Futuring

A regional business newspaper, the Valley Business Report, is sponsoring a Foresight Workshop for business people in May in Mission, Texas. This will be about futures/foresight methods and how to apply those methods in business, particularly in small business. This is a four-hour workshop, which allows business people to attend in the morning and be back in their offices in the afternoon.
The format that I’m planning is a personal futures approach, then a discussion of how each tool or method can be applied in a small business. As a result, I’m working on a supplemental workbook for small business.

I was thinking about this after reading blog entries from Patrick Tucker (who's been in Japan). . .

When writing scenarios, you must come to terms with the fact that the people in your scenarios will not think like you. Their assumptions on society, technology, economics and politics will come from a completely different set of data than your own. The only way to understand how the future might go, then, is to put yourself in their shoes. This is not easy, but it is the only way.

Professional futurists seek to achieve the highest standards of expert performance in all that they do and endeavor to live up to constructive thoughts at all times.

I’d like to underline the most important point from our podcast with World Future Society president Tim Mack yesterday. The study of the future is about fifty years old at this point, a fact that might escape you given the astonishment of major media every time they mention it.

In a January 26th New York Times op-ed, "25 Years of Digital Vandalism" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/opinion/27Gibson.html?scp=1&sq=gibson%...), William Gibson reflects on the Stuxnet attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. As a genuine futurist, Gibson looks to Stuxnet as a sign of the times--and a bellwether for the future.