Futurology

Weak signals, the future sign and wild cards

In futures research "weak signals" may be understood as advanced, noisy and socially situated indicators of change in trends and systems that constitute raw informational material for enabling anticipatory action. There is confusion about the definition of weak signal by various researchers and consultants. Sometimes it is referred as future oriented information, sometimes more like emerging issues. Elina Hiltunen (2007), in her new concept the future sign has tried to clarify the confusion about the weak signal definitions, by combining signal, issue and interpretation to the future sign, which more holistically describes the change.^[6]

There are some tools for utilizing weak signals in organizational environment. One tool is called Strategy Signals, which aims to collect weak signals inside of organization. The tool is developed by the Finnish company Fountain Park.

Another tool for using weak signals in organizations is called the Futures Windows, in which images of weak signals are shown in organization facilities. All the employees in the organization can send their images about weak signals to this tool. The purpose of that tool is to disseminate weak signals in organizations easily and increase futures thinking and innovating in the organization.^[7]

"Wild cards" refer to low-probability and high-impact events. This concept may be embedded in standard foresight projects and introduced into anticipatory decision-making activity in order to increase the ability of social groups adapt to surprises arising in turbulent business environments. Such sudden and unique incidents might constitute turning points in the evolution of a certain trend or system. Wild cards may or may not be announced by weak signals, which are incomplete and fragmented data from which relevant foresight information might be inferred. Sometimes, mistakenly, wild cards and weak signals are considered as synonyms, which they are not.^[8]

Near-term predictions

A long-running tradition in various cultures, and especially in the media, involves various spokespersons making predictions for the upcoming year at the beginning of the year. These predictions sometimes base themselves on current trends in culture (music, movies, fashion, politics); sometimes they make hopeful guesses as to what major events might take place over the course of the next year.

Some of these predictions come true as the year unfolds, though many fail. When predicted events fail to take place, the authors of the predictions often state that misinterpretation of the "signs" and portents may explain the failure of the prediction.

Marketers have increasingly started to embrace future studies, in an effort to benefit from an increasingly competitive marketplace with fast production cycles, using such techniques as trendspotting as popularized by Faith Popcorn.

John Naibitt

John Naisbitt (b. January 15, 1929 in Salt Lake City, Utah) is an American author and public speaker in the area of futures studies. His first book Megatrends was published in 1982. It was the result of almost ten years of research and is one of the biggest successes in the publishing world. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for two years, mostly as #1. Megatrends was published in 57 countries and sold more than 9 million copies

External links

• John Naisbitt's official home page
• USA Today ("Naisbitt turns lust for life into mega book career") 25-Sep-2006 (archived copy at archive.org)
• Financial Times Deutschland
• http://stockpunkt.com/2007/11/28/john-naisbitt-its-china-stupid/ John Naisbitt today
• Complete book summary of Megatrends - Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives

Bibliography

• Megatrends. Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives. Warner Books, 1982
• Reinventing the Corporation. Transforming Your Job and Your Company for the New Information Society. Warner Books, 1985
• Megatrends 2000. Ten New Directions for the 1990s. William & Morrow Company, Inc., 1990
• Global Paradox. The Bigger the World Economy, the More Powerful Its Smallest Players. William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1994
• Megatrends Asia. Eight Asian Megatrends That Are Reshaping Our World. Simon & Schuster, 1996
• High Tech/High Touch. Technology and our Accelerated Search for Meaning. Nicholas Braely Publishing, 2001
• Mind Set! Reset Your Thinking and See the Future. Collins, 2006.

Futurology

Shaping alternative futures

Futurists use scenarios - alternative possible futures - as an important tool. To some extent, people can determine what they consider probable or desirable using qualitative and quantitative methods. By looking at a variety of possibilities one comes closer to shaping the future, rather than merely predicting it. Shaping alternative futures starts by establishing a number of scenarios. Setting up scenarios takes place as a process with many stages. One of those stages involves the study of trends. A trend persists long-term and long-range; it affects many societal groups, grows slowly and appears to have a profound basis. In contrast, a fad operates in the short term, shows the vagaries of fashion, affects particular societal groups, and spreads quickly but superficially.

Sample predicted futures range from predicted ecological catastrophes, through a utopian future where the poorest human being lives in what present-day observers would regard as wealth and comfort, through the transformation of humanity into a posthuman life-form, to the destruction of all life on Earth in, say, a nanotechnological disaster.

