The Shared Perspective of the World in 2030 and Beyond Themes and Drivers Strategic Foresight Analysis Workshop #2 13-14 November, 2012 Budapest, Hungary Organized by Allied Command Transformation, Norfolk In partnership with Atlantic Council of the United States, Washington DC Security and Defence Agenda, Brussels 1
INTRODUCTION Building upon outcomes of the first Futures Workshop held 24-25 October, 2012 in La Hulpe, Belgium; the second workshop will use drivers initially identified as being important components of change within broader categories and further synthesizing those of likely significance to NATO. Most important will be identifying those that individually or collectively exert influence on the Future Security and Operating Environments. It is critical at this stage to differentiate those trends and drivers that will have direct security and military implications from those that will have an indirect effect or no effect on NATO decisions and action within the context of a framework for future operations and transformation. ACT s futures work examines relevant drivers and identifies developing trends that will shape our thinking about the range of possible future operating and security environment and that may emerge in 2030 and beyond, triggering a deeper discussion of future Alliance capabilities required to meet the threats and challenges in the 2030 timeframe. SUMMARY OF STRATEGIC FORESIGHT ANALYSIS WORKSHOP #1 The first Strategic Foresight Analysis (SFA) Workshop convened 24-25 October 2012 in La Hulpe, Belgium. The conference s primary aim was to socialize SFA and create the climate and opportunity for a diverse group of professionals to contribute to creating a shared perspective, a general foresight framework and a common language for discussing major themes, drivers and trends. The secondary aim of the meeting was to identify key drivers, sort them into themes and distinguish them from trends in order to focus syndicate work planned for the second SFA Workshop planned for Budapest, Hungary 13-14 November 2012. 78 participants from 21 nations, as well as NATO HQ (IS, IMS), ACO (CCOMC), ACT, think tanks, academia, MODs, Delegations to NATO, and military representatives from IMS and COEs attended the first event. The Workshop consisted of opening remarks, presentations by three distinguished foresight experts, three inquiry-based breakout sessions, a panel discussion and closing remarks. Surveys and quick polls were also used gather data from the participants. The workshop in La Hulpe concluded that 1. There is a requirement to do persistent and continuous futures work. The emphasis of this effort should be on the Process as well as the Product. 2. Both the discussions and the data gathering produced a diverse view of the future, but enabled the identification of four major categories or themes : (1) Political Arena; (2) Human Domain; (3) Physical Domain/Technology; and (4) Resources/Economy. 3. The main themes categorizing drivers and associated trends likely influencing future landscapes were identified as: a. Political Arena e.g. power shift, regional interests, hard power vs. soft power, threat perception, concepts of power and security, and the role of institutions; b. Human Domain e.g. age, gender, nationalism, democratization, migration, urbanization, demography, wealth distribution, ideology, culture and religion; c. Physical Domain/Technology e.g. industry, technological advancement, digital age, means of communication, virtual world and innovation; and d. Resources and Economy e.g. fiscal policies and GDP, resource availability, peak energy, peak water, globalization and climate change. 2
Workshop 1 s sets the stage for Workshop #2, which will flesh out drivers and identify trends within the four major themes. Workshop #2 will consist of four syndicates that will focus the discussion on the relevant drivers clustered within the categories identified in Workshop 1. Finally, detailed analysis of these drivers will facilitate further investigation of their security and military implications Workshop #3 scheduled for 3 December and hosted by the Atlantic Council in Washington DC. THE AIM AND EXPECTED OUTCOME OF WORKSHOP #2 The primary aim of the Second Workshop will be to examine and fully develop thematically categorized, related drivers that may, individually or collectively, indicate a trend that could directly or indirectly influence NATO future tasks and purpose. In addition, the participants will further scrutinize drivers within the identified categories and examine how significant drivers will impact security in 2030. This investigation includes answering questions such as: 1) How will drivers, acting individually or collectively, form trends and/or alter future security and operating landscapes? 2) What can or should NATO do to anticipate, avert, alter or mitigate predictable or unpredictable outcomes? This effort to refine drivers establishes the foundation for Workshop #3. The expected outcome of this workshop will be to identify and clearly define/describe sets of drivers of change and potential alternatives, which will shape the future security environment and hold implications of the Alliance. ANALYSING THEMES, DRIVERS AND TRENDS First, a theme is a logical construct grouping related ideas, which in this case, are referred to as drivers for the purpose of this study and the discussions which follow. Grouping drivers in categories provides a context in which to consider similarities among the elements and their interactions with each other to form a pattern or indicate a developing trend. Second, a trend is a discernible pattern of change over time. Climate change is one example of a trend characterized by increasing global temperatures, rising sea levels and warming oceans, receding glaciers, frequent droughts and extreme weather events. NATO/ACT foresight analysis is working to identify and monitor trends and component drivers affecting Alliance members, and to inform collective and individual defense planning. Third, drivers are discrete dimensions of reality with a significant impact on the shape of some future state of affairs, larger than each of the drivers themselves. We may therefore say that drivers are distinct; drivers are always in plural; drivers are always drivers of something, of one or more future states of affairs. Together, the drivers deemed to be of importance in conjunction with other causal mechanisms constitute an abstract and sometimes implicit model of how this future state of affairs is likely to come about. In consequence, it is necessary to understand first of all what drivers are in the context of forecasting, their character and function inside this bigger context, and then after that to examine what this context means with regard to the types of drivers there are and can be. Drivers are the building blocks of future studies and other long term analyses employed by public and private sector, security, military and civilian organizations as part of their strategic level analyses. In defence matters, these include preparations for strategic reviews, either with regular intervals or one-offs, as well as long-term defence planning. They can in other 3
