Introduction

The futures professions are enjoying a remarkable degree of attention, both from the public, but also from the business community as well. As uncertainty has, arguably, re-emerged as societal default state-of-affairs, futurists are called to provide answers of remarkable imagination. Futures Thinking requires an extraordinary quality of critical thinking to reason beyond what society conceives as commonplace. All the while, today’s normalities are challenged vigorously by deeply rooted changes that converge to transformational forces.

Despite its extravagant heterogeneity, the futures professions align in their mandate: to guide societies in going through these changes better prepared. In on. Yet, another central trait unites these professions with regards to whom they develop their elaborate recommendations for: Bureaucracies. In an unassuming manner, one finds that most literature regards the bureaucracy as the key protagonist in charge of transformational change. (Example) However, this unimaginativeness should neither come as a surprise, nor is it an accusation
 

The bureaucracy, and its various characterological types – the corporate, military, political party, non-profit, religious, entertainment, educational, cultural or governmental – was the defining social institution of the industrial age.  As we witness the fading away of industrial civilisation, this essay posits that the bureaucracy might be unfit to address transformational changes inventively. 

No other area offers as much as ample data to study bureaucratic failure in bringing forth radically different ways for creating value as the field of innovation. And no type of bureaucracy is as coveted, and more powerful, than the corporate.

The Corporate: Perfected to prolong yesterday 

Rightfully so, futures professionals point to their audiences that convenient, straight-line extrapolation suppresses the discomforting notion that the future is an uncertain topos. Even more so, expecting surprises, searching for emerging alternatives, and developing social, mental and psychological capabilities which allow dealing with these uncertain circumstances with more creative predilection and virtuosity, are part of the repertoire in attaining futures literacy.

That caution to not extrapolate into the future, however halts when it comes to imagining that the core entity responsible for producing future outcomes remains the same, old corporate bureaucracy. To many futures-foresight practitioners it hardly occurs that the corporate bureaucracy, as an organisational form, has been no older than two centuries or a bit more.

At its time it was, without argument, the superior form of social institute. Even marxists understood that it was more capable of unleashing productive forces than traditional types of social organisations.

With its triumph, life’s other aspects were modelled after this new dominant organisational form, perfected for state-craft and factory production. Its distinct characteristics: strict hierarchy, unambiguous competencies, division of labour, scale and efficiency, and scientific processes control came to define the symphony orchestra, and professionalised sports; it reformed the religious institution from agrarian age to industrial principles, and altered the military organisation and warfare itself. It imposed its ‘iron cage’ onto education, and helped modernise political parties – democratic or despotic – and accelerated scientific research and technological invention by organising academic work. 

In Europe and North America, it changed medical care from guesswork to science and consolidated Europe’s imperial expansion over vast parts of the world by introducing mass administration as the neural kanal that siphoned labour and natural resources from the African, Asian and Latin American peripheries to Europe’s metropoles.

Studied by Sociologist Max Weber, the bureaucracy possessed qualities that made not just factory work productive: at its time it solved pertinacious, and hard problems: It introduced professional accountability and fought dilettantism and corruption – fundamental in establishing an organisation that scales its production, and increases its capital efficiency.

This predictability in turn is a prerequisite to gain third-party trust to raise vast amounts of external capital to achieve its growth-purpose. Unlike its predecessors or struggling alternatives, the bureaucratic organisation could deal with an unheard of degree of complexity. 

Not only did it separate function from personality, and competence from charisma: the bureaucracy enforced technical discipline that uniformed manual labour, social hierarchy and cognitive processes. Particularly the latter part proposed an answer to an ever increasing challenge that these organisations dealt with: how to manage ever more increasing information. 

Footnote: (The bureaucracy – and any society that rests its social organisation on this peculiar type of institution – suffers precisely because bureaucracies are inherently poor at managing too much information.)

Neither capitalism nor socialism possessed an alternative concept of achieving their distinct aims without bureaucratisation of production – factory or farm – to unleash productivity and efficiency gains and thus distribute material gains for either capitalists or the collective. In other words: to bureaucratise was to advance.

