An Incomplete Guide to the Future

An Incomplete Guide to the Future was written by Willis Harman, published in 1979. Willis Harman was an Engineer, Futurist, and Author focused on humanity’s exit into a post industrial era. He was the President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences for two decades and was the cofounder of the World Business Academy. Some of his books include Global Mind Change, Higher Creativity, Biology Revisioned, and Intuition at Work. An Incomplete Guide to the Future is a call to action. Society needs to take notice of the transformation from an industrial era to a postindustrial era. In the book, he lays out exactly how we, as a society, need to transform to make the transition as smooth as possible. The transformation, as he put it, was inevitable. We could either go through it the hard way, and possibly fail, or do it the easy way and end up in an all-around better world. The most important point he was trying to make was that if we wanted to survive as a species and not drain the earth of all of the natural resources it provides us, we MUST transform. We must go from our bourgeois industrial era to a frugal postindustrial era. We simply will not make it if we do not change the way we behave now.

Willis Harman starts with a brief explanation of Futures work and how he develops scenarios. He talks about the six principles of futures research: continuity, self-consistency, similarities among social systsm, cause and effect relationships, holistic trending, and goal seeking. He quickly moves into the transformation into a post-industrial society, arguing why we must change. Change is already happening and we can either make the right decisions or the wrong decisions. There are four dilemmas that he reviews. First is the Growth Dilemma. Here he talks about the use of our natural resources and depleting the Earth. Basically, we can not sustain the way we are living. Remember, he was writing this in the mid 70s. The book was published in 1979. Eagle Ford Shale was not discovered until 2008. Production from the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field, the largest oil field in the US did not begin until 1977. The North Dakota boom began in 2006. And the Keystone pipeline was commissioned in 2010. Nonetheless, his statements are true. He just may have been a little off on timing. Or at least the acceptance from society that our resources were going to run out. From here he introduces the idea of a Frugal Society. This is a society that is not obsessed with constant growth. This is something that I am sure many of us can connect with. For many, our bonuses are based off of growth compared to prior year. But at some point, the growth just will not come. At some point, you’ve saturated your market. What then? What is the goal at that point? This is the shift from monetary growth to societal impact as a measurment of success. Corporate responsibility is what some would call it. When an organization stops obsessing over growth in the traditional sense and begins to obsess about growth in a nontraditional sense. How can we grow our impact on the world in a socially responsible way, helping to make positive change for the societies in which we operate? Ultimately, that will help sustain those very companies. All businesses should be focused on sustainability.

Work Roles Delimma was the next in line. This is the psychological impact on not having a job. Harman here argues that we need to implement policy to move the people capable of expanding their skills out of the menial jobs and allow the unskilled people to step into those menial roles to giving them a sense of accomplishment all while promoting the skilled people, that actually want to and can achieve a higher potential, an opportunity to grow into new roles. This is where society is at now. We want more meaningful work and for the majority of workers, we want to feel as if our skills are being put to the best use possible.

The third dilemma was the Distribution Dilemma. This was all about equity. “There needs to be a more effective way by which nations that want rapid industrialization can be helped to achieve it”. This can be related to India. India, for the most part, refuses to take into consideration its environmental impact on the world because it is trying its hardest to scale up to compete with China and the US. They claim it is unfair to expect a growing civilization to limit itself in the name of the environment when the US and other first world countries did not do such a thing during the industrial revolution.

And the forth dilemma was the Control Dilemma. Harman here is talking about technology and societies demand for some controls to be wrapped around it. How do you think he would feel about social media, cell phones, and AI? The control he is talking about here was swallowed up by tech companies’ rush to development and profitability. “There is a greater public interest in planning for the future, new tools exist for redesigning incentive systems to support socially responsible behavior, and cultural pressures are mounting against irresponsible institutions. Thus, there is at least some hope that we can learn to control our new Faustian powers over our physical and social environment”. Had he written this in 2024 he would have hit the nail on the head.

Moving on from the dilemmas, Harman begins to talk about the changing image of man. His argument is this: way back when religion ruled our way of life, science was absurd. We disagreed so much with what some said, we threw them in jail. As we transitioned from this religious thinking to more scientific thinking we must transition from an industrial era mindset to a post industrial era mindset. He argues that there are two ways of knowing, scientific knowing or the cold hard facts, and then intuitive hknowing, when you just have a feeling about something. This boils down to the Perennial Philosophy which he vehemently argues for. We need to unlock our minds to understand how we are impacting the world and only then will we be able to come through this transformation unscathed. He lays out the strategies for a viable future arguing that these dilemmas are all intertwined. One depends on the other so we must change them all if we are to be successful. So what are the strategies?

First we need to promote awareness of the unavoidability of the transformation. We need to construct a guiding vision of a workable future society built around the new image of man and the new social paradigm. We have to foster a period of experimentation and tolerance for diverse alternatives, both in life-styles and social institutions. We need to encourage a politics of uprightness and morality in government and a heightened sense of public responsibility in the private sector. We need to promote systematic exploration of and foster education regarding man’s inner life. And finally, we need to accept the necessity of social controls for the transition period while safeguarding against longer-term losses of freedom.

If I put my Futurist hat on, this book was a fantastic baseline for today. If we started our own scenarios with this sort of societal breakdown, how would that change what we produce? If we had a society that was fully or even somewhat aware of what the future looked like, would we change our pitch? His ideas may have been a bit ahead of the curve but nonetheless they are valid and we can see them play out as we speak. This is almost like a mix of STEEP and CLA, looking across different categories and digging in deep within the social norms. I am curious on what this would look like if we incorporated it into the divergence map. This is your baseline, this is where society teeters right now. In this really weird awkward phase of change. Then what?

As much as I enjoyed the book, there are some tweaks I would make. I am not sold on moving away from sicence but feel as though there is a nice blend of science and perennial philosophy somewhere out there to be discovered. It is undeniable that there is another force, but still I would like to leave somethings a mystery. I am also not sure moral politics could ever really be a thing. I can’t see it happening, not in my life time at least. Corporate responsibility better aligns with this and I do feel Harman hit the nail on the head with that. Society wants more meaningful work, that is clear. Study after study have been conducted and there is no denying it. But politics….I suppose only time will tell how that pendulum swings.

Harman, W.W.(1979).An Incomplete Guide to the Future. W.W. Norton.

Willis Harman (1918-1997). World Business Academy. (n.d.). https://worldbusiness.org/fellows/willisharman-1918-1997/