Explore Envision’s newsletter, the March 2023 Horizons. We highlight the successful March 1 World Futures Day celebration with Thomas Frey, “gifts from the pandemic,” and other forward looking insights from Envision Board members.
By Devon Christianson, Envision Board member and Health and Well-Being Signals Team
Younger generations are challenging companies to put their diversity and inclusion policies into action. According to a 2021 study by Deloitte, “it’s not enough to just market inclusiveness or diversity, as our results also show 57% of consumers are more loyal to brands that commit to addressing social inequities in their actions.” And true diversity and inclusion go beyond race and ethnicity. Brand loyalty also includes images and engagement with persons who identify as LGBTQ+ and those with disabilities. Companies are following suit as they see their gateway to growth reaching younger consumers with positive images and opportunities in a celebrated diverse community. The younger generations want more than just hiring practices or marketing strategies; they want to see functions and business change to match their message.
(more…)Nan Nelson, Envision Board member and Economic Transformation Signals Team
Envision’s Economic Transformation Signals Team has been looking for signals related to the future of our local economy. Among the issues on our domain map are:
We’re finding a great many signals of big change on the far horizon! In fact, so many that the team has decided to narrow our search focus for the time being to technological developments, while still keeping an eye on other areas of interest.
One such “other” intriguing signal recently surfaced in the area of workforce diversity and skill sets needed in the future: a new book by the famous animal-handling expert Temple Grandin called Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns and Abstractions.
Grandin, herself a visual (and autistic) thinker, makes the case for widening the neurodiversity of all work teams by recognizing the value of visual thinkers. Science writer Steve Silberman calls the book “a powerful and provocative testament to the diverse coalition of minds we’ll need to face the mounting challenges of the twenty-first century.”
Many large firms are beginning to recruit autistic individuals for their ability to concentrate and master detailed work such as computer coding. Other organizations have long valued those who can think in patterns of abstraction described by mathematics.
But Grandin contends that our increasingly verbal education system sidelines not only these thinkers, but also screens out “object visualizers” like herself. Young visual thinkers like drawing, building with toys like Legos, and are “good with their hands.” But today, hands-on learning has been scrubbed from the school curriculum—no more shop, home ec, art, theater, welding, auto mechanics, etc. Grandin, herself a PhD professor of animal science, said she was screened out of college initially by an inability to master algebra and calculus, something typical of visual thinkers. As a result, America, she contends, is losing technical skills essential to the future of manufacturing, construction, design and engineering.
Grandin’s book goes on to detail studies that show how diverse thinkers advantage teams and how real-world disasters like Fukushima and the Boeing 747 MAX result from the absence of visual thinkers on work teams.
How can you tell if you’re a visual thinker? She suggests an interesting shortcut to determining where you fall on the visual-verbal spectrum: You buy a piece of furniture and are ready to put it together. Do you read the instructions or follow the pictures?
Shouldn’t your organization’s employee recruitment program include a neurodiversity element?
By Judy Nagel, Envision Board Member and Upward Mobility Signals Team
Could the Indian and Chinese economies outpace the economies of the United States and Western Europe? Economic analysts say yes. Projections show the U.S. percentage of world GDP shrinking from 16% to 12%, with China’s share growing from 16% to 27% and India’s GDP growing from 7% to 16%. (These new levels are anticipated by 2100.)
So how is this possible? Currently China’s and India’s productivity growth lags behind that of the United States, but, if Chinese workers were as productive as American workers, China’s GDP would exceed the U.S. GDP by a factor of 4.3. Because this analysis is based on productivity and demographics, however, immigration growth would boost the U.S. economy in the long term.
Economists cited in “Will China and India Become the World’s Top Economies? It Depends” take note of – and exception to – a 2019 study that positions the U.S. as “the end-of-century economic kingpin.” Another perspective these authors offer puts India in the lead by 2100. Why? Because India’s population will be double that of China but with the same labor productivity. They characterize the possible position of the U.S. by century’s end as “particularly grim,” and suggest that Western Europe could move from one of the world’s largest economies to one of its smallest.
The authors identify a variety of changes that could determine the actual “economic kingpin” at the end of this century, including reduction of legal immigration into the U.S. or China’s continued one-child policy along with its preference for less efficient state enterprises over a more efficient private sector. These are definitely early signals that the response from multiple players will determine future economic dominance.