Perhaps more important to our case is the notion that the bureaucracy was mandated to provide stability and certainty. It achieved this partly by cementing the past as its reference point to which each subsequent action is measured against. In fact, its aversion to uncertainty might be its decisive reason why it spectacularly fails to deliver any change that goes beyond incrementalism.

Foresight: A corporate-first profession

One cannot begin to comprehend the foresight profession without stressing its bureaucratic origins. It was conceived (WHEN) within the corporate environment, precisely to serve stabilising it, amidst uncertainty and change. Its function was, and arguably still is, to find ways that allow corporations to extend their business model into the future. As societies grapple with disturbances amidst geopolitical conflicts, health-crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, technological upheavals, social unrest and rampantly rising inequity, bureaucracies are neither unaffected, nor oblivious about these changes. 

In fact, public and corporate bureaucracies are among the most vigilant actors aiming to answer these global challenges by building up foresight capabilities. It is worth mentioning that such large organisations are among the most open to adapt their foresight-mandates to consider alternative futures more vigorously. Bureaucracy-originated foresight, particularly in administration and corporations, does not simply fail because incredibly smart people lack intent or challenge-awareness. It likely plays a large, if not the, major role as to where foresight is being conducted for a prolonged period of time.

Up to this day the vast majority of employed foresight professionals work for organisations older than x years. X percent of foresight employees work for organisations with an annual budget or revenue of X mio. EUR, and staggering X percent of foresight employees work for companies making more than X bio Eur per year. 

Conversely, most strategy consulting firms or boutiques that offer a portfolio of foresight and futures services have a distinct customer in mind to whom they market their services to: midsize to large firms. Foresight is a game played by large, incumbent organisations. Within the Futures disciplines, emerging approaches such as Futures Thinking or Design Futures oftentimes lean on corporates to monetise their business model. 

In both instances – either by providing futures services through the market, or by internalising these capabilities organisationally, i.e. through salaried work – corporates are, by and large, the main customer segments futures practitioners default to. 

At a first glance, these organisational contexts seem negligible. Yet the peculiar systemic configurations of the corporate bureaucracy are probably the most decisive design factor to influence the effectiveness of futures work. 

It thus should not come as a surprise that the main focus of futures research and foresight regards the study and development of, and vehement discussion about, methods. Although methodulatory is not a phenomenon restricted to the futures disciplines, it adds an additional dimension to the 

Applying Futures to innovation and entrepreneurship is different. That not only has to do with foresight being foremost implementented to suit the needs of uncertainty-averse bureaucracies, government and corporates alike. 

Futures as process vs. Futures as capability

Describing the Fallacy

Foresight and futures professionals that aim to introduce their methods into Innovation, however do so with the implicit assumptions that the existing firm is organisationally capable and willing to pursue alternative futures in which they seek to discover new business models and opportunities for future growth.

And without regard for this hidden institutional decision architecture, any attempt to reason outside the constraints of the dominant organisational logic runs at risk of succumbing to window-dressing.

Moreover, those who pursue foresight and futures as professional services, and consulting and research work tend to favour reasonably the most coveted customers in the market, which are in fact solvent, large firms. This further skews economic dynamism in favour of large, existing firms being seen as the primary applicants of foresight-driven innovation.

How Financial incentive structures constrain futures

With it also arise second and third order implications. The main one being that methodologies created for large, legacy organisations tend not to be suitable for anyone but them. It rings most apparent when comparing accounting of small firms with those of large, multinational corporations. Corporate foresight vastly overdelivers: its technicality, its outputs, language, and costs are not fit for the needs of smaller firms. This renders its applicability to the circumstances in which they operate difficult. Of course there are certainly exceptions to that observation, yet the general managerial principle to apply is that of Contingency Theory – management approaches and methodologies depending on the context, generalisable recommendations, or best practices, cannot be transferred to other organisations the more their context differs from that one studied.

Futures practitioners that work for commercial projects assume that 1. the large existing firm is the best customer to serve, without considering the decisions and institutional constraints that regularly deliver ‘Innovator’s Dilemmata’ – thus the effectiveness of truly transformational work looking to offer alternatives to the business-as-usual is obliterated by that very mechanism, and financial incentive structures which corporate innovators already face, even without introducing transformational alternatives to their strategic consideration.

