Scenario Planning – with Jamais Cascio

Danny Buerkli: My guest today is Jamais Cascio. Jamais is a futurist and scenarios expert. He also has a new book out called “Navigating the Age of Chaos”. We’ll get to that in just a minute.

The core problem is that the future is uncertain, and yet we must act – as you also write in your book. And that’s why scenario planning holds so much promise. Jamais, welcome.

Jamais Cascio: Thank you very much. Glad to be here.

Danny: Let’s clarify some terms first before we get going. What’s the difference between scenario planning, forecasting, anticipation, and strategic foresight, and how do these things fit together?

Jamais: Well, these are not mutually exclusive terms. Scenario planning is a type of foresight practice which can be used for strategic planning, and they’re they all fall under the umbrella of anticipation. That is, they’re all about thinking about what might be the consequences of present day decisions.

Most people, when they think about the future, do so in a either in a linear way, you know, think about the future, and this is what will happen, or they think about it in a binary way.

Like, here’s a good outcome. Here’s a bad outcome. With scenario planning or scenario forecasting, scenario thinking, what that asks us to do is to think about multiple plausible futures that are, if at all possible, broadly equal in positive and negative. So you aren’t steering towards “this is my delightful outcome” and “this is my tragic outcome” so much as “here are three, four, five different ways things could turn out”.

Now, the the stumbling block for a lot of people is that you’re going to be wrong. Your scenarios are going to miss the mark on a lot of in a lot of ways.

The goal then is to come up with scenarios that are illustrative of different possible futures such that they give you a a new sensitivity to change such that that when something is happening that is that parallels one of your scenarios, you recognize it early. The goal of a scenario is not to tell you the future, but to give you the tools to see it coming.

Danny: What’s the intellectual heritage and the lineage of scenario planning? Because one of the interesting features of scenario planning is it seems so obvious today that it’s hard to imagine there was a world where we did not think in scenarios, and yet that was true at some point.

Jamais: Well, certainly to a degree. Certainly, people have always or have for centuries, if not millennia, thought about different possible outcomes. What came about in the nineteen sixties with a gentleman by the name of Herman Kahn, who wrote a book called “On Thermonuclear War”, among several others, was essentially formalizing a process. So, Herman Kahn, in in the early sixties, was a researcher at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, and his job was to think about what he called the unthinkable, to think about the consequences of an actual nuclear war. And in doing so, he developed a process to think about different ways the future could turn out, but to do so in a way that very formalized, so that all of the scenarios made sure they covered the same types of issue areas, that all of them were on roughly the same timeline.

And then a gentleman named, Pierre Wack, who worked for Royal Dutch Shell, took that same line of thinking and turned it into a business process. So, the late sixties, into the early seventies, Royal Dutch Shell started doing a regular, I think, every five year scenario process where they would work out different stories of what the future could hold for Shell around everything from, you know, oil production to climate to demographic global demographics. And tell, for them, they they’ve formalized it into four stories, and they used a something that people nowadays call the four box method. Essentially, the more technical term is the strategic divergences or, diversion catalyst futures, where you look at two large axes of uncertainty. Okay?

So two big issues that when you cross them, you get four big four large scenario types. So, for example, if you’re talking about the future of of computing, you might have one axis be what the the economy might look like over the next ten years, the economy outside of information technology, what it might look like, and the other axis being how fast information technology hardware gets better. That those are not the best ones you can do just off top of my head. And so you come up with a scenario in which there is a strong economy and rapidly improving IT, one that’s a strong economy with slowly improving IT, and then a weak economy, strong IT, weak economy, weak IT. And those four scenarios give you pathways to tell a story, pathways to figure out what would the future look like, how would we get from where we are now to that future?

Or as the technique evolved, they started looking future back is the term that gets used in the industry. You start out by looking at the what your imagined future is like, and you start thinking backwards from there. Like, okay. What caused that and what caused that and leading back to where you are now? The goal with all of these is to come up with different operating environments.

That is to stories about what the future may hold that you that will be the environment in which you will be making decisions.

Danny: How has the practice evolved since the time of Herman Kahn and Pierre Wack?

Jamais: Well, let’s see. In the late seventies, an academic named, Jim Dator at the University of Hawaii – they actually have a futures studies department in their political science department. Actually, you can get a a graduate degree in future studies from Hawaii. It’s kinda great. But Jim Dator came up with a – he’d been doing a lot of work both for governments and for businesses and for academia, but he realized that there were four different archetypes of what scenarios could look like, that no matter what you’re talking about, good I strong IT, weak economy, whatever your your specific characteristics, the underlying them were four broad archetypes.

The the first is what he called the growth archetype. That is, it’s a scenario in which whatever you’re looking at is increasing. Now most people interpret that to mean a good scenario. Like, things get better, things get we get more of the economy growth or whatever. Dator noted that that that doesn’t always mean a good scenario.

You could be looking at scenarios of, flu propagation, infection rates. And if that’s growing, that’s not a a good scenario. But so the the focus is the growth. It’s a scenario that’s built around whatever you’re looking at getting bigger or accumulating in in number. The in contrast to that, the second is what we call the collapse scenario.

Again, here’s one that most people interpret to mean that things are horrible. And in in most cases, that’s that’s the case. But it could also mean a collapse of opposition, a collapse of well, a collapse of infection rates. It’s it’s whatever you again, whatever you’re looking at, whatever is the focus of the scenario falling apart.

The third is what he called discipline, usually gets called constraint these days, and it’s a scenario in which there are limitations placed on the focal point. And they could be regulatory. They could be environmental. Because something happens in over the course of the scenario that puts, hard limits on what kind of kinds of outcomes you can get.

And then the fourth is transformation, and that’s a scenario where essentially all bets are off. Things happen that you don’t expect that may not even seem plausible.

And underlying all of this, Dator had an has an aphorism, because he’s still around, has an aphorism that is any useful scenario of the future must initially sound ridiculous. That is if you if the scenarios you come up with, whether they are growth constraint, collapse, transformation, whatever they are, if the first reaction isn’t an, oh, no way. If the first reaction is in some way being shocked, then it’s probably not going far enough. If the scenario sounds too plausible, it’s probably far too cautious.

