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“The future” cannot be “predicted,” but “preferred futures” can and should be envisioned, invented, implemented, continuously evaluated, revised, and re-envisioned. —Jim Dator, Hawaii, 1995
This paper introduces a framework called Target Worlds, with which I hope to offer an alternative to putting users, personas or target groups at the center of innovation. Instead I want to promote a more prudent approach that balances social, environmental, technological and financial sustainability in innovation.Target Worlds thereby tries to overcome issues of focus, scalability and responsibility in innovation by tackling the core of the problem: the targets of innovation work. The framework merges concepts of investigating ‘worlds’ today, identifying desirable futures for tomorrow and worldbuilding as a hands-on approach resulting in target worlds as new point of departure for innovation teams. This paper serves as a recipe for building target worlds offering a step-by-step guide for innovators and anthropologists to follow. Article citation: 2021 EPIC Proceedings pp 129–158, ISSN 1559-8918, https://www.epicpeople.org/epic
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INTRODUCTION
This paper is a reaction to our current era which pushes for a more responsible and considerate way of dealing with resources, data and each other. It aims to recognise that we all share one planet while also having our own districts to move through, several groups of society we belong with, and different life phases to find ourselves in. We are all part of multiple intersubjective worlds that overlap and interact with those of others. This means then, that centering innovation around THE user, THE target group, THE future, or THE world is naturally a limited point of view, representing nothing but a simplified imagination of something that never exists in an as straightforward manner as it is presented. With Target Worlds I try to address and hope to overcome such limitations in, both, scope and depth. Instead of the classic problem-solution gap, I suggest an analytical approach paired with a worldbuilding narrative to innovation as starting point and as continuous reference before narrowing down in scope and hone in on a specific idea, solution or user (hero’s) journey.
Figure 1. What is the starting point of good innovation?
In a way the paper leads back to the roots of anthropology while also pushing it towards the core of new futures. Anthropology has always been one of the key disciplines to discover, understand and describe the everyday worlds of people. I argue that we can leverage anthropology to help innovators immerse themselves in future worlds too. Similar to grand authors and worldbuilders like J.R.R Tolkien (Lord of the Rings), J.K.Rowling (Harry Potter), or George Lucas (Star Wars), who deeply immerse their audiences in their books and movies, might we also be able to draw innovation teams into desired future worlds that we ground in the local lifeworlds of people today and use this as a starting point?
Figure 2. Symbols of great worldbuilders
Certainly, there are many ways to materialize futures other than books and movies. These forms of materialization, though, will not be the focus of this paper. Rather it is the investigation and identification of what is desirable in the first place, not from an individual point of view, but from the intersubjective collective perspective of a local single- or multi-sited and multidimensional world.
As the title suggests, this paper tries to present something similar to a process or guide rather than a single call to action. Target Worlds is meant as a starting point and continuous guiding star for innovation teams to look up to, yet offering something more concrete than a vision, more grounded than a speculative future, more holistic and inclusive than a persona or target group, more than a problem but not yet a solution. With this paper I hope to provide a recipe of how to cook up a target world, which leaves some flexibility and freedom for the innovator to substitute or add single ingredients as long as the key elements remain. In that sense this paper partly functions as a step-by-step guide – knowing that many innovators would love to have yet another one to trust in – but the outcome, the target world, will only function as a compass showing the direction, not the exact path of how to get there. This paper is a recipe for constructing target worlds but the cooking process (the innovation process) is entirely up to you.
Similar to the fictional worlds of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, or an open-world game, which can grow indefinitely in scope and detail, target worlds are always expanding, get adapted along the innovator’s journey and can always gain in scope and richness. In that sense, it is not a static vision statement that gets formulated at the beginning of a project. Rather it is the future version of the world that you constantly discover and reimagine to live in, the world version to which your company or team wants to contribute to. With every research study you conduct and every product iteration you run, you uncover a new region of your world’s map that was hidden to you before, revealing new opportunity spaces to act on, but also reshaping your game strategy to play by.
