A Developmental Future

The Future cannot be trapped by Risk.

HYPOTHESIS: Risk increasingly feels like an outdated frame to scaffold innovation and the future.

Over the last years, I have been concerned by a risk framed view of the future and innovation. At the outset I was delighted by linking risk and innovation. Using that frame, it became much easier to get the attention of treasury, financial or board functions in organisations. But working with and understanding the implications better — it FEELS systemically problematic. Looking at a thesis of systemic change,, where risk has become a critical frame to hold and address complexity, it seems critical to re-examine the relationship between risk and innovation. Therefore,this piece is written as an open invitation rather than a statement of fact and comprehension.

The following questions aim to explore main issues which could point to different pathway for systemic change:

1. Which neuro-psychological frame is risk rooted in? And thereby what future does it bias, which future does it drive us to crave? Risk is rooted in the fear of loss. Hence fundamentally tying innovation to risk reduces the frame of innovation to mere MEASURED allocation to loss aversion. Imagine building a future on mere loss aversion. It leads to miserable futures constructed from balance sheets of fear — not the possibilities of expeditions.
2. To whom is risk-adhered-innovation beneficial, especially the typology of risk which can crystallize to price and provisions made? Risk is beneficial to incumbents and existing holders of wealth. For the non-asset owners, the poor, the future generations, human and non-humans are all largely ignored in this financialised risk world view. Of course risk is also understood by a series of red, orange and green tags on a register — unpriced, unvalued. And if Covid is to go by,this unpriced and unvalued risk is allocated by design. It will be left to “we told you so” moments of political discourse.
3. What aspects of our actual total risk are priced and crystallizable in our current society economy? And perhaps more importantly, what risk is not priceable in our accounting methods, society and economy and hence increasingly becomes ignored by our risk-framed innovation thesis? Looking at extremely volatile futures, we need to talk about the price or value of a human and how to price risk to human life, or price the risk to human thriving and development.This discussion has to happen with a wide range of citizens, not only those who can afford modern slavery.
4. How do we price or value the risk of civilization breakdown? Given the time and the scale of the transition we face as a society, can this actually be achieved through a collective agreement to manage shared risk to capital? Is this a “too big to risk” problem? We might need to reimagine our pathway of intangible, infinite joy, care, love, and thriving — not only for now but the next 1000 years. Instead of handling Ukraine fighting for its sovereignty as a risk adjusted calculation, it is time to open up a whole new space of allocation where current can be transcended and new ones entered — focused on resource mobilization as opposed to risk adjusted innovation.
5. How do we operate in a world where “doing nothing” increasingly is accumulating risk? The very act of not acting is accelerating and advancing future risks. Our mere persistence of living in the way we do is accelerating risk for us and future generations. How is the risk of non-action priced in relation to the world as we know it today and its entangled cascading effects? In this reality innovation needs to be a way of living and doing everything. By constantly responding to the infinite cascading effects it will become harder to define what is really valuable and for whom.
6. How do we operate in a world where risk reduces tomorrow to a quasi clockwork machine? When tomorrow becomes a mere function of risk, our agency is reduced to fulfilling the obligations of cause and effect, not an intentional creation. This presents the world as an extension of Newtonian world view fixed and determinate as opposed to seeing the world as a very malleable place. “If you know what you want and you go after it with maximum effort and drive the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more easily than you would think.” A world which is make able, determinable and intentional.

Risk presents us a world view built on fear, a world built on the preservation of the now, not the exploration of the possible. It will always be part of our reality but should not determine it. Nora Bateson says that it takes a huge amount of energy to keep things the same in a living system and relates directly to what we are experiencing in our socio-economic systems now. We are wasting our collective energy by channeling it into risk management, preservation of assets and outdated social norms for the very few at the expense of the wider ecosystem.

This risk adjusted future — fundamentally discounts, the deep disruptive capacities offered by the rise of near Universal Connectivity, Ubiquitous AI. Accelerated Innovation, Clean Energies, Genetic Understanding, Biological Engineering, the rise of New Majorities, the evolution of planetary Climate Cooperation.

Further, a risk-adhered innovation world, constructed by implication — is a zero sum future, driven by zero sum game economics and politics, a future bent on preserving the present, where the only pathway to justice and inequity is redistribution of the fixed present — voluntarily or via war and conflict.

Innovation cannot be limited to managing risks to the present. Instead we must discover, create and empower the exploration of the adjacent possibles of society by all and for all. If not, any innovation becomes a tool of driving inequality and entrenchment. Counter to the world presented to us today, there are extraordinary possibilities open to us and the planet, if the path is not guided by fear but an existential care

This is an invitation to look at risk as a social cultural logic. Especially if combined with an accounting and pricing logic, it has created systemic shortfalls in framing innovation efforts needed to approach a societal transformation towards regeneration and peace.. Whilst the risk approach is convenient in a steady state growth world — which is seeking to sustain and preserve itself — it becomes increasingly culturally inappropriate in a rapid transition. Taking the scale of the challenges and futures we face seriously, risk accounting becomes an instrument to defend the status quo — a status quo which is fundamentally harming and finally terminating us.

Addressing risk is not sufficient as a frame to invest and make the future. The future needs and must be bigger than the management of risk. The future must explore adjacent possibilities, must uncover the unpriced and the beyond valued. A new framework must put life and its thriving at its center — not the assets of the present world, it must be fundamentally developmental.

Addressing this next developmental frame needs precision and an integral approach to the future especially to counter our modernist models of growth — which explored a theory of progress based on specialization, segmentation, & silo-isation, externalization, material infinity. A developmental approach fit for the 21st century must recognize at a structural level systems, entanglements, co-evolutionary futures, infinite intangibles futures, inner development, and our capacity to intentionally construct futures.

This next developmental future must recognise a planetary entanglement in which human, machines, ecological systems are increasingly indivisible. A future in which we acknowledge that it took a civilization to make a pencil and it takes a planet to make a microchip. This is not a risk adjusted future but a new emergence, a new co-evolutionary singularity we are all contributing towards, along with bearing the pain of the old dying. This a future which embraces life in both its exploration of adjacent possibilities and its anti-entropy powers of converting energy into ever more complex order, albeit a new order.

Societies, communities and companies which can break the stranglehold of risk and embrace the next developmental innovation capacity will make tomorrow — a landscape of existential care for all, as opposed to just a museum vainly trying to preserve today for the few. Let’s make a bigger tomorrow together and not be a victim of it.

This piece is part of a series of explorations advancing existential hope futures supported by the National Lottery Community Fund.