2023 FUTURE OBSERVATORY
2023 FUTURE OBSERVATORY
5184 RESPONSE TO 11 SEPTEMBER 2001
In the period immediately after the attack on the World Trade Centre I was asked by the editors of Ozone to comment on the impact of this in the longer term. The resulting short article, below, appeared in their edition of January 2002.
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Predicting the future can be a messy business, as any racing tipster or stock market speculator will testify. Though they base their forecasts on the best available knowledge, pouring over past performances and analysing present conditions, there is no such thing as a sure bet there¹s always the sudden slump or the unexpected stumble.
David Mercer, a senior lecturer at the Open University Business School (OUBS) and head of its Futures Observatory also knows this problem well. On the eve of the new millennium, he and his colleagues published a map of the future called Six Drivers for the Future for the years leading up to 2025. It was the culmination of five years research, and provided a detailed projection of where political and economic changes, social and technological advances would take us during the coming century.
Among its predictions were that women will make the best managers, computer chips will become part of the human brain, and that the EU will take over global leadership from the US. It was a resource that business and governing bodies could use to help draw up their own plans and devise their responses to the developments that, all things being equal, it foretold.
But all things are never equal and there was no better proof of that than 11 September 2001. In a matter of seconds, on a brilliant autumn day, the world changed forever. All bets were off. There could be no winners. Armies mobilised, economies wobbled, populations stayed at home. Human history had taken a sudden and alarming detour, and maps of the future drawn up pre-11/10/01 were now about as much use as last week¹s lottery ticket.
In the months since, the tide of impending doom has ebbed and life for most has resumed its comforting routines. Still, the shockwaves from the attacks will reverberate for years to come. Given this, and the benefit of hindsight, how does David Mercer feel his predictions need to be recast?
“I went back and looked at our drivers in the context of 11 September,” he says, “and the first thing that struck me is that no matter how traumatic it was, it was a minor blip in terms of future trends.”
A minor blip? They must be substantial and robust trends to survive thedestruction of a prime area of New York and the subsequent events it set in motion. “Well, they are, and a number of them are closely related to what happened. The first trend is that America is disappearing off on a tangent to the rest of the world, particularly Europe.”
Evidence of this split was becoming clear before Ground Zero, as the Bush administration took on prevailing world opinion on a number of issues, from arms treaties to environmental policy. Taking this further, the Six Drivers forecast an economic conflict between the EU and the US, as the Europeans challenged the commercial might of the Americans. Only time will tell how 11 September has affected this, but for now David Mercer sees no reason to replot it.
Is it also significant that the map predicted a clash between developing and developed nations? That it observed a powerful fundamentalism, albeit in the US? And might this suggest Mercer and his colleagues really were on to something?
“We didn¹t stress global terrorism but we did recognise it,” he says. “Our research found that people felt there was a chance of a terrorist setting off a nuclear bomb somewhere, and the effect of that would be 5,000 to10,000 deaths. In effect the World Trade Centre attack was just that, as the power released by those two planes was the equivalent of a small nuclear bomb.”
Before this gets too sensational, though, David points out that while it’s possible to predict events of this sort, it’s not possible to know where,when or how they will happen. In lieu of the details, however, having a prepared response is paramount. “The point of predicting the future in this way is so that contingency plans can be put in place to handle events such as these,” he says, “and this appears to be where the Americans have failed.”
One of the difficulties in predicting the future is that while the big trends can be seen, there’s no way of knowing how quickly they are moving. And it may be this is where 11 September will be felt most either in speeding up or slowing down those trends.
There is also the implication that there are much bigger forces at work than either terrorism or the US military machine. According to David Mercer, globalism is one of these forces, and education another. “It used to be that only the elite were educated, but now more and more people are being educated, in developing nations as well as the developed nations, and they are beginning to find their voice.” This also ties in closely with other elements of the map, forecasting the decline of party politics and the nation state.
So the future of the map of the future appears more assured than might have seemed possible in the wake of 11 September much of its vigour can be attributed to the quality of research that went into its construction: conferences, questionnaires and interviews with thousands of businesses, organisations and individuals, along with the support of BT, ICI, ICL, the EC and other universities. Now the task remains to check the map periodically, to test its stability, to maintain its integrity in the faceof any further seismic shocks.
More than year later, with the war on Iraq under way, I still see no need to change the long-term map to any great extent. The main change is that the split between the US and the EU now seems to be expanding to be between the US and the rest of the world. Though this highlights the problem, of the US believing its position as the sole superpower gives it great privileges but demands no equivalent responsibilities, the principles remain much the same. At this stage it is not possible to exactly predict the outcome of the war, but it may perhaps go in one of two directions. In the first, the US response to the difficulties may be to see an even greater threat from such countries; and will build even bigger armies with even greater firepower – at the possible cost of pushing Wall Street into a crash. In the second, the US gets sucked into a debilitating stand off, and suffers much the same reaction as it did in Vietnam; in which case its electorate may move to the left and ditch George Bush Jr.
2 April 2003
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