Today we witnessed the presentation of Rolf Jensen, author of the best-selling book ‘The Dream Society’ and director of the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies in ‘De Kas’ in Amsterdam. The choice for ‘De Kas’ as a location was easy since this is a place with its own story, as the owner would explain after Jensen’s presentation….

(If you have questions for Rolf Jensen that you didn’t think of immediately after the presentation but maybe thought of while reflecting on this day, or after reading this summary: post them on the site. Jensen will answer them next week)

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The Future Makers – What will they do?

November 18th, 2005

Today we witnessed the presentation of Rolf Jensen, author of the best-selling book ‘The Dream Society’ and director of the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies in ‘De Kas’ in Amsterdam. The choice for ‘De Kas’ as a location was easy since this is a place with its own story, as the owner would explain after Jensen’s presentation.

If you have questions for Rolf Jensen that you didn’t think of immediately after the presentation but maybe thought of while reflecting on this day, or after reading this summary: post them on the site. Jensen will answer them next week

The Future Makers is about time travel. Many people, as Jensen explains, think it’s not possible to travel through time but he says it is indeed possible. If you believe in it enough. He says he has travelled through time, and to be exact he has travelled to the year 2030, 25 years from today. This reminded me of the book ‘Future Shock’ by Alvin Toffler, who in 1970 spoke about the world we would be living in in thirty years from then, that is: now.

Jensen has travelled with companies from Denmark, from the UK, and now there is even a small group o companies in Slovenia that travels with him, all to find out what the future will look like.

As many people do when they travel, also Jensen and the companies that accompany him, make observations, take notes, take pictures, return home and write a book about it, although that last thing is not very common for ‘normal’ travellers. Jensen’s book about his journeys in time has recently been published in Danish and we’re waiting for the translation in other languages.

Some people have asked him if looking forward for 25 years is not too much. Most companies plan ahead for maximum 3 to 5 years. But, explains Jensen, a longer horizon makes it easier to think out of the box, and there are also many trends that move slowly. Focusing on three years you won’t even notice them. That’s why it’s important to look further ahead. It will give you inspiration and good ideas.

Explaining the whole evolution of the mind in a nutshell, Jensen explains that first there was a reptilian brain, here we find the instincts like crocodiles, flies, and sharks already had. The next phase is the limbic brain. Here lie the emotions, which most social animals have. The next phase, the neo cortex is responsible for reason, logic, and ratio. This is the part that makes us human.

Now the year 2030 has told Jensen that the limbic brain rules in the future. We should move away from logic and rational thinking in communications and advertising. In value based companies the limbic rules.

Now what does the limbic brain need then? There are several markets. There is the market for love and romance. Here we find the arts, popular music, movies, cosmetics, watches. Most hit songs are about I love you or I don’t love you and most blockbuster movies are based on the same theme. As someone in the audience remarks also sex is part of this market and Jensen is happy with this remark, he himself is too shy to list sex under this market as he says.

The next market is that of control and freedom. It is better to get up at 6 AM, exercise, not drink, not smoke, eat healthy food, remember your spouse’s birthday, answer emails. We need some control over our lives. But also freedom is important, doing what you want. Jensen gives the example of Miller’s Beer. In their marketing they say: It’s Miller time, meaning you’ve been working, it’s 5 pm, let’s get out of the office, talk, and have a beer. Of course there are more companies that have this message, for example ‘have a break, have a KitKat’, and ‘4PM, Cup a Soup, more people should be doing that.’

Also tradition is a market. Here we find anniversiries, birthdays, Christmas, Kodak moments so to say. It is a big market but if you’re in it you are safe according to Jensen. The problem is that it is hard to create a tradition. But it can be done, When the tree business was in a slump 150 years ago, some people thought: what if we persuade families they should buy a tree with Christmas? Today you need a good reason not to buy one.

Other markets are Change (university, education in general, holidays), Care (healthcare, give and receive care), Recognition (Chivas Regals’ slogan: You deserved it’, but also think of Loréal’s ‘because you’re worth it’) and Spirituality. Concerning this last market Jensen tells us that 80% of the population needs answers to basic questions about what life is about, what the meaning of life is and what happens after life, and for them religion provides answers. The remaining 20% does not believe in god, only in what they see, or so they say. According to Jensen they have a God anyway, they just don’t know his name.

A product can be part of several markets. The point is that products will compete in a different way: they will compete if they’re in the same emotional market.