As a final note to the reader, my thoughts in this paper are fresh and need continuous shaping. In that sense, this paper – sort of being my own target world – is not definite, never-ending, and (re-)starts at the moment you (re-)engage with it. I hope it sparks interest, inspires new thinking, gets experimented with, criticized and improved, and gets more beautiful as it ages.
PROBLEMS IN INNOVATION WORK
Innovation is messy, non-linear and fuzzy. Teams have to deal with a lot of uncertainty – not only in the early stages of a project but also in later stages when building the first prototype, MVP or next version product.
The Why
Aligning on a common vision is difficult too. People agree on vision statements after half-day workshops going through the Golden Circle and other tools, where they frame and reformulate the Why over and over again. While the team might remember the statement word by word, it often lacks the imagination of what the vision could actually look like and how it might integrate into future worlds. Having witnessed this myself, innovation teams often end up juggling with words, eventually finding themselves with the fanciest, shortest, yet most abstract statements which are no more than empty phrases and catchwords.
Innovation teams reflect too little on how their preferred future world will facilitate some of the people’s desires, aspirations and values that will inhabit it. What is the richer picture of world-famous Why examples like the one of Apple stating: “We believe in challenging the status quo, and doing things differently.” (Sinek, 2009) So what? What does this say about anything? What world does this statement allow us to imagine? How does this contribute to any kind of human values, aspirations or cultural histories and identities being embodied by people living in targeted future worlds?
Figure 3. Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle (Sinek 2011)
What Simon Sinek (being an anthropologist himself) tries to point out in his best-selling book and TED-talk was not the actual why-statement but the shared belief people connect to as the starting point for a commercial relationship. The shared belief, cause or purpose is what connects people and is the basis for a strong relationship and for loyalty. The exploration of these shared beliefs, though, must go beyond brainstorming and the manifestation beyond a single statement, post-it or slide.
Assumptions & Adoption
The reason why so many innovators struggle with the Golden Circle, in my opinion, is the same reason why many fail to ever produce truly meaningful innovation. At the heart of this lies the missing understanding of people and the missing awareness of how wrong our assumptions about people often are. We (innovators) fail to see the relations between people and the socio-technical networks they are part of as well as their interpretation of their everyday lives, their aspirations and their desired futures. Too often, we (innovators) simply project our own assumptions onto the lives of others. As a result, our idea and how an innovation could potentially overcome a problem we thought we found fails – not because of execution but because we have taken the wrong direction from the very beginning. The innovators’ assumptions and intentions rarely – if ever – equal user adoption.
Figure 4. User adoption (Source: westbrook.co.uk)
The point is that the innovator’s understanding of a problem evolves through-out the innovation process and that an innovator never gets to a complete representation of the problem. This is what has been described as the problem-solution-paradox:
We cannot think about solutions until we understand the problem, and we cannot understand the problem until we think about solutions. (Wendt 2015)
What Wendt and others before him (e.g. Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Ihde, Verbeek etc.) have built up sophisticated philosophical thoughts and frameworks over decades, seem to be in line with what entrepreneurs and innovators experience in daily business. Despite well-established frameworks like Lean Startup and Riskiest Assumption Testing leading to numerous pivots, innovators fight an unforeseeable ocean of user adoption possibilities.
A chair e.g. can be used as a piece of furniture to sit on, a ladder to step on, or as a weapon to attack someone. Similarly, Facebook helps to connect people and brings them closer together (as intended in Facebook’s vision statement) but also allows for and even enables political misinformation and polarization. Often having some sort of underlying wicked problem, solutions provide a stage for new problems to arise. Thus, it is the innovator’s moral obligation to weigh whether everyone is better off with the new problems at hand. For example, will autonomous vehicles really improve city traffic overall? Who is to decide – the rider watching TV in the future or the cyclist getting run over today? Do e-scooters support our mobility goals to reduce carbon emissions, free up parking lots in cities, etc. or have they created more problems than positive impact, considering the high number of often quite severe accidents and scooters lying around at every side-walk, thus blocking city space and posing a risk for others? Serving one target group, hurting another group that was forgotten or ignored in the innovation process.
