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What’s Next: Top Trends | Diary of an accidental futurist – observations on current & future trends What’s Next: Top Trends Diary of an accidental futurist – observations on current & future trends SearchHome About this blog Post navigation ← Older posts The future really is here Posted on April 11, 2024 by Richard Reply Pre-order the future here. Publication date in the UK is June 5. US is June 25 I believe. https://www.dk.com/uk/book/9780241647479-the-childrens-book-of-the-future Posted in Books , Fear & anxiety , Future , Future for Kids , My Next Book , Robots , Sci-Fi , Science & technology , Science fiction writing , Teaching , Technology , The Future | Tagged children’s books , fantastic fututres , future , optimism | Leave a reply Never say never Posted on March 7, 2024 by Richard Reply About 20 years ago I had a conversation with the Marketing Director of a tobacco company in Asia Pacific. I was trying to sell him on the idea of creating some scenarios for the future of the industry. He liked the idea and ran it up the chain of command. The response from above was no point, there’s only one future scenario” (that the industry would disappear, and nobody would smoke). This was before the widespread introduction of e-cigarettes and vaping. But my mind at the time was somewhere else – and to some extent still is. The question for me then – as it now – is why do people smoke? I still don’t know, because the project never materialised, but my suspicion is it’s initially to do with rebellion and then perhaps relaxation or anxiety. If this were to be true then one might want to look at the deep drivers of rebellion, relaxation and especially anxiety. If, for example, there was a broader scenario where people were more anxious, this might drive a renaissance of smoking (dependent upon availability and legal restrictions). My serious point here is never to say never. People get the future wrong for numerous reasons, but one of the key reasons is extrapolating from current trends, which often bend or change direction given enough time. Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a reply Where’s Watson? Posted on March 5, 2024 by Richard Reply Answers on a postcard please… Posted in Where’s Watson | Leave a reply 1947 Posted on February 27, 2024 by Richard Reply Not bad from 1947, a year before Orwell published 1984 with his telescreens. Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a reply Children’s Book of the Future Posted on February 27, 2024 by Richard Reply Getting close now… Posted in Children’s Book of the Future , Future for Kids , My Next Book , New Book | Leave a reply Tired all the time Posted on February 18, 2024 by Richard Reply Mark my words, there’s something going on here. People are tired of living in the world we’ve created. One where human contact is being removed by technology and where evil is repeatedly triumphing over good. Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a reply Progress… Posted on January 31, 2024 by Richard Reply 2nd edit stage…… Posted in Books , Children’s Book of the Future , Future for Kids , New Book | Leave a reply Welcome Baby Jesus! Posted on December 30, 2023 by Richard Reply Some readers may remember Ted, my lovely little lockdown lamb (not quite so little anymore). What you won’t know is that Ted was a crossbreed, so the farmer that actually owned him had him castrated to keep his flock pure bred. Trouble is he may not have been castrated very effectively. Ted has had a son. And get this. His son was born in a stables on Christmas day. In the morning. He’s been named Jesus, obviously. If anyone wants to bring Baby Jesus some birthday presents might I suggest some gold as it’s currently a record price. If you must you could bring Frankincense, but keep the Myrrh. PS – I’ve just got the headline: Father Ted and the Immaculate Conception. Posted in TED , Uncategorized | Leave a reply The Future of Futures Posted on December 22, 2023 by Richard Reply A university in the United Kingdom recently asked its students to write essays on whether the future was open or closed — an open future being one where anything could happen, a closed future being where a single or fixed future had become inevitable. Without exception the students all wrote essays about closed futures. But if there is one thing we can be certain of concerning the future, it is surely that it will always be uncertain. There must always be many ways in which the future could unfold or be amended. We have been engaged as futurists for more than 30 years with the needs of businesses, governments, and non-profit organisations to grasp the nettle when it comes to the question of What’s next?” and to investigate how future-proof is our organization to the cluster of change agents circling our operating environment. Over this time, we have come to think of the future as a terra incognita, a landscape that some people may claim to have seen, but one where the terrain remains mostly unknown beyond some basic geographical and geological elements. The millions of people that will, as Oxford’s William MacAskill outlines in his breathtaking book What We Owe the Future , inhabit this cloud-covered land are also largely unknown, so we have an ethical responsibility to rehearse how we should behave towards them to optimize the outcomes both for them and ourselves. But the more we have grappled with the uncertainties of the future it has become increasingly clear that the future only exists in the present. Adapting Benedetto Croce’s aphorism about history, all futures are contemporary futures. They are not, after all, imagined destinations but rather complex world views through which we look at today. They are reflections of who we are, where we have been and where it is that we would like to travel next. All futures are contemporary futures. They are not, after all, imagined destinations but rather complex world views through which we look at today. They are reflections of who we are, where we have been and where it is that we would like to travel next. T. S. Eliot, like many artists (for example, where would modernist architecture be without Mondrian?), got there before us. In Burnt Norton , the first of his Four Quartets, he said: Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. …. human kind Cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Cataloguing these world views is not hard provided we own up to what we are really doing. It is notable that we futurists are rarely employed to predict or forecast the future. Rather we are hired to either validate a journey that is already well underway or to fashion alternative futures or scenarios that flow logically from the contemporary present. An Australian client interested in the future of primary industries, selected one future scenario from the four worlds we had created as a preferred future and set ing this prediction” as the purpose of the scenario planning exercise. In other words, the future was an excuse to justify a pre-existing view of the future or perhaps to reassure everyone that everything would turn out alright. In scenario work the most important building blocks are what we call the critical uncertainties shaping the external environment in which scenario-client organisations operate. Over the last 30 years, across 30 or so projects, the favored drivers of change we have encountered have been in areas such as China & Geopolitics, Climate Change & Environmental Sustainability, Artificial Intelligence & Technology, Generational & Social Change, Economics & Happiness – not forgetting Culture Arts, & Entertainment Foresight is, inevitably, an...