21 April 2022. Transport | Futures
‘Swarm buses’ and rural transport. // Using the Three Horizons model to think about funding transformational futures.
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1: ‘Swarm buses’ and rural transport
15 years or so ago I wrote a set of transport scenarios that included “swarm buses”—a rural transport innovation in which people would would key in where they were, and where they needed to go to, and an algorithmically programmed minibus would tell you when they would arrive and then take you to your destination, having optimised your route to fit in the other people who were heading broadly in your direction.
I think we assumed that these buses would still have humans at their controls.
Fifteen years on, and it turns out that most of the algorithmic innovation in the transport sector in the intervening period has been designed to minimise the control that Uber or Lyft drivers have over their working conditions, although something like Citymapper is an honourable exception.
(Photo: Andrew Curry. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
So I was pleased, when visiting Texel in the Friesian Islands recently, to discover that there’s an early version of these ‘swarm buses’ serving the public transport needs of much of the island.
There is one single standard bus route on the island, which runs to a timetable and has set stops. This links the ferry terminal with the two largest villages on the island. But all of Texel is also covered by the ‘Texelhopper’, a system of eight-seater minibuses which collects people and drops them off at one of 130 numbered locations around the island.
(Photo: Andrew Curry. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
You can order by phone or online, but it’s best to have the app. The fare is that same as the standard bus.
We thought back in 2005 that the swarm bus was a better solution to rural public transport because the current model doesn’t work very well. It’s expensive, and generally local authorities (in the UK, certainly) end up spending money to subsidise services to promote rural inclusion, but not by enough to create a sufficiently useful service to make a dent in inclusion or car use.
It’s also an old model, designed for a fixed telecom world, in which the transport system has no information about its customers, and also can’t send them information. (The information bandwidth of a conventional bus system is a set of published routes, a set of published timetables, and the fixed infrastructure of the network of bus stops.)
This model still works for urban transport, where densities are higher and thus passenger demand is more predictable, and stops can be closer together. In this world the optimisation of the Citymapper data app works well, in telling you when to leave the house to minimise waiting times, and how to optimise your waiting times.
You have to give them some notice (they recommend 30 minutes to an hour), and I’m guessing that the Texelhopper app might have let me known more exactly when the Texelhopper was going to turn up—the first one we took arrived around 10 minutes after the quoted time, which was fine on a warm April day but might have been less fun in December.
I also discovered later that there were some ‘shadow’ routes—one of the minibuses sweeps through the island in time to drop people off for the ferry sailings.
I’d expected some service chatter on the bus from the controller, to direct the driver to their new pick-ups, but I realised that this (and ticketing) was being done via a phone plugged in to the dashboard. The driver also has an earpiece.
I may also have lost quite a lot in translation.
(Photo: Andrew Curry. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
But some future version of this service will be able to use GPS to increase the number of drop off and pick up points (although there’s something useful about the physical roadside markers), tell customers more about ETAs, and even—with the right privacy permissions—see where the customer physically is as they approach the pickup point.
The Texelhopper app was already connected to a payment system.
It might also remind customers of journeys they make regularly (into town on market day, to a local school every Friday) and prompt them to make a booking if it’s needed.
Pretty much all of this technology is here already. No, strike that: all of this technology is here already. But it hasn’t been joined up yet in a set of social institutions with a public purpose.
In turn, this is one of the results of living in an age where there is too much loose capital washing around, in a world of low to no productivity growth, where most of that capital is in the hands of wealthy people who are looking for super-normal speculative returns. Somehow the idea of investing in platforms with a public purpose gets squeezed out around the edges. Which is, incidentally, another example of how the ‘finance curse’ damages our societies.
2: Using the Three Horizons model to think about funding transformational future
My SOIF colleague Daniel Riveong has just pointed me to an article written by (the prolific) Cassie Robinson in January on using the Three Horizons model to think about future funding. Since the workshop was run by Graham Leicester of the International Futures Forum, which probably has more organisational experience of using 3H than anyone else, and since it’s always useful to have examples of applied futures work, I thought I’d share some extracts here.
But first: this is the futures Three Horizons model we’re talking about now, which is designed to understand systems transition, not the rather flimsy McKinsey Three Horizons model.
(The two versions are related. When Tony Hodgson was still consulting, a client asked him to run a workshop about strategic investment drawing on the McKinsey 3H model. Tony looked at this and realised it was basically just a set of piggy banks with slightly different spending criteria, and didn’t tell you anything about the nature of the transition between them. Which led to an early version of the futures Three Horizons model.)
If you’re not familiar with it, it looks like this. H1 is the current dominant system; H3 is a possible or preferred future system, depending on what you’re doing in the workshop, and H2 is the transition area between them. Cassie explains the distinctions well in her article.
(Source: Tony Hodgson and Bill Sharpe)
And here’s her account of the questions that Graham Leicester used to prompt the discussion when she used the framework in some earlier work:
For the sessions IFF used their simple framework of just three questions. For the 1st horizon perspective they ask “what’s troubling at the moment?” That might draw out what people are seeing in the landscape that feels as if it’s failing. For the 2nd horizon they ask “what’s working?” And for the 3rd horizon — “what’s hopeful?” Asking any group those questions will create a map, drawing out their strategic sense of the potential in a landscape.
The second horizon, obviously, is where the innovation is. One way to think about the different horizons is that H1 is the space of maintainers, H3 is the space of visionaries, and H2 is the space of entrepreneurs, including social and policy entrepreneurs, who try to bridge the other two. So H2 is also where the turbulence is.
In IFF’s practice it makes a distinction between ‘sustaining innovation’ (sometimes called H2-, because it’s prolonging the life of the existing system) and ‘transformative innovation’ (sometimes called H2+, because it’s trying to push towards a news system).
Graham described the following -
It’s not a function of the innovation that makes it sustaining or transformative. It’s a function of which pattern you want it to fit into. Take the example of wind power — wind power is an innovation but we can take it in any number of different directions. We can replace our existing centralised power stations connected to the centralised grid with massive wind farms. That doesn’t change the pattern. It takes the technology and fits it into the old pattern. Or we can say this is the chance to have distributed power generators for all and much more sustainable local community living... So it’s not about technology, it’s not about the ‘innovation’. It’s about where you see it fitting into wider social and cultural patterns and values?”
The questions for funders that were teased out of the workshop look as if they’d help both to establish the prevailing orientation of a funder—which futures are you looking at?—and their risk appetite for innovation. There’s a whole slate of questions in the article, but to give you a sense of them, here are the questions about supporting pioneers and taking risks:
There’s a lot of self preservation and self protection within philanthropy and on some level we are probably all trying to convince ourselves that what we’re doing will be enough. It’s difficult to hold both perspectives that whilst we are doing something, what we are doing may not be enough — that we need to think both of the 2nd and 3rd horizons.
Questions for funders are —
- Are you looking for burn out in those visionaries you fund? And offering ways to support them?
- Are you funding better infrastructures and conditions to ensure that those propositioning the 3rd horizon stay standing?
- Are you doing all you can to remove barriers and show solidarity to those trying to bring the future into the present?
- Are you open to and curious about holding that tension between the 2nd and 3rd horizons — and looking at what it means to fund both?
I was involved in developing the Three Horizons model back in the 2000s, and have written about it a lot. Here’s the version of the original paper that Tony Hodgson and I updated in 2020 for the Knowledge Base of Futures Studies.
And here’s a shorter piece from 2015 on the systems that sit behind Three Horizons.
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