For someone who has made the study of world trends and decision-making the focus of his working life, Stefan Hajkowicz is still wondering exactly why he sided with the optimists.
The senior principal scientist with the CSIRO was in Paris for the 2016 OECD Strategic Foresight Community Meeting when delegates were asked to declare their feelings about the future.
The pessimists went to one side of the room, the optimists another and the undecided somewhere in between.
“Tragically the pessimists were the biggest group,” Hajkowicz says of the revealing meeting icebreaker. “But I still struggled to decide whether I was with the optimists because I wanted the world to be better or actually believed that it was getting better.”
Given the state of world affairs – from the violence and displacement in Syria to adverse economic indicators and the pace of change brought on by technology – the question is a challenging, but fascinating, one for him.
“The geopolitical situation is not trivial,” says Hajkowicz, a specialist in helping organisations prepare for future change. “The world has huge challenges in front of it. It’s really significant what’s happening in the Middle East.
“I don’t want to be Panglossian, but I do see strength in creating a narrative people can connect to and see, and ultimately have hope for the future.
“If all you see is bleakness you lose hope and the ability to do anything. But it has to be based on solid evidence and clear thinking, and that’s where we need to put our heads together.”
Hajkowicz, who shies away from the term “futurist”, leads a team of researchers and consultants at the CSIRO called Data61 in Brisbane, working on strategic foresight with a focus on the digital economy.
He has also written the recent book Global Megatrends: Seven Patterns of Change Shaping Our Future outlining his analysis and predictions about how small individual changes “combine to push humanity into a different space”, with these huge, seemingly unstoppable shifts.
The patterns he covers include the rapid economic growth and urbanisation in Asia, the increasing demand for limited natural resources, and the way digital technology is transforming our businesses and working lives.
“The logic for getting into this space is it allows us to anticipate change and frame decisions earlier,” he says. “The whole shift is to earlier and proactive action. To look at alternate futures and to how we can get to one we want.
“We are looking at economic and social changes so we can put digital technology into context.”
Hajkowicz first became interested in how the world works as a young boy when he was given a gift subscription to National Geographic magazine by his aunt.
When his father, an upper atmosphere physicist, got a job in the UK, the six-year-old also had his first taste of international travel, moving there with the family for a year.
“I thought the world was fascinating,” he recalls today. “It was big and diverse and complicated but it was a source of deep fascination for me. That deep desire to understand and explain how things work has stayed with me.”
Hajkowicz now holds a doctorate in geography, which, combined with a background in economics, enables him to examine “big picture” changes using a highly interdisciplinary approach, he says.
He moved into strategic foresight after working on decision-making models in the CSIRO’s policy and economic research unit. He realised we first needed to “work out what the decision options were” while we headed into a rapidly changing future.
The Data61 team’s latest projects include looking at blockchain technology, the same engine that underpins the virtual currency Bitcoin and something he says is set to substantially change the way information is managed.
Another recent report by the team tackled how technology, and especially automation, is driving a rapid transition of jobs.
Hajkowicz says a looming megatrend for humanity is that we do not yet have a solution for the “planetary pushback” of drug-resistant bacteria, a shift he terms in his book as “Going, going… gone?”
But despite all these huge global challenges, being a father of two young children ultimately forces him to be optimistic about the future.
“There’s no stronger drive for thinking about the future than having kids,” he says. “I love big and complex systems and how to understand them and I love connecting science and decision-making and finding the way ahead.
“We have got to tell the story as it is, but there’s a responsibility to create a plausible positive pathway to a better future that we can sign up to. There has to be some leadership on this and we need to kick-start it.
“We are looking for something to refresh the scene, to get things back onto a better pathway. We can contribute to pushing things in the right direction.”
Dr Stefan Hajkowicz is speaking on Wednesday November 2 at the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane as part of the Intergenerate event series, brought to you by the Guardian and Optus Business.
