Facing the future head-on
Apage-turner of an election campaign is getting people pondering the big issues. And those are exactly the discussions Roger Dennis believes New Zealand needs to have if it’s going to be ready to face the challenges ahead.
Dennis, a Christchurch-based consultant, tries to avoid the phrase ‘‘futurist’’ but the future is most definitely his focus.
‘‘What I like to do is help organisations understand where the world’s going, what it means for their industry or their sector, and what are the right strategic questions they should be asking themselves in order to be more proactive in a fast changing world.’’
Dennis is speaking at the Facilities Integrate conference this week, where he will be outlining his view of the future to property owners and managers, urban planners and others.
Of all the possible trends, there are four which he believes will happen with a high degree of certainty: the rise of Asia and decline of the US, resource shortages, the continued growth of cities, and the onward march to digitalise everything.
Globally, urbanisation reached a tipping point a couple of years ago, so Auckland’s infrastructure needs are not unique, he says.
For necessities like transportation, roads and electricity, ‘‘typically scaling up those facilities and services falls well behind the demand curve as cities grow faster and faster’’.
‘‘Countries that start to think into the future position themselves much better. I was in Oslo three weeks ago and Oslo is actively planning to remove all cars from the centre of the city in the next three years.
‘‘Contrast that with the rebuild of Christchurch, where at least four parking buildings have been built in the rebuild.’’
Another trend that was the inexorable move towards data, even in the notoriously slowmoving construction sector.
’’In the construction industry, the creation of data requires a different way of thinking around your assets to incorporate new practices into something thats been essentially unchanged for decades,’’ Dennis said.
Examples included the increasingly use of BIM or ‘‘building information modelling,’’ a system which collates information from all the players in a project before a hammer is touched.
Another was the use of sensors to monitor a building’s performance, such as water usage or seismic resilience.
US-owned GPS company Trimble had been quick to install sensors in its Christchurch building, enabling it to make quicker decisions about re-entry after an earthquake.
‘‘That’s one very clear example of how you can use data generated from sensors to create a commercial return on how you utilise an asset.’’
Resource-wise, Dennis said New Zealand was starting to face its water issues, but there were big challenges facing its two biggest export earners, tourism and agriculture.
‘‘If you look at things like vertical farming, for example, precision agriculture, protein replacements, I think these things could have quite significant impacts on agriculture and our exports.
In low-margin tourism, there were problems in scaling up. ‘‘We’re a volume tourism destination, not a quality and price destination.’’
His advice to the incoming government?. ‘‘In a world where it’s increasingly hard to understand where some of these trends might converge, you need to consider the words of Eisenhower who famously said ‘Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable’.’’