And so around and in the mid eighties, the whole bunch of folks from from Royal Dutch Shell spun off into their own company, a scenario planning company called Global Business Network, in which they basically had as their business practice, both providing scenario services but also training others to be scenario forecasters.

And I actually worked with them from ‘95 through ‘98, and they had this real philosophy of this should be part of every consultant’s toolkit. Every business analyst, every strategic planner, they should all have have scenario thinking, scenario planning in their set of tools, and they did it. It’s actually kind of remarkable to look back at the eighties and nineties, the early parts of the February, and see how little how rarely scenarios were brought up as a strategic planning method. But over the course of the late nineties into into the present day, scenario thinking has become extremely commonplace. And it’s it’s really odd to see a revolution succeed.

I mean, because they they really did try to do something what they felt was revolutionary. It really changed the way that business people and government people and military people thought about the future, and they did it. And so at this point, scenarios, whether they are the the Royal Dutch Shell style four box axes of uncertainty or the Jim Ditter scenario archetypes or just some other kind of generative process, a kind of a way of just sort of pulling the different scenarios out the possibilities out of what you’re thinking in your head. All of these are very not just commonplace, but very useful to people, whether we’re talking business or government or military or community organizations.

Danny: How did you get into scenarios work in the first place?

Jamais: I’m an easily distracted generalist. That is, I’m interested in everything and, oh, shiny. It’s something I don’t know whether I have ADHD or never been actually, officially diagnosed with it, but it is my education comes from a study of history with a focus on revolutionary movements, anthropology, which is a stud, with a focus on, human evolution, political science with a focus on international politics, then doing a lot of work with computers, primarily in the network administration sense, and doing a lot of writing in comic book type stuff. I mean, so I have this really both a varied footprint of interests and a desire to to learn something new. And my wife got a job at Global Business Network doing some some administrative work and actually set up their first web server.

And so I got started to go to GBN events and met these people and thought, oh my god. This is exactly what I want to do. So I figured out a way to get myself a job there, and that was in ‘95. And it’s just been that my life’s been going gangbusters as a scenario thinker since.

My life has been going well as a scenario thinker since. It is an interestingly applicable skill because I from that basic training and then the elaborations upon it that I did, I worked in the I worked in Hollywood for a few years, working with, screenwriters to help them build out their science fiction stories. I did I actually created a couple of role playing game books for Steve Jackson Games, a pretty well known game company based in Texas.

They were doing a series they called Transhuman Space, which was a very realistic look in what the year 2100 could look like. And so I wrote a couple of the settings books for that, one about what the developing world looks like, one about what popular culture and religion looks like in 2100 in a world of AIs and genetically engineered animals and the like.

So and then you can start to see that the this practice has given me just an incredible playground to imagine different possible futures. And that’s so that’s what I’ve been doing, and I work with I I’ve given talks and done done work with everything from major, Fortune 10 companies.

One of the biggest automakers in Europe actually use some of my scenarios for their strategic planning to governments, various whether you’re talking ministry of education in The UK, the Department of Defense, or the Ministry of Defense in Singapore, you know, of all.

I’ve done work with them on their the the ways they think about their future, and I’ve just a lot of writing and ultimately accumulating coming finishing up in this book, Navigating the Age of Chaos.

Danny: As an anthropologist, you’re familiar with the the idea of of manifestation. And it seems there’s an interesting concern occasionally around scenario writing, scenario planning that and I think one of the criticisms leveled at Herman Kahn was, that by describing, by thinking the unthinkable, he might bring about the undesirable future of nuclear holocaust.

How do you think about the this worry of manifesting undesirable futures just by describing them? Or maybe put differently, have you ever refused to develop a scenario because you’re worried that making it so vivid might actually somehow make it real?

Jamais: Generally speaking, I’m not concerned in the esoteric sense of being able to manifest a reality. And, frankly, if I if I were able to do that, it’d be coming up with a much better reality than what we have. I actually am a strong believer that you can’t think about what you would do if you don’t have an idea of what’s coming. That is, if you are in a if you’re in a crisis or if you think a crisis may be on on its way, thinking through the different possible consequences is I believe that is a really important it’s a very important task. It is something that allows you to recognize the surprising elements.

So when you we all have an embedded view of the future. It’s just the nature of how we have to work in reality is we have to think about the future. But we do so in a very haphazard way. Like I said at the outset, it’s it tends to be very either linear or binary, and it is we tend to expect that the world will be more or less the way it is, except some things might change. But we already have a sense of what those things that that would change might be.

So phones will get will get better or whatever. Computers will get will get smarter, or the environment will continue to get worse. And we usually unconsciously build out our expectations for what we might be doing in six months or a year or ten years based on those internalized expectations of normality.

But always, there are surprising and unexpected developments along the way. Sometimes they’re small. Sometimes they’re massive. Sometimes they’re, like, they’re pandemic level massive. It’s important not to imagine exactly what will happen, but think about the possibility.

What if something really disruptive happens? What is something that makes it impossible for us as a company to have all of our workers in one place at the same time, which is something that many companies in California already think about in terms of earthquakes.

So if you’re a company and because highway roads have been damaged, but there’s still but there’s electricity and Internet and you wanna keep working, how do you keep going? Will you build out plans for remote work, or you build out plans for remote for remote access to your clientele, your customers, or your patients. And a lot of companies in California have done that.

And it turns out the companies with the with the best remote work, remote whether remote employee or remote client structures in place, plans in place, are the ones that you know, around earthquakes were the ones that were best suited to shift around COVID. Because earthquakes and pandemic are very different in many ways, but the same underlying it’s a crisis that has made it so that we can’t get our people in here, you know, all in one place for an extended period, what can we do?

Those plans actually still could still apply. And so that’s my response to the manifestation idea is that they didn’t manifest the they didn’t manifest the pandemic. They were thinking about earthquakes. But the planning that they had done, the thinking about possible outcomes, possible consequences, and building up the resilience around how do we adapt if some this something really disastrous happens. Mhmm.

That was very important that allowed many of these organizations to survive and even thrive.

Danny: There’s sort of a a positive version of this, which I believe comes from Adam Kahane, who was also at Global Business Network, possibly with you. And I think he calls it transformative scenario planning, which sort of deliberately using thinking about the future to then shape reality or give he works in conflict facilitation. Right? Give conflict parties some sense of how a different future might be possible.

