Dr. Chris Luebkeman, is the leader of the Strategic Foresight Hub in the Office of the President at ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich). The recently established Hub engages with a broad range of stakeholders on future focused drivers of change. Luebkeman is also a member of the nominating committee for the prestigious Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize, the external advisory board of the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Singapore, on the Brain Trust of the Climate Music Project and co-founder and CEO of [y]our2040.
Prior to the Strategic Foresight Hub, he was a fellow and corporate intrapreneur at the global consultancy Arup (London). He joined the firm in 1999 as the Director of Research and Development and after a corporate restructuring three years later founded the Foresight, Innovation and Incubation teams. He was essentially responsible for the future-focused activities of the firm. Luebkeman has taught Design Studios and courses on technology at MIT, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the University of Oregon. He has given hundreds of keynotes including at TED and the Aspen Ideas Festival. He founded the Design Council and Cities communities, and hosted conversations at the World Economic Forum. He holds a doctorate in architecture from ETH Zurich and a Master’s degree in civil engineering from Cornell University. He recently spoke to The Innovator about how to think about the future.
Q: How did you end up specializing in strategic foresight?
CL: I have been involved in strategic foresight for almost 30 years. My interest in the future began when I was a faculty member at MIT and was working on the “Home of the Future” project. Our focus was to enable elders to stay in their homes as long as possible. I discovered that to look forward you need to look first at the past because the challenges we face, and the thought processes around them, have probably already been around the block once or twice. The knowledge and insights from the past are invaluable. At the same time, I realized that when looking at the past, the context of the moment we are looking at is important. What was the value of the currency? What was happening in business and politics? What scientific discoveries were being made? What music was being played at that time? I became a contextualist and left MIT to join the private sector. The first thing I asked our vice chairman when I joined Arup was ‘When we look ahead at some our big projects, how do we know they are going to be fit for purpose?’ He replied: ‘Because we are the consultants in the market.’ I responded, ‘I know we are good, but what about the future and the changes we know are coming?’ He looked really puzzled, so I knew I had an opportunity to help the company better understand how the forces of change would impact our clients’ infrastructure. And, then to design them in a way that would work in the future as well as today. Another piece of the puzzle was while I was working on my home of the future project at MIT, one of the partners was P&G. They employed a futurist and one day while I was in a black cab driving down the street in London I called him and said ‘I want your job.’ He replied, ‘Well, Chris, you can’t have my job.’ I explained that I didn’t want his job at P &G. I wanted to understand what his job entails so I can do the same thing at my company.’ What he was doing was strategic foresight for P&G around the year 2000. He told me that his job was to make sure his CEO and executive board were never blindsided. He outlined some of the different activities he was engaged in, including strategic intelligence gathering and investigative networking, to help ensure he knew what could be coming. I took what he said to heart and then set to work figuring out what to ask myself and our executive team. Most companies in their hearts and heads know most of what is driving change for their industry, but sometimes they need permission to allow themselves to verbalize what they already know.
When you do foresight work with any group, company or country, to me the most important part to understand is what do they already understand about the future – not just in their domains, but lots of other areas like social trends, climate realities and unintentional impacts. In the end, every future forecast is based in part on hope, in part on belief and in part in ground truth.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about the work you are doing at the ETH Hub?
CL:The ETH is the top technical university in Europe and one of the top ten in the world and we wish to stay that way. In order to do so, we need to be thinking about what is driving change in higher education. I think of the drivers of change as an ellipse with two focal points; one global and one local. We are in global competition for research talent and we are also a ‘local’ Federal Swiss university. Our mission is to serve society by executing world class teaching, research, technology transfer and preparing for the next economic evolution. So, my team and I work with our president and executive board in their mandate to craft the strategic direction of the institution. It has been a fascinating challenge.
Q What mistakes do people make when they think about the future?
