What have I been up this? I’m glad you ask, dear reader. On Thursday I did a half-day workshop at the London Business School for a group of South African students. The workshop was on futures thinking and was interesting because many of the trends that I usually talk about do not apply in South Africa. For example, demographics are very different and the country faces some particular health issues also. If you are not familiar with the Mont Fleur or Dinokeng Scenarios for South Africa check them out (see link comments below).

The other thing I did this week was have dinner with Napier Collyns, co-founder of GBN. Or rather I didn’t. He was seated too far away and we only snatched five minutes conversation about reading, generational shifts and intelligence. This event was put together by a very smart guy called Noah Raford who is studying for a PhD in crowd-sourced scenarios at MIT.

Anyway, I did have a fascinating chat with one guy much older than myself who was lamenting the death of slide rules. His point was that we have lost thinking in terms of orders of magnitude. In the olden (slide rule) days one only got answers ranging from 1-10. You had to apply an order of magnitude to this and this made you think. I thought this was an interesting point.