These days we’re used to seeing things move quickly: new products, new ways, each more extraordinary than before. We live in an age of anticipation. We anticipate the new; whether it frightens us or excites us, we anticipate change. In many ways this has made us all prognosticators, seers of tomorrow. But as a number [...]

In part 1 I touched briefly on some of the restrictions that, if we’re not careful, models can impose on our visions of the future. By focusing on known variables and extrapolating both the consequences of the interactions of those variables and the interactions themselves, models can lure the unsuspecting into a belief that these [...]

With the exponential (or near exponential) growth in computer processing power and speed, the tendency to look to silicon for answers about the future increases. Particularly in the case of complex systems, with many drivers, variables, actors, inputs, and outputs, computational power can make the linkages and interactions seem more apparent and predictable. And, with [...]

It is true, and even some futurists forget, that not all change is radical or fast or even noticeable. Sometimes change will be entirely predictable. But we also know that sometimes, indeed, it will be radical, fast, and very noticeable, and the difference between those two states, and in the choatic interstice between them, is [...]

One of the things that we keep at the forefront of all of our government work is that policy making is about the future. Good policy is an attempt to bring about a particular vision of a particular future. For that reason, its development benefits from a strong, disciplined futures orientation, for instance: a recognition [...]

Futurists rarely talk about the impossible. Indeed, we spend much of our professional lives telling people nothing is impossible. When pushed, we’ll talk about probabilities and improbabilities, but we just can’t commit to impossible. With one exception: it is impossible to know the future. Instead, like quantum physicists, we imagine a cloud of potential futures. [...]

Over the last few years we’ve seen a number of stories cropping up from all over the world of governments – both local and national – paying students to attend school. These programs have covered elementary, secondary, and tertiary schooling, and are proliferating. Currently there are a number of counties and cities in the US [...]

A recent mid-day radio program here in Washington DC had a couple of very well-informed, well-educated, and articulate commentators talking about the green economy. One, at some point early in the hour went out of her way to say something along the lines of ‘that [something] is a trend…well no, I don’t mean trend as [...]

A central discipline in systems thinking is a rigorous and constant appreciation of context.  Nothing can be understood – really – unless you’ve figured out two things.  The first step in understanding is teasing apart the relationship between the thing you’re studying and everything else in the system. The second step is understanding not only [...]

In the US, as elsewhere in the world, the climate change debate has been defined by two extremes. On one end are the apocalyptic oracles; on the other, the denying pollyannas. As in most modern debates, the war for attention and persuasion has been waged across the media. In this effort, far and away, the [...]