CL: The worst thing you can do is to say ‘That will never happen.’ Strategic foresight is really about stretching yourself to imagine what could help you make more robust decisions. I like to describe the goal of a foresight exercise being like saltwater taffy. It is rigid and hard at the outset, but once you start bending it, there is no going back to the original form. There has been a permanent deformation or mindset shift. The neurons in our brains are like that. You start bending them by thinking about future possibilities in an organized way. You become sensitized to certain signals or potentialities. You still have your daily business and P&L to deal with, but eventually as your sub-conscious keeps chewing on what you have learned you often gain deeper insights and start to see signals which lead to better decision making.
Q: People resist change. Is it difficult for executives to accept new futures?
CL: Not everyone at Arup loved it. About 20% of senior leadership thought I was a waste of time, 20% invited me to anything they could, the rest respected me and gave the team support. The push back bothered me the first few years, but then it didn’t because I knew the work we did helped the company.
For example, at an annual gathering of our senior leadership about 15 years ago I spoke about how new tools will allow the creation of a design in one hour for something that used to take two years and mentioned that there will be time when our clients might not need us anymore. One of the senior leaders who worked closely with clients got really upset and berated me. I really appreciate that no one wants to be told that their job and their knowledge is obsolete. The same leader apologized two to three years later for insulting me and said :‘You were right, things are changing, and I didn’t want see it.’ Part of the foresight role is to make sure we stay relevant and that means holding up hard truths.
Q: What role do you see AI playing in helping companies forecast the future? Will it make strategic forecast experts like you obsolete?
CL: First off, I am not a huge believer in forecasts. I remember very well the little book entitled ‘How To Lie With Statistics’ by Darrell Huff which I read at some point while at MIT. It really impressed upon me the importance of understanding deeply the data we work with and not to trust forecasts. So, AI is a tool that everyone needs to understand and to use. As with all tools, there are good aspects and bad ones. There are appropriate uses for each tool and often we can extend that use either willingly or unwillingly. For example, I have used a good old Craftsman screwdriver as a hammer every once in a while.
I believe that AI will impact everything. It is extremely powerful and is changing the game of supply-change management to marketing messages to individually crafted interfaces, essentially anything when it comes to business and processes and opportunities Every executive team needs to have folks inside and outside looking at AI for them.
Q: What advice do you have for corporates that want to engage in strategic foresight?
CL: These four things are key:
*If you create an internal team it needs to report directly to the CEO and be able to talk with any operational units with impunity. It shouldn’t represent a single unit or geography, but the whole company. Everyone needs to understand that it has the support of the CEO and that it is in the best interest of the company to talk with the foresight group.
*Understand that return on investment may not be operationally identified in the short term. When you set up a foresight team internally be ready for a three-year ‘let’s see what happens period.’ The foresight team will work with different units and executive boards on vocabulary about the future but it is important to understand that this work is not a future plan. It is a language you need to evolve to allow yourselves to think more structurally about the future. You can’t do that in one year, you need at least two. It still means you have expectations in terms of mindset and ideas, but not on operational changes. The operational changes come later and need to come from the CEO and his/her board.
* Consider getting an outside view. At ETH we started working on the future of higher education. We started with an internal exercise to identify what is driving change and decided that we would also commission the same piece of work to an outside foresight boutique agency to make sure we are not missing something. When you are sitting inside of an institution you are bound to be prejudiced; and I would even say that this is a good thing. And, at the same time, it needs to be aware of its bias and compensate for this. The outside agency came up with 20% new drivers and they were all things we hadn’t thought about.
*Think of foresight tools not just as something that is useful internally, but also externally. At Arup we created a tool to talk with clients about the future we might collectively desire and thus co-create. It served as a client engagement tool in our offices all over the world. We were able to bring in views from China, Australia, Europe, North and South America. It was a huge amount of work, sometimes painful, but it was an opportunity to engage with our clients in ways which we had not engaged with them before.
Q: What do you want The Innovator’s readers to take away from this interview?
CL: In my view, the world is now entering the most dynamic situation that we have ever experienced, everywhere, in every single way. I truly believe engaging in forward-looking exercises is more important now than ever. We can’t predict the future, but we can understand where our critical uncertainties lie. Do we even know them? I would suggest one-third of companies do not. A strategic foresight team can serve as a rudder for the company and help keep you on course while you steer towards the future.
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