Futurist Richard Watson: ‘There is a willingness to change the model’
Author and futurist Richard Watson’s latest work ‘A Potential Corona Chronology’ is a short film charting the current crisis and the scenarios that could follow. Richard talks to Adam Morgan about his latest work and reveals why he is cautiously optimistic about the future.
There is a scenario which is the Great Depression in your chronology, and clearly, there will be a profound downturn of some kind, how long it lasts is to be determined. But you end on quite an optimistic note, don't you? And you don't always end your predictions on an optimistic note. What reasons do we have to be cautiously optimistic?
I didn't set out to make it optimistic, certainly not consciously. But working through it, it seemed to make sense. It's still unclear what the economic aftershock from the virus will be. The funny thing is, there's a contradiction because if the economy snaps back very fast, and we return to whatever the heck normal is, that could be quite a bad thing. In the very early days of lockdown people liked that their local community came to the fore. They liked the fact there was an almost viral outbreak of kindness and humility. People weren't as nasty as they were before in most instances, and they liked that life was slower. There was less pressure. People had time on their hands and for the first time perhaps could really question: assuming I survive this - how do I want to live? And that's practically the oldest philosophical question: how should I live? What is a good life? It was about questioning the idea of endless economic growth, and this relentless productivity drive to get faster, faster, faster, etc. And that questioning slightly disappeared once we could reliably get into Aldi or Waitrose and will probably never come back if we return to some semblance of normality. But if we are hit very hard, either by the virus or the economic aftershocks, I think there will be questioning. There is a willingness to change the model, and we might get somewhere quite interesting.
I'm struck by your thought that, in a sense, bouncing back too quickly would be bad for humanity long term and actually, maybe the path to a real rebirth is actually through experiencing that great depression.
The parallel is the crash in 2008, when the early talk was of the end of capitalism. We were to develop capitalism 2.0 or ethical capitalism, and it was the end of investment banking and speculative finance. In the end, we just stuck a lot of sticking plasters over the capitalist free market model and went back to it. Had it collapsed more, I think we would have questioned the entire model and possibly built something different. I believe this is a similar instance.
You're a very noted futurist. You were quoted by The Telegraph predicting a pandemic would cancel all travel. You presumably get companies coming along and asking you what they should be thinking about. What questions should the CEO of a large packaged goods company or a large tech company consider as we move forward?
My ultimate advice is not around what might happen. I would turn that around and say, well, what do you want to happen? How do you want to live? How do you want to run your organisation? You know, really questioning the purpose of the organisation and how to deliver that purpose. To some extent, there is an opportunity to do that now, and you may never get the chance again. You may never get to the promised land, as they say, but at least you'll be going in the right direction. There's a lot of anxiety at the moment, and it's not just the pandemic. I think there's another reason. No one is articulating a vision for where we're going. It sounds pretentious, but we almost need a vision for the human species for the next hundred years, in light of AI and the climate crisis. If someone could articulate that vision, I think a lot of that anxiety would evaporate, because we'd be able to see the path ahead. Having a vision of where you want to go is far better than trying to guess what's going to happen next.