Back to the future

It is essential for companies to look ahead and think about who their consumers will be in a changing world, according to Andrew Zolli.

If you call Andrew Zolli a futurist, do so with caution. The National Geographic Fellow and head of New York-based Z + Partners, which advises leaders and organisations on how to predict and react to change, says it's a title he hates for several reasons - a prime one being "it suggests you're a proponent" of an area that has definition and a philosophy.

"But what happens in the future happens at the intersection of forces of grand consequence, that consequently force and influence our decisions about them. That term suggests the person knows what will happen and knows what your choices will be."

Instead, Zolli - who has degrees in computer science, cognitive science, long-term forecasting and research, and has been named one of 20 outstanding entrepreneurs under 35 by Red Herring magazine, and acclaimed as a top business leader by Fast Company magazine - prefers to talk about doing future's research, stressing that 's'.

"It's an adjunct to long-term strategic planning," he says. The result of that analysis and understanding can help companies think about their brand, the value of that brand in a changing world, the company's role in society, and determine which products and services will be winners in the future - and where. "Our job is to study the big changes, to think about big structural systems," he says.

These include areas he terms "more stable and predictable" - such as demographics and environmental change, which can be analysed and where fairly confident projections can be made - and "more chaotic, uncertain" areas like geopolitics, economics and the impact of new technologies. "What we're trying to do is build multiple scenarios, to tell narratives around a future that looks like this, or like that."

If demographics, geopolitics and environmental issues seem far away from most companies' bottom lines, Zolli begs to differ.

"If you think about where the most significant change is going to come over the next 25 years, it's going to be around sustainability, resource utilisation and economic inclusion, on a grand scale." As companies go in search of their next markets and their new consumers, they will not come from existing, developed markets so much as "the next four billion future inhabitants on earth", who will primarily be born into the bottom of the economic picture. We need to understand that demographic, their environmental consequences and the stresses they will place on resources, the technologies that will be used to better their situation, and bring them into a broader marketplace, he says.

Focus on the more near-term future - the next decade or two - and Zolli notes that last year, for the first time in human history, more people lived in cities than in the countryside. This increasing urbanisation doesn't mean everyone is rushing to live in saturated cities like New York or London, either. "Where are those cities? They're in places like Lagos in Nigeria," he says, and are cities with sanitation and health problems, restricted resources, and a largely impoverished and uneducated population.

The rise of global capitalism means that increasingly it will be companies helping to create change in these cities of tomorrow, looking for opportunities but also accepting responsibilities towards inhabitants that will become their markets of tomorrow.

"This is a remarkable convergence, where companies will have to address areas traditionally the domain of NGOs," he says.

Consumers, perhaps only subliminally, recognise the shift, even on the small and immediate scale of deciding what brand they will buy when looking for a product. Increasing commodotisation means "if all else is equal, people will choose based on the record of the organisation," says Zolli. They want "meaningful consumption" and will examine the company as an ethical leader, and at its environmental and social stewardship.

The same goes with employment. When tomorrow's workers - the "millenial" generation - goes looking for a job, it will look for employers with such broader commitments. In particular, the creative worker will want that extra commitment and ability to get involved from his or her employer, and the creative worker is the worker of tomorrow, Zolli says.

"Look, everything that can be done by computer, will be done by a computer eventually. That leaves all the creative work . . . and it requires different rhythms to the workday, it requires change in the workplace," says Zolli.

If this all sounds the concern only of the major multinationals, Zolli says no. "The toolset can be scaled down to the local." Take a mid-sized textbook company in Ireland, he says. Demographics, immigration, and changing home life and the composition of the family will all affect the company's market. So will increased digital literacy, as online resources will have to become part of tomorrow's textbooks.

New technologies like print on-demand could have a very disruptive effect. Amazon, for example, is close to being able to offer digital textbooks for an e-book reader, meaning Amazon is now a competitor. And, many Irish companies competing for skilled workers already know their employees weigh up their global sense of responsibility and social and environmental activism.

So, it's all right here, right now, argues Zolli.

He has a particular interest in how technology affects the present and of course, the future. "I think technology is the fundamental driver of change," he says. "Slightly ahead of war, famine and pestilence."

More seriously, he notes he thinks there are "a couple of revolutions which are not fully played out" on the tech front, likely to bring dramatic future change. The first is global connectivity - high speed broadband circling the globe, accompanied by cheap and ubiquitous microprocessors chips with, and in, everything ("Last year, humans produced more transistors than grains of rice," he marvels).

Even more interesting is what he calls "the deep, deep connection between the physical and the digital worlds." Embedded sensors, RFID tags, will enable ecological sensor networks, "finding, aggregating and exploring the world of objects". Chips "will be embedded in the structure of matter".

In the very big picture, this means the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive technology.

In the short term, he thinks the two big revolutions on the web will be first, the geo-spatial - the convergence of maps and all sorts of data sets, mashed together to enable people to have information follow them around, available as needed - and second, overcoming language barriers.

The latter "isn't even on anyone's radar" at the moment, he says, but half the world, half the possible market for a business, is currently unavailable online due to the split between English language sites, and everyone else.

Oh yes, and on the geopolitical and economic front, watch out for China returning, after 500 years, to a position of of global economic and cultural dominance. "We're going back to the future," he laughs.

•  Andrew Zolli will be a keynote speaker at The Irish Times-sponsored fourth annual Leaders in London conference, Westminster, November 27-29th. Speakers include Kofi Annan, Al Gore, Edward de Bono, Nicola Horlick, and Steven Leavitt.

• For more information, check: www.leadersinlondon.com