The Futures Foundation

"Companies are born, companies die, capitalism moves forward. Creative Destruction, they call it", what US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill calls "the genius of capitalism". But economic and meaning systems (that frame what it is that we do when we wake up in the morning) also fail. 

September 2003
Could the global water crisis be the catalyst for a shift towards more futures thinking in public policy?   Might the political dries, who have so long resisted worldviews other than economic rationalism, finally move out of denial under the pressure of physical reality?   At last there are some signs that this is beginning to happen.

More than five million people die each year from water-related diseases.  Three million of them are children under the age of five.  Global consumption of water is doubling every 20 years, twice the rate of population growth.  A westerner uses as much water just flushing a toilet as someone in a traditional culture would use to wash, cook, clean and drink each day. 

Imagine the reaction of future generations when they learn that people in our time actually washed their cars (their what?) with drinking water.  Even sprayed it over the land.  And that as late as the 21^st century, toxins from cities, factories and farms were still being allowed to pollute fresh water supplies.

“The best strategies can be the worst strategies, if all they do is move an organisation more quickly to the wrong destination,” says futurist Sohail Inayatullah.

He argues that strategy should be nested within a wider awareness of who we are, where we are in the world and how we relate to others.

“The word ‘strategy’ tends to option out all the other worldviews,” he told a Futures Foundation workshop on November 9.   “There is, of course, a place for strategy but it is not the only place.  Strategy has too often become the driver of organisational purpose when in fact it is itself instrumental, a tool rather than a guiding principle.

“Today strategy is widely seen as the short cut to corporate success.  But as Ravi Batra reminds us, ‘success is the last rung on the ladder of failure’.

 “How can we have affluence without effluence?” asks Takashi Kiuchi, chairman and CEO of Mitsubishi Electric in the United States, whose visit to a rainforest changed his life and the way he viewed the corporation.

“It is more than a matter of protecting the rainforest,” he told delegates in his keynote address at the recent World Future Society conference in San Francisco.  “It is a matter of becoming the rainforest.”

Takashi’s immersion in the Sarawak forests, where he met with everyone from loggers to “visionary environmentalists”, made him realise that this was a living system which learns, a self managed organisation.  While productive assets were minimal – poor soil, few nutrients – its real capital was hidden in the design.  Nothing was wasted.  The forest was decentralised.  It listened to feedback.  It adapted to what it didn’t possess.   In short – it was incredibly productive.

Inspired by this firsthand encounter with a self sustaining system, he returned to the US and began reseeding Mitsubishi Electric.

In addition to costs and profits, the company’s accounts now attempt to measure such factors as their impact on pollution and the quality of life.

The law of the jungle was not really about the survival of the fittest, Takashi realised, but about being “a good fit”, which is what his company, and its numerous commercial allies, would henceforth set out to be.

“Social responsibility is not a last minute add-on,” he told the applauding delegates, “but is central to the whole purpose of doing business”.

November 1997

Given the political will we could reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Australia by at least 50 per cent in one generation,” Professor Mark Diesendorf, director of the Institute for Sustainable Futures, told the October meeting of the Futures Foundation.

“We have almost all the technologies now to create a sustainable energy system.  Some of them are cost-effective now, some are close to it, some can be soon.  It is not obvious that it would cost us more to cut our greenhouse emissions by as much as that.”

Professor Diesendorf is critical of the data on which the Federal government bases its current policy, noting that research methodologies were flawed, and that key studies were funded by the coal industry.