On September 12, 2008, the day before Hurricane Ike hit the Texas coast, the U.S. National Weather Service told people in low-lying, thinly-protected Galveston that "Persons not heeding evacuation orders in single-family one- or two-story homes will face certain death.” [Link] My futurist friend Andy Hines found it bizarre to watch for hours as that phrase, [...]
Just because your careful, reasoned look at the future makes a decision or conclusion clear to you, doesn’t mean everyone else will “get” your reasoning. When you have grasped how things are changing, and decided what should be done that is new and different, you still have to explain your thinking to others.
It’s hard to [...]
We may often get a breakthrough in thinking by changing the words we use. Linguists and psychologists have long debated how much language shapes how we think, but there’s little debate that it does. A powerful way to break down barriers to new thinking is to reconsider what words we use.I’ve learned a lot about [...]
The Long Now Foundation, and increasingly lots of others with an eye to the future, humanity’s prospects, and so on, use 5-digit dates, e.g. May 26, 02008. The Long Now website, notes: “The Long Now Foundation uses five digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in [...]
I wrote a while back a piece called “Talk to the Frog.” Mary Jane Naquin, of Informed Futures, Houston had shared a fable at the opening of a World Future Society General Assembly she chaired in Houston some years ago. I have always remembered the fable as a great way to make the point that [...]
I spend a lot of time thinking about effective communication in exploring the future, and have posted a number of entries on it (see: communication). Every time I give a talk or lead a workshop, I try to up my game and reflect on how it went, what worked, and what didn’t. I consider the [...]
J. T. Cobb, blogging at Mission to Learn recently wrote about a 60-second lecture series done at the University of Pennsylvania. This caught my eye because, first, I attended Penn for college and also because (note my previous post) I have been focused for a long time on how to be effective in presentations and [...]
And now for something completely different…..
I regularly give talks on the future. I’ve spoken to groups from second grade to senior citizens. I have given talks to members of dozens of professions, in different industries, and in different countries. I have evolved my approach over the years in an effort to make it work as [...]
Every time I have used versions of the diagram shown here with groups in workshops, conversations, and consulting visits, it has always helped to clarify and solidify people’s thinking. The other day, in a typical business workshop setting, I introduced it, and as I drew the diagram on a flipchart, I heard one of the [...]
I spent a little time on a beach beside the Gulf of Mexico the other week. It was beautiful, and sitting there, I felt totally optimistic about the future. But I also felt that optimism on a day’s visit to Sea World with my son. The people there were friendly, happy, reasonably healthy, and engaged [...]
