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