Interview on March 20, 2006
with Eamonn Kelly

Biographical Sketch

Eamonn Kelly is CEO of Global Business Network, the renowned future-oriented network and consulting firm, and a partner of the Monitor Group. For more than a decade he has been at the forefront of exploring the emergence of a new economic, social, and geopolitical order and its far-reaching consequences for organizations and individuals.

Kelly has developed insights, tools, and methodologies for mastering uncertainty and consulted at senior levels to dozens of the world’s leading corporations, governmental agencies, and major philanthropic organizations. His most recent book is Powerful Times: Rising to the Challenge of Our Uncertain World (2006). He is also the co-author of What’s Next? Exploring the New Terrain for Business (2002) and The Future of the Knowledge Economy (1999).



Introduction - Using Scenarios for Planning

EK: Every decision we make, whether it’s in our personal, organizational, political or social lives, is actually a bet. And it’s a bet that is based on our beliefs about the system in which we’re operating and in which our decision is occurring as well as our beliefs about how that system is evolving. So, there are two dimensions to the bet: one is a time dimension about how it might unfold in the future and the other is about our understanding of the system right now in order to make a decision.

While that’s always been true, every system we work in today is increasingly complex, an outcome of the last century. Change has been accelerating, and the faster it accelerates, the more interconnected and complex the systems become with more moving parts, more actors, more innovation, etc. So, our understanding of the system is getting weaker.

Secondly, as things move faster, it’s axiomatic that the uncertainty over time is increasing as well. And again, as the systems that are in play become more complex, our sense of how the future unfolds becomes even more uncertain. Those, I believe, are simply facts.

But the human brain is subject to both cognitive biases and affective or emotional biases. The cognitive biases are the lenses through which we see the world. We each have a world view which helps us make sense of the system and that rests on an implicit set of deeply rooted assumptions and beliefs about how things are going to play out—what we describe in GBN and the scenario world as the official future. The affective bias is that we don’t like uncertainty so we deny it. We want the illusion of being in control and we ignore the realities and possibilities we dislike. Right now at the macro-political level, for example, you can see the way the U.S., Europe, and other parts of the world are looking differently at decisions. Those reflect different world views based on both cognitive and emotional biases.

The scenario process is essentially a powerful antidote to the tendency to make bets based on assumptions about the system we’re working in and what’s going to happen over time. I stress both of these dimensions because the scenario process is not just about telling stories of the future. In the course of that storytelling, you don’t just understand the future possibilities better, you understand the system better. You start to see connections between things that you didn’t really realize were important.

So, the scenario process is really a way of making explicit a range of possibilities that might happen in the future and a range of ways of seeing the current system through varied lenses. It challenges the official future because in most decision-making processes we arrive at a premature convergence. We do it organizationally; we do it personally; we do it in our families. We want to get to closure, and so we rush toward convergence, which is based on a set of beliefs.

What scenarios force you to do is diverge for longer, keeping a broader range of possibilities in play and then quite explicitly moving through them and asking if this were the future, what would we do and how would it be different from that future? And you start to understand, “Okay, the bet I’m making is that it’s this world, not that one. But maybe that’s not a good bet… so now I’ll reframe the bet because I understand the assumptions I’m making, the risks I’m taking on, and the possibilities in play that I hadn’t really thought about before.”



Scenarios and Individual Decisions

JE: Can you use scenarios in terms of individual life decisions?

EK: Absolutely. I use scenarios all the time. I force myself to imagine multiple outcomes, and I think about what I would do and why. Scenarios help us make better decisions as individuals that are leveraged against the possibilities, rather than blindly driven by our assumptions and beliefs. This not only makes the bet better informed, but it also gives us the ability to frame and rapidly act on contingencies. In any sphere, if we make a bet and then realize that the scenario that’s unfolding is this scenario, not that scenario, we’ve already figured out how to respond and adapt.

To take an example, we invite Aunt Maude stay with us for a whole week because we reckon we can survive it, but if we get to day three and everybody’s on each other’s nerves, we’ll all go to Monterey for a couple of nights. So, let’s have a provisional booking in place. We can always cancel it if we’re getting on like a house on fire. But it’s about building in flexibility and imagining the various scenarios that could unfold—and actually being prepared for them.

