The Importance of Foresight
Tunnel vision gets things done, but can also drive you into a wall.
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Roger Forsgren, the former Chief Knowledge Officer at NASA, when the guys at the Invisible Machines podcast graciously invited me to guest host their show. In preparing for that interview, I read a fascinating paper by Forsgren called The Architecture of Evil, which is about Albert Speer, the chief architect for the Nazis.
In that paper, Forsgren tells the story of how Speer, a brilliant engineer, was an integral player in building Nazi infrastructure. The most astonishing thing to me was how Speer was so absorbed in the details of his work that he was willfully disinterested and emotionally detached from what his work was helping to accomplish. “I myself had become part of this perverted world. For twelve years…I had lived thoughtlessly among murderers,” Speer later lamented.
While the Nazis are in a league of their own for how much harm they’ve inflicted on humanity, the lesson of Albert Speer is an extreme cautionary tale of how lack of attention to the greater purpose and effect of what you create can lead to disastrous consequences.
Now, I want to be crystal clear that I am not comparing anyone in food or agriculture to the Nazis. Even the worst polluters and most dishonest actors in the food industry do not even come close to the Third Reich. But I want to point out that the tunnel vision that Speer demonstrated can apply to other things with far less horrific, yet still undesirable, outcomes. Speer’s colossal detachment of his work from its mission shows that humans are capable of selectively focusing on a narrow set of tasks and purposefully ignoring the big picture. And if it’s possible for someone like Speer to ignore a holocaust and just focus on engineering problems, then anyone is at risk of forgetting about less extreme offenses to focus on their current to-do list.
On a far less dramatic level, we can all be guilty of prioritizing an immediate objective and not think about its broader effect on others, the environment, or the future. Single-use plastics and transatlantic flights satisfy our “right now” needs but contribute to a giant “later on” problem. But some individuals are in positions at corporations or governments where their individual decisions can affect the world in a very meaningful way both today and tomorrow. The stakes are much higher for those individuals to be blind to the broader effect of their organizations’ actions, and having strong foresight is especially important for them.
Over the past two decades, billions of dollars in funding have been poured into brands and technologies looking to transform the food industry. From the ongoing journey of the lab-grown meat industry, to precision agriculture, to simple healthy snack brands, legions of people in the industry are trying to build the next chapter of food and agriculture. All of these things are hard to do. But whether you’re trying to turn cow cells into a burger or optimize an email campaign to boost sales and get a better valuation on your next funding round, it’s incredibly easy to get lost in the weeds of what you’re doing right now.
However, we in the food and agriculture industry aren’t just making paperclips or shoelaces—we’re making things that directly impact the well-being of people’s bodies and the planet on a daily basis. So the cost of not looking ahead and being thoughtful about the accumulative effect of your business on the future is far higher than in most non-food industries.
Food and agriculture tends to move slower than other industries like tech, so the risk of being locked into a supply chain or product that’s harmful to people or planet is higher. Coke is still Coke, even though we know it’s not healthy to regularly drink that much sugar. And farming monocultures are still monocultures, even though we know they’re degrading our soil and consuming epic amounts of petroleum based inputs that will one day run out.
In food, companies have not proved that they can act like Apple who will unilaterally decide to change the iPhone’s charging cord to a more state of the art solution in order to keep evolving the product at a fast pace. Tech companies like Apple have the guts to piss off consumers in the short term for what they think is the greater good of the product in the long term, while no one at Coke or Pepsi will ever likely be allowed to change the core formula. The only thing that drives change that fast in food is if a product becomes unprofitable, not if society suddenly realizes its unhealthy for people or planet.
For those doing the real innovation in food, this is not a call to stop innovating. Instead, it’s a call to keep innovating but with a stronger sensitivity to the broader and longer impact of your inventions. We have the luxury of witnessing how inventions like glyphosate have panned out and we can apply those lessons to current innovation. Yes, boosting yields on farms to feed more people is a laudable goal, but is it still worth it knowing that some farm workers are going to get cancer from RoundUp? And how many farmers need to get cancer before the benefits of RoundUp become untenable?
While we aren’t able to always predict the full future ramifications of our current day inventions, that’s no excuse to not bother thinking about the future at all. My book, Mise: On the Future of Food is officially out today, and in the sample chapter that I released earlier this month, I explore the potential future for personalized nutrition, which has been a hot topic in food-tech circles for over a decade.
One of the central questions I debate in that chapter is if having personalized nutrition technology in our lives is entirely a good thing. The idea of having an AI use sensors to understand our body chemistry and make accurate decisions for us on what to eat to be healthy is incredibly alluring. The siren song of this promise is already enticing enough for startups and researchers to dedicate large portions of their careers to building pieces of the personalized nutrition stack. I think people in this field right now should keep moving ahead, but start to dedicate more time considering the knock-on effects of such a technology once it becomes reality.
You can read the full chapter on personalized nutrition for free here, but in it I write about a fictional family called the Burlingtons having Thanksgiving dinner in the year 2052 when personalized nutrition has become a reality. This family doesn’t share a single turkey anymore because half the family has their personalized nutrition app, called Stack, telling each individual what to eat. They prepare a series of single portion quails that fit each person’s recommended diet instead. Their grandmother is saddened to learn that no one will eat her homemade pumpkin pie, a longstanding family recipe, because their algorithms have prohibited it. And the main couple in the story are even instructed by the Stack app to have sex at the end of the night after the guests have left to presumably work off the calories they just ate. Like how no one uses paper maps anymore after Google Maps was invented, the Burlington family depends entirely on technology to decide for them what to eat and how to stay healthy.
There are a bunch of questions explored in that scenario, but the plot points I list above zero in on how the social aspect of eating can be altered or degraded (depending on your opinion of traditional Thanksgiving family dinner) with the introduction of a seemingly all-knowing digital food oracle. Maybe a future where everyone eats their own quail, or no bird at all, is preferable to some and sacrilegious to others. But innovators working on personalized nutrition today should at least think through the effects of enticing people to eat in their own silos instead of truly sharing meals with their loved ones.
This is what good foresight can do—help anticipate what the world would be like if today’s innovators solved all their engineering challenges and their inventions took flight. Like the proverbial dog chasing the car that doesn’t know what to do once it catches it, innovators can often focus so much on chasing their goal that what happens after they accomplish it becomes an afterthought.
It’s truly hard to build something new. I get that. And the struggle to simply get something to work correctly can force a certain level of tunnel vision. But being in the habit of regularly poking your head out of the tunnel to look ahead can not only help avoid trouble far down the road, but give you certain advantages right out of the gate that your competitors didn’t think of. Not everyone takes the time to look deeper into the future, so those who do can be rewarded. Otherwise, you risk crashing into a wall or ending up in a place you never intended on going to.