Future Design Inquiries. January 2024

Futures happen by default or by design. Here are some things we think push past the default.

Hello from your friends at enso, a future design company, and happy new year.

For anyone new here, we’re sharing the things that make us think, bring us joy or shift our perspective. And we welcome your reactions, additions, and suggestions – reach out news@enso.co.

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What we’re reflecting on

These nuggets curated by enso partners Hanna Siegel (HS) and Sebastian Buck (SB).

The case for optimism in 2024.

We want to start our first newsletter of the year with a quick look at what we expected vs. what we got in 2023 (courtesy of the Christian Science Monitor). It’s a reminder of a theme we’re fascinated with at enso – the stark perception gap that seems to be gripping our nation. There are many understandable reasons for its existence, but the truth is we’re suffering from a collective pessimism bias that hurts progress much more than it helps. We actually made the case for optimism at the beginning of last year, and continue to make it this year. So consider this a friendly reminder to give the universe – and the people in it – the benefit of the doubt in 2024. (HS)

Is compassion better than empathy?

All my life, I’ve been an avid consumer of news. Yet sometime during the harsh year of 2020, reading the news made me feel more anxious than informed, and I put myself on a strict news diet, steadfastly avoiding anything that made my cortisol levels spike. In many ways, it’s served me well, but this piece by Adam Grant about empathetic distress made me rethink my new habits. Empathetic distress is a term psychologists use to describe the feeling of hurting for others while feeling unable to help – and it can immobilize us to the point of disengagement. It made me wonder, was what I thought of as smart curation really just me withdrawing, rendering me useless to myself, others and the world? Empathy – absorbing others’ emotions as your own – is important, but it can cause us pain, so much so that we disengage. Responding with compassion, on the other hand, means that you offer comfort to others, without actually taking on their pain. And evidence is starting to show that it’s better for you and for others than empathy. So maybe now instead of looking away from the news, I’ll shift how I respond to it. (HS)

Positive agendas

Pioneering innovator animated by a powerful urge to better the world and more equitably distribute power, only to see their innovation co-opted by the most powerful, big industry and big militaries. Sound familiar? The Mysterious Case of Rudolph Diesel, he of engine fame, is a fascinating tale about the industrial revolution, the dawn of cars, the transformation of shipping, and the technology and egos behind World War I. Clay Christensen’s seminal Innovator’s Dilemma showed how innovators lose their edge, and ultimately lose their market lead; these days we’re wondering if there’s another, more pressing innovator’s dilemma: how to preserve and embed the positive intentions that sparked the initial progress through the distracting allure of success. Colin Mayer’s new book, Capitalism and Crises, makes the case that a big part of the problem is that shareholder primacy is just so… simple. It’s cognitively easier to choose one objective ($$$) than to balance many ($$$ + mission + values + happy employees, etc.). (SB)

Standardized tests are the worst form of metric, except for all the others.

Could standardized tests possibly be good? NYTimes has a piece about how standardized tests are one of the best predictors of whether or not someone will thrive at college – for advantaged and disadvantaged kids. While the recent trend has been for colleges to eliminate standardized testing requirements, data shows that actually, the other application factors (extracurriculars, etc.) favor affluent kids much more than the tests do. For disadvantaged kids, says economist and researcher David Deming, the SAT is a lifeline. MIT even says reinstating the requirement helped them admit their most diverse class in history. Yet if these tests predict success in college – what exactly does that say about what the higher education system is offering kids in the first place? If one test can predict success in college, maybe it’s time to scrutinize exactly why. (HS)

Diffusion of power

Janan Ganesh wrote a provocative piece in the FT last week: The world is better seen from Dubai than from Davos. He makes the case that the concentrated wealth and power of the past era (the America & Europe, free market era) that Davos represents is increasingly an anachronism, and that the more diverse collection of wealth and power in Dubai is a more accurate reflection of the world today. “The economic centre of the world is moving east.” Whether that evolution can lead to broader, fairer human and planetary health is one of the big questions for the next era. (SB)

Do you feverishly follow politics? Then you're probably not deciding our elections.

As we enter what has become our every-four-years national nightmare (also known as the presidential election), this chart and piece from WashPost (paywall, sorry) caught my eye. Here’s the punchline: Independents aka swing voters aka the people who decide our elections pay much less attention to political news than everyone else (source: polling from Selzer & Co., released by Grinnell College). In fact, nearly 20% actively avoid it. I generally support people staying informed, but it’s hard to fault anyone for avoiding the news – especially political news. And I wouldn’t be surprised if those people are more open-minded, less susceptible, or at least exposed to misinformation, and generally calmer as a result. Of course, the core problem is that a tiny group of voters (in a tiny group of states) decide our elections in the first place. But it’s worth thinking about how much our political news ecosystem does to exacerbate that problem – and how relatively little influence they have over the people actually deciding the fate of our leadership. (HS)

Accessible creativity

As someone who pivoted from a decidedly non-creative field (hi, fellow policy nerds!) to enso, where I get to work with lots of creatives and feel self-conscious about my own linear instincts, I’m a sucker for pieces about how to increase your creativity. I like this one by Julian Shapiro, which says to focus less on coming up with something totally new and more on putting things unexpectedly together. He calls it Relentless Juxtaposition; I call it much less intimidating than being ‘creative.’ I don’t feel like I know how to be creative, but I definitely know lots of things that I like – and it’s fun to think about putting them together. In fact, many great creatives do this all the time – if you don’t want to read the full essay, just scroll down to the short video of Paul Simon on the Dick Cavett Show explaining how he wrote Bridge Over Troubled Water. Spoiler: he gathered ingredients of inspiration from other people, added his own personal flavor, put it all together and came up with something extraordinary. (HS)

9 things that made us think, gasp, share and laugh:

• Attention all parents and lego enthusiasts: Brickit lets you take a picture of a pile of legos, gives you all the options for what you can build, and then shows you where each piece that you need is in the pile (🤯). It’s nuts.
• The NYPD’s new dance team
• Positive News and Clear Channel UK are partnering to display “socially relevant good news stories,” swapped out weekly, on 3,500+ digital ad screens across the UK (now someone just needs to research how this impacts people):

• This exchange in the Paul Simon video I wrote about above: 

Host: What makes you get stuck? 

Paul Simon: Well, everywhere I went led me to somewhere I didn’t want to be. So I was stuck.

• This chart, showing just how much the negativity bias in the news has worsened over the past 150 (!) years:

• Snow in Washington DC (Rock Creek Park specifically) for the first time in 2 years:

• This ‘contextual calendar’ from Neil Freeman
• This video of Giant Pandas enjoying a snow day (no one is exempt from the joys of snow days)
• These photos of racers competing in the Dakar Rally in Saudi Arabia, one of the most dangerous off-road races in the world:

What we’re working on

enso is a small, senior team so that we can work on just a few initiatives at a time. This allows us to go deep on some of the biggest challenges/ opportunities. Recently, we’ve been working on a few main missions with our partners:

1. The future of exploration: A global survey shows that there is a lot of fear and anxiety around space, but a lot of ambition too. Could space exploration solve climate change? Many think it could.
2. Internet everywhere: Enabling those working, traveling and living in remote areas to connect to the world.
3. The future of Small Businesses: Can we (re)build communities alongside convenience?
4. Design The Future book: Distilling wisdom from those actively designing and creating the future, from a wide variety of fields. We hope to complete this in 2024.

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See you next time.

enso • 115 W California Blvd #9101 Pasadena, CA 91105