Creating a mindset for a wise and responsible future

Citation

Ratcliffe, J.S. (2007), "Creating a mindset for a wise and responsible future", Property Management, Vol. 25 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/pm.2007.11325baa.001

Creating a mindset for a wise and responsible future

It is 40 years this year since I entered the property profession, and I have now arrived at a personal philosophical position that only the pomposity of age and the shelter of academe allow. It is this: a new mindset, reinforced by fresh ways of thinking about the future, is needed by the global real estate community to face the challenges, and grasp the opportunities, that lie ahead over the next few decades. Following the prescience of James Martin (2006), founder of the 21st Century School at Oxford University, conspicuously we are living at a turning point in human history:

… travelling at breakneck speed into an era of extremes – extremes of wealth and poverty, extremes in technology, extremes in globalisation. If we are to survive, we must learn how to manage them all.

Given our chaotic knowledge now that everything affects everything else, and that small things can have large effects, the future management of the world’s property assets has no small part to play in this struggle for survival.

There is growing recognition that humankind is on a non-sustainable course which could lead to “grandscale catastrophes” (e.g. Lovelock, 2006; Rees, 2004). At the same time, however, we are unlocking formidable new capabilities. This could be humanity’s last century, or a century that sets the world on a new course towards a spectacular future. Echoing the warnings of Hawken et al. (2000), and their promotion of natural capitalism as a fundamental change in the way of doing business, the global economy seems to be outgrowing the capacity of the earth to support it. We are consuming renewable resources faster than they can regenerate: forests are shrinking, grasslands are deteriorating, water tables are falling, fisheries are collapsing and soils are eroding. On top of this, there is climate change, rising and moving populations, an increasingly polarised world, perverse subsidies by governments, impending energy and water wars, failed nations, shanty cities and false accounting for the GDP measure that ignores natural capital. Throughout, there is also the uncertainty of new technologies more powerful than the sum of their parts. Indeed, I often think that we have become like the sorcerer’s apprentice, having started something we can barely control!

Arguably, one of the single most important issues entwined in this imbroglio is the power of large corporations to shape the future of the planet. And, for us in the property professions, this means how corporate real estate, in all its forms, is proficiently developed and properly managed. The debate, of course, rages around those twin concepts of “sustainability” and “corporate social responsibility”, and few involved in the processes of land use development or property management can remain untouched or agnostic about either the ethics or economics of each. Palpably, both sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) are fast becoming mainstream business imperatives. In this context, CoreNet Global (2004) placed what it described as “Five Big Bets” (research hypotheses) to structure their excellent report Corporate Real Estate 2010: Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility. These were:

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  all publicly traded companies will be required to report on their economic, social and environmental performance of “triple bottom line” by 2010;

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  sustainability issues and related performance requirements in 2010 will have a major impact on the location of buildings and in the way they are designed, constructed and maintained;

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  reporting on sustainability and CSR topics will be embedded in corporate real estate practice by 2010;

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  there will be increased differentiation by 2010 between buildings of current institutional specifications, which will have implications for pricing; and

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  the corporate real estate function will have a leading role to play in managing the sustainability agenda within a corporation.

Views aroused are inevitably varied as to the likely veracity of these propositions. But, risking the charge of hubris, in a futures study for King Sturge (2005), European Real Estate Scenarios: Nirvana or Nemesis, I identified 12 policy fields with associated agendas for action which went much further in scope and farther in time in anticipating how the two strands of sustainability and CSR will be woven throughout the future tapestry of property markets and their prospective patterns of performance. These were set against the possible impact of five meta-trends affecting the world over the next 15 years (cultural modernisation, economic globalisation, universal connectivity, transactional transparency and social adaptation), and tested within four alternative scenarios of the future in 2020 constructed around eight common critical issues or pivotal uncertainties (sustainability, competitiveness and innovation, corporate responsibility and accountability, political and social cohesion, climate change, security, demography, and quality of life). Over 30 property professionals participated in the process of producing this publication – but the main outcome was not so much the set of policy findings that resulted; rather, it was the different way of thinking that the methodology invoked.

Over the past decade, The Futures Academy at DIT has taken a lead in developing and applying futures studies methods and techniques for built environment policy issues favouring the “prospective through scenarios” process. Prospective, a francophone form of foresighting, is a methodology that helps decision-makers determine a shared vision of a preferred future, whilst scenarios are powerful tools for strategic policy analysis, especially where organisations have too much fragmented, unstructured and biased information. Together, they provide a normative framework for future proofing present policies directed towards a common goal. The Futures Academy is just embarking upon a major three-year project of producing a set of layered of global real estate scenarios for various regions of the world, which should offer an invaluable way of evaluating the complex and uncertain future for an ever-changing real estate industry. We welcome interested parties in participating.

My main proposition, throughout, is that the real estate community worldwide, through global organisations such as the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and the Urban Land Institute, should foster and promote a more informed, structured and imaginative understanding of the long-term strategic stewardship of the built environment. Most particularly, that corporate organisations and real estate companies collectively and singularly anticipate and prepare for the future by exploring and addressing the constructive connections between sustainability, CSR and property asset management.

Returning to the start – this requires a new mindset. A mindset that embraces individualism, collaboration and innovation. A mindset that addresses societal and environmental, as well as economic, imperatives. Above all, however, a mindset that can tackle complexity, uncertainty and change. In other words, property management, in the post-capitalist era demands a total strategic commitment based, as Tom Peters, the great management guru, would say “on entirely new ways of thinking about organisations”. This implies a mindset that is oriented to process rather than to structure; that is ecologically driven rather than hierarchically driven; that is value-added rather than competitive; that is holistic rather than functional; and that is collaborative and innovative rather than adversarial and derivative. Quite a transformation!

In all this, education and academe has a prime role to play. It must embrace the concept and practice of futures studies; comprehending its main characteristics, purposes and rationale; and adapting and applying the principal methods and techniques that are available to explore and understand how alternative global real estate futures might unfold. Mimicking Einstein’s dictum, and reflecting again on 40 years of real estate education, we cannot solve the problems we face with the mindset that created them. A futures orientation, with strong foresighting capability and capacity, based on multi-disciplinary perspectives, founded on flexible and adaptable systems, must be the ethos of real estate education and learning. With this, hopefully we can move from the present age of information and regulation, through an age of awareness and understanding, to one of wisdom and responsibility.

John S. RatcliffeFaculty of the Built Environment, Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, Ireland, Secretary-General, World Futures Studies Federation, and Visiting Professor, University of Salford, Salford, UK