words be both upstream (strategic guidance) and downstream (implementation of and focusing of political guidance) of the policy process. When examining approaches to forecasting using drivers, it is clear that a large number of these are recurrent, some are identical across many studies, some are partially overlapping with slightly differing definitions and some are related in more generic terms. These commonalities are not surprising. Drivers are different from the future states of affairs that they can produce. Drivers are also normally seen as being different from shocks. Shocks are momentary events which affect one current state of affairs to bring about another state of affairs. Shocks bring about a state of crisis after which the system will return to a stable state. In a sense, shocks can come from or be part of a driver. The Arab Spring protests, for example, may have erupted suddenly but were contingent upon a number of converging drivers demographic change, deteriorating economic conditions and incompetent, repressive or weak state capacity. Added together, these drivers created the conditions which only needed a spark to ignite. Shocks are therefore related to drivers even if they are not identical. Shocks also indicate something about the character of drivers. Drivers are discrete dimensions of reality with a significant impact on the shape of some future state of affairs, larger than each of the drivers themselves. This means that each driver has discernible long-term trend lines. Demography, for example, can describe phenomena, which in some cases are interlinked and in some cases are not, such as a youth bomb, an age bomb, migration, urbanization and gender balances At least three criteria can be established to evaluate the relative significance of drivers. These criteria are quantity, quality and productivity. Quantity refers to the number of times a given driver appears across the studies. A high frequency of appearance is an expression of how a given driver has been perceived by the teams behind the studies to be of significance for their specific future state of affairs. Quality refers to the discussion in the study of the character and effect of the specific driver. Relatively comprehensive discussions of specific drivers can also be an indication of their relative significance with regard to other drivers. Productivity, finally, may be harder to establish for each driver, as it is an expression of its ability to connect to and strengthen the impact of other drivers. A high level of productivity is thus an expression of a specific driver s capacity to act as a force multiplier. These three criteria are important for the establishment of a common list of perceived central drivers in forecasting especially with regard to defence and security affairs. 4
SIGNIFICANT DRIVERS Participants will identify which of the above described drivers will directly affect how NATO will operate. Whether there are many drivers, a few, or only one, planning for future operations will be enhanced through driver identification and examination, and later, in Workshop #3, determining their security and military implications. There are certain to be many different viewpoints. The key to identifying primary drivers is to identify those that point to or form an existing or emerging trend. For example, burning fossil fuels yields greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change that in turn contributes to a host of other possible outcomes. Interacting drivers, imagined as multiple, colliding particles, should be identified. Under the right conditions, the effect of drivers colliding with, combining with or cancelling each other can shift trends and alter outcomes, which will change the future in some way. Examples could be a financial crisis combining with an environmental change that causes populations from on state to migrate elsewhere. Refugees put pressure on institutions and service in an adjacent state precipitating internal unrest that destabilizes a government. As previously discussed, drivers form patterns and/or contribute to trends. Does NATO, as a Political-Military Alliance, act in some manner to affect a driver or drivers thus altering a trend? Or does NATO prepare for an inevitable outcome over which it has no influence? Identifying drivers and their critical paths in Workshop #2 will facilitate identification of the security and military implications during Workshop #3. Associating drivers with general themes establishes a logical construct and a context for discussing their relative significance. The aim is to identify both strong and weak drivers, determine the interaction of drivers and examine how they work individually or in concert to establish a trend or form a pattern likely indicating a possible future that will impact the Alliance at some point along the continuum. The categories listed below were derived from the opinions of the collective gathered at Workshop #1 and through the writings of various organizations and institutions conducting foresight efforts. 1. Theme-Political a) Trend-shifting power to the East b) Trend-shifting regional interests c) Trend- smart power vs. soft power vs. hard power d) Trend-changing threat perception e) Trend-changing concepts of power and security f) Trend-changing role of institutions such as NGO/IO/Non-States/Diasporas 2. Theme-Human Domain a) Trend-ideology and radicalization b) Trend-aging c) Trend-nationalism d) Trend-self governance e) Trend-social f) Trend-demographics g) Trend-wealth disparity h) Trend-culture and religion 5
3. Theme-Physical Domain/Technology a) Trend-industry b) Trend-technology c) Trend-digital age d) Trend-telecommunications e) Trend-virtual domain 4. Theme-Resources and Economy Group a) Trend-fiscal governance b) Trend-resource allocation c) Trend-energy scarcity d) Trend-climate change e) Trend-deteriorating economic performance CONCLUSION Workshop 1 identified major themes, categorized drivers within themes and considered how they interact to form current and emerging trends. Taken together, themes, drivers and trends have broad implications for the future of the Alliance. Using this read ahead for Workshop 2, participants can begin to think more deliberately about the significant trends and those drivers most affecting them. The goal of Workshop #2 is to identify as many relevant drivers as possible. Even those drivers that appear to be outliers in the grouping of common possibilities are important to establishing the groundwork for Workshop 3 in Washington, D.C. The ultimate goal of developing a persistent foresight capacity is to develop a continuously updated, shared perspective of the range of possible futures. This shared perspective will lead to recognizing range of future security environments and respective operating environments. The outcome of this undertaking, as illustrated above, represents possible pathways to a range of potential futures that will inform long term requirements and capabilities determined within the NATO Defence Planning Process. 6