What I learned in school today…

We know the past but cannot influence it: we can influence the future but cannot know it.
So said, Stuart Brand, or something like that. It is one of those cute comments it is tempting to quote. But Andrew Curry of the Futures Company relates that once asked to reconsider it, he immediately realised it is [...]

Future Savvy

The title is by way of a small plug for the book of the same name by Adam Gordon, out last year but with a 2009 copyright line (future-oriented even there).
It’s a nice, user-friendly guide to forecasting, and especially to reading other people’s. The business-person-in-a-hurry style pull quotes on each page are sometimes, er, chosen [...]

Deja vu all over again?

The future is getting repetitive…
At least, that seems a fair reaction to the 2025 report issued last week by the US National Intelligence Committee. Nothwithstanding the fuss made in much of the serious press, this prospect of a multipolar, interdependent world seemed pretty familiar.
The feeling is reinforced by the security futures report just out from [...]

(even more) climate futures

They will take a while to digest, but worth noting that Forum for the Future just produced an interesting set of five climate-consequence scenarios (I suppose you could call them). I happened to hear Jonathan Porritt mention them while presiding over the Schumacher lecture and discussion day in Bristol, but I fear others may have [...]

US future intelligence

Nothing like getting your retaliation in first…   Entertaining US lefty commentator Tom Engelhardt (who I recall meeting at Pantheon books way back in the ’80s) has an entertaining pre-emptive demolition of the US National Intelligence Council’s next Global Trends assessment, apparently due for release in December.
He reviews what was in previous editions, and concludes that, [...]

Gaming the future

Quite excited by the idea that an interactive  Web 2.0 game can be used to develop thinking about the future – and it launches on my birthday, making it even harder to resist.
Details as follows, from the e-alert link at the Institute for the Future:
You’re In!!
We’ll email you in late September with an invitation to [...]

competition, competition

Just ordered the next mega-compilation from the UN Millenium Project, the 2008 State of the Future Report. I have been through the last edition. Now all I have to do is digest the latest – now running to 6,300 pages on the accompanying CD – and insert the result into the draft of the Rough [...]

business as usual

The Guardian, slightly surprisingly, finds a whole news page today for a report from the Chartered Institute of Management on, less surprisingly, “Management Futures”.  More people will work from home, apparently.
Download the thing, and you will find it is pretty slight (though there is a full “environmental scanning” report which you may have in May, [...]

The state of futures studies

Trying to take some stock of the state of futures studies – aside from the corporate and marketing trends stuff which often seems to pass as “futurist” these days. There’s an interesting critique of the old World Futures Society by Richard Slaughter in the latest Futures (Feb 2008, though it’s been online for [...]