JE: What are the characteristics of a good scenario?

EK: In the process of creating a good scenario you need a number of things, starting with a variety of perspectives. If everybody comes in with the same mindset then you’ll just get the same old stuff. You also need a genuine, open willingness to think the unthinkable, including possibilities that are unpleasant or undesirable.

JE: Can you give an example?

EK: A pretty controversial example would be the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Did we, as the U.S., do the scenarios of what might happen next, and were we really prepared? Actually there were lots of people doing those scenarios; even the military on the ground was saying, “You know, we’re heading into an insurgency here, and the faster we drive towards Baghdad, the more we’re leaving it behind.” What got in the way was less a cognitive bias than an emotional bias. We wanted to believe a particular scenario and we pressed ahead. And so we pursued the wrong mission, which is again what organizations often do. In Iraq, the goal became taking Baghdad and everything became focused on that end. But taking Baghdad was only a proxy for the real objective—to liberate Iraq. As a result, all of the decision-making, all of the bets, were based on a single scenario rather than a broader range of possibilities around what might actually happen. And those alternative scenarios weren’t very hard to imagine.

New Orleans is another example. People had been talking about a breach of the levies and what might occur since the 1960s. Not hard scenarios to imagine, just unpalatable ones. People don’t like to explore unpalatable scenarios. That’s why, in an organizational scenario process, we often bring in external voices. This really helps to provoke new thinking—the diversity of perspectives from within the organization is further stretched by the external people who really see the world differently.

Thinking from the Outside In

Another critically important aspect of scenarios is to start thinking from the outside in, not from the inside out. Almost every strategic process is 90 percent, and sometimes 100 percent focused from the inside out: What do we want to do in the world, what are our values, what’s our mission, what’s our strategy, what resources do we have, where are our assets, how do we deploy those assets against our goals? Those are certainly important questions but they all play out in the real world, which is rapidly changing and evolving.

To illustrate this, GBN often uses a three-ring, “bulls-eye” model: the external world of social, technological, economic, political, and environmental forces (the outer ring); the transactional world, which is, in a business context, the marketplace, and in a nonprofit context, the arena where agencies interact with partners, customers, competitors, communities (the middle ring); and the internal world of an organization’s people, technology, values, systems, and culture (the inner ring). One of the disciplines of the scenario process involves saying, “Stop talking about how this doesn’t fit your values or why you don’t want other people to do this or why the systems aren’t going to work, because that stops you from preparing the right strategy. You’ve got to think of the outside world first. If you prematurely bring in all the things you can do, want to do, and have the assets to do, you will start doing something that’s all about you rather than about the world out there.” So, thinking very explicitly about working from the outside in is another fundamental piece of scenarios.

Clarity and Craziness

JE: In Powerful Times you write, “Ultimately, the test of a good scenario is whether it helps you see the world differently, to read the morning paper with a new eye, and to connect the dots and find the patterns that really matter to our future.” Can you expand on what you mean by that?

EK: That quote links back to the tendency to underestimate scenarios—to just think they are blue sky, about the future, about thinking long term. That’s part of what makes scenarios very valuable. But scenarios are really about “predicting the present,” by which I mean that they boost our systemic understanding of what’s happening right now and how the system we’re working in is operating. Predicting the present involves realizing, “This is an issue for us and it’s not something we’ve talked about.”

An example from Powerful Times is what I call the dynamic tension between clarity and craziness. It’s rooted in thinking with clients about the long-range future and how technologies are continuing to make things more and more transparent. What became increasingly clear to me was that a huge gulf exists between the capabilities of these technologies of connection to create magic and mischief and the state of societal preparedness for those capabilities. You see that particular tension daily in the newspapers.