Jamais: Well, right. Yeah. That that’s actually a really useful thing. I have worked with Adam before, and we’ve talked a lot about the work he did in South Africa and thinking about the what happens post apartheid. And he I think he raises a really important point that in many ways, we can’t build out a future we can’t see.

That is, if we have convinced ourselves or have let ourselves believe that no good outcome is possible, then when opportunities arise to create a good outcome, we may miss them. We may not be able to see that as a possible path forward.

Whereas, if you think in terms of scenarios and there are scenarios where you succeed at this, in dealing with this big problem. Now there may be side effects and other consequences to deal with, but you you generally succeed at this problem. You now see that as a as a possible path forward.

And even though, as we said before, the real future isn’t going to be identical to that, You will recognize where there are opportunities to make positive changes in ways that you didn’t that you might not have seen before simply because you didn’t believe it was possible. There is that old cliche of it. If I didn’t see it, I wouldn’t believe it. Well, with scenarios in the future thinking in many ways, it’s if I didn’t believe it, I wouldn’t see it.

Danny: A critique that comes up often of the scenario method is that sort of it stops that insight, but then it doesn’t translate that into strategy or, you know, what what should we do now. Merely improving insight doesn’t just give us better action. Right? What what’s needed to make that happen to bridge that gap?

Jamais: So that’s actually part of I would do a lot of work with a group called called Institute for the Future, which actually spun out from the Rand Corporation fifty three years ago. And, so they’re one of the few futures foresight companies, foresight organizations that have outlived their own scenarios. They have a pretty good track record, but they have as their guiding principle this trinity of Foresight, Insight, Action that by developing foresight, it allows us to to then build insights into what our problems are, what steps we could take. Action allows us to to let is our movement, which then generates a need for more foresight. So it becomes a circular process.

But they also recognize that they are not experts in auto making or health care or environmental defense or politics or all these different issues that that, IFTF has to work with. So whatever action steps and what are strategies the IFTF people come up with are not going to be as useful or as insightful as the strategies that are that are come that people within the organization, the client organizations come up with.

So what they argue from early on is that the decision makers have to be part of the process. The people who ultimately make the strategy, make the decisions, have to be part of the underlying scenario and foresight creation process. Because if it’s just brought to them afterwards, they’ll say, thank you, and put it on a shelf.

I in doing this for as long as I’ve done I’ve done this, I’ve seen that so many times where the people who are who within the organization who are responsible for the foresight don’t have the authority then to turn around and implement the strategy. All they can do is bring the foresight and their insights and suggestions to the decision makers who invariably have their own agendas. And some of them will will make use.

Like I said, the major European automaker, the folks in charge who were who were a level above the folks that we worked with, did take those those recommendations seriously. But by and large, if you don’t have the buy in from the outset and the participation from the outset of the people who have the responsibility to make decisions and to carry out strategy, it’s really hard to to make that leap from insight to action.

Danny: So it seems that maybe something that occasionally gets misunderstood about this type of work is that what you’re describing is is an experiential good. It’s not the quality is not, as you say, in the brilliant output, though, course, the output may well be brilliant. It can be, but much of the value is in taking people through the process. And I think Pierre Wack also talks about this.

Unless you manage to sort of change the mental model in the head of the decision maker, it’s very unlikely to actually generate any meaningful.

Jamais: Yeah. As you say, the the foresight work, the writing, the videos, whatever the artifacts you come up with, they may be brilliant. But if no one is deriving an insight from them, they are an exercise in creative fiction. And creative fiction can be great. We’re all big fans of creative fiction. But the the the business case for creative fiction is fairly limited outside of a few companies.

Danny: What’s different in how the military and the intelligence world use scenarios versus the civilian world? Because naively, it would seem that that is a domain where this type of method, this type of work is taken way more seriously, probably on average, compared to the private sector.

Jamais: It’s interesting. My experience with having worked with military and intelligence, and of course, with the the civilian business world, is that the military and intelligence scenario thinkers, foresight thinkers are very broad minded, very, very much willing to look at seemingly disparate, seemingly irrelevant drivers that might actually have a long term consequence. They’re willing to look at the big, big picture and see how it all become is interwoven.

Whereas my experience with business leaders, even the ones that have bought into the idea of doing foresight and scenario thinking, so often focus solely on their industry or solely on the economy without really thinking through, well, how does the how does climate change affect us? How does the potential for conflict with between The US and China? How does that affect us? And so the military and intelligence services tend to be better at doing the work.

However, they haven’t they are definitely in the position of not having the authority to make the decisions. All they can do is bring the analysis and insight to their to the political officials. And very often, those political officials don’t wanna hear the hear it.

In 2000, the organization I worked with had someone come in who was a mid level CIA person complaining about how can we get our higher ups to listen to us? They they all have a preset idea of what the future’s gonna hold in mind. How can we communicate this? Because we’re seeing all sorts of stuff they’re just not listening to, not paying attention to, which was frustrating and had a lot of sympathy for them. And, of course, it takes on a very different very different tone when he thinks that it’s just about a year before nine eleven.

Similarly, I did a a big project in 02/2012, I think, with the the CIA Center for Climate Change and National Security. There was actually a CIA Center for Climate Change and National Security. We did a whole role playing game, essentially, of a tensions between The US and China over geoengineering. And we all brought in a bunch of people, people who were who had worked in government, people who were currently in government, people who were and intelligence, people who were media folks, people who were just thinkers and scenario thinkers and the like.

And we all had different roles within this larger I think about a 100 people involved total. And it was fascinating. It was great. We actually came up with some really interesting results. And the next year, congress was taken over by the Republicans and shut them down, stopped funding them because it was climate change, and so, therefore, it was a liberal hoax.

So the great tragedy is that the folks in with government connections who do this kind of work tend to be really good at it, but they have a very limited amount of success because of who they have to report to. And the people they have to report to tend not to be those who like to think in terms of different possible futures. Very often, politicians have a future, and if you push against that future, you are a you’re a traitor.

Infamously, during the Gulf War, in so early February, Condoleezza Rice, who was the national security administrator for the for, George Bush George W. Bush, said something along the lines of, it’s counterproductive to think about what happens if you fail when you’re trying to succeed.

