What is the Future of Fundraising?

By Mal Warwick

Copyright © 2006

 

Are you ready to take a journey to the future? Can you stand the thrills, the chills, the utter disorientation of the world you’ll encounter, ten, twenty, thirty years down the line? Well, fasten your seat belt, and hold on tight!

 

For more than a century, science fiction writers and so-called “futurists” have predicted the shape and direction of things to come. You may hear them brag about their successes. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells got a few things right, after all. And Arthur C. Clarke predicted the earth-orbit communications satellite. But, for the most part, their predictions have been wrong.

 

Where, for example, are those atomic cars they used to talk about? Where are the household robots and the houses that clean themselves, cook our food, and wake us up in the morning? I could use one of those!

 

More than a hundred years ago, in the closing years of the 19th Century, our cities were choked with coal-dust . . . factories ran on steam power . . . the horse was the dominant mode of transportation . . . and epidemic disease ran rampant all across the globe. Who could foresee a future with electricity in our homes . . . our roads and streets clogged with gasoline-powered vehicles . . .  and smallpox eradicated?

 

Certainly not Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office. In 1899, Mr. Duell, advocating the abolition of his own department, proclaimed “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”

 

One of the seminal events of the past century was the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, and the Great Depression that ensued. There are likely to be very few people reading this column who remember those terrible events – but all our lives have been touched by them.

 

Soup lines became a commonplace as millions were thrown out of work. Industrial production slumped all across the world. Class conflict sharpened. For America’s middle class, grown fat in the Roaring 20s, it was the end of an era.

 

Who could possibly have foreseen this global catastrophe?

 

Not the leading economists or business leaders of the day. And not the President of the United States, Herbert Hoover, who asserted in September 1929 that “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.”

 

In fact, humankind’s track record in envisioning its future has been extremely poor. Experts routinely fail to predict major changes. Even meteorologists can’t predict next week’s weather! If you think you can do better, good luck to you!

 

But why is this? Why is it so very difficult to foresee the future?

 

Complex systems. In recent decades, scientists have come to understand that the complex systems that guide our lives—the power grids, the communications networks, the political institutions—cannot work in predictable ways. They’re . . . well, they’re just too complicated!

 

Law of Unforeseen Consequences. We’ve also come to appreciate that even the very best of motives can lead to outcomes we just never considered. For example, heroin was invented as a way to cure people of addiction to morphine.

 

Murphy’s Law. Then, of course, there’s the old folk wisdom that all too often proves true. “When something CAN go wrong, it WILL go wrong.”

 

People. After all, what can you possibly expect with more than six billion ornery and unpredictable people living on the planet?

 

But one factor stands out above all as a way to understand why we simply cannot expect to predict the future . . . Discontinuities.

 

It’s in the nature of our species to expect that our lives will continue along pretty much the same lines as they’ve followed in the past. We don’t relish change or expect it. But nature and history rarely unfold in straight lines. Consistency is a human construct. Disruption and change are the rule in our universe.

 

Technological innovations can have earth-shaking impact. Not overnight, rarely overnight, but as they spread. The automobile. The airplane. Radio. Television. The Internet.

 

Wars are our greatest disruptors. For those involved – and often for those on the sidelines, too – a war can change EVERYTHING.

 

Epidemic disease can have the cruelest effects. No sooner did humankind eradicate smallpox and bring polio under control than AIDS suddenly appeared. Our war with microbes has lasted throughout the ages. We can’t expect it to stop.

 

In a complex, interdependent economy, a major economic reversal can touch everyone in a society, and sometimes even everyone in the world. In the 1990s, some thought that computer technology had created a “new economics” free of recessions. Then came the dot-com bust of 2000.

 

The potential for environmental change is the biggest wildcard of all. Global climate change is already affecting us in ways both big and small. But there is no scientist on the face of the Earth who can describe with confidence what its effects will be two decades from now.

 

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman’s recent best-selling book, The World is Flat, describes the astonishing changes that have reshaped the world’s economy during the past decade and a half.

 

He regards the advent of the Internet as the first of three driving forces that constitute the “Triple Convergence.” Email and the World Wide Web have brought us all much closer together, abolishing many of the limitations of time and space and allowing us all, no matter where on Earth we might be, to collaborate . . . or compete . . . for the first time ever.

 

Meanwhile, clever people have developed new forms of business, and new tools, to take full advantage of these new technologies. With modern workflow software, for example, a project manager at an accounting company in Kansas City can receive an assignment from a client late Wednesday afternoon, email it to an accounting contractor in Bangalore, India, that evening . . . and have the finished work on the client’s desk first thing Thursday morning.

 

And all the while the world was beginning to assimilate these new technologies and new ways of doing business, the global marketplace doubled. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the continuation of economic reforms in China and India, we now find ourselves in a world with three billion more consumers than we had in the 1980s.

 

All that upheaval is enough to make a person uncomfortable, isn’t it? As Mark Twain put it, “I’m all for progress. It’s change I can’t stand.”

 

It would be huge mistake to think that we are suddenly now immune to new, wrenching changes. There are possibilities, some good, others very bad, that we have to take into account as we peer into the future.

 

Infectious disease may elude detection or control and get totally out of hand. A lethal new pandemic could kill 500 million before coming under control – or simply burning itself out.

 

U.S. politics, already under the sway of extreme right-wing forces, could turn even more sharply rightward in reaction to a dramatic new terrorist attack and lash out with all the country’s military might, imprisoning thousands and permanently alienating our remaining allies.

 

Continuing advances in medical science might make it possible for the world’s billions to live decades longer than our parents or grandparents. Already, a healthy baby girl born in today’s United States has a reasonably good chance of living to witness the 22nd century!

 

Global warming might not stay on its gradual course but trigger a sharp reversal, bringing on a sudden new Ice Age. Already, in fact, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet threatens to disrupt the Gulf Stream that keeps Northern Europe livable.

 

Or new technology might cut the price of generating solar energy by 90% and sweep away all concern about our shrinking petroleum reserves.

 

Anything is possible!

 

We used to think of competition in business, in sports, in world affairs – indeed, in every facet of human life – as taking place on a level playing field. We used to say “It isn’t whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.” But we now live in a world where the shape of the playing field has changed. It’s a winner-take-all society. And the stakes are higher than ever. 

 

In the view of Klaus Schwab, the Swiss businessman who founded the World Economic Forum, “We are moving from a world in which the big eat the small to a world in which the fast eat the slow.”

 

So, in the light of all the uncertainties we face and of humankind’s demonstrable inability to predict the future, how can we explore the possibilities that lie ahead of us in a useful and productive way? How can we possibly peer into the future, ten, twenty, thirty years away, and learn anything from the experience?

 

The answer lies in a method pioneered in the oil industry a generation ago and still widely employed by major corporations, government agencies, the U.S. military, and other large institutions to anticipate the unknowable. It’s an approach to strategic planning called scenario planning, and it’s the topic of my next column. I’ll explain how this proven method works and how you can apply it to your own organization, and I’ll point you to resources you can tap to explore scenario planning more fully. 

 

In subsequent months, I’ll put the scenario planning method to work to envision three possible and widely divergent futures for the world of philanthropy and fundraising twenty years from now—a world that is likely to bear little resemblance to today’s reality. So, make sure that seat belt’s tight. There’s a rocky ride ahead!