The NSA monitoring of phone calls, for example, shows how the capability of the technology has exceeded our current regulatory, legal, moral, and ethical debate. The Danish cartoons of Mohammed were a classic example of both clarity and craziness: riots in Pakistan were caused by a dozen cartoons published in a fairly low-circulation newspaper in Denmark because of global connectivity. Then worse cartoons developed elsewhere were put into portfolios and spread around to Imams and opinion leaders, generating a great deal of craziness. Moreover, the riots were organized through smart mobs, through instantaneous, angry, passionate cell phone text messages. Not only did the messages say, “Let’s organize at this location,” but, “They’re about to ban the Koran in Copenhagen.” Not true, but very, very incendiary. So, what you got was an incredible Petri dish nourished by part truth and part fiction.

But people still miss the point. The debate is not just over whether it’s okay to publish cartoons of the Prophet. Although that is important, it’s the sub-story. The big story is what do you do in a world in which the actions of an obscure newspaper’s editor in the tiny country of Denmark can provoke riots in Pakistan, cause hundreds of deaths, and lead to boycotts of Danish foodstuffs, products, and even Legos.

The much bigger story is that we’ve created the technological capacity for clarity and craziness that way outstrips our societal, organizational, and psychological preparedness to deal with it. And those are gaps we’ve got to close. So, when I talk about connecting the dots when you read the morning paper, I mean reading those stories through a filter of understanding how the Internet, global connectivity, a global market economy, and lots of multimedia capabilities including cell phones, come together in this new, rich stew of possibility.

The point is that thinking scenarically about how these technologies create different potential futures leads us to a deeper understanding of the system as it exists. This in turn enables us to see and link what’s happening in the world through a very distinct and more useful lens than simply reading The New York Times or The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal provides.



Quantifying Scenarios

JE: In terms of decision-making being a bet, is part of the process when you’re working with clients giving them the odds on the various scenarios? When they come to you, do they want you to say not only what are the possibilities but what are the likelihoods?

EK: It’s a great question. You’ve touched upon one of the fault lines in the scenario community between the purists who would throw their arms up in horror and say, “Never, would we be able to do that” and the more quantitatively-minded, who say, “We ought to be able to go in that direction” and the realists who sit in the middle – and I would put myself in that category – who say, “You’ve got to be able to do a bit of that, not least because the clients want it, but you must deploy it very carefully.” The reason you have to deploy it carefully (as the purists would argue) is because quantifying probabilities of the future is just too complex. As soon as you create four scenarios and start saying that one is 70 percent likely and another’s 10 percent likely, you’re going back to the old model of forecasting and creating a false certainty that’s disingenuous.

Moreover, as soon as you assign probabilities people will gravitate toward betting on the future that is 55 percent likely, without really challenging it. And that’s a problem because you’re not really being open to the possibility of any of these worlds unfolding.

JE: What’s the alternative then?

EK: More useful, I think, is to say, “What do we now believe is actually predetermined and locked in?” Can we find factors from the scenario exercise that we believe are now a reality and therefore, shouldn’t be treated as uncertainties? For example, I have been saying for some time that if you’re a major American corporation, you should assume that if you are doing anything that you would be ashamed of if it were known in public, then it is going to be known in public at some point in the future. Moreover, it will be both accurately reflected and maliciously exaggerated or twisted to make you not just ashamed but mortified. Therefore, the only sane strategy now is to just stop doing it.

In addition to exploring what’s predetermined, you should also ask, “What are the things we’re in danger of making assumptions about?” It’s important to recognize your own bias. A good example is the pervasive assumption that the processes of economic globalization will continue unfettered, with no return to protectionism. That’s not inevitable; it’s not predetermined; it’s simply an assumption that we default to when we make our decisions. Frankly, it’s probably a bet that’s worth making, but we should be thoughtful and mindful of it and much more aware of the fact that we are choosing to believe it, which is very different from knowing that it’s predetermined.

So, there are elements that are predetermined, there are things we make assumptions about, and then there are important uncertainties that we don’t really think or make assumptions about because they’re just not on our radar screens.

I remember giving a talk in Scotland in 1990 about the six big trends to watch in the future. One was the rise of fundamentalism and the huge geopolitical tensions that might be triggered by fundamentalist religions. Even though I’d given a nice, wide-ranging speech, that’s all everybody talked about in the bar afterwards. It caused a huge debate and even anger about raising the issue in the first place: “What’s this mean for our organization? If that’s right there will be bad civil unrest in Britain, etc.” It was very interesting. Nobody was thinking about fundamentalism then. But they realized, “If that’s true, it’s really important. That could start to change everything.”