And my response is, no. That’s exactly the time you need to be thinking about what happens if you fail, because you know that you are not certain to succeed. And so you need to be able to think about what do I do if. At least that’s my perspective. It wasn’t hers.

And she was in a high position in government, and I’m not. So what do I know? But that that’s the dilemma. So you have businesses who, when they implement, are usually usually able to make that connection between insight and action possible or better at least better able to than folks in the government, but they’re less likely to have good insights. Because in many cases, especially those who are not working with scenario service organizations and consultants, you have you have very limited narrow views of the future.

And it’s something that we’ve that a lot of us in this field talk about when we talk to our the clientele, the audience, is the the cone of possibility. And to think where we are today, we have a a range of different possible outcomes, and the further out we look, the wider the range is.

Well, most people have a fairly narrow cone of possibility, a cone of what they can imagine as possible, and the job with of the scenario of the foresight people is to get you to widen that cone, which means including some stuff that seems ridiculous. But as Jim Dator says, any useful forecast must initially seem ridiculous.

Danny: You mentioned geoengineering. I know you’ve done quite a bit of work on geoengineering. You’ve published a book on geoengineering. Should we just put the sulfur back in the shipping fuel?

Jamais: No. No. First of all, that’s that’s not getting getting it high enough in the atmosphere to do anything more than acid rain. So the the thing about the the stratospheric sulfate injection types of geoengineering, you know, these those plans, that those part particles get put very high up into the stratosphere such that they get caught up in the global wind circulation, global atmospheric circulation, and spread around.

And that we know from we know from history that that that kind of material in the stratosphere can have a cooling effect on worldwide, and that’s from volcanoes. Because big volcanoes, like in most classically Mount Pinatubo in ‘91, pump a lot of crap into the air, and a good chunk of it hits the stratosphere. That makes it possible. And so as a result of Pinatubo, we saw a couple of years of global cooling of about a degree. We, actually cooled down about a degree from where we were prior to Pinatubo, and that lasted for a couple of years.

The problem with any of that, any kind of thermal regulation geoengineering or solar solar radiation management geoengineering, is that it only attacks one part of the problem.

Temperature is a big problem. Heat is a big problem, but the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere has its own set of of other issues, including, in particular, the increased carbon levels in the oceans. And ocean carbonization has led to leads to coral bleaching and the death of coral reefs, just as of one small example or one big example, but just one of many.

And because even as you put stuff into the stratosphere to block out 3% of incoming sunlight or whatever the number is, if you’re still pumping c o two and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it’s still it’s trapping more and more heat. And so you have to put more and more stuff into the stratosphere to to keep up with that.

So you do this for for fifty years, and you build up all enough stuff that you’re blocking now five or even 10% of incoming sunlight, and you have your carbon levels on the and greenhouse gas levels on the atmosphere are much higher than they are today, and then something happens. There’s a war. There is a some kind of global event that makes the geoengineering system break down and stop being able to put stuff into the atmosphere, and it dissipates. You know, the stuff that we have we have to keep pumping. We have to keep pumping the sulfates or the whatever, you know, whatever per particulates we put into the stratosphere.

And if we stop doing that, it dissipates fairly quickly, and all of that accumulated greenhouse gas in the atmosphere remains. And all of that heat that is accumulated that’s being compensated for by blocking sunlight remains. And what we see is a temperature spike. A temperature spike of, you know, something like 10 degrees is the is the typical estimate for for one of these processes. Something that is outrageously unsustainable, frankly unsurvivable in large parts of the world.

And so it is something where you have two two pathways ahead, broadly speaking, if you start geoengineering, thermal geoengineering, and one is to keep doing and keep doing and cross your fingers that it never stops, and the other is to use that as a tourniquet. Use it as an emergency procedure to give you the time to pull as much greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere as possible, because you’ll need to get actually get down to a level below pre industrial levels, pre industrial greenhouse gas levels in order to compensate for the accumulate the accumulated heat.

And so it is what thermal geoengineering does is it basically stops it stops the world from getting too hot to act. So in the so my analogy of a tourniquet is very much on point. The goal of a tourniquet is to stop you from bleeding out and dying while we get you to a doctor who can do something more than that.

Danny: And there’s very much an expiration date on it.

Jamais: Exactly.

Danny: Measure measured in minutes, maybe a little more, but not much.

Jamais: But yeah. Right. Exactly. And with thermal geoengineering, it may be measured by a little bit more than minutes, but it’s still a finite process. And you need to be to use that time to work rapidly and comprehensively.

We should be doing that now anyway. The heat, however, is a big issue. And I was actually on a project fairly recently with a with an organization that had a lot of money that they wanted to provide for an NGO. They had a lot of money they wanted to provide for climate related adaptation. And my suggestion was easy, air conditioning, because most a good part of the world is not built around having air conditioned buildings.

And those parts of the world, when they get hit by large and persistent heat waves, see thousands, if not tens of thousands of people die. There are massive waves of of death, heat related death, across Europe nearly every summer. And parts of the world that are built around air conditioning, and there are all sorts of problems with air conditioning.

There with the environmental issues around energy consumption, around the the cooling the cooling material, but people dying from it is not one of them, at least dying in the short term. The parts of the world that don’t have the infrastructure around air conditioning, they don’t it doesn’t have to be a big Freon or chemical based cooling system. It could be radical changes in architecture, because there’s really interesting architectural designs that allow for cooling.

But something has to be done, and that will save a lot of people fairly quickly and fairly inexpensively. But it’s very hard to get a big organization that’s accustomed to thinking on this massive scale about something so prosaic. And that’s one of the big dilemmas about doing any kind of foresight work, any kind of futures work, is convincing people that you’re working with that the changes that they see are both plausible and, in some cases, desirable, or they must be avoidable or they must be avoided. And so often people are stuck in their their predetermined visions of the future that it’s very difficult to get them to see a different perspective, which is isn’t a problem unique to foresight work.

Danny: There’s an interesting asymmetry there in what you say when we think about geoengineering because the AC solution requires, at least in Europe, regulatory approval. The reason why in many European countries there is no AC is for regulatory reasons. On the other hand, certain geoengineering interventions have this frankly fascinating property of being permissionless. Technically, a single sufficiently sophisticated actor could just do it.