Futurists have a decidedly mixed reputation and a patchy track record at successful prediction. For reasons of convenience, they often extrapolate present technical and societal trends and assume they will develop at the same rate into the future; but technical progress and social upheavals, in reality, take place in fits and starts and in different areas at different rates.

Many 1950s futurists predicted commonplace space tourism by the year 2000, but ignored the possibilities of ubiquitous, cheap computers, whileMarxist expectations of utopia have failed to materialise to date. On the other hand, many forecasts have portrayed the future with some degree of accuracy. Current futurists often present multiple scenarios that help their audience envision what "may" occur instead of merely "predicting the future". They claim that understanding potential scenarios helps individuals and organizations prepare with flexibility.

Many corporations use futurists as part of their risk management strategy, for horizon scanning and emerging issues analysis, and to identify wild cards - low probability, potentially high-impact risks.^[5] Every successful and unsuccessful business engages in futuring to some degree - for example in research and development, innovation and market research, anticipating competitor behavior and so on.

(Wikipedia)

Futurology

Futures techniques

Main article: Futures techniques

While forecasting -- i.e., attempts to predict future states from current trends -- is a common methodology, professional scenarios often rely on "backcasting" -- i.e., asking what changes in the present would be required to arrive at envisioned alternative future states. For example, the Policy Reformand Eco-Communalism scenarios developed by the Global Scenario Grouprely on the backcasting method. Practitioners of futures studies classify themselves as futurists (or foresight practitioners).

Futurists use a diverse range of forecasting methods including:

• Anticipatory thinking protocols:
• Causal layered analysis (CLA)
• Environmental scanning
• Scenario method
• Delphi method
• Future history
• Monitoring
• Backcasting (eco-history)
• Back-view mirror analysis
• Cross-impact analysis
• Futures workshops
• Failure mode and effects analysis
• Futures biographies
• Futures wheel
• Global Prescience
• Relevance tree
• Simulation and modelling
• Social network analysis
• Systems engineering
• Trend analysis
• Morphological analysis
• Technology forecasting

Futurology

METHODOLOGIES

Futures practitioners use a wide range of models and methods (theory and practice), many of which come from other academic disciplines (includingeconomics, sociology, geography, history, engineering, mathematics,psychology, technology, tourism, physics, biology, astronomy, and aspects of theology (specifically, the range of future beliefs)).

Future Studies takes as one of its important attributes (epistemologicalstarting points) the on-going effort to analyze images of the future. This effort includes collecting quantitative and qualitative data about the possibility, probability, and desirability of change. The plurality of the term "futures" in futurology denotes the rich variety of images of the future (alternative futures), including the subset of preferable futures (normative futures), that can be studied.

Practitioners of the discipline previously concentrated on extrapolatingpresent technological, economic or social trends, or on attempting to predictfuture trends, but more recently they have started to examine social systemsand uncertainties and to build scenarios, question the worldviews behind such scenarios via the causal layered analysis method (and others) create preferred visions of the future, and use backcasting to derive alternative implementation strategies. Apart from extrapolation and scenarios, many dozens of methods and techniques are used in futures research (see below).

Future Studies also includes normative or preferred futures, but a major contribution involves connecting both extrapolated (exploratory) and normative research to help individuals and organisations to build better social futures amid a (presumed) landscape of shifting social changes. Practitioners use varying proportions of inspiration and research. Futures studies only rarely uses the scientific method in the sense of controlled, repeatable and falsifiable experiments with highly standardized methodologies, given that environmental conditions for repeating a predictive scheme are usually quite hard to control for. However, many futurists are informed by scientific techniques. Some historians project patterns observed in past civilizations upon present-day society to anticipate what will happen in the future. Oswald Spengler's "Decline of the West" argued, for instance, that western society, like imperial Rome, had reached a stage of cultural maturity that would inexorably lead to decline, in measurable ways.

Future Studies is often summarized as being concerned with "three P's and a W," or possible, probable, and preferable futures, plus wildcards, which are low probability but high impact events (positive or negative), should they occur. Many futurists, however, do not use the wild card approach. Rather, they use a methodology called Emerging Issues Analysis. It searches for the seeds of change, issues that are likely to move from unknown to the known, from low impact to high impact.

Estimates of probability are involved with two of the four central concerns of foresight professionals (discerning and classifying both probable and wildcard events), while considering the range of possible futures, recognizing the plurality of existing images of the future (alternative futures), characterizing and attempting to resolve normative disagreements on the future, and envisioning and creating preferred futures are other major areas of scholarship. Most estimates of probability in futurology are normative and qualitative, though significant progress on statistical and quantitative methods (technology and information growth curves, cliometrics, predictive psychology, prediction markets, etc.) has been made in recent decades.

