It is presumptuous to discuss the future of any community and how it will fare in the 21st century. I never call myself a futurist because I've learned that most futurists describe not the future but the present to the great majority of the population that hasn't arrived at it yet.

One of the effects of networked computing, of which the Internet is both a metaphor and a vehicle, has been the change in the future itself -- not the real future, whatever that might be, but how we frame the future, how we think about it, how we plan for it.

The change in our conversation about the future -- and it is our conversation about the future that defines our possibilities in life -- is illustrated by "scenario planning."

According to Peter Schwarz and the Global Business Network, scenario planning evolved when Shell Oil was shocked by the oil crisis of 1973 into realizing they needed to do a better job of anticipating the future.

Scenario planning is a way of recognizing that exponential change makes the world unthinkably complex and the future impossible to predict. Input is gathered from knowledgeable people in diverse fields to imagine possible futures; these scenarios are given names and the social, economic, or political events that would have to be true for them to happen are identified. Frequent comparison of the models with what subsequently happens enables organizations to adapt and respond appropriately.

Scenario planning is a new way to construct the future. The future is defined as a set of branching possibilities to which actual events will lead us through a set of logic gates. That construction resembles the structure of the information systems with which we interact.

Like the computer programs it resembles, the Internet teaches us as we interact with it how to frame information. If we view ourselves also as symbol manipulating systems, we can see that our interaction with the Internet changes us in fundamental ways.

Scenario planning is a way of simulating the structure of a computer program and by extension the hyperlinked structure of the Internet. Paradoxically, the net is the model, and human life is the simulation.

This is why all of our systems -- political, economic, social-- are in a process of transformation driven by the revolution in information technologies. This revolution does not just change this thing or that thing about us or our work. It transforms work itself. It transforms US.

Scenario planning is appropriate to a time of "exponential change," when everything is changing everywhere at once. Exponential change and the ways it insists we construct the future threatens the traditional Japanese mode of organizational learning, which is incremental and progressive. "Companyism" has long fostered an expectation of long-term employment and security, but global changes of which the Internet is a primary agent threaten to undermine this deeply-rooted dependency.

A response by Andrew Grove, the president of Intel, to an employee who asked if his job would exist in another year, illuminates the new contract between employer and employee.

Grove told him honestly that the job probably wouldn't exist, but offered to help the man identify the jobs likely to emerge (a form of scenario planning). He could then help him get the training he needed to have a reasonable expectation of being ready for the evolving jobs.

The employee's predicament is that of workers everywhere: systemic change generates fear which generates isolation and rigidity, the very things we don't want during times of radical change. Grove's response, however, indicates the antidote to those factors: mutuality, feedback, and accountability.

Only those organizations which intentionally build structures to generate mutuality, frequent feedback, and mutual accountability can generate the security we need to remain flexible and responsive.

Grove created a context of mutuality by engaging with the employee in an open conversation and provided useful feedback, then held the employee accountable for doing what was necessary to ensure his own well-being.

Each of those qualities -- mutuality, feedback, and accountability -- must be present in organizations that intend to remain viable in the networked world. The lack of any one of them negatively skews the organization in a predictable way.

As it happens, those are also the qualities needed by individuals. The only competitive advantage of an organization or an individual is the capacity to morph into new forms appropriate to evolving conditions.

The Internet does globally what WANs and LANs do locally -- redistributes information throughout the system, putting it into the hands of people who need it and thereby transforming the roles of employees and supervisors alike. Those who administer such systems inevitably find the uses of their authority redefined. They must be more like coaches than generals; they still have authority, but it must be used to assist empowered employees, as Grove demonstrates.

Learning the behaviors needed to live in this new world is more difficult than understanding why new behaviors are necessary. One danger of companyism is that corporate leaders will mistake institutional culture or identity -- which give an illusion of stability -- for the kind of culture that generates mutuality, feedback, and accountability from the inside out.

But companyism can also give Japanese organizations an advantage. Companyism is predicated on a long-term orientation and the persistence and patience it requires.

American companies have often responded to competitive pressure by rapidly downsizing. Many are now reaping some of the negative consequences of a vision that could not see past the next quarter.

A worker at a telecommunications company told me the effects of massive restructuring at her company.

"It was too much too fast," she said. "They let go of too many experienced people. The new people don't understand the system. You learn how a system works by being part of it. That takes time.

"They didn't realize," she concluded, "that people ARE the system."

Nothing is more deeply ingrained in Japanese culture than the knowledge that people are the system. What sometimes looks like hesitation to rush into the open space and freedom of the Internet can also be seen as an acknowledgement of the organic nature of systemic growth and the need to engage always in root-binding, nemawashi, the inclusion of everyone in the system in the gradual process of adaptation.

That fact points to another way the Internet is a perfect fit for Japanese culture.

The ability to morph that constitutes our competitive advantage is not a solitary task. We need a work group engaged in corporate learning in order to capture enough information to know how to act. Then we need the group to transform that information into knowledge.

Knowledge, not information, is the capital valued in the world today. Simply gathering and distributing information is not helpful.

If I tell you that a new Infiniti has more computing power than Apollo 13, a digital watch more computing power than existed in the entire world prior to 1961, what have you gained? When information overload is the problem, adding another brick to the pile doesn't help. The raw data must be synthesized into useful abstractions.

The Japanese passion for collecting information, however, is transformed on the Internet into an advantage because the activity of gathering data from every possible source generates cooperative learning of necessity in order to make sense of the data. That in turn creates the virtual community that in turn creates security.

An experienced manager recently told me he doesn't know what information is really relevant out of the immense flow that comes to his terminal over the Internet. Even if someone tells him what it is, he isn't sure what to do with it.

He is bringing outmoded behaviors to his participation on the Internet. He is treating the Net only as an opportunity to gather information. He must engage in the larger community made available by the Net in order not to be overwhelmed by that information. That virtual community is both a filter and a platform for action.

Paradoxically the Internet will create for the Japanese who use it a more global form of companyism. The mutuality discovered on the Net will root the Japanese more deeply in their core culture. That in turn will temper the very real danger that the open space of the Internet represents. Members of a highly structured culture can experience too much freedom as an invitation to explode beyond their boundaries. To feel secure as they exploit that freedom, Japanese must recreate themselves as a virtual culture that fences in their virtual presence with the symbols and icons of a familiar cultural identity. Those symbols will create safe boundaries in the limitless world of virtual space and keep Japanese culture more or less steady as it speeds into the unknown future.

1996

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