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
Today some friends are burying their father who died last week after his health took a sudden downturn. One of them, Penny got the urgent call to get to hospital. Penny is a conservative driver at the best of times and on this occasion was aiming to get through traffic as best as she could…
Read More >Cyclone Yasi heads towards Queenslands North East coast this morning with significant concerns for residents. There is potentially an added danger based on the way cylones work. Typically a cyclone needs two things – heat and water, which is why they can dissipate quickly once they head inland. However Yasi hits following a couple of…
Read More >As promised, the wash-up to my experience with the toll-road operator Eastlink and what I regard as a pretty poor approach to Customer Service. However as I am treating this is the International Year of Solutions, I’m not complaining without making suggestions for improvement, which I have done You can download the document here…
Read More >The floods are under way throughout the majority of Queensland and now into northern New South Wales and all we can do is hang on and wait to see the impact. Unfortunately it looks like the numbers of people who have lost their lives as a result is set to rise significantly beyond the 12…
Read More >Reckon it’s time we had a focus on getting things done and so I am declaring 2011 to be the ‘International Year of Solutions’. Seems to me that a lot of talk fests have been gobbling up the neuronal space for a few years now with insufficient ACTION being generated – just lot of promises…
Read More >Another stream of consciousness on the customer service theme that I come back to frequently. If you’ve ever received one of those scam emails from say ‘the past Minister of the Immigration and Business Department in Nigeria’ seeking your assistance at repatriating funds for which you’ll be paid a fortune, or those other scams claiming…
Read More >A shift is underway in television in Australia and it has nothing to do with digital versus analogue or the pay versus free shifts. Instead we are finally seeing the promise of TV as a medium of engagement. That promise sees a shift from the passive watching of TV (a ‘push’ approach) to the active…
Read More >That will be the question many will be asking leading up to the replay of the AFL Grand Final this Saturday between Collingwood and St Kilda. Regardless of the outcome, the AFL have already had their fairytale come true courtesy of a drawn game which is believed to have handed the AFL a bonus likely…
Read More >Being someone who questions the value of technology before climbing on board, I’ve been perhaps a tad slow to check out the Google Chrome web browser. Mistake! Given it’s speed and ease of use, the first couple of days have impressed me greatly and I’m mindful that I don’t have all the working of its…
Read More >In preparation for work with a couple of clients in the past fortnight I’ve had to throw myself into substantially more ‘tourist’ style activities than I have for quite some time in an attempt to answer the following question: ‘How do we get more people to come here?’ Yes there’s a lot of fun to…
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