(Wikipedia)

Futurology

PROBABILITY AND PREDICTABILITY

Some aspects of predicting the future, such as celestial mechanics, have been discovered to be highly statistically predictable, and may even be described by relatively simple mathematical models. At present however, science has yielded only a special minority of such "easy to predict" physical processes. Theories such as chaos theory, nonlinear science and standardevolutionary theory have allowed us to understand many complex systems as contingent (sensitively dependent on complex environmental conditions) and stochastic (random within constraints), making the vast majority of future events unpredictable, in any specific case. Nevertheless a number of stochastic systems (such as biological development, weather patterns, and aggregate social behaviors) also show simple, regular, and quite statistically predictable dynamics, on average, over particular time horizons and environmental conditions, in ways that can be falsifiably tested by simulation and experiment.

Not surprisingly, the tension between predictability and unpredictability is a source of controversy and conflict among futures studies scholars and practitioners. Some argue that the future is essentially unpredictable, and that "the best way to predict the future is to create it." Others believe, as Flechtheim, that advances in science, probability, modeling and statistics will allow us to continue to improve our understanding of probable futures, while this area presently remains less well developed than methods for exploring possible and preferable futures.

As an example, consider the process of electing the president of the United States. At one level we observe that any U.S. citizen over 35 may run for president, so this process may appear too unconstrained for useful prediction. Yet further investigation demonstrates that only certain public individuals (current and former presidents and vice presidents, senators, state governors, popular military commanders, mayors of very large cities, etc.) receive the appropriate "social credentials" that are historical prerequisites for election. Thus with a minimum of effort at formulating the problem for statistical prediction, a much reduced pool of candidates can be described, improving our probabilistic foresight. Applying further statistical intelligence to this problem, we can observe that in certain election prediction markets such as the Iowa Electronic Markets, reliable forecasts have been generated over long spans of time and conditions, with results superior to individual experts or polls. Such markets, which may be operated publicly or as an internal market, are just one of several promising frontiers in predictive futures research.

Wikipedia

Futurology

OVERVIEW

Futures is an interdisciplinary field, studying yesterday's and today's changes, and aggregating and analyzing both lay and professional strategies, and opinions with respect to tomorrow. It includes analyzing the sources, patterns, and causes of change and stability in the attempt to develop foresight and to map possible futures. Around the world the field is variously referred to as futures studies, strategic foresight, futurology,futuristics, futures thinking, futuring, futuribles (in France, the latter is also the name of the important 20th century foresight journal published only in French), and prospectiva (in Spain and Latin America). Futures studies(and one of its subdisciplines, strategic foresight) are the academic field's most commonly used terms in the English-speaking world.

Foresight may be the oldest term for the field. In a 1932 BBC broadcast the visionary author H.G. Wells called for the establishment of "Departments and Professors of Foresight," presaging the development of modern academic futures studies by approximately 40 years.^[2] Futurology is a term common in encyclopedias, though it used almost exclusively by nonpractitioners today, at least in the English-speaking world. Futurology is defined as the "study of the future."^[3] The term was coined by German professor Ossip K. Flechtheim^[4] in the mid-1940s, who proposed it as a new branch of knowledge that would include a new science of probability. This term may have fallen from favor in recent decades because modern practitioners stress the importance of alternative and plural futures, rather than one monolithic future, and the limitations of prediction and probability, versus the creation of possible and preferable futures.

Three factors usually distinguish futures studies from the research conducted by other disciplines (although all disciplines overlap, to differing degrees). First, futures studies often examines not only possible but also probable, preferable, and "wild card" futures. Second, futures studies typically attempts to gain a holistic or systemic view based on insights from a range of different disciplines. Third, futures studies challenges and unpacks the assumptions behind dominant and contending views of the future. The future thus is not empty but fraught with hidden assumptions. For example, many people make predictions of the fall of this Earth, in the near future.

Futures studies does not generally include the work of economists who forecast movements of interest rates over the next business cycle, or of managers or investors with short-term time horizons. Most strategic planning, which develops operational plans for preferred futures with time horizons of one to three years, is also not considered futures. But plans and strategies with longer time horizons that specifically attempt to anticipate and be robust to possible future events, are part of a major subdiscipline of futures studies called strategic foresight.

The futures field also excludes those who make future predictions through professed supernatural means. At the same time, it does seek to understand the models such groups use and the interpretations they give to these models.

Wikipedia