Not only the basis of competition is changing but also our values, they are changing in two dimensions. We are going from materialism to postmaterialism and from uniformity to diversity. And these two developments are going hand in hand so we are going towards postmaterialistic diversity in the next 25 years.

The Nordic countries are the most postmodern thinkers of the world. The Netherlands are joining the club and other countries are following. In the North people are more individualistic, they don’t believe much in authority. They also see that other religions have their own values, that divorce is acceptable and that gays should be tolerated. Other countries that are more in search of uniformity and fixed values do believe strongly in authority, they see one religion (theirs) as the only right religion, for them divorce is a social catastrophe and being gay is not good. It is al a matter of tolerance.

The acceptance of diversity has to do little with political and economical leadership but more with ordinary people, although leaders would like to think otherwise. Jensen explains this by using the example of Tivoli Gardens. Here there is an attraction with cars on rails. Bigger children understand that steering is no use since the car is being pulled over the rails. Smaller children keep on steering, they don’t understand yet that whatever they do, the car is moving in the direction it was planned to go.

According to Jensen the ‘elite’ in charge has completely different values than the ‘common’ people have. The values of the elite are uniformity, control, normality, control your life, belief in authority. The values of the common people will win the value clash however, even if the elite doesn’t like this.

The fact that people in the Nordic countries and the Netherlands don’t listen well to authorities could have to do with the fact that there we trust other people, we have much social capital. This also means that we need less bureaucracy compared to countires where there is much corruption. Maybe this is because we’re small, everything and everyone is near, we are kind of like extended families.

Now back to companies. When everything is the same, we compete on price and nobody’s making money, making a better product won’t help you, because competition will copy it immediately. What helps is a good story. Jensen gives the example of the book ‘Who moved my cheese.’ This is not just a book about mice and cheese, but it is about change. How do you persuade people something has to change? With figures? With facts? No. we are seduced by stories. The fact that so many people focus on narratives, metaphors and symbolism already shows us that linking with the limbic system helps.

Every story, every good story, has a certain structure. Many people have written about this but the structure goes back to Aristotle. This structure looks like this: first all things were fine. Then suddenly something happened. But luckily this thing saved us. And we lived happily ever after. Every UNsubsidized movie works like this.

Every good story also has principles. First of all it comes from the heart. In most advertisements this is not true, they just want to make money. Second of all it has conflict. Also this is usually missing in ads, which is like removing the sharks from the manuscript of jaws. And they are personal

What companies should do is: automate what machines can do, let employees do what only humans can do (saying hello can be done by a machine but telling a good joke is something only a human being can do), go from watching to participation, from passive to active, add a story (you can’t compete on the features and benefits anymore). Also the definition of success should change, it should now come to mean: how many people believe in your story.

Two other trends that Jensen describes are the ‘horrible’ trend of C2C and the need for new accountants. C2C means that consumers sell to consumers. Jensen calls these consumers the ‘amaproffs’. These individuals can be found on Wikipedia, Linux, omhy (Corean online paper which uses 30.000 citizen journalists), craiglist, blogs. These people don’t care about profits so how are you ever going to compete with them? These people do things because they are worth doing. The thing you have to realize is that consumers want to have a dialogue with other consumers so you must make room for that. And as was also clear from Godin’s Unleashing the Ideavirus: developments are not waiting until you’re ready to deal with them, they are happening anyway. Jensen tlls that Rupert Murdock has said at a conference that unless newspapers become interactive they’re out, over, gone. The hierarchy with experts and authorities etcetera is becoming flat, the world is becoming flat.

The second trend consists of the fact that company assets consist of 10% material assets (= dead values) and the remaining 90% are human assets (brand value, share of emotions, intellectual capital, employee value, process capital, collaboration value). At the moment these human assets are labelled as costs!. And since the chance that accountants are going to change in the short run, there will arrive new companies who are going to specialize in calculating these immaterial human assets.

All in all Jensen told us not only an inspiring story with many inspiring examples, but he also gave us a positive perspective on the future that lies ahead of us. With all the negativity in the news about China taking over the Western economies, the upcoming inevitable crash in the American stock market etc, I prefer this view for two reasons. First of all there are literally hundreds of theories from all sorts of disciplines that describe the same positive line of development. When speaking about the future one can never predict what will be true, the only thing one can do is give a perspective on the future and what will happen. This does not mean that every perspective is equally valuable, the perspective that explains the most and is most plausible is the better one generally.

Second of all: real development is the opening up of possibilities, not closing them off because of fear.