4 reasons why an increased pace of change means greater unpredictability

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I am writing this in the air over the Rockies, flying back from a scenario planning workshop I ran for a client yesterday.

Over the last dozen years that I have been running scenario planning projects I have observed that corporate interest in scenario planning is cyclical. The time horizons that executives think in tend to be driven by the health of their business, the recency of prominent unanticipated events such as the global financial crisis or Middle East upheaval, and visibility of challenges to their business model.

In my experience interest in scenario planning is picking up strongly, reflecting a variety of recent surprises of various kinds, as well as a general feeling of prosperity that permits budgets for the like of scenario projects.
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Notes on the future of distributed work and organizations

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I am sitting in the lounge at Sydney airport, about to fly to San Francisco. It is the ease of the iPad that allows me to put up this post on the fly.

I came straight to the airport from a media panel organized by Cisco to follow up on their Connected World research study. Below are the notes I managed to catch on my iPad as we spoke..

The panellists were:
Senator Kate Lundy, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister
Jacob Murray-White, Head of Salmat’s Customer Solutions at Home Programme
Fernanda Afonso, National Chair of Australian Psychological Society and Specialist, Freehills.
Ross Dawson, Futurist

Les Williamson, Managing Director of Cisco Australia, told the story of how Cisco was born from love. Two academics at Stanford University were in a relationship, but worked on opposite sides of the campus. They created a multi-protocol router to communicate, started building them commercially in a garage, got funded, and grown spectacularly since then.

Below are live notes from the panel. I haven’t attributed them as they sometimes bring together comments from several people or my interpretation. It was a fascinating discussion.
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How do you become a futurist?

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The current edition of Fast Thinking magazine has a feature article titled ‘Know Future’ on “the future of futurists”. It looks at the history and background of the profession and goes on to interview a number of prominent futurists. It quotes me:

Ross Dawson says becoming a futurist is pretty straightforward. “You can claim you are a futurist and people either believe you or they don’t.”

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The latest robots are virtually indistinguishable from people

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Almost five years ago now I wrote a post titled Being in two places at the same time which described how Professor Ishiguro, a Japanese roboticist, had created a robot replica of himself so he could give lectures at his university without enduring the commute from his home.

The robot, named Geminoid HI-1 to emphasize that it was his twin, mimicked his expressions and movements. Having this doppelganger meant that he could send it (or indeed multiple versions) out to represent him in the world.

After a sequence of other Geminoids, the state of the art has become startlingly good. The following videos show Geminoid DK, which is the twin of Associate Professor Henrik Scharfe of Denmark’s Aalborg University, designed in collaboration with Professor Ishiguro. Check out the videos.


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Developmental robotics: the cute baby robot who will grow up to be just like you

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We are at the cusp of a new phase of robotics, where some of what has been promised to us for decades will come to fruition. An example of this is the iCub, a humanoid baby robot that can learn, emulating human cognition and development. This is the field of ‘developmental robotics’: creating robots that can learn and develop their capabilities over time.

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Six trends for 2011 and beyond on how businesses can tap the power of the web

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The very dynamic Adam Franklin and Toby Jenkins of Bluewire Media recently did a video interview of me, asking me about the trends driving how the web will shape business.

Here is the video, with a summary of my headline points below. (Also see Bluewire Media’soriginal post of the video , which has my comments written up in greater detail.)

What do you see the future of the web being for businesses?

The fundamental trends include:

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We will need better filters as spurious news explodes: the curious case of the king of Saudi Arabia buying Facebook

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Earlier today ‘satirical’ website DawnWires published a story titled Saudi King to buy Facebook for $150 billion to end the revolt: Goldman Sachs to advise. The article was published in the LoLNews category, and the bottom of it says “Sunday Humor… (Sunday Humor article at Dawnwires.com are meant to humor our readers. They may or may not be the truth.)”

The article was taken up by a number of mainstream news sites in the Middle East, including Tehran Times (quoting “inside sources”) and Egyptian media, as noted by Google exec Wael Ghonim. The original story on DawnWires shows almost 30,000 Facebook shares and over 30,000 shares on other channels, suggesting a lot of people have seen this now.

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When will tablets be given away for free? Perhaps before the end of this year

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When we launched our Newspaper Extinction Timeline I noted that tablets similar to the iPad of today will cost less than $10 and given away for free by the end of the decade, a prediction that interviewers have frequently questioned me on since. 

I have since realized that tablets are likely to be given away far earlier than this, probably first bundled with content subscriptions. However it is not just publishers who would consider subsidizing the cost of a free tablet. Marketers may find it less expensive than traditional advertising to reach the right audience by giving them tablets which embed carefully presented messages. Consumer services companies such as banks could provide handy interfaces within tablets to embed and broaden relationships with select customers.

The following chart comes from John Walkenbach’s blog via Kevin Kelly, suggesting that Kindles will be given away for free by November 2011.


Source: John Walkenbach
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The Future of Customer Relationships: notes on where they are going

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I’ve just finished a teleconference on The Future of Customer Relationships (follow the link for an overview), hosted by Focus.com and Brian Vellmure.

The panellists were:
Ross Dawson
Dr. Graham Hill
Dr. Michael Wu
Denis Pombriant

Our discussion will be available shortly as an mp3. For now, here are a few quick notes I took from the discussion. We certainly didn’t have the time to cover the full scope of the future of customer relationships in our 45 minute discussion, but we did get across some very interesting issues.

We started by talking about the big picture, where I covered a few of the themes from my map of the ExaTrends of the Decade.

MapoftheDecade_500w.jpg

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The future of business: choosing the industries that will prosper in the decade ahead

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The cover story on the current issue of MyBusiness magazine is on The Future of Business: Businesses to seek – or flee – in the next decade.

It features ideas from three futurists: myself, Bernard Salt of KPMG, and Christine Christian of Dun & Bradstreet.

Here are a few of the quotes from me they used in the article. I will do a separate post tomorrow that runs through some of my ideas on the specific industries that will grow and shrink in the coming decade.

Ross Dawson, a futurist and Chairman of Future Exploration Network, advises that it is not important to pick which industries will rise or fall. Canny business people, he believes, will try to preduct what those changes will mean for the way business is conducted. “It does not make much sense to think about rising or shrinking industries,” he says. “It makes sense to think about where value is going.”

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