Drivers of Change
Intro to Futures, Week 11
This week’s topic continued building off of prior concepts toward a comprehensive toolbox for futures practitioners. Drivers of change are forces we can feel today (unlike emerging issues, which are on the very fringe) that exert influence on the course of the future. That is, when you bring up a driver, the reaction should be more like “of course” or “oh yeah” rather than the “what?” or “no way” you’re going for with an emerging issue. Drivers are larger building blocks of futures that have their own gravity - related emerging issues, trends, and signals will orbit around them with the potential to accelerate or weaken the driver’s force1. In turn, drivers combine as the core building blocks of scenarios (more on this next week).
One great taxonomy for drivers (both to organize and also to help generate them) is Inayatullah’s Futures Triangle: we experience some drivers as undirected pushes toward change, some as pulls toward specific visions of the future, and some as inertia weighing down any movement. Inayatullah draws a parallel between these forces and the three Gunas of Hinduism that weave together to make up all creation: rajas, the quality of passion and movement; sattva, the quality of harmony; and tamas, the quality of inactivity and disharmony2. A simplified way to think of this is that we are collecting drivers that come from images of the future, trends, and institutional inertia. A few ways to engage people around this framing: looking for points of leverage and agency where choices can make a difference on the way the future unfolds, generating questions around drivers to elicit potential changes and opportunities (both internal / related to the organization in question, and external / related to the organization’s mission), or have people role-play one of the drivers or even an entire point of the triangle.
In general, drivers will be specific to the context being considered, and the frames and lenses of the audience. For example, the rise of remote work might not mean much in the context of the future of agriculture or dentistry. However, there are some drivers that are so pervasive that they may be relevant in almost any context: climate change and the rise of AI are the most obvious two right now.
One popular medium to package and communicate a set of drivers is through a drivers deck - a literal deck of cards briefly explaining the driver and posing provocative questions. It can also be helpful to include wildcards in the deck, which serve to acknowledge that the future is often surprising, and might take the form of emerging issues or even known low-probability events that could introduce chaos3; inclusion shows that you’re not ignoring them. Bonus points for making 52 of them to push the metaphor (or even 54 with two wildcards), but that’s a lot to ask. Here are some examples.
Here are a couple of practical examples of drivers in US healthcare, where I work and have the most experience. The legal and regulatory structure that created the system of healthcare we have today (mix of employer-sponsored and public insurance mostly paying fee-for-service, post-Flexner medical training system, rules on data sharing, etc) is a heavy weight of the past; shrinking/negative margins on Medicare and Medicaid patients and the general system of cost-shifting is an example of the push of the present; and reports of GPT-4 acing med school exams is a signal that shows the pull of the future as part of a larger driver of AI-enabled healthcare.
For example, demographic/immigration trends strengthen the role of Hispanic voters as a driver of change in US politics.
In addition to the standard disclaimer that I’m in no way an expert in Hinduism, I’ll point out that this mapping imposes a normative direction to the past and future that speaks to deep cultural assumptions of progress that are probably worth exploring further.
For example, a war escalating, a nuclear plant meltdown, a pandemic, or a massive change in social values.