The Approach Mobility Futures Alliance Will Use to Achieve its Mission
Achieve our Mission, which is to “Redefine mobility systems to drive economic growth, societal wellbeing and climate neutrality” will require extraordinary and wide-ranging perspectives, insights and creative activities.
We believe that there are three critical areas of work at which we must excel and in combination set us apart – namely:
- Understanding and then making sense of futures that no-one can ever predict with certainty. To do this we will use the future-casting processes familiar to us that professional futurists use.
- Facilitating and moderating significant groups of experts and stakeholders representing diverse disciplines and interests. This will require highly developed processes for managing cross-disciplinary collaboration and concurrent concept development.
- Converting complex and wide-ranging transportation and mobility systems concepts that inspire change, into highly informative, compelling and inspirational visual narratives that excite many different stakeholders and end-users. We will use the best and most appropriate creative and production processes from the entertainment and design professions.
We will synthesize these three key elements of work to create stories that present compelling, visionary transportation and mobility systems solutions through the eyes of different demographics of users. We will look at different kinds of environments too, rural, semi-rural, urban, suburban, dense cities, sprawling metropolises, cold climates, warm climates and many more. We will present our stories for every mode of transportation including people, freight, energy and agricultural produce and always referenced to their primary stakeholders and always remembering that all these systems, stakeholders and environments are interconnected.
MFA Future-Casting Process
Mobility Future Alliance’s Mission is to create visons of how life, transportation and mobility can be in the future. If we are to present desirable, plausible and viable solutions that are possible to deliver, we also need to make plausible assumptions about how the future will look over the next few decades.
Of course, nobody can really predict the future. If we are considering what tomorrow is going to look like, it is probably safe to say it will be just like today. Six months from now, wars aside, it is possible to make a reasonable prediction of how America will look; three years from now is more difficult. When considering transportation systems, where planning, systems design, impact assessments, political wrangling, policy compliance, and then implementation must be worked through, we might be talking one, two or three decades before final delivery. For such timespans it becomes extremely difficult to make accurate assessments of how that future might look.
To make plausible assumptions about the future, we will be anchoring our work around the methods and protocols that professional futurists use and with which we are familiar. Essentially, we will use a process that looks at the future through a number of different lenses. Typically, these lenses represent Society, Technology, Economies, Environments and Politics. Futurists also consider X-Factors, which represent completely unexpected and potentially world-changing events that trends cannot totally predict. Examples of X-Factors would be a global pandemic, huge, devastating hurricane-initiated floods, freak, bountiful harvests, an unprecedented nuclear attack, etc. Futurists often refer to these lenses as STEEPX.
Because we are concerned with transportation, the future of Energy and Built Environments will also be considered – so, STEEPEBX.
Across each of these sectors we will convene appropriate and related experts, as well as non-expert stakeholders, to help us create a range of plausible futures based on known and expected trends. We will then shuffle these different evaluations around to arrive at several different “World Scenarios”. We will also throw some X-Factors at these different World Scenarios to see how they might be affected.
The point of creating these different World Scenarios is to test our transportation solutions against them. Are they robust enough to operate across a variety of futures? Will they provide the support that different societal outcomes might desire? Will the right technologies exist to make them work? Will they meet our objectives of not impacting the natural environment? And so on.
To get a better understanding and mental model of this process, you can go to mobilityvip.com to examine a card-based mobility futures tool that Geoff and Dave were involved in creating some years ago.
MFA Facilitation of Cross-disciplinary Collaboration and Concurrent Concept Development
There are three major activities in the work that we will be doing at MFA:
- Making sense of the myriad ways that the future could unfold.
- From these insights, creating desirable, plausible solutions that will populate our visual narratives to mobilize action towards shared goals and accelerate the huge changes that mobility systems need.
- Creating plausible visions that inspire and excite future users and stakeholders.
The first two of these these activities will need the input and collaboration of many subject experts to ensure that our work is legitimate, plausible and to the extent possible, supported by qualifying and quantifying data. We will be synthesizing multiple factors and perspectives, including those of a broad range of end-users.
As both these major activities will depend on convening large numbers of collaborators, the collaboration processes and making sense of the outcomes quickly get complex. How we manage these collaboration processes will be key to the successful outcomes we are aiming for and the plausibility of our Mission.
While we have successfully applied such processes towards product and portfolio development throughout our collective decades of corporate experience, the complex nature of Mobility Future Alliance’s Mission, requires an extra power.
We will borrow heavily from the extreme-collaboration, concurrent-engineering processes that are used by complex-systems, engineering groups such as the Jet Propulsion Lab or Aerospace Corporation. Essentially, such groups facilitate a process whereby all the major stakeholders in the engineering concept to be developed are convened in one place and taken through a carefully moderated, iterative sequence of creativity sessions and “scrums”. At each scrum, the goal is to gradually align each discipline to an emerging concept direction. The end-goal is to reach complete alignment and agreement on a final concept so that every stakeholder is in agreement. Then the concept can be developed into a finished product quickly and efficiently.
Looking at our work in the field of transportation systems, we know that there are multiple stakeholders such as urban planners, financiers, public policymakers, civil engineers, designers, elected officials, community leaders, transit operators, manufacturers and developers. Typically, many of these stakeholders have mutually exclusive agendas and this is the reason that major transportation projects take so long to realize, if they ever get started: conflicts get passed from one siloed meeting to another without getting properly resolved. We, at MFA, will never be able to eliminate this but what we can do is propose concepts where there is broad alignment and agreement. We will do this through developing these extreme collaboration processes that get everybody in the same room and drive alignments towards concepts that have broad support.
An important twist to the processes we develop is our recognition that extreme-collaboration, concurrent-engineering processes work because all the decision-making points are based on objective, quantitative data. In our work we will be seeking agreements based on a mixture of quantitative and qualitive factors – objective and subjective. We will be adapting and developing our way of extreme collaboration to this reality. The subjective inputs will be extremely important because the desirability factor of our visions is crucial if we are to excite. The subjective factor is often neglected in the typical process of developing transportation systems.
So, we will be convening our multi-disciplinary experts and non-experts in carefully facilitated extreme collaboration processes for both determining plausible futures and then developing the broadly supported and desired mobility and transportation systems concepts that can justifiably exist in these futures.
MFA Creative and Production Processes from the Entertainment and Design Professions
Mobility Futures Alliance deeply respects the vast amount of work that other industry and academic organizations have been doing with the very best intentions for improving transportation and mobility. We will be working with many of them.
However, our approach to our work will add what we believe has been a vital missing ingredient: presenting the results of deeply researched and important solutions to stakeholders in an inspiring and comprehensible format. We contend that far too much important work remains under-recognized because key decision-makers and intended beneficiaries cannot comprehend or even read densely jargoned and cited reports and academic papers. We intend to present our visions in the form of visual narratives that take viewers through human-centered stories that also inform them of significant facts through clear infographics.
We also contend that all our work must offer all end-users plausible concepts that excite them, and that are demonstrably superior to what they are familiar with. Most people are reluctant to accept change unless they are shown something that is clearly advantageous to their wellbeing and/or prosperity. This is why we are emphasizing user-experience as a key reference point in our work. Our audiences must understand the material in a way that they can personally relate to.
So, MFA’s leadership is highly experienced in different presentation formats, storytelling techniques and media technologies across the design and entertainment worlds. We are bringing these latest and emerging processes all together to compellingly present our ideas and concepts to inspire and accelerate change for a long overdue new vision from the 1939 Futurama exhibit!