses help children with autism recognize facial expressions and the emotions transmitted, and alerts the children to the emotion of the people they’re looking at.

Given the points made by Mr. Miranda, I wondered how augmented reality could be used to address the pervasive challenges around bad driving behaviors  – a topic very close to my heart.

It was an excellent keynote and it really made me think about scenario planning. The concept is something I’ve tried to do in my career multiple times, and I think is a concept familiar to most engineers. Now I know what to call it, and look forward to using it to help continue to improve mobility in cities across California and (hopefully) the US.

About the Author

Sam Morrissey previously served as an associate vice president at Iteris, leading its Mobility Services group.