“The information you have is not the information you want.
The information you want is not the information you need.
The information you need is not the information you can obtain.
The information you can obtain costs more than you want to pay”
― Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
I spent yesterday with the MOD discussing what the world might look like in 2040. There were presentations on Sub-Saharan Africa and South and Central Asia along with an interesting discussion on the role of identity and how globalisation and the internet may be changing how individuals and groups see themselves. If anyone is interested there is a public domain document on some of the work to date that I can share.
Other thoughts…
Did anyone see Channel 4 News (UK) last night? There was a somewhat alarming piece on the emergence of a movement called Golden Dawn in Greece. Essentially, the economic downturn and austerity measures have released a surge of nationalism and racist violence. Even the police seem to be drawn into this by, in the first instance, questioning anyone that doesn’t look Greek and, in the second, locking up anyone that is in the country illegally. Tolerance, it seems, has gone out of the window.
This not only links with alienation and the rightwards shift of politics in Europe (especially the emergence of far-right parties), it also seems to have parallels with the 1930s and the second emergence of the KKK, which if my political memory serves me correctly, was fundamentally linked to austerity in the US.
Links: My blog post November 2011 about parallels with the 1930s
The problem, of course, with saying that you are not blogging for a while (previous post) is that when you start blogging again it could reasonably be expected that you will say something hugely important. Well sorry to disappoint, but I’m still working on that. In the meantime I have noticed a few things of relevance to anyone involved with thinking about the distant future, which I thought I’d share.
The first is a paper by Jessica Bland and Stian Westlake at NESTA (a UK organisation providing grants and research for innovation and early stage ideas). It’s called Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: A Modest Defence of Futurology. Click here for the PDF (24 pages). Thanks to Alex Ayad at Imperial College London for sending this.
Broadly, what it says is that new forms of data potentially provide a variety of new ways to forecast the immediate future. This, I guess, taps into the thoughts of Nate Silver and the area of ‘Big Data’. The paper also suggests that scenarios – done well I should add – can help organisations to become more resilient in the face of extreme change. Third, it suggests that narratives around how the future could look are essential ingredients in the innovation process. This last point is a good one because in my experience scenarios are generally thought of as a corporate strategy tool when in fact they can also be hugely useful for innovation, category management and risk also.
The other item of interest is a UK Defence Academy document about cyber-crime, although the real ‘find’ is a three by three matrix that Hardin Tibbs at Synthesys Strategic Consulting has developed. As Hardin explains it: “The ‘Cyber Gameboard’ consists of a nine-cell grid. The horizontal direction on the grid is divided into three columns representing aspects of information (i.e. cyber): connection, computation and cognition. The vertical direction on the grid is divided into three rows representing types of power: coercion, co-option, and cooperation. The nine cells of the grid represent all the possible combinations of power and information – in other words, cyberpower. The grid then allows interactions between cyber players to be mapped.” (Thanks to Oliver Freeman at Futures House in Sydney for sending this).
Get the whole report here.
The main image, BTW, is me standing by my Trends and Technology Timeline 2010-2050. It was in a meeting room of a German company earlier this week. They told me in advance that they liked the map and had printed it and put it on a wall, but I wasn’t expecting anything quite so large!
This isn’t the end, but it is the end of the beginning. After 9 years writing this blog I’ve decided that it’s too much. Too much of it is facile, superficial, shallow nonsense. At the very least far too much of what I write isn’t me writing at all. It’s me echoing banal platitudes that someone else has already recycled.
The occasional statistic is OK, but that’s what my brainmail newsletter is for. And there’s What’s Next too.
Anyway, enough. Enough of the pressure to post something (anything) daily. Enough thinking that if I don’t post something every day people will stop reading what I write. Enough writing without really saying anything. Most of all, enough time looking at a screen instead of looking out of a window and really thinking.
Instead of a daily post I will try to post something more substantial weekly or even monthly. It will hopefully be considered, edited, original and, most of all, me.