Marina Gorbis on: ”Five Principles for Thinking Like a Futurist”

Forget about predictions. Focus on signals. Look back to see forward. Uncover patterns. Create a community. […] At its best, futures thinking is not about predicting the future; rather, it is about engaging people in thinking deeply about complex issues, imagining new possibilities, connecting signals into larger patterns, connecting the past with the present and […]

Porn, activism and technology forecasting

Laurent Haug quoted Ethan Zuckerman’s point which is really worth repeating in forecasting and futurist circles. Since I am, at least partly, finding myself backing a bit to my original turf of technology forecasting this is a good reminder of a rule of thumb that I actually used as an argument for the future success […]

Scenario Planning – a necessary tool for the CIO

Scenario planning, IT managament, CIO

What is it with Canada and the future?

A couple of weeks ago I noted an increasing pattern on Google Trends when it came to Canada and searches for the word future. This trend seems to continue even this year and peeks more than before… And it seems to be unique to Canada! I guess it is some kind of cultural phenomenon. Are […]

Future Scanner – A promising future oriented digg

I got a mail yesterday promoting a new site called Future Scanner. It happens now and then that people finding my blog also want to use it to promote new things. As reader of this blog notice I am a bit skeptical to go somebody else’s errands. This time it took me some minutes testing […]

Google trends and the state of the Western World

Inspired by this post in Google Blogoscoped (found via 43 Folders) and the statements that people are predictable I got reminded of the power of Google Trends. A service that let anyone look into the gathered statistics from probably the single largest information hub in the world. When the service was announced I sat for […]

Forecasting and Fermi problems

The other day a friend unexpectedly referred to Fermi problems (attributed to the famous physicist Enrico Fermi). I am the one who once (in ancient times) studied mathematics and physics and he is a marketing /advertising guy so I was a bit surprised. When realizing in what way he used the notion of Fermi problems […]

Managing complex structures – how complex?

Since many years I have been working in and with organizations which is suffering from increasing complexity. The problem is usually not the complexity in itself but the inability of the top management to acknowledge the current level and understand that this particular degree of complexity require a different set of methods and skills. It […]

Visualization Periodic Table

Wow!! For me being a complex and visual thinker it was really amazing to find a site which collects so many visualization techniques in one page. I see it as a really valuable tool when working with scenario planning project are looking for ways to present the data to explain the relation behind driving forces […]

Google Trends – to search a search engine

Google have released a new fascinating and probably controversial tool onto the world: Google Trends. By simply letting users search directly in the meta-data some of the higher level patterns of what people search for is out of the box. If you e g search for “united states”, you get a list of regions from […]

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