Meeting of the Minds: Key future trends with Ross Dawson and Gerd Leonhard

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When I was in Switzerland recently, esteemed colleague Gerd Leonhard and I recorded a number of video conversations, produced by Jonathan Marks. Following ones on Big Data, the future of privacy, and the future of Switzerland, here is our conversation on Key future trends.

For more conversations about the future see Meeting of the Minds.

After discussing some of the major trends, we go on to discuss our own preferred futures.

Trends and implications that we raise and discuss in the video include:
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Citizen sourcing and the future of cities

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As I noted last week in my post on Four fundamental principles for crowdsourcing in government, one of the most powerful applications of crowdsourcing is in government.

PSFK has just launched a nice report and summary presentation on the future of cities, embedded below.

The third section of the report covers Citizen Sourced aspects of the future of cities, including:
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The role of the futurist as leader

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When I was in Amsterdam recently for client engagements I also gave a keynote to the Dutch Future Society about the role of the futurist.

It was a fascinating evening. Given the audience of futurists and those well engaged with the future, my presentation went further out than usual, and the ensuing conversation went beyond that, to issues including the nature of humanity, the ethics of the future, and more.

In coming months I intend to share some of the many fascinating strands that came up during the evening.

After the event I was interviewed by Stephan Verveen. The interview, embedded below, covers quite a few of the points raised during the evening.


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Four fundamental principles for crowdsourcing in government

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A few weeks ago I gave the keynote at the annual conference of the Business Improvement and Innovation in Government (BIIG) network of the Queensland Government, speaking on A Future of Crowds: Implications for Government and Society.

I have been increasingly pulled towards the government sector over the last years. I’m delighted, as changing the nature and structure of government is one of the most important aspects possible in creating a better future for ourselves.

In my keynote, after describing the underlying tenets of crowdsourcing and giving a varied set of examples of how they can be applied in government (which I’ll share in another post), in my final section on leadership I ran through the practical issues that drive success and finally offered four principles for crowdsourcing in government.

Here are the four principles in summary:
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As more jobs are automated, how many of us will still have productive work?

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There has been a lot of press the last few days about a paper The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?, published by the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology.

Almost all the coverage has been on the headline figure that 47% of US employment is at risk. However the paper provides many more interesting insights when you examine the detail.
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Reality check: intelligence agencies have been using social network analysis since the 1990s

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There is a big hubbub today over a New York Times article N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens.

I fail to understand why this is big news, since US intelligence agencies have been using social network analysis (SNA) for domestic purposes since the 1990s, and likely even before that. The only issue here is that the NSA is tasked with non-domestic surveillance, so is not supposed to gather data on US citizens. However other US agencies that cover domestic intelligence have long been using SNA.

Certainly recent revelations suggest the NSA appears to have data surveillance capabilities that exceed those of US domestic intelligence agencies, but there is no good reason to imagine the CIA, among others, doesn’t have access to equally good data to seed its social network and other analysis.

I have been focused on networks since long before I wrote Living Networks in 2002. In the July 22, 1997 issue of The Bulletin (at the time Australia’s equivalent of Newsweek) included an article I wrote titled Beware! Netmap may be watching, which described how an Australian software package called Netmap was being used by police and intelligence around the world, taking examples of the identification of insider trading and a serial murderer. I wrote:

“For nearly 10 years, Netmap has been used primarily in high-level security and intelligence analysis. In Australia clients include the NSW Police… and the Australia Tax Office, while in the United States, several secretive government agencies use the software.”


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[VIDEO] Conversation with Gerd Leonhard: The future of Switzerland

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When I was recently visiting Switzerland to deliver a keynote on the future of work my colleague Gerd Leonhard and I recorded a series of video conversations that are featured in his Meeting of the Minds series.

Following our conversations on the implications of Big Data and the future of privacy, here is our dialogue on the future of Switzerland.

While I haven’t spent a lot of time in Switzerland recently, I lived there for 13 years in my childhood, so do have experiences and perspectives to bring to bear on the topic.

Here are some of the issues we discuss in the video:
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Launch of CIO of the Future

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Advanced Human Technologies is, among other things, a publisher. To complement our existing ventures and publications, we have been building the platform and capabilities to generate more web publications and soon, more books and reports.

The general theme of our publications is the future, or in some cases what we need to do today to be successful in the future.

The first of our new phase of publications is CIOoftheFuture.com, looking at where the Chief Information Officer role is going.

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Exploring the future of investment management

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Last week I was in Amsterdam for the International User Community Meeting of SimCorp, a leading provider of software for the investment management industry. I gave the keynote on the Future of Investment Management and ran a half-day Executive Master Class on Creating the Successful Organisation of the Future.

Prior to founding Advanced Human Technologies most of my working career had been in financial markets with Merrill Lynch and capital markets with Thomson Financial, with my final role as Global Director – Capital Markets.

My initial client base when I established my company was largely in financial services, and I began to focus on the investment management industry, for a number of reasons.

In the later 1990s my work and research was split between the fields of knowledge management and intellectual capital on the one hand, and futures methodologies such as scenario planning on the other.
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Conversation with Gerd Leonhard: The future of privacy in a world of government data gathering

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I recently spend some time with Gerd Leonhard recording some conversations about the future. After our video on Big Data, here are our thoughts on the future of privacy in the wake of the disclosures of NSA and US government data gathering.

Some of the points we made in our conversation:
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