For a summary as well as links to the specific reports cited, read this article from Forbes by Stuart Anderson, Executive Director of the National Foundation for American Policy.
Both our keynote speaker, Thomas Frey, and the representative of our lead sponsor, Brian Stuelpner of Schneider, opened their remarks on March 1 with references to the 1960s animated cartoon series, The Jetsons. We were reminded that the Jetsons lived in something looking suspiciously like the Seattle Space Needle (which didn’t yet exist), used robot vacuums and smart phones, and even participated in “Zoom calls” on flat-screen TVs. What to make of it all? With that opening, our 300+ guests at the KI Convention Center were mesmerized with signals of what the future holds and the evidence of developing trends. The eye-popping, inspiring presentations were punctuated with regular audience discussion and participation and great networking.
Click here for the complete article.
Randy Van Straten, Envision Board member and VP, Business & Community Health, Bellin Health
“What we have before us are some breathtaking opportunities disguised as insoluble problems,” said John W. Gardner, former United States Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. This quotation aligns perfectly with my experiences in health care over these past three-plus years after completing the strategic foresight training program. This program helped me identify signals and trends by scanning the horizon, which then helped picture the most probable future – a chance to turn those insoluble problems into rich opportunities for Bellin Health.
Sometimes, timing is everything: Having completed the strategic foresight training and then heading straight into COVID-19 really helped when approaching some of the biggest health care challenges we have faced in our lifetime. As I set up my Google alerts during this time, the information flew in; this helped guide new contacts and innovative approaches to COVID-19 safety, testing, and vaccinations. One primary example was the opportunity to participate in the Global Mass Vaccination Site Collaborative through Harvard. This led to guidance on important community breakthroughs in the fight against COVID-19. We learned to partner with employers, the Green Bay Packers, and the Brown County Health Department to deliver what our community needed: onsite COVID-19 testing at large employers; a drive-through testing and vaccination site in a former Sears Automotive Center; converting the Lambeau Field atrium into the largest vaccination site in the region; and repurposing a city bus into a mobile vaccination clinic to reach individuals in all areas of our community.
Another success we achieved through “scanning the horizon” was creating Bellin’s Early Intervention Ergonomic and Rehab service. This program totally flips the old way of providing rehabilitative physical and occupational services only after a referral or surgery is completed by a medical provider. This Early Intervention and Rehab service is now offered directly to employees onsite or nearby and delivers hands-on care to individuals after only one or two days of onset of musculoskeletal issues without a referral, providing a 94-percent resolution rate with only six percent needing to go on to see a medical doctor. This solution has reduced high-cost imaging volumes, surgery volumes, and medical costs over the last two years.
Lastly, and the new opportunity I am most excited about, was the design of a mobile medical screening truck and trailer that will provide onsite audiometric services, pulmonary and respiratory exams, and medical services to employers and community groups. This new rig will arrive at Bellin Health in late spring. Thanks to our scanning, we’ve been able to create and design a new service that will help elevate the health of the employees at our employer partners, big and small, city or rural, in a way that helps our employers provide safe and convenient services to their employees at work while creating production efficiency for the employers in a tight labor market.
Now that Bellin Health has trained a few leaders and committed to scanning the horizon faithfully, I offer this advice to the community: Do not hesitate to get signed up for the next Strategic Foresight Training Session. After completing the training, you will have an immediate impact on your organization and find those key drivers of change that will determine which alternative futures your organization needs to take. With this knowledge, you will more effectively plan your actions to influence your organization’s future rather than only react to problems. And as John W. Gardner says, take some insoluble problems and move them into breathtaking opportunities. See you in the future!
Jim Golembeski, Envision Board member
It started in the paper industry, a mainstay of the northeast Wisconsin economy. In 1996, the Scott paper company in Oconto Falls closed. That was followed by closings and mass layoffs at many area paper companies. The number of affected workers was soon in the thousands. Then the layoffs hit the manufacturing sector as well.
I remember well, because it was my job to provide employment and retraining services to those workers. I spent many hours in sessions full of middle-aged, gravitationally- challenged men whose world had turned upside down. My poster child was Mirro Aluminum in Manitowoc, which closed in 2003, leaving 1300 men and women idle, a third of them at reading and math levels below fourth grade. It was an ugly time.