And then there’s the final category of things that we tend to obsess about, hugely important issues that we should probably stop making a central part of our decision-making. Economic forecasting’s a good example. We have organizations that employ 100 economists to do economic forecasts. Why? At the end of the day, it’s not that big of a deal for any particular industry whether global GDP goes up by 4 percent or 2 percent. And you’re not going to get it right, anyway.

In 1984 the Economist magazine asked four groups of people to make predictions of annual global GDP growth for the next decade: financial investors, economists, European finance ministers, and garbage collectors. They sealed the predictions and opened them 10 years later in 1994. Of course, the group that was closest was the garbage collectors, though
none of the groups did particularly well. Is that a surprise to anybody? Absolutely not. Even the economists who do this work know that it’s a classic case of the Emperor has no clothes. Why do we vex ourselves about the big uncertainties we’re never going to resolve when we could just start paying less attention to them?

The scenario process also helps you to discover the default behaviors that we bring to these kinds of conversations. I always say, “This process has many side benefits. Do you want to hear about them?” And often people will say, “No. We’re not really interested. What we want is an answer to our question.” Every time that happens, I just say, “Okay, we’ll wait and see.” Three months later at the conclusion of the process, they’re saying, “Wow! People are connecting differently. The level of the dialogue is so improved. They’re having conversations instead of arguments and are talking about learning differently. These meetings have changed their character.” An amazing process unfolds from creating good scenarios and having a deep dialog with the right people in the room.

The final thing I’ll say about scenarios is the importance of storytelling. Ultimately, if you’re not going to have the decision-makers who are making these bets in the room as you generate the scenarios, you must create great stories to grab their attention. Logical graphs and charts will get processed through the same set of cognitive and affective bias mechanisms and will produce the same old outcomes. That’s why compelling, engaging story lines are critical if you’re going to use scenarios to change the mindsets, opinions, and decisions of people who are not involved in creating them.



Dealing with Uncertainty in a Complex World

JE: I want to build off what you said earlier about fundamentalist world views because increasingly it appears there are two big trends at work: one is that as we live in this ever more complex, swiftly-changing world, many people’s default position goes to a more fundamentalist type of thinking because it seems they want an anchor in this world. “This is what I will hold onto. This is what will give me a sense of control.” And this trend is at odds with another general one in which people are more aware that we live in an uncertain world with a multiplicity of beliefs.

So, when you’re talking about these processes, part of what you’re talking about is having people develop a new relationship to uncertainty itself. That gets into what you wrote about in one of your articles about learning to embrace uncertainty and risk.

EK: I think you’re spot on. My own view of fundamentalism is that in many ways it’s a response to increasing uncertainty. Now, I’m not a psychologist, nor am I religious, though I like to think of myself as spiritual, so I’m not very well-qualified to make sweeping assertions. But I do believe that there is something in the human character that is pretty uncomfortable when confronted with overwhelming uncertainty and looks to resolve that uncertainty by defaulting to some traditional certainties that then make uncertainties go away. It’s not just fundamentalist Christians or Muslims. There’s a whole movement in the Catholic Church to decry relativism, too. And that’s all about a lack of ease with uncertainty.

As I noted earlier, it’s axiomatic that if the world has been changing faster for the last 20 years, which it has, and if it has been becoming more interconnected, which it has, and if the systems are becoming more complex, which they are, and if technologies are becoming more transformative, which they are, then we are living in an era in which there is more and more and more uncertainty in the environment of every organization and of every individual.

At the same time, we’ve also been living through a fundamental shift in the nature of our economy. That’s not fully globally yet but it’s true in the developed parts of the world and becoming more real everywhere else. As a result, more and more of us are becoming what Drucker called “knowledge workers.” Drucker predicted very accurately, as he always did, that we were utterly underprepared for a society in which most of us were knowledge workers. He foresaw a profound social transformation that we hadn’t even begun to contemplate. And I agree.

