I recently had the opportunity to be futurist in the “ask a futurist booth” at the American Association of Museums conference. The intent of the booth was to pose alternative scenarios that would encourage museum folks to think about different possible future environments and what changes they might suggest for the museum experience. The theme…
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I’m finishing up Iain McGilchrist’s brilliant journey of a book The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, looking for (and finding!) implications for futures studies and foresight. (I have a forthcoming article exploring the “I” of the beholder in relation to our discipline). But more on that…
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The foresight work we do for clients seems to have two primary applications: as a stimulus for innovation and as a key part of the situation analysis that supports strategy development. I was recently reminded of one of the most important principles of strategy by an unlikely coach—Mr. Hoots, the Muppet. My kids (now thirty…
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Amazon sent out a news release this morning announcing that sales of digital books for their Kindle digital book format/reader had eclipsed sales of printed books. All printed books, not just hardbacks. (That milestone was reached in July 2010.) This news about digital book sales edging printed sales is apparently a big deal as many…
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One of the things we help our clients do is reframe their perspective on their business. As we tell clients, we can never have the depth of their institutional knowledge, but by coming in with an (educated) outsider’s perspective, we can help them uncover their hidden assumptions and biases, and move past these biases to…
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As analysts of social change, one trend we monitor is the dramatic, ongoing evolution of the American family. The Leave It to Beaver model of married-couple-with-kids, plus the odd dog or gerbil, now fits less than one-fifth of US households. Instead, many more people are living in “voluntary” families composed of (or at least including)…
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The raid that killed Osama bin Laden yesterday has to have been one of the most secret operations in the world — and yet it was live-blogged by an inadvertent witness. Sohaib Athar, an IT consultant trying to get away from it all in the small Pakistani city of Abbottabad , was so irritated by…
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