Jamais: Yep. That’s one of the things about about thermal geoengineering is that it’s something that a moderately sized nation state could start to do. And and one of the handful of centibillionaires that are out there could do it without without question.

And then it becomes an issue of it’s something that a single nation, a single actor can do, but it has a global impact. And the global impact isn’t just bringing down temperatures.

It includes things like changing rainfall patterns, changing wind patterns, changing the the calendar for when when plants can do their first leaf after winter. All of these major changes that then have their own cascading follow on effects that quite often are not pleasant.

So one thing that gets brought up fairly often is one of the earlier studies around the possible consequences of thermo geoengineering was one that showed, or at least gave gave strong evidence, that monsoonal rain patterns would shift in South Asia such that it would eliminate the traditional growing season for South India. And so that’s the most populous country on the planet suddenly going without food or going without a large amount of its food.

Even if the overall climate is cooler, the the lower level impacts can be so dramatic and unexpected that we don’t we don’t like that I don’t have a good policy in place for how to deal with that, and it’s almost certainly going to lead to conflict.

I mentioned that CIA center, simulation event that I participated in a decade ago, more. The outcome of that simulation was both the American team and the Chinese team preparing to preparing to engage in nuclear retaliation, expecting the other side to launch first, but both of them being ready to engage in nuclear war over the actions taken during geoengineering to that have adverse effects on each side. Now in many cases, the adverse effects in that simulation were imaginary. That is not based on on a particular scientific study.

But broadly, they were the kinds of things we should expect to see, changes in drought and rain, changes in growing seasons, changing in the types of plants you can grow. It’s people often when we talk about geoengineering, it very often gets brought up in the context of it’s a quick fix, but it’s not a fix, and it’s not quick.

It’s something that you end having to do for decades, and the consequences can be terrible. It really it’s one of those and I I’ve talked with a lot of scientists who work on geoengineering, who have done who do that research. And pretty much to a person, they are adamantly opposed to the deployment of geoengineering except in the most desperate situations.

They do not want to see this used because they know how many consequences and bad consequences there could be, but they recognize that there may be a point where not doing it has even worse consequences.

Danny: Speaking of weird things, in 2008, in an interview, you were asked about “advanced AI”, and your answer was, “we’re waiting for a breakthrough, but it’s going to be weird””. We arguably have advanced AI. Is what we got more weird or less weird than you anticipated?

Jamais: Weird in a different way. I think my assumption was in that in that 2008 interview was that we were talking actually actual self aware sapient AI, singularity path AI. And what we have now, I tend to at least with the language model based systems that are the ones that can easily pass a Turing test and seem intelligent, they’re fancy autocomplete. They are not self aware. They’re not sapient.

They just do a really good job of pretending. But it is weird because of the impacts that the one, the impacts that the existing systems have had on behavior, especially among younger people. Two, the impacts that they’ve had on the behavior of corporate executives. And three, the almost violent demand by so many tech companies to embed language model AI into everything. No.

I do not need to have my word processing program give me writing tips based on what their LLM thinks about what what I should say next. I do not need that in my email. They’re all we just see this in so many companies embedding semi useful, at best, AI systems into their products and making it the only product path available. And we see what happens when too many people start using it. There there are already multiple studies showing a decline in critical thinking for people who use LLM based AI on a regular basis.

There are the way that these systems have been designed to be essentially be obsequious to tell you what you wanna hear and to tell you that you’re great for even asking that question, That has all sorts of terrible psychological and sociological impacts.

And so, yes, the it’s weirder now that we have this kind of AI. It’s just not weird in the way I I was expecting. I was expecting something along the lines of much more rapid leaps in capacity to do things, completely inexplicable designs for, energy systems or the things that we really do require super intelligent AI to come up with.

But, also, at the same time, I think what I was also arguing was that as much as we may think of it we think of it as a weird future, we should avoid thinking of it as a salvation future.

So whether we’re we’re talking they finally get out language model AI to do something decent or they actually do invent superintelligent AI, I have talked with so many people who think the singularity is a sustainability tactic or strategy. That is who think of, don’t worry about this present day problem because once we have the singularity, once we have super AI, they’ll fix it.

Danny: The the deus ex machina will fix it.

Jamais: Exactly. Exactly. And that’s why you had Cory Doctorow and Charlie Strauss calling it “the rapture of the nerds” way back when. You know, it it there are some amazing parallels between rapture eschatology and the harder core Marxist revolutionary eschatology, whereas Marx himself wrote, all that is solid melts into air, and once we get to that point where of a true communist, utopia and singularity eschatology.

It’s all essentially coming up with the big system to take to that makes us not need that makes us not need to have responsibility anymore because the system is taking care of us.

And I have to say that that is a really appealing future. The the Richard Brautigan machines of loving grace, if you’ve ever heard that poem. Yes. All watched over by machines of loving grace.

Danny: Incidentally, also the title of Dario Amodei’s, one of the cofounders of Anthropic, essay about the future capabilities of AI.

Jamais: Right. Or to to be less literary about it, but perhaps more enjoyable, the Ian Banks culture novel science fiction novels where you have these massively intel superintelligent, hyperintelligent AIs in control of everything, allowing humans to just be, to go out and explore and have fun and play games and have a lot of sex and just all the things that would make life wonderful.

I sometimes when I’ve talked about this kind of kind of possible future, I’ve talked about it as being like a permanent burning man where there’s no need to work because it’s all part of the environment. You you get what you need. It’s art and drugs and games and sex.

And for a lot of us, that’s a really appealing vision of the future, but that’s not where the current companies in charge of designing AI seem to wanna go.

Danny: Strange that. You you coined the acronym BANI, brittle anxious nonlinear incomprehensible, as a sort of counterproposal to VUCA. Right? Volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous

Jamais: It’s not a counterproposal. It’s an evolution. VUCA was a term developed by the US Army War College in 1989 as a way of giving a broad umbrella description of the state of the world at the end of the Cold War. So you think about late eighty nine, early nineties, you had the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the the collapse of the Soviet Union, the emergence of the Internet in a truly substantive way. And then within a few years, the worldwide the emergence of the worldwide web, you had radical changes in demography.

It just seemed like the world was really volatile and very uncertain and complex and ambiguous, and that was for the military and government planners. That was a really useful term. When nine eleven happened, the use of VUCA among the among officials might have broadened out to being it becoming a term that’s really commonplace for business analysts, business consultants, in part because they love that military language, but and in part because it’s actually a really it was a really handy acronym.