For many knowledge workers one of the biggest uncertainties of all is, “What am I doing?” “Does it matter? Is it in any way meaningful?” The fundamental difference between the people who build TiVo, and my grandfather who was a ship’s carpenter, is that he knew what to do at the start of the work day and what he had to achieve by the end of the work day. He could look at it, touch it, and literally measure it before going home, which a knowledge worker can never do. And that’s a radical social transformation because one of the most profound uncertainties of all is, “Am I worth anything? Does what I’m doing have value?”

Another part of this social transformation is that more and more of us in the developed economies and in organizations with any level of sophistication are involved in jobs in which we have to exercise judgment. And by exercising judgment, I mean making decisions and choices that cannot be resolved by more data. In other words, there comes a point when you have to say, “I’ve got this data, I’ve got that data, and I say we do this.” I make a judgment. Yet our organizations are not comfortable with us making judgments because that’s not the industrial model. We’re in a transition phase just now characterized by more uncertainty and volatility in our work environments. And the fact that there are more and more competitors and actors in every system introduces still more uncertainty.

So, bring all that together and what I argue is the mastery of uncertainty is becoming increasingly important and is poised to become the differentiating characteristic between organizations that succeed and organizations that fail. Frankly, the same is true for individuals.



Oraganizational Responses to Uncertainty

JE: So what are organizations doing to meet this new reality?

EK: We do the same thing that the fundamentalists do when they revert to the basics of their religion—we go back. We have spent 30 years trying to create new kinds of organizations that are networked, flexible, adaptive, decentralized, flattened, and empowered. Yet what are we doing as things get more uncertain? We’re defaulting to the old ways. First we centralize everything again and put in more bureaucracy.

What do we do when 9/11 strikes? We create The Department of Homeland Security. Who in their right mind thinks that the best way to make emergency response teams more effective, to make FEMA a better agency is to centralize its control in a monolithic bureaucracy? It doesn’t make any sense, and yet this entire country, with huge bipartisan support, all moved in that direction. What do you do when you get an avian flu pandemic? When this started to emerge last summer, I said, “Watch, we’re going to get calls for a flu czar. Get a Daddy and the problem will go away.”

So, Daddy can be God, it can be scripture, it can be the flu czar, it can be the Department of Homeland Security. And Daddy solves the uncertainty, the complexity for you. So, that’s the first set of actions we take.

Secondly we say, “Let’s get more and more data” because as soon as we get all the data, we’ll eventually know the right answer. So we go off in a hunt for data, we waste money, we waste time, and we get more and more stuff that, frankly, doesn’t provide us with any more clarity.

The third thing we do is get busier. If you’ve got the existentialist angst of the knowledge worker, you don’t really know the value of what you’re doing. There’s no measurement, so there’s nothing tangible that you can point to. You don’t even know if you believe it all. So what do you do? You get busier and busier and busier, the assumption being that if you work more it has to be worth more – if it’s worth anything to begin with. So, you get addicted to your Crackberry, you’re checking your e-mail all night and on weekends. You’re never disconnected from work.

Another thing we do is get more and more focused. One CEO used to pride himself on the statement, “We break all the wood behind the same arrow.” That’s great, but what if we all get behind the same arrow and then fire it in the wrong direction? So, everything becomes focus, focus, focus because you want to get more and more and more efficient. “Times are getting scary, stuff’s really uncertain. We don’t want people off doing this and that. Let’s get rid of all this exploratory stuff that’s not fitting because that’s going to kill us.” In fact, it’s the other way around. When we over-focus and get more and more productive in terms of efficiency, we lose the value of redundancy and the slack in any system that lets people learn things.

Finally, we decide to measure everything relentlessly because if you measure stuff, then it’s no longer uncertain; you’ve actually got metrics. And if you’ve metrics and measurements, then you’ve quantified it all and everything’s okay. You see that default in organizations. The most spectacular illustration of it just now is in the education system, where we have decided that the solution is to measure everything. What we are seeing with the “No Child Left Behind” policy is that reading and writing are center stage but under-performing schools are dropping all the other parts of the curriculum that aren’t measured.

And so kids are coming out with no history, no geography, and certainly no arts; they’re not being educated, they’re being trained to pass the standard tests so that their schools don’t get punished financially. The thing is, metrics don’t measure performance, they drive performance and often in crazy ways.

