Futures thinking

Just like other iconic duos you already know — Simon & Garfunkel, Kirk & Spock, Sherlock & Watson — strategy and foresight are better together, because they amplify what each element could achieve alone. Strategy without foresight makes companies vulnerable to outside disruption. Foresight without strategy renders scenarios unactionable. Each on... See more

To meet these challenges and increase the impact of foresight work, we need to rethink our approach from the very beginning of a project.

While it’s tempting to play with scenario planning and leave it at the implications, we must not hide behind the data, deck or titles of our roles, protecting us from the vulnerability of getting out there and doing the messy work: making the futures we wish to see.

You can’t really be in favour of both democracy and billionaires, because democracy requires equal opportunity in order to participate, and extreme wealth gives its holders unfathomable advantages with little accountability.

According to the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis, extracted episodic details must also be recombined into a coherent event simulation. This recombinatory ability is thought to be central to flexibly imagining the future – to construct as well as disassemble and rework the components of scenarios to create different outcomes to enhance... See more

The present findings also show that it is possible to develop systems that can instantly interpret emotional cues to provide immediate and intuitive feedback in a wide range of situations. This could lead to scalable, cost-efficient applications in various domains where understanding emotional context is crucial, such as therapy and interpersonal... See more

When you apply possibility thinkingin your daily life, it can give you a powerful sense of agency. It can help you find innovative solutions to actually do what you want to do, in one form or another.

Today, there is perhaps no animal we are more unmoored from than ourselves. ‘The world is now dominated by an animal that doesn’t think it’s an animal,’ writes the natural philosopher Melanie Challenger in How to Be Animal (2021) . ‘ And the future is being imagined by an animal that doesn’t want to be an animal.’