Because all of the stuff that we saw happening was very volatile, but ultimately understandable. That is, yes, the consequences of nine eleven in terms of global power and ethics, all of these issues around who who’s in charge and what military what kind of military gets used, a military action happens.

That was all very uncertain and complex. But once you had an explanation, once you could see all the pieces, you could figure it out. It was not baffling, but it was VUCA was certainly in the February a really useful way of looking at the world.

But as things got weirder, as politics started to change and technology started to get strange, and you started to see some really radical shifts in behavior. By the mid twenty tens or so, VUCA became less and less useful, both because it was everywhere.

I sometimes would say in talk, we eat VUCA for breakfast. It’s just it’s ubiquitous. We swim through it, in part because it was insufficient. And so in a talk I gave for Institute for the Future for their fifty fifty year anniversary in 2018, which makes them ‘57, not ‘53. Anyway, for the fifty year anniversary in 2018, I gave a talk about global anarchy and chaos, and I offered up the term bonnie, brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible, partially as a a provocation.

And I didn’t really expect it to go to get big, and in part because it felt more satisfying to me based on what I was seeing in the world. I had been doing a lot of writing around resilience and brittle systemic brittleness. I have been doing writing doing a lot of research around, anxiety and especially among younger people and just seeing that being a a global phenomenon. Nonlinearity, I I had done a lot of writing around climate change, and one of the things that had stuck with me is is something called climate hysteresis, which is a lag between cause and effect, a lag between changes in levels of greenhouse gas and changes in temperature and precipitation of about five to ten years. So I would start and I immediately started thinking of it not as a geophysical issue, because it’s interesting as geophysics, but as a political issue.

Because if you get people around the world to radically change their behavior, to stop eating beef, to stop driving, or at least as much, to stop taking air travel, at least as much, to stop using, trans oceanic shipping that runs on diesel, all of these things that would would lead to radical changes in our lives that a lot of people would see as not for the better, at least in the short term, and then nothing improves as a result. Temperatures continue to rise.

Things continue to behave just as they did before we made all these massive changes. Thinking that as a political issue, not just as a geophysical issue, was when I how I started to see it as this non that kind of nonlinearity of a disproportion of action and result, a disproportion of power, that’s really critical to thinking about how the next few decades are gonna transpire. And then ultimately, incomprehensibility, not in the sense of we don’t understand what is happening, but why.

We’ve seen we have seen a measurable increase in situations that make a lot of people ask, what the fuck? And it’s things that in when I wrote the book, Navigating the Age of Chaos, which is a folk look at BANI, I talk about the incomprehensible world as meaning unthinkable, things that we just don’t want to wrap our heads around and absurd and and baffling. And I include things like the anti vaxx movement. It’s it’s absurd, and yet there’s something happening that needs to be understood that why is that become such a powerful political force? Unthinkable.

And talking there, actually, I this I wrote in detail about geoengineering there because that really does fall into that unthinkable category. It’s something that the people who study it don’t want to be thinking about, and the people who aren’t studying it but have heard of it just sort of somebody else will think about it. Let’s not think about the consequences because it it has a particular utility, particular goal, and let’s just focus on that. And so when COVID hit in 2010 or 2020 or 2019, 2020, few folks who had seen my original presentation, which was met with polite applause and not much more than that, except for people from Brazil. They saw and said, that exactly describes our world.

In 2020, when COVID hit, I was it was suggested to me that I make that talk available. So I rewrote it as an essay, put it on on Medium, and didn’t think much more about it until I started to get email and started to get pings popping up on Google, you know, Google alerts about my name. And, suddenly, BANI was everywhere or at least was increasingly used, especially by people in the in the global South, in the developing world, because what they told me is that it was a much more accurate articulation of their of their experiences than VUCA ever was. That you had so folks in in Brazil I started doing remote talks in Brazil and Mexico. Rajarata University in Sri Lanka actually held a Bani symposium that summer in the 2020, and I gave a remote keynote for that.

And it at this point, there are now hundreds of thousands of uses, if not millions of uses that you can find on Google, of people using BANI primarily, but not exclusively, in the developing world. It’s really popular in India among business and political leaders in India and Indonesia, but I’m starting to see it now pop up in Western Europe.

The minister the of education for in Spain just a couple of months ago did a talk around the BANI world, for his team. I get a lot of pings from Russia and Ukraine, and I have talked with a lot of people in in The United States and in Europe and Japan, and it’s starting to become a more prevalent idea in the in the post industrial world too. It not because it is technically better, but because it is it feels more accurate.

And that’s something that really has become an important part of the the Bonnie conversation is that it is not just a depiction of what we think about the world. It’s a depiction of how the world makes us feel. And for quite a few people, that’s actually a really powerful tool to be able to talk about what they’ve experienced, to talk about their their lives with a language that is both informative and evocative. That is, it helps to give them a name for what they’re experiencing. You know?

Yes. These systems are brittle. I can see I I see how brittleness fits into this into what I’m seeing. But, also, it’s not just informative. It is it’s evocative in that it helps to legitimize what they’re what they’re feeling.

That’s something that I I’ve had quite a few people react to me talk to talk to me about is that they felt they were alone, or they felt they were overreacting. Looking out at the the chaos of the world and having a very extreme what the hell is going on, but they must be overreacting to it. Because, surely, this kind of stuff has happened before. I mean, there was the whole nineteen sixties in The US. I mean, there were and the the revolutions in in Central Europe, the the Hungary uprising, the Czech uprising, surely we’ve gone through this before, but we haven’t.

Not to this degree and with this level, this breadth, because it’s not just the poll that politics have gotten weird. It’s that politics and our technologies, especially around AI, but not exclusively, our climate, our ways of communicating with each other, our abilities to to our the impacts we have on others and the way that everyone in the world can have an impact on us goes far beyond anything we’ve ever experienced.

And so BANI became a language the language that people wanted to use so many people wanted to use. I knew I needed to write a book, but in talking with Bob Johansson, who’s a former president of Institute for the Future and has been doing this kind of foresight work longer than I have, he strongly suggested they have a positive BANI, something that uses the same acronym, the B-A-N-I, but flips it and says, okay.