In fact, in the education case, you don’t make the kids smarter by training them for the test, you make them stupider. So why are we doing that? Because of the illusion of control. If we measure it, then we’ll know exactly what we’re getting and we’ll solve the problems of education. So, our response to uncertainty is to do insane things that look sane.

Let me be more generous in my rephrasing, a little less Bolshevik.

JE: That’s okay! [Laughter]

Over the last 30 years organizational development is a story of two or three steps forward and one or two steps backwards. And right now, for people who get obsessed with cost controls and focus and metrics, those are the steps backward. But we can keep making the steps forward too.

JE: What would some of those steps be?

EK: If I were working in an OD capacity, I would say to anybody in any organization, “The natural instincts of leaders in times of uncertainty are to go back to the old ways of the tried-and-true, hierarchical, centralized model. So, don’t try to resist every instinctive move that leadership makes to try to centralize and control. Recognize that those buy you some psychological comfort and then try and figure out how to capitalize on that psychological comfort to try some other stuff that’s less comfortable, that balances the scales, that’s actually just as essential for becoming an adaptive organization?”

And recognize that you may have to take a different approach. Ask, “If this is a very uncertain world, where are the people who are learning about it the fastest?” They’re unlikely to be the czars at the top of pyramids; they’re much more likely to be people who are out interacting with customers, seeing suppliers. So, how do we start thinking about an organizational form in which the leadership is seen as being in the middle with everyone is around them? And how do we make the ripples flow in both directions so that the leaders can learn from the people that they’re directing? Instead of thinking of the people at the outer edge as being at the bottom, think of them as your explorers. And if you start thinking of yourself as cocooned in the middle, rather than as the person at the top of the pyramid with the ability to see over everybody else’s heads, you’ve suddenly got a much more realistic metaphor for how you’re positioned in your organization.

Starting to shift your metaphor of organization and your ideas about how you organize and deal with uncertainty is important. So is understanding that you need to balance exploitation -- focus is all about exploiting what’s known -- and exploration, which is about discovering what’s not yet known. As competition increases, as what is known becomes disseminated faster and faster by more and more people, ultimately what is not known becomes by far the biggest source of advantage. We’re not going to get advantage by exploiting the known; the known will always commoditize, and that’s happening faster and faster as everything speeds up. So, finding the balance between your exploitative capabilities and your explorative capabilities is fundamentally important. So is understanding that metrics have to be balanced against stories. Metrics are quantitative measures that tell us a piece of what we need to know. Stories are qualitative but they logics are embedded in them. And the logic of why we’re doing things is just as important as you how quantify what you’re doing.

I also think that every organization should make a point of revisiting the question “What is the moral purpose of what we’re doing and how are we fulfilling it?” every couple of years. And it should do so with its employees in a very direct, explicit, open manner. This is especially important in the era we’re living in just now, when our roles in a complex, knowledge-based, intangible system aren’t always clear. The thirst for meaning is a huge, growing phenomenon so rearticulating our moral purpose and celebrating how we’re all contributing to it becomes a critical part of changing the nature of the relationship that our people have to the uncertainty of what they’re doing and why. We’re going to see a lot of experimentation in the world of human resources to find new ways of forging closer, warmer, human connections between the individual and the organization.

The story of organizations is a really interesting one; if you take the classic industrial era model, we’re not even halfway into the process of developing the next organizational model. But it will come, and it will come through new forms like eBay and Wikipedia and Google that just weren’t possible ten years ago. It will come through the next generation of people who have become online gamers and are accustomed to creating strategy together, learning together, and teaching each other since age 12. It will come from a rediscovery of the joy and humanity of work and the fact that the knowledge worker, like the craft worker, brings a whole person to the workplace.



Divergent Thinking and Empathy

JE: You end Powerful Times by stressing the importance of developing our capacities for divergent thinking and for empathy. Can you expand on why developing those capacities is key to our decision making in terms of the world moving forward?

