Last time we talked about snowball scanning as a way to find the fringe in horizon scanning. As I thought more about, I …
Snowball scanning
We have been doing a lot of thinking and work on horizon scanning at Houston Foresight. We revised our process several …
Capitalism in Context
And [finally] some thoughts on Volume 3, The Perspective of the World from Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism series …
Progress Report on Virtual Classes
Last semester we took the bold step of doing away with the physical classroom and conducting all classes virtually via …
Measurement, Trust, and Meatbots
Reliance on measurement from lack of trust in our own intuition is turning us into meatbots. The desire to measure is …
A Futurist Journey to Thailand
I’m about to finish up a wonderful month-long visit to Bangkok on a Fulbright Specialist Grant. The Thai Office of …
Futurists doing Foresight: My take on the name game
If I could wave the magic wand and settle the name game, I would say that we are futurists doing foresight. That is, the …
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Walking Away from Capitalism
How will we get to “After Capitalism?” Perhaps we’ll simply walk away? That’s the idea of Cory Doctorow’s excellent and …
Highlights from Houston Foresight Spring Gathering 2019
Introducing the Future was the topic of the 2019 Houston Foresight Spring Gathering on April 12-12. Since we spend so …
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Capitalism coming full circle?
Some thoughts on Volume 2, The Wheels of Commerce from Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism series (post on Volume 1) …
Ten things we could do if we did not have to work
It’s great to see my piece “Getting Ready for a Post-Work Future” published in Foresight and STI Governance. I blogged …
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Jobs as income is a distribution problem
In our series on a post-work future, last time we looked at how jobs providing structure to daily life would be a …
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Jobs provide structure to daily life
In our series looking at the possibility of a post-work future, last time we looked at how the centrality of work to our …
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Work is central to our identity
When you are introduced to someone, how long is it before you let them know what you do for work? And how soon do you …
A Post-Work Future May Take Longer Than We Think
The After Capitalism research has identified three categories of visions of a world in which capitalism is no longer the …
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The Non-Tragedy of the Commons
Most of us have dutifully learned the Tragedy of the Commons, how unchecked individual interested overwhelms the group …
Saying goodbye to the physical classroom
The Houston Foresight graduate program is running an experiment this semester: there will be no physical classroom for …
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Visions, images, and utopias
I’m working on the explanation of what’s to come for After Capitalism. As regular readers are aware by now, three …
Integral Futures Questions
It was great to dive back into some Integral Futures in Alternative Perspectives class this semester. The all-too-rare …
Pre-capitalism and post-capitalism
Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism three-volume series has been in my “to-read” pile for many years. I’d heard many …
Reasonable futures timeframes
What’s an appropriate timeframe for foresight work? It’s a question we futurists often get. It’s usually coming from a …
An Integral Futures lens on security
It seems that each time I teach Integral Futures as part of Alternative Perspectives class, at least one student really …
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More future-oriented than we thought?
Futurists have long lamented the bias of most people to the past (at the expense of the future). This bias seemingly is …
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Avoiding Used Futures in After Capitalism
Part of my goal in putting together the After Capitalism research into a book (admittedly going too slowly!) is identify …
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Knowledge Base of Futures Studies 2020
I am excited to share that I accepted Richard Slaughter’s offer to be the Associate Editor of the next update of the …
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Evolution of Framework Foresight Part 5 Archetypes
Let me begin with proper credit to Professor Jim Dator for the concept [Jim Dator, Alternative Futures at the Manoa …
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12 Steps for Futurists
I would argue that 12 step groups are one of the great social inventions of the last century. This post and the steps …
Evolution of Framework Foresight: Drivers (part 4)
The graphic has the drivers in the rectangles. This is from a project on the future of knowledge work we did about ten …
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Evolution of Framework Foresight, Part 3
Last time we talked about the different approaches we used to develop inputs to create the ingredients for the baseline …
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Clustering, Pattern Recognition, and Synthesizing
These are a few of my favorite things (humming Sound of Music). I have been doing all three a lot lately, and talking …
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