They’re not fixes for the for the BANI, you know, the negative BANI, the original recipe BANI, forces so much as they are adaptations. What can we do to cope? So instead for a world that’s becoming increasingly brittle, we need to think about being bendable. That is building up our resilience, our adapt our adaptive ability, our capacity to both bend, you know, bend and not break when the problem hits, but remain rooted. For a world that’s increasingly anxious, we need to be attentive, which is the a version of empathetic.

We need need to increase our ability to have empathy, to listen to what other people are saying, to recognize that they’re having they’re undergoing a crisis just as much as we are, and to have and to be kind, frankly. My wife has a T shirt, and I may have mentioned this to you before, but my wife has a T shirt that she wears every now and then that says, in in a world where you can be anything, be kind. And that really does resonate for me as being the underlying message of the a in Positive BANI. The n, in a world where of that’s increasingly nonlinear, you gotta be neuroflexible or neuroplastic, improvisational. That is you need to be able to recognize when situations are not what you thought they were, and you need to be able to adjust on your feet.

Improvisational training, improv acting training is actually really useful for leaders, it turns out, because it puts them it trains them in how to listen to what the situation is in ways that it you didn’t expect it to be, that break away from your assumptions, but still allows you to have a plan have an idea of what where to go.

It is a embodiment of the the definition of fluid intelligence that I that I read a while back is that it’s how you know what to do when you don’t know what to do. That is your capacity for recognizing the stat the the state of a situation and how it differs from what you expected and to change your change your actions accordingly.

And then I, for an incomprehensible world, what you need is interconnectivity, interconnected or inclusive. And, actually, inclusive, I used initially, but there’s such a weird pushback in the political and business world around the DEI words that we decided that it’s better to have that as the secondary definition, interconnected.

But, basically, what it says is that you broaden your circle of of people that you get information that you exchange information with. Your your circle of people who have different perspective, different backgrounds, different are in different locations, different cultures, different life experiences, because very often the things that make no sense to you may make sense to somebody else because they are seeing it from a completely different angle.

And so by broadening your your circle, expanding out who you’re connected with, you have a better chance of getting that getting access to that new perspective, those differing perspectives, and to be able to provide your own.

So the the book, navigating the age of chaos, the first first chunk is the original body going into detail about what these four terms mean and how they have manifest in the past and issues that may be coming in the in the over the next few decades that are manifestations of it to come, things that the way that the Western Antarctic ice shelf is very brittle and what that may mean. And I use geoengineering in in the incomprehensible, unthinkable part as an example of the the kinds of actions that people are talking about taking in the face of climate that just, on their surface, are totally crazy.

The second half or the second part is positive BANI. And here, we take a slightly different approach. We go into the the mechanisms of what each of these what resilience and empathy and and improvisation inclusion is what that what they include, but also give multiple concrete examples of people who have, in their lives, experienced something along the lines of brittleness or anxiety. And what they have done and their life experiences.

So as an example, for the improvisation chapter, I talk about, Stanislav Petrov, who was a Soviet air defense officer in 1983, had a was on it was he was on duty about a week after the Soviet Union had shot down Korean Airlines jet double o seven over Kamchatka Peninsula, basically, shot down an airliner.

And so the global tensions were dramatic. There was the US was engaging in a military exercise in east in in Europe. And on the night in question, the computers lit up saying that there are five missiles incoming from the United States.

And Petrov, who had written the book for air defense officers about what you do when you get an alert, how to send it up the chain of command and the the language you have to use and all that, felt conflicted because it just something felt wrong about this. And yet he knew that he needed he he should send it up the chain.

And because the Soviet Union at the time had a massive retaliation strategy, nuclear strategy. He knew that sending up the train had a very high likelihood of leading to the Soviet Union shooting all of its missiles back in The United States, leading to the US to shoot all of its missiles back in the Soviet Union, and that’s all folks. And so he said, okay. This is just weird. I why would the US only launch five missiles?

That just doesn’t seem right. I’m gonna sit on this. And he sat on it for longer than it would take for the missiles to hit, and nothing happened. And then the confirmation came through that it was a satellite error. It basically saw, it interpreted the sunlight reflecting off a layer of clouds as the the infrared signals of launches, and and so he broke he broke his rules.

He did not follow the expected pattern. He improvised because the situation felt different than what he expected. And so that, to me, that was an example, because I love that story, because it really does drive home just how critical that the need for being aware of change can be, aware of aware of how the reality differs from your expectations.

And on top of this, a a an academic psychologist, Judith Moskowitz, I think she’s at University of Chicago, had come up with a, with methods for dealing with a chaotic world, psychological practices. And some of them are very familiar, mindfulness and gratitude journals, the kinds of little things that seem massively out of, out of proportion with talking about collapsing ice shelves and climate engineering, but they all come down to how do we cope?

How do we, as individuals and as leaders, develop the skills that will allow us develop the capacity to think about how we respond to these these large issues. Because it’s so easy, and so many of experience of us have experienced this of feeling over so overwhelmed that we just shut down. And so the positive BANI is really about not shutting down. Yeah. Being able to to listen, learn, and adapt.

And then after that, I do a deep chapter on scenarios and storytelling as a tool for thinking about a world. Bob was a primary author on a chapter on leadership, how to be an effective leader in a BANI environment. And so that book just came out on the October 28, and it is very exciting to have it out there in the world. I I don’t know what the reaction is gonna be. So far, it’s been reasonably positive, but I think it will be useful for people, not as a an instruction manual so much as a a way to shift their paradigm, to shift the way they they they look at the world.

We talk lot about how BANI is a lens. Negative BANI or original BANI and positive BANI, both. They’re a lens to see the landscape ahead. And it does doesn’t tell you where to go, but gives you greater clarity for figuring out your path.

Danny: And it’s a great book. Everyone should read it.

There’s one thing analytically sort of chewing on and left with, which is if you listen or read, for instance, Pierre Wack’s work, but also others, scenario planning, which often can come across as sort of creative endeavor, which it is, actually rests on really solid analytical foundations. Right? There’s we try to figure out what are the predetermined variables that are already baked in that we can see today, things that are baked in certain elements of the future.

