What Not to Expect From a Futurist: Trend Watch & Forecasts. Do you know what the main difference is between a trend watcher and a futurist? It’s the time-span orientation. Trend watchers tell you about trends that are happening now in the avant-garde. Futurists philosophize about possible futures many years from now. Not trendy at all! The longer time-frame has effects on what customers can expect from their futurist. Colleague futurist Matthias Horx defined a megatrend as follows. A megatrend takes at least 30 years to decay to half its original valueIt must be apparent in politics, in the economy, in society and cultureIt’s a global phenomenon, so a megatrend is discernable in many areas of the worldIt’s development knows periods of both temporal setbacks and growth Global warming is a good example of a megatrend, as is the increase in the number of technological innovations or the growing world population.
As a consequence, our stories develop slowly. Then they’d ask me: “Okay, but how would the job of the cleaner / banker / secretary change?” Global Problem Solving Without the Globaloney. How to See into the Future. Speaker(s): Tim Harford Chair: Professor Wouter Den Haan Recorded on 5 February 2015 in Old Theatre, Old Building. Tim Harford will explain what’s really going on in the large-scale economic world – and what it means for us all in the future.
Tim Harford (@TimHarford) is a senior columnist for the Financial Times and the presenter of Radio 4’s More or Less and Pop-Up Economics With Tim Harford. He was the winner of the Bastiat Prize for economic journalism in 2006, and More or Less was commended for excellence in journalism by the Royal Statistical Society in 2010, 2011 and 2012. Harford lives in Oxford with his wife and three children, and is a visiting fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. Wouter Den Haan is Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Centre for Macroeconomics. The Department of Economics at LSE (@LSEEcon) is one of the largest economics departments in the world. Credits: Tom Sturdy (Audio Post-Production), LSE AV Services (Audio Recording). Event posting. How Different Cultures Understand Time.
The Acceleration of Acceleration: How The Future Is Arriving Far Faster Than Expected. The Acceleration of Acceleration: How The Future Is Arriving Far Faster Than Expected This article co-written with Ken Goffman. One of the things that happens when you write books about the future is you get to watch your predictions fail. This is nothing new, of course, but what’s different this time around is the direction of those failures. Used to be, folks were way too bullish about technology and way too optimistic with their predictions.
But today, the exact opposite is happening. Take Abundance. And we were wrong. Just three years later, Google went on a buying spree, purchasing eight different robotics companies in less than six months, Amazon decided it was time to get into the drone delivery (aka flying robots) business, and Rethink Robotics released Baxter (a story explored in my new release Bold), the first user-friendly industrial robot to hit the market. Rethink Robotics Baxter robot. Baxter was the final straw. And we’re not the only ones having this experience. Paradigm Shifts. Driving Forces and Trends. There is no disagreement that the developed world, has moved from an AGRICULTURAL society (or era) to an INDUSTRIAL society and then to a SERVICE society. Many believe we are now in an INFORMATION society and some might even add a "TECHNOLOGY" society.
I agree with the first two, but rather than use the term "information" I would "digital" and place it under TECHNOLOGY (this is not the conventional wisdom but it seems appropriate to me). I believe we are also seeing the early trends that will usher in the next era (it is hard to tell in advance); my guess is the next era will be described by something like sustainable or "sustainability enhancement" (see below for definition). It is important to realize when using the term ERAS we are talking about the DOMINANT portion of society or the workforce, and that ALL of these sectors still are at play today.Only the relative emphasis changes over time.
Within these big ERA shifts, there are paradigms, and driving forces. Driving Forces. Futures Glossary. Your tech predictions are wrong, but they aren't pointless. “Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax.” – Lord Kelvin, 1899 January is boom time for soothsayers, sages and snake oil salespeople everywhere. As we self-flagellate after the Christmas excesses, diets, detoxes and dryathlons abound, in most cases without a shred of medical support.
And in the popular press forecasts and predictions for the year ahead add to the nonsense. It was the original intention here to write about the history of the predictions business, and have a good old laugh at the stupidity of some otherwise pretty clever people. Instead, I thought I might try to understand why exactly we persist in this, frankly, monumental folly. Predictions sell Making predictions is a tempting business. They sell well too. They are of course, as flawed as the idea of detox itself (don’t you think you’d be pretty close to dead if you were really full of toxins?) The plight of overconfidence There are perhaps two types of forecast. Clustering illusion.