Secondly, given that futures practitioners – in consulting or corporate – deliver their work to a customer who economic conditions very vastly from that of young innovative firms, they position their work from a state of relative organisational certainty and alienated from decision-making and risk.

This not only widens the gap for futures to be adopted outside its implicit, yet dominant market logic, that is to work for corporates, its methodologies are geared towards suiting these types of organisations – at the expense of other organisational archetypes.

Entrepreneurship is different Kind of Beast

As we will see, entrepreneurship takes this to the extreme.

The entrepreneurial venture possesses a unique mandate that established firms do not: to create and establish the new, under adverse conditions such as the heightened exposure to uncertainty, and by carrying the entire economic risks involved in that pursuit.

Current futures approaches do not address these core functions with regards to innovation. To become productive for the purposes of innovation (such as economic growth, societal transformation) it is thus a prerequisite for futures and foresight to become established, thus seeking the most successful strategies that help them achieve that. In this regard it is almost paramount to understand the organisational and strategic conditions that are likely to lead to failure beforehand.

Corporates as the default customer

And as it concerns those futures practitioners motivated to establish viable alternatives through innovation, understanding of what reliably leads to innovators’ dilemmas is on the one hand a practice to avoid entering these paths towards failure before any ideation can actually take place. Theory in this case serves as a filter to deselect costly, and likely innovation failures beforehand. On the other hand, the Innovator’s Dilemma not only introduces itself as a descriptive theory of how, and why organisations fail to respond to innovation. It also offers a prescription: the Theory of Disruptive Innovation, which offers a strategic design framework to build winning alternatives that would otherwise be cannibalised by the host organisation or by competition. A chief concern of entrepreneurship is indeed not just to establish a but an organisation capable of asserting itself under adversity.

And as it concerns truly transformational futures, ideas are rather likely to stir some feathers. It is thus savvy to position oneself to win such inevitable confrontations even before they arise. As a result, transformational futures being technically unlikely (not impossible, but improbable) to emerge from organisations given that their institutional design (business model, governance, incentive structures, power relations etc.) is perfected to maintain the status quo, and eliminate uncertainty. Alternative futures need alternative organisations. And despite the many weaknesses entrepreneurial venturing possesses, it is the most advanced, best studied, most broadly available type of social organisation to embrace, not suspend, uncertainty to find opportunity in it, and reduce risks systematically until an economic-organisational equilibrium (also known as product-market-fit, or break-even-point) has been achieved. Very few other disciplines achieve that (the other being the military and the arts).

To deliver transformation, however, requires a reconfiguration in the way we think of entrepreneurship, how we organise it, and how we alter one of its core functions for rigorous managerial application: Opportunity.

That is why purely retrofitting corporate foresight methodologies yield limited  productivity for the peculi

It is indicative of its corporate mandate the foresight community has not emerged with any insight positing corporates unfit to create truly transformative change.

Partly because of the economic dependency practitioners in this field have and are thus denying their clients the question whether their organisational fate is to become obselete or exnovated.

Alas, he who feeds you, ownes you. And although there will be established organisations that in themselves will undergo necessary internal transformation, we should not expect this to be the norm, but the exception.

It is this for any futures professional to decide whether they will undertake the unpleasant experience of also changing such organisations from within, with all friction and frustration that comes with the job, or whether they will choose a different approach.

One might further argue that the necessary external pressures to seriously engage and invest in transformative innovation will most likely be inspired by introducing serious competition as viable alternatives.

Unfortunately, such passive approach to innovation, one which postpones the inevitable challenges, results hardly in sustainable economic advantages, as the opportunities to build capabilities needed require longterm effort and compound over long time.

This attitudes is also further characterised by fearfulness and an incapacity to productively deal with uncertainty.

Futures Beyond today’s organisations

In light of this analysis it dawns that the contingencies that provide structure to the corporatised bureaucracy also make them unfit to deliver futures of the kind required to deal effectively with the transformational challenges of our era. 

After all, a bureaucracy is a type of socio-economic institution, which was entrusted with the very specific mandate

To thus  entrust scuh entities with a mandate so different from their original emphasis on