And Wack also said, I think most of the errors in futures don’t come from wrong reasoning, but from poorly observed facts. So from not looking at the present or the past properly. N

ow if this world that you’re describing, this sort of this age of chaos is true, what good are analytical methods? If there is no sort of cause and effect relationship to be discerned, what is the point?

Jamais: The cause and effect relationships are are still there even if they’re hard to spot, even if they are have become so complex, so nonlinear that they’re they’re very difficult, functionally impossible to discern.

But it goes back to something that you and I were talking about just a little while ago, and that is it allows you to see paths that might otherwise not be apparent. So I I often refer to the work that I do, the foresight work, as anticipatory history.

Because, actually, one of my like I said, one of my undergrad degrees is in in a is in history. And the the same processes used by historiographers today and historians today to look at the past, to figure out, you know, why did the the world take the path that it did?

What led to these developments? Those are the exact same kinds of analysis that we use in scenario and foresight work to look at what might come in the years to come, what might happen in the years to come, what are the driving forces that are shaping that have shaped the world, and how might they shape the world going forward, and how might they change?

We know that with our force I work, with the scenarios, we are not going to be accurate. We’re not going to give you a pinpoint prediction of exactly what will happen. What we are able to do, though, is to give you insights into what might happen so that you become sensitive to those changes, become aware of that possibility, and you start to look for them.

The analogy and there’s a lot of analogy and metaphor in foresight work, but the analogy that I often use is scenarios in foresight. They’re a vaccination. If you think about the way a vaccination works, it sensitizes your body to a pathogen that you may not ever encounter. But if you do, your body recognizes it, recognizes it early and is is ready for it.

So, similarly, what the scenarios what foresight does is that it what foresight scenarios do, what foresight does is to give you a sensitivity to the kinds of changes that you might see so that if they do happen, if they do or something very similar to them happens, you’re ready.

You’ve thought about it. And so to the degree that the folks like Pierre Wack really tried to focus on getting it right. I think that was probably appropriate for the era, but that’s not where we are now.

I don’t think that getting it right does anything more than make you feel very frustrated as a futurist because nobody listens anyway. You I actually have had the experience of getting it right on some things that people who heard me talking about what I called the participatory panopticon.

And I think a big problem part of the problem was that it was such a mouthful. But, basically, what happens in a world where everyone is carrying around networked always on recording devices, cameras. And I wrote about this in 2005 2003 to 2005.

Danny: That’s pretty good. Pretty early.

Jamais: Three years before the iPhone came out, where the the only camera phones could take really tiny three twenty by four eighty pictures. Okay. But thinking about the consequences of in terms of what it does to relationships, what it does to politics, what it does to policing. And writing about this and giving talks about that, the people who heard it were very positive, but it didn’t really make a difference other than I can I can look back and say, I told you so? That’s it wouldn’t be on my headstone and say, I told you?

I told you this would happen. So what you know, the value that I see is not so much around the act the value that I see to foresight work, to scenarios, is not so much around the accuracy as around the provocation. Mhmm. Does it get the listener? Does it get the reader?

Does it get the thinker or the the strategic thinker to see something different, to have that epiphany, that moment of, oh, wow. I never thought of it that way. I can totally see that happening. And suddenly, their mind starts to calculate or figure out all the different implications that might occur because of that change that they never saw before. And so scenarios are epiphany engines.

They’re basically ways to get you to see the world differently such that when the real future does happen, you are better situated to be able to spot it and act on it.

Danny: Second to last question. You worked with, Kenneth Waltz when you were at Berkeley. What did you learn from him?

Jamais: To think about the world in a systemic way. So Ken Waltz was a massively important political science theoretician. He he died about a decade ago, a little over a decade ago. He wrote a wrote a book called “Man, the State, and War” in 1959.

He was freshly back from the Korean War. He wrote a book in ‘79 called “Theory of International Politics””. Both of these books are still in use at the college level for, one zero one level courses on on politics because they so clearly articulate a world where we think not in terms of the decisions made by individual actors or the transient power levels of nation states, but in terms of systemic balances and concerns around safety and security. He is a he is one of the few people who think who thought that nuclear proliferation was a good thing. Now I don’t 100%

Danny: – He wrote the article “More May Be Better””. Right? –

Jamais: “More May Be Better””. Yes. So he he wrote a piece that said, look look at the evidence of what has happened in the as a result of the acquisition of nuclear weapons, countries that have fought multiple wars with each other have stopped fighting those wars. They may still be rattling sabers at each other. They may still be very angry at each other, but they haven’t actually fought with each other at anything other than maybe some border skirmishes between India and Pakistan or India and China.

They’re not engaging in that kind of war because they’re terrified of the possibility of being obliterated or, more importantly, of obliterating, functionally obliterating the world. His way of thinking, looking at how systems function, balances not of of individual power, but broader systems of security really does really has influenced my way of thinking about what the future could hold. Really, thinking about the great person, the great man theory of history, not to think about what one person would an Elon or a Zuckerberg or whatever might do, But, really, what does it mean to have that kind of of financial and political power? What does it mean to have that kind of technological influence at that broader level?

Danny: Final question. What should I have asked that I didn’t?

Jamais: I don’t actually know what I would just say there. The snarky answer would be where you can purchase the book.

Danny: Where can you purchase the book?

Jamais: At any of your standard, US based online booksellers or physical bookstores for those of you who have them. You can order it internationally. I’ve discovered from the from the preorder listings that at least a third of our preorders have come from international buyers. So, this is it’s certainly available to to be purchased from overseas, literally and figuratively.

So I really would hope that anyone who does pick up the book and and gives it a chance, I hope they really think about what it means and what they can how they can use use it.

That one of the things that we’ve included in the book at the very end is a set of, discussion questions. Really, hearing questions that you might ask in a classroom or in a business meeting about how to take the BANI insights, BANI and Positive BANI insights, and operationalize them or turn them into tools for understanding the world.

And so I would highly I would encourage people to get it not just because I wrote it, but because I think action is a useful idea. And I am extraordinarily grateful and humbled by the fact that so many people around the world, people from very different cultures and backgrounds to my own, so many people have found it an insightful and powerful tool, and I hope that, everyone feels that way.

Danny: Let me repeat. The book is called navigating the age of chaos. It’s a great read. Jamais, thank you so much.

Jamais: Thank you very much, Danny.