Australia’s 2020 Future – the Futurist’s report
As preparations continue for the Prime Minister Rudd’s ‘1000 heads’ ideas summit in Canberra in April, a group of Australia’s leading futurists are gathering in Melbourne this weekend for the ‘Australia 2020 Futurists Summit’. The futurists attending the summit work across Australia, in corporate, not for profit and Government agencies in a variety of fields and will look at each of the key areas the Prime minister has flagged as critical themes for development.
Given the gathering will be of a ‘Tell of Futurists’, you’d expect that the group would be ahead of the main game, which of course it will be by about 6 weeks. The aim of the 2020 Futures Summit is to pre-respond to the larger gathering in April and to produce a report that will have quite a pragmatic flavour to it, whilst allowing for deeper consideration of the challenges that lie ahead.
Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber commends the Prime Minister on the initiative whilst cautioning the difficulties of taking too ‘thin’ an approach to a serious consideration of the future: “The willingness to gather a thousand people in Canberra to generate ideas for each themes is a very interesting approach and takes much from the ex British Prime Minister Blair’s forums in the UK. Two of the biggest challenges for the upcoming gathering in Canberra will centre around an effective facilitation process which might require some of the Zing-type data software for it to work quickly at gathering ideas effectively, and for there to be enough depth of discussion and peeling back the layers to ensure any idea has an element of pragmatic value, no matter how left field it might seem initially. In fact the bigger challenge might be in too few ‘out there ideas’ being generated if the process encourages group think. That’d be a difficult hurdle given the number of people and the limited time involved”
The 2020 Futures Summit report will be made available to a select number of media who will be embargoed from releasing it until after the PM’s summit has been completed. “Allowing for the individual perspectives being brought to the tables in Canberra, it is important for people attending the PM’s summit to be as ‘clean from recently influenced bias’ as possible. We are already seeing a flood of activity of press releases and discussion papers pouring into mainstream media which I suspect is in no small part an attempt to shape the type of thinking of the 1000 people who make their way to Canberra” says Marcus Barber
“We want the quality of the depth of thinking from our Summit to be seen as additional to the thinking that emerges in Canberra in April, not an attempt to shape it before hand. The one big advantage we have as futurists is an ability to work with multiple perspectives simultaneously and to look for confirming, disconfirming and alternative perspectives, a luxury that time constraints will probably not be afforded to the Canberra meeting”
Media inquiries regarding the 2020 Futurists Report can be directed to Rebecca Camilleri at August on 9445 0326
Potentially the biggest area of untapped competitive advantage (and arguably one of the biggest areas where costs could be reduced) is within supply chains. Most approaches to Supply Chain Management are linear and isolated with one player trying to squeeze the other with no regard to the overall effect of the full supply chain. It’s…
Read More >There’s a shift underway in the mining industry that will likely catch Australian airlines out if they aren’t paying attention – the shift toward ‘remote’ mining. Remote mining is being pushed by the automation ability across all aspects of current mining technology, which at the basic level, means that fewer humans are needed on site…
Read More >Simple question really. Or is it? In this quick article I provide an overview of the difference between strategy that is D.E.A.D and A.L.I.V.E Think of it as a potential ‘do this’ collection for your Organisation You can download the article for free here – ‘Is your Organisational Strategy D.E.A.D or A.L.I.V.E?’
Read More >Lots of thoughts for the year already underway, with some covering a range of ideas from ‘don’t cut corners on relative incidentals when the project is significant for you’ to ‘you can’t change your approach if you keep thinking inside the same box’. But for now a reminder about planning for your future: If you…
Read More >In thinking about the year ahead I’ve decided to call it the International Year of Resilience. With everything that appears to be going on in the world there’s unlikely to be any quick fixes and so I provide for you here below, my Top 10 Tips for building more resilience into your lives. If you…
Read More >The United Kingdom’s Committee on Climate Change has released a report that shows rising household energy costs are not caused by the apparent burden of environmental policies. Instead the core factor is increases in costs increases of Oil and Gas as the Energy resource sector taps into a ‘growth’ market. You can have a…
Read More >After a great although too brief trip to Islamabad in Pakistan, I joined Vicki Kerrigan on ABC Radio Darwin to discuss the idea of official reports for travelers and who you should believe. Sometimes we fear the unknown because we aren’t well enough informed. In the absence of any other information, the Official line is…
Read More >It’s taken me a while to get the Tourism Thinking piece together given the extensive travel this year that has enabled me to assess where Australia’s tourism is not getting things right. This update won’t paint the full picture (a couple of clients have first crack at this research) but it is important enough to…
Read More >I alert you from the outset that I’m about to make a massive leap of potentially an supportable scientific theory in discussing a potential Wildcard event. If you’re only interested in the concrete real stuff, head elsewhere after you get about half way. I’m going to make a massive leap first of all and then…
Read More >n this MP3 with Paul Dale on ABC Darwin radio we chat about the recent fly past of a large chunk of rock called Asteroid YU55, and what we might do as a species in managing a potential Asteroid impact. We also diverge into the concept of mining Asteroids for their mineral content as the…
Read More >