Articles

For Rainer Rilke, poet and novelist, the future wasn’t a distant and nonexistent concept that could be flippantly disconnected from the present. Rather, the seeds of the future were contained within the present, and those seeds were waiting to grow and blossom. To extend the analogy, the human race is the fertile ground for the seeds of the future, and that soil is the key to the ultimate manifestation and expression of what is waiting to emerge. In order to…

In an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, we can cling to our vision and mission, but we have no hope of clinging to strategy.

For many of us, the question of how to prepare our organizations for the future usually centers on current trends. We consume “Top Trends of 20YY” content with gusto, and shell out hundreds of dollars for annual industry trend reports. After all, they give us a warm, fuzzy feeling of being “in the know,” and may even spur exciting conversation about new initiatives. But the confidence inspired by some expert’s interpretation of the tea leaves is fleeting in today’s VUCA…

Have you ever wondered if NASA has made alien contact?  Well, I know firsthand that they have, because I had the honor of being NASA’s alien visitor! In August 2017, I was asked to serve as the speaker for the NASA iTech Speaker Series at the Armstrong Flight Research Center in California. The room was filled with brilliant individuals who go to work every day to create ideas and innovations around space travel and exploration, private and commercial flight, and…

I had no idea that what I was doing in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s cultivate a passion in my heart for “artifacting the future” – creating the landscapes, devices, utilities and materials that would both define provocative images of the future and be born out of them.

We will never be successful in navigating our way through uncertainty by only extrapolating historical data or exploring the possibilities that exist within our dominant narratives — our world is much too complex for such simple ways of thinking; we must move beyond adaptation or resilience as our response to the future, and begin cultivating a mindset of transformational change.

A new way of thinking first requires a fresh way of seeing and measuring the world around us. There are several ways you can challenge your worldviews through the Natural Foresight® Discover facet.

Creating a sustainable foresight practice for yourself or within our organizations can be a challenge. Our outdated systems may be faltering, but they are holding on for dear life.  There are lessons, however, in failed attempts at foresight implementation. In our experience, there are several common pitfalls which should be avoided when pursuing foresight integration.

The adaptive systems within a panarchy are most commonly represented by a figure eight or an infinity symbol. This demonstrates how the various phases within the system alternate in a continual cycle rather than following a straight line that has a clear-cut beginning and end.

Leadership qualities tend to be timeless. It’s why we look back through history at the esteemed individuals who led successful businesses, governments and social initiatives. The thinking goes that, if we can emulate these trailblazers, we will be successful leaders too.