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Futurist Friday: A Dark View of the Next Urbanism
Military people are professional pessimists. Which I guess is a good thing, since we want them to be prepared for the worst. Back in the 1950s, Herman Kahn (often cited as the father of scenario planning) helped the US envision potential … -
Futurist Friday: Immersing Yourself in Your Fears
Today’s video–the Many Sad Fates of Mr. Toledano–is longer than my usual FF suggestion, but it is so sad, weird and thought-provoking I’m serving it up anyway. It would be well worth taking 24 minutes during lunch, … -
Monday Musing: Electoral futures
In today’s brief musing I want to draw your attention to a piece by Philip Kennicott in yesterday’s Washington Post.In “Would Donald Trump make art great again?” Kennicott pens a short scenario of what the arts … -
Playful strategy development for museums
When I tell people I’m a futurist, I inevitably get some jokes about crystal balls and Tarot decks. Ironically, I actually HAVE a Tarot deck on my desk: one that I’ve hacked to create a “forecasting deck”—a clever tool to help people … -
Summer Reading: What’s on my iPad
I never have enough time for long-form reading, but every summer I queue up a few things and make time to dive into them. Preferably sitting on the porch. With lemonade. And cats. Here are the next four on my list—these summaries are based … -
The Future of Storytelling
On a recent series of flights across the country I burned through Scott Westerfeld’s “Leviathan” series: three Steampunk-style alt-history novels. One fundamental premise of strategic foresight is that any area of … -
Futurist Friday: Past Visions of Future Highways
It is fun, and instructive, to revisit the future as envisioned by past visionaries–in this case, Disney. This [8:47] min short from 1958 envisions color-coded highways that defrost themselves, parking elevators and self-driving cars … -
Futurist Friday: I Think, Therefore I Am
Some futurist scenarios are more probable than others. But even those that seem wildly improbable help us see the present in a new light. The March, a lyrical animation (5 min) wrote, directed, and animated by Josh Fortune for the Sci-Fi … -
Spend Some Time Daydreaming the Future
Humans are natural storytellers. That should make my work easy, because the apex of strategic foresight is using storytelling to plan for the future. Futurists call these stories “scenarios,” and while they have a very serious purpose, … -
Dark Futures: Nonprofit Fragmentation
I wanted to start the year on a positive note, I really did. But I find myself writing about a middle-of-the-night worry, instead.What gave me nightmares? Not a bad dinner, unfortunately, but a steady diet of sobering news. I spent most of …
Tag: Scenarios
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