The 'Looking Forward' agenda
The 'Looking Forward' agenda
LF01 | Eight agenda items that frame the Looking Forward agenda. A dynamic list, that will evolve over time.
Welcome to Looking Forward. Yes, it’s a newsletter, but hopefully more; a mindset, a community, an information portal, and maybe even a way of life.
There’s so much bad news out there, delivered at increasing pace and volume. Looking Forward attempts to give you a look to the future with an optimistic lens - if we don’t have that, what do we have? It’s focused on the topics I’ve spent the past few years on: healthy aging, impact & ESG and Web3, loosely representing the future of people, planet and tech.
Looking Forward will be two emails a week: a Friday Essay, on a topic of interest, or an interview or podcast, and on Monday Five Things, a quick digestible set of links, documents, books or whatever, that I think will interest you, dear Reader.
It’ll have a paid subscription option. Benefits will vary, but essentially paid subscribers get priority and I see as the most important members of the community. One of my themes is sustainable communities and whether it’s payment in tokens or cash, figuring out how to make communities that deliver impact sustainable is one of the challenges of our age - see Tokenized Communities point below.
The Looking Forward agenda. After several years building innovation communities in healthy aging, it was clear to me that you can’t solve these complex issues in isolation. I was recently asked to give a talk to the Aging2.0 Palo Alto Chapter about my reflections after a decade with Aging2.0, and this Looking Forward agenda represents an updated version of that talk. It covers eight concepts that I’m hopeful can make a difference as we navigate an uncharted territory of unprecedented aging populations, exponential, crypto-fuelled tech and a dangerously unstable planet. I call it a toolkit because the ideas are all practical rather than theoretical. The deck with similar information is here.
1. Live Long, Die Short
Maximizing health span compressing morbidity and a good end, for everyone. The ultimate metric of successful longevity is [healthspan] / [lifespan] = 1, i.e. all days lived are days in good health. A recent project that we did with with Japanese insurance company SOMPO developed a framework for the ‘Pin Koro Society’, which builds on the Japanese concept of pin pin korori essentially a long full life and a quick, dignified end. The key here, is “for everyone” and with a set of metrics we can start to make this happen. In our view, a far better goal than GDP.
Opportunity: Helping an individual or a country achieve ‘pin koro’ by establishing a better understanding of the metrics and levers of action to deliver this for all.
2. The Care Economy
Recognising and supporting the legion of undervalued and crucial caregivers. Pollution is a well-known negative externality and economic failure. A lesser known market distortion is the positive externality of caregiving; recognising and valuing the contributions to the economy of caregiving. Melinda Gates’ Pivotal Ventures estimates the size of this to be $648bn, while Economy is Care does a great job of showing just how dependent our capitalist system is on this very social activity. We’ve started to explore what it would take to build a B2C marketplace to support caregivers, via a project with Stanford’s Distinguished Career Institute (more here: fc.fordcastle.com) and have since evolved the thinking by looking into whether DAOs could play a role in reducing friction, removing intermediaries, doubling wages and empowering more people to be caregivers (more here).
Opportunity: Providing affordable, ubiquitous care for all, and supporting informal and formal caregivers with new tools that improve care, save costs, reduce burdens and support career advancement. Integrating the care economy more fully into society in general and the healthcare industry in particular, recognising the value of caregivers and reducing overall health costs.
3. Brain Capital
Recognizing the value of brain health and brain skills throughout the lifecourse. We live in a knowledge economy, and our economic futures will depend more on how we treat and nurture brains than brawn. ‘Brain Capital’ is the idea of a new economic asset which integrates brain health and brain skills in the knowledge economy, (see e.g. here).
Cognitive disorders are estimated to cost the global economy $2.5tn–$8.5tn per year in lost productivity. New neurological tools that measure brain function and crucially provide biofeedback to allow people to optimise their brain function will be game changing.
Opportunity: Measuring and optimising an individual’s and nations’ brain capital, and making ‘brain healthy places’ that support brain health through the lifecourse.
4. Personalized Purpose Pathways
Creating unique pathways for everyone to reach their own goals. Everyone is unique. In this heartwarming video, an older, otherwise unsporty man spends months working out to the amusement and consternation of his neighbours, in order to be able to lift his granddaughter up to place the star on the Christmas tree.
Behavior change is the arguably the biggest barrier standing in the way of long, healthy lives for all, since 60% of longevity is due to lifestyle factors, and only 20% due to genetics and 20% due to medical care.
For the past few years I’ve been convinced that the way to keep people independent is via a personalized ecosystem, that I’ve called Hive. It’s your own modular system, giving you what you need in terms of products and services in a seamless, joined-up data way. The business model is an insurance one - the hypothesis being that a population using Hive will have lower healthcare costs and better outcomes than the status quo.
Opportunity: Creating personalised pathways that connect with an individual’s goals and sense of self, integrated into medical records and care protocols.
5. Tokenised Communities
New tools to reward community participation and value. After a decade of building innovation communities with Aging2.0, the thing that excites me most is the new paradigm of Web3 that starts to build a bridge between economies and communities. Tokens are nothing new - from scout badges to airlines to grocery stores, we’ve been rewarded for our loyalty for eons. But the blockchain enables these rewards to be programmable (i.e. automated), transparent and decentralised, potentially making it much easier to capture and rewards the activities of disparate community members.
Opportunity: Building the ‘rails’ that connect community actions to real world outcomes, and ensuring that value flows to the tokens held by community members.
6. Impact Marketplaces
Ability to buy and sell non-financial outcomes. Social impact bonds introduced the idea of governments and other funders buying impact outcomes rather than paying for processes that may or may not work. A recent review suggests that the activities have been broadly successful in terms of value created (up to 10x, depending on how you interpret value), although they have suffered from some PR flops. Other than poor optics, a challenge has been the cost of oversight and expense in setting up bespoke legal contracts for projects, something that blockchain has the potential to overcome. Organisations such as IXO Foundation and Proof of Impact are making this happen.
Opportunity: Building the data, infrastructure and interoperability to enable marketplaces for outcomes to take off.
7. Tontines
Self-insured group annuities that incentivise healthy long lives. A few hundred years ago tontines were popular in Europe as a form of self insurance - members of an army would throw gold coins into a pile before they went off on a rampage. When they returned they would split what was left amongst the lucky survivors. Unique among financial products today, this type of product aligns incentives towards living long and healthy - addressing the #1 concern of older adults about retirement - not poor health, but outliving your savings. We’re starting to see some financial products along these lines emerge, such as Q Super’s Lifetime pension in Australia and Guardian Capital in Canada.
Opportunity: Connecting 401k and Superfund companies with a tontine-type product to offer longevity support services as well as a sustainable financial model for aging.
8. Living Labs
Empowering local intergenerational groups to build products & purpose. Older people can be overlooked and under appreciated, too often the last to be consulted when it comes to products and services that impact them. Living Labs change that by engaging directly with local residents and participants to gather needs and validate product and services concepts. Examples include CABHI (Canada), NICA (UK) and GCMA (Australia). Cogenerate (formerly Encore.org) is running with a version of this in which intergenerational groups work together on purpose-related projects.
Opportunity: A global network of living labs that share data, insights and best practices with each other to catalyse intergenerational missions by older adults.
If you’ve made it this far, congratulations and thank you. I’ve always been open to ideas and input and as it’s still early days, I particularly welcome feedback and ideas for the things that interest you.
I look forward to having you join me on the journey in the months ahead.
- Stephen
Note: Last update: January 24, 2023.