Of the 41 posts to ForesightCulture during 2011, the 12 below got the most visitors. The list reflects my main focus: the art and craft of exploring the future. Two posts got particularly personal for futurists, and drew a lot of interest from people in the field:
“I am a futurist, leave off the quote marks” and “A typology of futurists”
Just one post on the “content” side, i.e. about the future, made it in too, a 2021 scenario of a shopper.
Here are the top posts for 2011 in order:
- Get comfortable with complexity — How we have to fight the tendency to explain change as have a single cause, and embrace that things are complex: many forces, interacting.
- Foresight tool: A simple scanning technique to open up your thinking — A simple tool for triggering more and deeper thinking in your environmental scanning.
- I am a futurist. Leave off the quote marks! — Why futurist is a genuine profession. How futurists bring value. An argument to leave off the air quotes when you talk about futurists.
- A typology of futurists — Musing over different “types” of futurists; what they do and why it’s powerful.
- 5 critical things in foresight — The five things you must have for foresight: a purpose, a mindset, a habit, a toolkit, and a community.
- The short-term view and the long-term view — How we need to acknowledge, but not limit our thinking to, people’s immediate, near-term concerns.
- Foresight illustrated: Choosing how broad a view to take when exploring the future — A visual model for exploring “what future?” and how far into the future you should look (your time horizon).
- Get comfortable with uncertainty — How you have to tolerate uncertainty, and help others do so, when you explore your future.
- Offsetting your suburban, middle class, white collar bias — Ways to relieve the biases you may bring to looking at the future by getting out and seeing how things are made.
- A 2021 shopper’s path to purchase — A scenario of a possible 2021 consumer experience: the consumer’s path the purchase, enabled by technology.
- 9 things that “lock us in” in our thinking — Nine ways our thinking is narrowed, clouded, or misguided, and some advice on what to do about it.
- Experiencing the future Part 1: Getting beyond analysis and changing minds — Comparing the problems of the historian/archaeologist and futurist in getting people to deeper understanding, and a call for the experiential in foresight.
Thanks to all my readers for their interest this year. Have a terrific holiday season and a happy new year.