EK: The one thing that would most profoundly change the world right now is if we were all given enhanced powers of empathy, if we could all learn to really walk in the shoes of the other. In a funny way, it’s one of the fundamental precepts of every religion. But being in some way aware of the needs, feelings, emotions of the other is hugely significant. Nor are we constrained in the scale of our empathy in terms of how far out it can really reach. I would argue that the march of history has actually been, for the most part, a continuous expansion of the sense of we: from the familial we, to the clan we, the tribe we, the village we, the national we and, even now, the continental we, and ultimately the global we. Yet there is an inevitable lag between the reality of connectivity and frequency of interaction with each other and our sense of identity, our sense of we.

When a village has been around for a few generations, there’s immense loyalty, and that village will go to war with other villages. People have feuds and fights and defend each other; similarly with clans and regions and countries. One of the very positive outcomes of our globalized economic, technological, social, and cultural world is that we are now primed to expand our sense of we. I don’t think it’s going to be instantaneous, I think it will take a couple of generations and will not be spread out equally. As science fiction writer Bruce Sterling said, “The future’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

There will be pockets of deep resistance. We’re going to see, as we always do as we move forward, extreme moments of moving backwards. Protectionism and the influence of national interests will be around for a long time to come. But eventually, we’re going to reach a point where it seems irrelevant when politicians talk about this or that serving American national interests because what matters today isn’t directly and meaningfully linked to nations--but exists at the very local level, at the community of interest level, and at the global level. There will also be triggers that will accelerate the global we concept. One of them is definitely climate change.

We’ve known for a decade plus that climate change was going to enter our consciousness at some point. Now is the time; it’s happening. I think climate change is predetermined. What’s critically uncertain is what do we do about it? How will we react? Climate change is really hard to think about from a U.S. perspective or a British perspective or an Iberian perspective. It’s a global phenomenon and we’re going to become increasingly aware of global interdependence and interlinkage. If an avian flu pandemic strikes it won’t stop at any borders.

So, there are a lot of reasons why, at a very pragmatic level, we’re going to be driven to think at the level of the global we. There is an inevitability about it as part of the historic march of interconnectivity. In a more humanistic, spiritual sense, we also feel each other’s lives more acutely now, we see them more cleanly and clearly, we recognize them more fully. An interesting example is the linkage between the evangelical Christian right and a lot of AIDS groups that are arguing for more debt relief in Africa or poverty elimination. It’s fascinating to see this convergence of previously hostile political factions around some kind of global leadership.

When you have hitherto hostile stakeholder groups and interest groups converging and aligning their energies and efforts on shared concerns, something has shifted. And I think the thing that’s shifting is that sense that humanity now includes people in Chad and villagers living in rural China with their chickens. This is an inevitable sweep, I believe, and a truly transformative one.

And this shift will trouble and vex a lot of people but it will come and it will change our political institutions. It will recalibrate a lot of our economic decisions. It will probably lead to very important changes in the way that we think about progress and growth. I think we will move beyond the GDP, which fails to measure things that really matter, most particularly, contributions of women in societies, including ours.

My wife has played a very, very important social and familial role by not working outside the home for the last 18 years since our first child was born, but of course she’s been working. She’s been creating social networks; she’s been shaping the environment for our kids and rearing them; she’s been helping with other people’s kids and doing informal child-minding for her friends. All this activity, which actually makes our communities work is undertaken by women, but has no attributed value. And yet, it’s fundamental to our societies. As soon as we take it out of the realm of familial responsibility and pay a child-minder, suddenly it’s given an economic value and features in our GDP – but not when someone’s doing it as part of their mothering.

JE: That makes me think of the foundation world. For many funders, I think building relationships is not something that is generally explicitly valued in terms of a performance measure. It’s maybe implicit, but many

often want to see lofty objectives realized quickly without recognizing the value of the relationship-building that is necessary to reach those goals -- and which takes time. So, when you say we may change our notions of what is valuable, I wonder if part of that will involve placing a more explicit value on things like relationships.

EK: I think you’re right. There’s an increasing disconnect between the tangible assets that we can actually account for, literally, and the intangible assets that are about relationships and are fundamental. These questions are starting to become more visible and meaningful and will lead, I believe, to really important changes. Will we end this century with our same measurement systems for value, growth, and development? I truly hope not and I don’t believe we will.