What if you could be enticed into saving more money just by being made to look older? What if you could be encouraged to exercise with greater regularity by appearing to be more overweight, and what if you could be made to become more environmentally-conscious by cutting down “virtual” trees. The aforementioned ideas might sound [...]
For some time now, I have been advocating (here and here) the idea of getting a reverse mentor. (In fact, I even have a reverse mentor. His name is Simon Anderson and he is one of the most promising young futurists I know.) Why a reverse mentor? The world is moving so fast that it [...]
The first chapter of my new book, Higher Unlearning: 39 Post-Requisite Lessons for Achieving a Successful Future, is entitled “Unlearn or Die.” To better appreciate why unlearning will be such a critical skill in the future, I’d like to share this paragraph from Josh Linkner’s outstanding article, Vu Deja: Tricking Yourself Into Looking At Problems [...]
In my 2008 book on the future, Jump the Curve: 50 Essential Strategies to Help Your Company Stay Ahead of Emerging Technologies, I recommended that people should add “a healthy dose of science fiction” to their regular reading diet. Why? Because such writings can provide insight–and guidance–about future technologies as well as the future demands [...]
Recently, Cisco announced that mobile web video communications are expected to grow “250-fold by 2015.” This has a number of implications but have you ever thought about how this change will impact office design? Cisco and Microsoft have. The former has discovered that 35 percent of it’s office cubicles now stand empty because its employees [...]
One of the more valuable tools when attempting to anticipate future changes is to look for “weak signals.” As a professional futurist, I have developed a number of methods over the length of my career to help clients and audiences do this. First, I begin by framing the future. This “frame,” however, is usually much [...]