Review of The Future Normal by Rohit Bhargava and Henry Coutinho-Mason
By Bill DeRouchey
How does someone curious about futures and foresight get started in learning about these massive topics? Where can they go to get an introduction to how these topics are thought of? How do you explain what it is that you do?
You should start by pointing them to The Future Normal, an excellent book for foresight newcomers to dig into. The book runs across 30 different topics of our daily lives, including ambient health, immersive entertainment, green prescriptions, big brand redemption, guilt-free indulgence, work deconstructed, good governing, the 15-minute city, beyond net zero, and many more.
Written by Rohit Bhargava (author of Non-Obvious Megatrends) and Henry Coutinho-Mason (managing director at Trendwatching), The Future Normal takes about a 5-10 year view looking forward. Whereas most futures topics start at 10 years and proceed from there, this book is aimed at beginners. In fact, this book is more of a wide book than a deep book.
The 30 topics are divided into three simple parts.
Part 1 is about personal issues. What if closing the generation gap could cure loneliness at any age? What if you could develop a meaningful relationship with an app or a robot? What if you could be part of entertainment instead of watching it passively? Topics covered include ending loneliness, virtual companionship, and metabolic monitoring.
Part 2 is about the work world. What if more of the world’s biggest businesses prioritized doing good over profits? What if work flexibility meant sharing your job equally with a partner? What if you didn’t have to give up products and experiences that are not great for you or the planet? Topics include augmented creativity, remote work for all, and calculated consumption.
Part 3 is about the collective parts of our existences. What if you could throw things away with a clean conscience? What if every long journey in the city was cut to 15 minutes? What if companies aimed beyond going carbon neutral and toward being actively regenerative? Topics include inhuman delivery, nu-agriculture, and millions of microgrids.
Each chapter covers a single topic and only eight pages or so, covering three to four examples per point. It’s a fast book. But once you get into a few chapters, the survey begins to feel better. Remember, this book is meant for breadth, not depth. It’s a bit refreshing to look at the future like this, maybe even as an introduction to the field. Especially given all the bad news that’s circulating out there, it helps to see a bunch of good news across a wide variety of topics.
Let’s look at a chapter, “Waste Free Products,” which covers our use of plastic and the resulting microplastics that for decades has clearly become a problem for the environment and our own personal bodies. As an example, they mention the 2018 Carnivale in São Paulo. Typically, at this event, people are surrounded by glitter from everywhere. It’s part of the celebration! However, in 2018, Skol, a local beer brand, hosted a “Skol Station” that encompassed its participants with biodegradable glitter that would be bioconsumed with ease.
It then covers how companies that produce fleeces such as North Face are partnering with Brewed Protein material. Or how Cove is creating water bottles from biodegradable plastic alternatives. Or how Notpla (as in “not plastic”) has been creating compostable packaging solutions from seaweed, “one of nature’s most renewable resources.”
This chapter then (like all 30 chapters) covers an Instigator, going into more detail about a company that is tackling the problem head on. In this case it’s Vollebak, a clothing company which is producing everyday t-shirts. But what is different is how the t-shirts are produced, using wood pulp and plant-based linen for the foundation while using algae for the graphic inks. Then once you’ve worn the t-shirt down to nothing, you can simply bury it in your backyard!
Let’s look at another chapter, “Ambient Health.” It begins with a visit to the AirBubble at COP 26 in Glasgow. Visitors to the AirBubble were treated with a pneumatic bioreactor, or really a big-huge bubble with green algae sloshing on the side. People bouncing in the bubble bounces the algae further, better cleaning the air. This exhibit pointed to the silent pandemic of poor-quality air that contributes to more than 7 million deaths per year. The COVID pandemic adds to these challenges. Many companies have improved upon the indoor conditions of working there, upgrading ventilation, adding plants, and so on.
This chapter’s instigator is the International WELL Building Institute, the first building to earn Platinum status within Hong Kong. It features standard WELL features such as natural lighting, clear air, good acoustics, and generally encouraging healthy lifestyles. Yes, adding all these healthy features drives up the core costs, but as we’ve seen within other drives, the more buildings do it, the cheaper it becomes globally.
Let’s investigate one last chapter that we are finding ourselves in the middle of, “Remote Work for All.” While the COVID pandemic created a white-collar revolution of working from home, many others were left out of this. Early on in the pandemic, in 2020 in Northern Italy, Circolo Hospital introduced Tommy, a robot that checked patients’ blood pressure and oxygen saturation, while also letting them talk to professional doctors remotely. AI has clearly increased these capabilities since. (The book was copyright 2023 and therefore likely done writing in 2022.)
The instigator here is Einride, a Swedish company addressing the coming battles within autonomous long-haul trucking. While many companies are pursuing them as without drivers, Einride takes a different approach. They do have drivers, just remotely. In fact, they hired their first remote operator. Einride figures that while they won’t need one-to-one drivers per truck, they can get by with having one driver per 10 trucks. This entire approach will open up a job market that had already been disintegrating.
Returning to the thought this book is for beginners, it gives them an excellent place to start from. Since covering “the future” would be a gargantuan task, The Future Normal gives beginners a way to figure out where and how to focus. Even though covering “the future of everything” would be valuable, it can’t be done by a single person. You would need to pick an area to focus on.
To move this further, they have also included a graphic towards the end of the book that helps them. It takes major industries (education, food & beverage, health care, real estate, and so on) and picks 10 of the 30 things that apply to that industry. For example, within Entertainment, Media & Art we see that Multiversal Identity, Certified Media and Impact Hubs can impact it, and conversely that Metabolic Monitoring, Inhuman Delivery, and Secondhand Status may not.
In the end, it is exactly this running fairly quickly across 30 different areas that makes this book powerful. With all the negativity happening in the world, or rather, all of the negativity being broadcast over mass media, it’s important to see small positive changes that happen where few people see it. The world is not a binary place. Bad things happen and good things happen, but with the media focusing on the bad, it’s good for books like The Future Normal to focus on the good. They make you think that maybe, just maybe, we are heading towards a positive future.
Bill DeRouchey is principal of Fluxion, a consulting firm based in the San Francisco Bay area focusing on climate and AI topics. He is currently working on a book entitled, The Future of Design Careers. He earned a graduate certificate in foresight from the University of Houston.
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