Success in the future is directly related informed preparation and hard work, right? And the futurists who succeed got …
Designing Foresight and Foresighting Design
I’m happy to share that my collaboration with [former] design student (and now Dr.) Danilo Zindato exploring the uses of …
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Translation and Transformation
I previously wrote [rather briefly] about letting go, translating, and transforming as three major roles of futurists. …
Jobbing or Doing?
A frequently asked question I get as an educator is “can I get a job as a futurist? I tackled this important and …
MISC: Prepping for the Next Economy(s)
I am pleased with the Houston Foresight program's collaboration with the elegant and informative MISC: A …
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Public sector interest in foresight taking off?
I’m in Dubai for a week doing scenarios with a government agency. One can’t help but be impressed by the tremendous …
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Next Economy Additions: Commons, Creative Molecular, and Em/Singularity
A couple of years, I started collecting and posting concepts or names for the next economy as part of my scanning (which …
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Intuition in Futures Work
We come to the week in Alternative Perspectives class where we see how far one’s embrace of alternative extends. We call …
Foresight in the university world: size matters
Last week we tackled the pressure to bring in research dollars. This week we confront a classic chicken-and-egg problem …
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Foresight in the university world: Research
I'm thinking of a series of unofficial random musings about the state of foresight in the university world, as I begin …
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Future of income inequality via Picketty
Every now and then, perhaps more than I care to admit, I defer reading a book that attains some degree of popular …
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2016 APF Most Significant Futures Works Winners
One of my favorite things to do each year is to coordinate the APF’s Most Significant Futures Works program. Each year, …
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News Flash: Futurists Are Dying Again
Almost on cue, after a few days of saying nice things about Alvin Toffler, the NY Times pointed out the demise of …
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Indicator: “Mainstream” economist embracing uncertainty
Okay, I’m sure there are economists out there embracing or at least acknowledging uncertainty about the future. But a …
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Artificial Intelligence: It Depends
Futurists pretty regularly get asked about artificial intelligence, often along with robots, and perhaps some …
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Help Disseminate Foresight Market Survey
Most of you know that the market for foresight is still pretty murky. As part of my work on the APF …
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Indicator Alert: The Swiss Say No to Basic Income
We have been keeping an eye on new economy concepts. The passage of a guaranteed basic income would be an indicator of …
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Foresight Classics: Earth Might Be Fair
My journey into classic views of the future recently turned up an expected gem – unexpected in the sense of my not being …
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Is better better?
What’s on my mind here is the potential perniciousness of ubiquitous feedback/performance rankings/predictive …
Historians & Futurists: More Alike than Not
A few weeks ago, we explored a few thoughts around the history of the foresight field. APF colleague Ruben Nelson …
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Next Economy Additions: Zero marginal cost, metaspace, conscious, and Blockchain
A couple of years, I started collecting and posting concepts or names for the next economy as part of my scanning (which …
Foresight for changing the world
We’re always exploring new things to teach at the Houston Foresight program. One topic that has come up a lot in recent …
Roots of foresight: When (and how) do you say it started?
We had a great discussion last week at APF on the origins of the foresight field. I was not sure whether to even start …
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Adding some wow to our projects
Every now and then I like to scan the home library and see if anything I hadn’t read deserves to be promoted, or if …
Transformative scenario planning
I finally got to Transformative Scenario Planning by Adam Kahane. It’s one of those books that stayed too long in my …
The Aspirational Archetype
I’ve written previously about the scenario archetype technique. A few years ago, In World Futures class, we started …
Can we all get along? The key role of group norms
Getting along is pretty important in all walks of life, including it turns out, if you want to have a high-functioning …
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What is a futurist?
Last year my grad assistant Maria Romero produced a series of short videos (none more than two minutes) about the …
Second edition of Thinking about the Future
An updated second edition of Thinking about the Future is now available on Amazon. The foreseeable depletion of the …
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Foresight Classics: Rescuing All Our Futures
Rescuing all our Futures: The Future of Futures Studies was edited by Zia Sardar and published in 1999. It makes a …
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