Two trends were developing, and we didn’t see them coming. First, sectors of our economy were entering a global marketplace. Countries that were finally recovering from the devastation of World War II and the dissolution of the Soviet Union brought tens of millions of workers into that global supply chain. Secondly, and equally important, was technological advancement: Computer applications and the Internet brought new tools into the workplace. It was going to take more than a high school education to operate a $200 million paper machine.
We did not see those trends coming. It was also the beginning of the Baby Boom retirement movement, and our workplaces were becoming more generationally diverse. We discovered that Gen X and the young Millennials had work and life values different from Boomers.
Nancy Armbrust, VP of Community Relations at Schreiber, had given my board chair, Paul Linzmeyer, a book entitled The Rise of the Creative Class by Dr. Richard Florida, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Paul read it, brought it to me a week later, and said, “Get him here.”
Dr. Florida had begun to articulate the seismic economic changes facing the American workforce; he was becoming a nationally recognized guru on adapting to those new realities. In 2002, Senator Herb Kohl had secured a $1.2 million federal Earmark Grant for my organization, Bay Area Workforce Development Board. That gave us some resources to start looking at the future. I also partnered with Wendy Seronko at Employers Workforce Development Network, a business-led group we had brought together.
On September 18, 2003, Dr. Florida and his team led a day-long “Creative Future Economy” workshop with three hundred business and community leaders at the brand new Lambeau Field Atrium. He addressed the trends we were experiencing around the overall theme of becoming a “Community of Choice” for talent. He gave us a new vocabulary and insight into our new economic realities.
Following up on the workshop, my colleague in the Fox Valley, Cheryl Welch, and I sponsored a major study, the NEW Economic Opportunity Study, conducted by Northstar Economics; it became our game plan for moving forward. An implementation committee led by Kathi Seifert (Kimberly Clark) and Bob DeKoch (Boldt) focused on bringing together the resources to implement the study recommendations.
That effort resulted in the creation of NEW North in 2005, which became the model for similar regional efforts in the state and remains the most successful of those efforts. It also led to a partnership between Bay Area WDB and NWTC to create NEW Manufacturing Alliance, an industry partnership that has won national and international awards for successfully promoting manufacturing careers.
In 2013, Bay Area WDB helped NWTC purchase the first of a fleet of mobile training labs to make technical skill training available throughout northeast Wisconsin. We soon integrated the first mobile lab, containing a CNC mill and CNC lathe, with our prison re-entry programs, giving 120 men and women at the Oshkosh and Taycheedah facilities a hands-on demonstration of manufacturing careers. Today, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections has its own fleet of five mobile manufacturing labs.
We were late getting into the game, failing to recognize the economic trends that should have been apparent at the end of the twentieth century. Once those trends became painfully obvious, we brought in Richard Florida and got buy-in from community and business leadership. We caught up quickly and are enjoying the fruits of our efforts in 2023.
But what trends are developing now? What should we be planning for today?
Nan Nelson, Board Member
The world’s first robot lawyer will soon defend a human in a speeding ticket case in an actual United
States court. The CEO of DoNotPay introduced his AI lawyer to the world in a January Twitter clip. In this
video the company’s bot successfully negotiated a Comcast Internet bill with the Comcast Chat bot.
Human observers noted that both bots were “a bit too polite.” Next up for the AI lawyer will be credit
card chargebacks, airline complaints and Amazon returns, the CEO said, noting the service will be
publicly available soon. More complicated cases like parking and speeding tickets, appealing bank fees
and suing robocallers will be available next.
Click here to read, “World’s First Robot Lawyer to Defend Human in Speeding Ticket Case in US”
The Automobile Gallery was again the site for a new Envision Strategic Foresight cohort to begin studies under the guidance of Garry Golden. On February 3 the following businesses and nonprofit organizations sent representatives to the training, bringing the total number of local leaders now trained to 125:
• O’Connor Connective
• NE Wisconsin Technical College
• Foundations Health & Wholeness
• St. Norbert College
• Prevea Health
• HSHS
• Bellin Health
• Bay Towel, Inc.
• Greater Green Bay Chamber
• Green Bay Police Department
Click here to read the entire article with accompanying photos.
Randall Lawton, Envision Board member
“The surprise-free future isn’t.” —Herman Kahn
Firms prepared for the future are 33% more profitable and grow twice as fast as others, research says. Companies that scan a variety of environments, such as technology, politics, environment, competition, and customer landscape, develop a strong understanding of market shifts and of new features that meet customer needs, and so their revenues increase.
(Click here to read the entire article.)