For a Futurist, Focus is a Key Issue
What you look at, how you look at it and where you find your information are critical elements for developing far more effective strategy. Futures work is about removing the organisational blinkers to increase awareness of risks and emerging opportunities often through Environmental Scanning (ES). ES comes in all sorts of guises and the key to turning data into information or better yet, ‘knowledge’ requires an effective analysis framework.
Much of my current activity is geared around my co-founding of the Centre for Australian Foresight, a multi sector, cross functional research consultancy. We founded CFAF last year and kicked it off with an AsiaPacific Foresight Conference at the Perth Zoo
The book ‘Killing Trends – the Graceful Art of Innovation’ has been taken out of the freezer and is finally nearing completion! It’s taken me waaaaay longer than expected to finish this one and fingers crossed it’ll be just a few more months. I think 🙂
I’ve put my mind to: How GM Foods can be made to work and How to Stop Japanese Whaling in its Tracks (see articles below); Water Theft Increases – how society is likely to respond to increasing water restrictions, private storage capacity and opportunism; and Customer Service in a time of highly active consumers. I’m still yet to finish the book ‘Killing Trends – the Graceful Art of Innovation’ and have two others in development, so things are heating up!
My focus as a Futurist is also seeing me closely involved with The Australian Strategic Planning Institute which I have founded recently to help enhance the way in which organisations drive Strategic Planning and extract benefits from the process. The link between futures thinking and strategic planning ought to be explicit and unfortunately for most organisations, it isn’t. Other serious issues for strategic planning efforts include poor planning processes and a lack of accountability to the strategic plan the organisation develops. Hopefully TASPI will go some way to developing Strategic Planning into a much more effective discipline. Check out The Australian Strategic Planning Institute for further details. Remember if you’re looking to Find a Futurist, email us here
Over the past year I’ve been part of an advisory board for the Australian Bill of Rights Initiative and recently our group co-authored and submitted a small thought piece on the use of WIKIs as a means of engaging with stakeholders. You can find out more by visiting the ‘Re Public’ website link here Just recently I was asked to join the futures advisory board of the Lifeboat Foundation, a group looking to answer some of the existential problems for the species Homo Sapiens.
A Carbon Free Electricity generator idea is still developing bit by bit. The generator concept is much more fully developed than it was and I’ve met with a business advisor for suggestions and ideas for getting this thing to the market. This includes some very interesting opportunities for capital investment, Venture capital or a sell off/licensing of the IP. And with a chance to present at both the World Future Society in Vancouver in July and the Stockholm International Water Institute in Sweden in August, it’s already an active year
The Trucking Industry, as a key part of the wider Supply Chain and Logistics Industry is coming to the end of an era, right at the time when it should be being refreshed. Put simply, there just aren’t enough drivers for trucks, and to date, attempts to recruit more drivers have been less that what…
Read More >In case you haven’t had time to keep up with these events, here’s a quick overview of the Everyday Sexism project’s attempts to hold FaceBook to account for its explicit support of sexual violence against women as portrayed in the many permitted Facebook pages that promote rape, rape culture, and violence against women. Facebook appears…
Read More >Today I have a bee in my bonnet, so please look away if my frankness might bother you. In the last couple of days I’ve had yet another conversation with a Local Council planning team manager about Strategic Planning for their Council that bothered me a great deal. What really has me bothered is that…
Read More >Whilst many people have heard about Drones in terms of their military applications, the concept of micro drones and their use in civilian settings is not quite so well known. It appears that the surveillance capability that technologies like Drones provide, are edging their way into more social environments. That may or may not be…
Read More >The link below will take you to the audio of the discussion I had with Annie Gaffney on ABC Radio Sunshine Coast the day after the Opposition released its Broadband policy. There’s been much discussion about the perceived value or otherwise, and I flag my bias here upfront: As a small business owner likely to…
Read More >In the article I link to below, Diana G Oblinger, the President of EDUCAUSE offers the Higher Ed community some insights such as this one: we’ve moved on from the Information Age and are now in the Connected Age. Such a statement will come as quite a shock for many Higher Education Institutions and policy…
Read More >In case you haven’t heard, technology is making so many jobs redundant, that only the adaptable will survive. And when I say ‘jobs redundant’ I mean across EVERY conceivable industry and level of specialisation. Robotic surgery is now so good that not only can it be done remotely, it can be done without human intervention.…
Read More >Coca Cola, Lion Nathan and Schweppes have successfully challenged the Northern territory’s compulsory container deposit recycling scheme in the Federal Court. The scheme had seen recycling rates jump by 30% in just a few months and was widely applauded by the public as the right thing to do. Despite the overwhelming public support, Coca Cola…
Read More >If you’re looking for an accelerated course in Strategic Planning and Advanced Management techniques in the Philippines in July, then TruEventUs has a two day session coming up on the 4th and 5th of June. Marcus Barber, founder of The Australian Strategic Planning Institute will facilitate this intensive program. For full details You can…
Read More >Without putting too fine a point on it, most of us pay little attention to what we ‘deposit’ in our toilets each time the body needs to exit our bodily waste. And yet with a looming phosphate shortage around the world (along with other useful components) our personal waste streams are worth billions of dollars…
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