Figure 5. Visual illustration of Thomas Wendt’s Designing for Dasein (Fiasova 2018)
Emerging Technologies
Even though methods like forecasting and scenario building and newer approaches including speculative design, design fiction and experiential futures have emerged as alternative points of departure for innovation practice, they seldomly investigate what would be desirable local worlds for the collective, as the basis to identify artefacts and activities as a form of contribution to these worlds. Most futures-oriented practices either analyse trends and signals, study the effect and adoption of emerging technologies (English-Lueck and Avery 2020, Pink 2019) and artefacts in the making (Auger 2013), frame visions, hypotheses, how might we … questions, and future user journeys (see e.g. design thinking or lean-startup) or study “future as an alterity of the present” (Pink 2017).
James Auger has separated formerly mentioned approaches into two categories: First, speculative futures, extrapolations of the contemporary, being used to “test potential products and services (…) before they exist” (Auger 2013). The second category is alternative presents, which ask “what if” artefacts were applied by different ideologies and speculating about how the present was different (ibid.). In both categories, the technological artefact stands at the center, is the point of departure and of continuous reference. Within the anthropological community, related work has been referred to as Ethnographic Futures Research (Textor 1980), Ethnographic Experiential Futures (Candy and Kornet 2019), Speculative Ethnography, Anticipatory Ethnography/Anthropology (English-Lueck and Avery 2020), Futures Anthropology (Salazar et. al. 2017), Anthropology of the Future (Bryant and Knight 2019), amongst others. These have surfaced more regularly throughout the last two decades but started to shape already from the 1960s onwards (English-Lueck and Avery 2020). Aside from a few outliers, though, much of the futures-oriented practices overlap or interact with design and user experience, as they mostly look into “unintended consequences of technological use on social life” to eventually “imagine the future use of a service, product, architectural form, or land space” (ibid.). In my opinion and experience, most effort in innovation work is spent on figuring out how new technologies can lead to new tools, gadgets, experiences in the future. Too often emerging technologies are the starting point. Too little do we invest in exploring, understanding and inventing future worlds which we collectively would enjoy to live in.
Scope & Inclusivity
Ideally, I argue, the effects of any innovation would always be measured against the desired worlds we actually want to live in. Focusing innovation efforts on solving problems, pain points, needs, and jobs-to-be-done of isolated and often rather fictive user personas proved efficient as innovators had structures at hand to guide them through the process in a few days or weeks. Yet, they have turned out to be shortsighted, often treating symptoms without understanding the underlying complexity, nor steering towards better futures from a collective point of view. Innovation needs to be more inclusive from a broader perspective. The following funnel shows the development of centeredness in innovation.
Figure 6. Centeredness in innovation
Critically, while many forerunners argue for the advancement of centeredness: to be user- or human-centered, and to start with a problem or need instead of the solution, many companies still struggle to even understand their existing customers. Although more and more leaders realize the value of human insights for their businesses, many fight the often brutal reality of changing markets, growing competitors and unexpected disruption, which leaves little space to think about sustainability or social inclusivity. This means, what we need, now more than ever, are new frameworks that allow for holistically sustainable innovation that balances not only social and environmental but also economic aspects.
This follows the arguments and discussions others referred to as ‘complex adaptive systems design’ (Slavin 2016), ‘humanity-centered’ (Donelli 2016, Wren 2018, Kikin-Gil 2018, Palaveeva 2018), ‘planet-centered’ (Frick and Luebkeman 2017, Kwame 2018, Impossible 2018, Schubert 2019, Jackson 2020, Patel 2020), ‘the design responsibility revolution’ (Grillo 2020), ‘post-human-centered’ (Payne 2020) and other terms (Fry and Nocek 2020). Thus, solving a simplified problem is not good enough anymore (ibid.). The point is that our scope, scale and focus in innovation work is experiencing several shifts towards more complex systems involving a multitude of not only human actors, which we need to involve and reflect on before developing the next product or company.
We have to be more inclusive and more holistic in the values and goals that we set out for our innovation efforts. The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals provide a great start for this on a macro level, but I believe there is a larger opportunity for us to go beyond, and draw richer pictures for the micro and meso level, which I will argue for throughout this paper.
Figure 7. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (Source: unoosa.org)