Up to 10,000 points randomly distributed inside a square with apparent "clumps" or clusters The clustering illusion is the tendency to erroneously consider the inevitable "streaks" or "clusters" arising in small samples from random distributions to be statistically significant. The illusion is caused by a human tendency to underpredict the amount of variability likely to appear in a small sample of random or semi-random data.[1] Examples[edit] Gilovich, an early author on the subject, argued that the effect occurs for different types of random dispersions, including two-dimensional data such as clusters in the locations of impact of World War II V-1 flying bombs on maps of London; or seeing patterns in stock market price fluctuations over time.[1][2] Although Londoners developed specific theories about the pattern of impacts within London, a statistical analysis by R.
D. Similar biases[edit] Using this cognitive bias in causal reasoning may result in the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. Commonplace 2023: who said you can't do foresight with a startup? Someone asked me a couple of months ago why startups don’t do foresight or futures work. My response was that new companies are often the product of a particular vision of the future. They don’t need to imagine future scenarios or trends; they are forging the future already. Since then I have changed my mind. Scenario planning and other strategic foresight tools are traditionally the preserve of governments and large corporates. But I found a particular case where articulating a future scenario helped a startup. Commonplace is an early stage startup: one of the teams that have been working away on Nesta's first floor for the last three months in the social enterprise accelerator Bethnal Green Ventures.
They are developing a digital tool for neighbourhoods and property developers. While organising a workshop on future urban innovation, I met Commonplace founders Neil and Mike. First, they listed trends and drivers of change in London. This information is then aggregated. Futures Dialogue. The impact of strategic foresight is shaped by both the interior development of the participants and their capacities to add depth to their levels of conversation. The following picture illustrates a ‘dialogue line of development’ that is motivated by two models of dialogue and conversation from William Isaacs. The first shows a line of development (with both light and shadow sides) that reflects Isaacs’ bifurcation model of dialogue (see Isaacs, 1993). The seconds is the ‘four player model’ that captures the four fields of conversation (see Isaacs, 1999).
I have over-layed these two model into a meta-model that may be used as a real-time dialogue retrospective. As shown, each ‘level ‘ of dialogue is represented as a vertical movement with the stages labelled as ‘Conversation’, ‘Deliberation’, and ‘Suspension’. The four player model illustrates four roles (move, oppose, follow, bystand) that occur (with different textural combinations) at each stage of development. Neil Like this: Forecasting - levels, examples, manager, definition, model, type, company. Photo by: tiero Forecasting involves the generation of a number, set of numbers, or scenario that corresponds to a future occurrence.
It is absolutely essential to short-range and long-range planning. By definition, a forecast is based on past data, as opposed to a prediction, which is more subjective and based on instinct, gut feel, or guess. For example, the evening news gives the weather "forecast" not the weather "prediction. " Forecasting is based on a number of assumptions: The past will repeat itself. William J. Accurate—some degree of accuracy should be determined and stated so that comparison can be made to alternative forecasts. Forecasting techniques range from the simple to the extremely complex. Qualitative forecasting techniques are generally more subjective than their quantitative counterparts. The Delphi technique uses a panel of experts to produce a forecast. The sales staff is often a good source of information regarding future demand. Table 1 Naïve Forecasting. Futures Knowlab. Beyond the Bell Curve, a New Universal Law | Quanta Magazine.
Imagine an archipelago where each island hosts a single tortoise species and all the islands are connected — say by rafts of flotsam. As the tortoises interact by dipping into one another’s food supplies, their populations fluctuate. In 1972, the biologist Robert May devised a simple mathematical model that worked much like the archipelago. He wanted to figure out whether a complex ecosystem can ever be stable or whether interactions between species inevitably lead some to wipe out others. By indexing chance interactions between species as random numbers in a matrix, he calculated the critical “interaction strength” — a measure of the number of flotsam rafts, for example — needed to destabilize the ecosystem. Below this critical point, all species maintained steady populations. Above it, the populations shot toward zero or infinity.
