In Jose Luis Borges’ exquisite story The Garden of Forking Paths he beautifully evokes the many different paths that our lives could take. Every day we make choices small and large that lead our lives down a particular path, collapsing the infinite possible directions into the one reality we actually live.
I often say that a trend-watcher and a futurist are very different things. Trend-watchers see what has happened and implicitly assume that it will continue into the future. Futurists uncover trends and consider the impacts of and responses to those trends, that could sustain, accelerarate, slow, or potentially reverse them. In fact one of the […]
Fellow futurist Mark Pesce is an old friend. We first actually connected when he spoke at my Future of Media Summit 2008, but I had long before being inspired by his work, writing about Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML), which Mark co-developed, in my first book. We happened to live 100 meters from each other […]
The world has always been uncertain. Now perhaps it is more uncertain than ever before, not least in that new uses of technology are shifting the structure of society, business, and government, amplifying the manifold unknowns of the COVID-19 pandemic and how it might play out. In the past many leaders sought a sense of […]
Since the advent of coronavirus here has been a lot of work put into building virtual events. However we are now realizing that having virtual audiences is an essential part of creating great events, energizing sportspeople, speakers, and performers and creating a positive feedback loop that is at the heart of a great in-person event. […]
Among the insights that John Hagel shared in our recent conversation on The Virtual Excellence Show was how to frame change for leaders. From his decades of experience he says that you must focus on opportunity. Emphasizing threats simply increases resistance to change. What makes this easier today is that fundamental shifts in the economy […]
Despite the deep challenges of the last decade, now overlaid with the dramatic impact of the pandemic, physical retail absolutely has a future. Much of that future will be through integrating useful technologies into the in-store experience to compete with the purely online experience. This morning a segment on the Sunrise national breakfast show on […]
One of my oldest and most central themes in my work as a futurist is interfaces. How humans can and will interact with technology will shape not just our future, but indeed who are. We have only relatively recently begun to move beyond keyboard, mouse and screen interfaces to voice and a handful of early-adopter […]
Since March many people feel they have been caught in a ‘Zoom hell‘ of back-to-back video calls throughout their waking hours. While this would have seemed futuristic a few decades ago, it already feels deeply tired. We have all experienced the problems with engagement, attention, and effective collaboration on video-conferencing calls. One of the most […]
For the last couple of months I have been selectively sharing conversations, tutorials, and highlight videos from The Virtual Excellence Show on this blog, but I haven’t written anything about the show itself. This is the story of the show and the most important things I’ve learned so far. The last time I spoke in-person […]
