The New Perspective Agents
Different sources, modes of thought can prepare us for big changes to come.
Culturally speaking, dread is deeply in fashion. Stability feels unobtainable. Leaders from anchor organizations have lost touch. An aggregate picture of doom suggests a new dark age looms on the horizon.
A counterview suggests an alternative, more empowering portrait of the future. This one is painted by new problem solvers and world builders expanding the realm of the possible. These new “perspective agents” force us to “think different.”
Perspective agents are new sensemakers, collaborations, and intelligent agents altering society and culture.
They function as idea start-ups, social engineers, or game-changing companies. Think of them as the new interpreters of current affairs. Intelligent agents that fuse data and insight into self-service platforms. Communities working together on shared missions. In their most potent form, they are new “world builders” set to reshape society.
The idea of perspective agents reflects a big question I’ve been thinking about for a while now. How do we make sense of a world that doesn’t make sense to us anymore?
It’s a question worthy of study with my colleagues at Weber Shandwick. We’ve conducted research and brought together experts from a range of disciplines asking similar questions. The search doesn't end at the office. I do the same in my free time, going so far as to also build out my own intelligence system to extract new patterns from the chaos.
Here’s what is apparent throughout the investigation. The precedents we hold dear, and the “mainstream” sources we use, can’t help us understand what lies ahead. If anything, they compound the sense-making crisis we feel.
That’s where the new agents come in.
The “matrix” above is a way to conceptualize and map them in a new way. Depicting a current/future worldview, perspective agents are grouped into new categories, forms, and potential. If we’re to make sense of new developments, we need new, emerging frameworks like this.
These tools can help leaders navigate transitions impacting a range of stakeholders they serve. I’ve also found them to be essential to protect personal interests and see ways to capitalize on new inventions.
Anticipating benefits and shocks to come are important matters of perspective. Where we turn to make sense of it is a serious question.
When technologies reach mass adoption, they change fundamental assumptions about how things work. When a new era is born, new ways of living and being are too. While we can’t see it, scholars believe we’re in a renaissance time now.
How we react when everything feels new means a lot. For example, on one hand, a growing sense of chaos and panic characterizes mainstream discourse. Opportunists feed off base fears. Incumbents fiercely protect their turf. News networks and Internet feeds compound a sense of crisis. The conflicts here are highly visible and well-known.
What’s more interesting is harder to see. Deep within digital networks, different patterns emerge. Consider the great resignation. Mandate resistance. Citizen science. Cyberpartisans. Wall Street Bets. Right to repair. Open-source intelligence. Web3.
It’s not the isolated events here that are illuminating, it’s the underlying pattern. They all stem from new sensibilities just beginning to be understood.
Marshall McLuhan said decades ago, “The age of automation is going to be the age of do-it-yourself.” The era he referred to is the here and now.
Networked, grassroots accountability is growing. We expect to shape our world and future, not have it dictated to us. Don’t believe “the opposition” simply comes from political ideologues and pawns playing new power games. There is much more to it than that.
Consider the urgency to build perspective in more “practical” terms.
If forecasts are accurate, in the next twenty years, humanity will process more change, more quickly, more uniformly around the world than at any point in history. This will dramatically shift the balance of power and rules we live by.
New ideas and capital investment reached unprecedented levels globally last year. Within the next ten, analysts predict hundreds of trillions of dollars in economic activity will divert into new digital ideas, intelligent infrastructure, virtual platforms, and more. The new world-builders will be the primary creators and the guides.
The human impact will be equally disruptive. World-building visions must be also interpreted by potential effects, beyond the interests or blindspots of the builders.
The gap between new ideas and public impact — how we psychologically, personally, and socially adapt — is a massive void in the making, another territory for new agents.
Perspective agents will displace industrial-minded organizations and figureheads for insight and leadership. They will rise in influence as interpreters and makers of new worlds.
The domain of “expertise” is flattening by the day. Individual interpreters will continue to beat news and media organizations by influence and ratings, in some cases by wide margins.
The individual agent will be eclipsed in influence by the “community.” The way we organize collectively to sense and respond to change will be transformed. Notably, self-organized squads will not only be about “work.”
Perspective agents now design cloud-based religions, political structures, art forms, economics, and education models. A modern Renaissance is happening in the network. If you’re not in it, you can’t see how fundamentally society, culture, and power are on the move.
We’re early in this historic transition, driven by unrelenting tech advancements and exhausting effects on our personal psyches. The convergence and the acceleration of change will decimate comprehension unless we see reality clearly and upgrade sensemaking capacities.
Dark or light. Peril or promise. Hide or seek. It’s hard to consider a more important pursuit than how we think about change.
We’re all participants in a mystery of what the future holds.
I’m betting on new perspective agents to help show us the way.
The Perspective Agents idea is an ongoing work in progress. For weekly insight on new agents, case examples, models of thought, and more, you can subscribe to my Perspective Agents letter on Substack.
I hope to engage with you there and hear from you in the comments below.