Little did May know, the tipping point he discovered was one of the first glimpses of a curiously pervasive statistical law. Renate Schmid Lopsided Curve. The foresight gap: What too many organizations get wrong. Businesses aim close. Too often, a business’s view stays on its current realities and where the business is excelling or struggling. The mindset is near-term and management aligns its tools to support that near-term view. This creates a gulf between the challenges and opportunities of the future and the demands of the status quo.
It is a foresight gap. The problem is endemic. Business rewards executives for improving the current business model and processes, but too rarely for charting a smart future course. Businesses measure results with tools which lock them in to present-focused, incremental improvement. Ideas and behavior around risk create the foresight gap. As in baseball, businesses tend to punish risk takers when things do not work out. The foresight gap is rooted in these ingrained habits. We need to adjust three critical factors to close the foresight gap: First, we need to encourage a longer view. And what is that future view like? Introducing Chaos Engineering. Chaos Monkey was launched in 2010 with our move to Amazon Web Services, and thus the Netflix Simian Army was born. Our ecosystem has evolved as we’ve introduced thousands of devices, many new countries, a Netflix optimized CDN often referred to as OpenConnect, a growing catalog of Netflix Originals, and new and exciting UI advancements.
Not only has complexity grown, but our infrastructure itself has grown to support our rapidly growing customer base. As growth and evolution continues, we will experience and find new failure modes. Our philosophy remains unchanged around injecting failure into production to ensure our systems are fault-tolerant. We are constantly testing our ability to survive “once in a blue moon” failures. In a sign of our commitment to this very philosophy, we want to double down on chaos aka failure-injection. We strive to mirror the failure modes that are possible in our production environment and simulate these under controlled circumstances. Welcome to Dataland — re:form. She’s referring to the colorful wristbands now provided to Walt Disney World Resort guests. Rubberized, waterproof, and emblazoned with Mickey’s iconic silhouette, the MagicBand bracelets are a part of a new digital parks strategy Disney dubs MyMagic+. Besides wearables, MyMagic+ involves upgrades to in-park terminals for purchases and FastPass line-skipping services, a new vacation management mobile app, and improved back-office crowd management systems for traffic flow logistics.
Previously, park visitors received a payment card-sized pass with a magnetic stripe and an embedded radio frequency identification (RFID) proximity sensor. These cards served many purposes: they provided entry to your resort room and to the parks (working in tandem with biometric sensors), as well as allowing charges to your Disney account from anywhere on the property. I had thought that the MagicBand bracelets just replicated this old functionality in a slightly more convenient, striking format. DILL Main. What Some Crazy Smart Futurists at Shell Oil Predicted. Shell Oil has some crazy smart futurists on staff. They scan the periphery for anomalies that will overtake the landscape of tomorrow.
Well, in 2008, they found that something really big was going to happen. Here’s what they said: There are 3 Hard Truths:1) A huge increase in global energy use is coming.2) There won’t be enough energy to keep up.3) Climate change is real, and getting worse. Wait a minute. In the Blueprints scenario, we get ahead of climate change. People around the world start making the link between erratic, local weather and climate change. In Scramble, we royally screw up. Discussion bogs down in ideological quagmire. Climate campaigners get louder and everyone else is beset by alarm fatigue. Shell Oil came out loudly recommending Blueprints and asking governments to set carbon limits. It’s six years later. In the absence of any meaningful action by government, the people and organizations with the money are moving to profit off of climate change.
I write code. The Futurist Manifesto. F. T. Marinetti, 1909 We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts. And trampling underfoot our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets, we have been discussing right up to the limits of logic and scrawling the paper with demented writing. Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost, facing the army of enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs.
Then we were suddenly distracted by the rumbling of huge double decker trams that went leaping by, streaked with light like the villages celebrating their festivals, which the Po in flood suddenly knocks down and uproots, and, in the rapids and eddies of a deluge, drags down to the sea. Then the silence increased. "Come, my friends! " We went up to the three snorting machines to caress their breasts. 10 Futurist Phrases And Terms That Are Complete Bullshit. Whose Vision of the Future is This? | LibrarianShipwreck. Introducing Four Types of Values for the Future | Hinesight....for Foresight. 20 Crucial Terms Every 21st Century Futurist Should Know. My “Game Changing” Talk at LOGIN2013. The future is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
Dominant predators theory. Adaptive Foresight. Integral futures. Critical futures. Ethnic Futurism.