Here’s a bit of news. I’m setting up a UK and European office for Futures House, which is an Australian consultancy specialising in scenario planning. We’re still in the planning stage, but we’re aiming to launch in London in September. Key services will include scenario planning consultancy (running large turnkey projects, but also contributing process and people to much smaller in-house projects), research and report writing looking at the future of specific industries and professions and finally workshops aimed at facilitating client consensus on likely futures and the strategic implications thereof.

Our initial focus will be on just three industries, but we’ll consider anything interesting with an appropriate budget.

Andrew Crosthwaite, formerly Head of planning at Euro RSCG, has already signed up to work alongside me and I’m talking to an ex-McKinsey partner, an ex-government strategist and someone that used to work for KPMG. German, French and Italian partners are in the wings, although our initial focus will be the UK.

In terms of my other work there’s no significant change. The only thing that I am thinking of doing is moving my quarterly What’s Next report from every 3 months to every six months and to and reinstate the annual hard copy publication. The main reason for doing this would be time, but quality has become an issue too. I don’t know whether it’s just a temporary blip, but recently I’ve found it more difficult to source high quality content to comment upon.

This could be linked to current economic conditions (few new ideas or long-term thinking due to a focus on immediate survival) or it could be that long copy analysis is in decline due to shifts in how media is created and consumed.