How do we make sense of a rapidly changing world?

We think the answer lies in our new H\B Foresight service

On a warm night in May, we gathered friends and interesting people for dinner and conversation to launch Hawkins\Brown’s foresight consultancy service. We wanted to share with our community what we think is a unique offer in the built environment / property development world.

H\B Foresight is structured thinking about the future, setting out multiple futures that are possible and probable, but also preferable. In contrast to forecasting, which uses recent data to project a likely near future event, foresight is a methodology that navigates the ‘cone of uncertainty’ – the increasing uncertainty of things as we move further into the future. Our mission is to arm our clients with insights, scenarios and strategic propositions that help them face the future with confidence.

Darryl Chen, who is leading the new service, started by setting the necessity of foresight against his own personal journey through architecture, urban design and research, culminating in a desire to affect change at a systemic level: “We needn’t be anxious about the future, as long as we are prepared for it and have agency to make positive change.”

All our speakers talked to the different tools to think about the future, with refreshingly no mention of AI, the four-day work week or interplanetary exploration.

Anab Jain, self-confessed ‘angry optimist’ posed the inevitability of current projection of civilisation collapse, and asked how can we see and do things differently in the face of that? It’s almost impossible to feasibly imagine ourselves 20 years from now, so we need to use different tools to navigate. She pushed back on the efficacy of data, since we as humans actually use most of our brain processing power for stories, narratives and experiences.

How to have a long term perspective? Technology entrepreneur Bengt Cousins-Jenvey asks companies ‘Do you want your company to be around for another 100 years?’ It’s powerful to look at how different your world was then, as a way of thinking about the future.

He referenced the fact that compared to other species, we humans have so far lasted a relatively short time on the planet. Our ability to create things has been our undoing but can also be our saving grace. Now that we’ve built so much, we can now ‘mine’ buildings for their resources, thinking of them as material banks.

Architect and critic Jack Self pointed out that maybe the people who are really anxious about the future are those whom are personally invested in the way we do things now, in other words, late capitalists.

After all, the current paradigm of modernity – which Jack defines as the exploitation of one group of people over the lives and resources of others – could be coming to an end. Until we see an end to that dominant paradigm, it’s hard to imagine radically better ways of doing things like, for example, an alternative to mortgages.

Issey Gladstone of the Sexy Climate Change podcast said it’s hard to get people to engage with something like the IPCC report, unless we use culture as a means to shape beliefs. In a highly segmented society that is increasingly divided along generational and political lines, we need to simply ask, what do people care about, and how can that create new alliances of shared interest?

As discussion moved across all table guests, the question emerged: how do we value buildings? Should buildings last 100 or even 1000 years?

Over time we have seen that long lasting buildings have survived not just by virtue of their structural integrity but by underlying financial models and society’s cultural values. We should therefore ask the right questions – not just what will make money now, but how something will retain value (in its broadest sense) over time.

The discussion at times skewed off into population collapse, the regulation of online content, and the phenomenon of conspiracy theories. It was a stretch to consider such things thoughtfully over dinner, however it demonstrates the point that the value of foresight is to identify things just outside the common range of vision, to get beyond our industry echo chambers and distractions to consider multiple futures.

With such multiple visions of possible and probable futures, how can we take actions that lead to futures that are preferable? Change may be better than stasis, but only as long as we ourselves change things for the better. How can foresight help with that? Get in touch with Darryl for a dose of intelligent optimism about how we can help you ready your business for an uncertain future.

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