Speculating about the future can help people and institutions cope with what might next
future is hard. But preparing for its uncertainties, while you lie on the beach, can at least be entertaining. It can also broaden the mind and subtly change your understanding of the present. Rather than the Great American Novel or a tall stack of chick-lit bonkbusters , we propose a different sort of summer reading. Speculating about the future, even if it is far-fetched, can help people and institutions cope with what comes next. For the best material, here are three places to look.
The first is scenario planning. This originated in the armed forces during the second world war and was pioneered in industry by Royal Dutch Shell, enabling it to react more quickly and effectively than rival oil firms to the oil shock of 1973. The central idea was to avoid betting everything on a single forecast and instead to test future projects and plans against a set of plausible scenarios.
The last speculative category is corporate anthropology and trendspotting. Many large companies employ roving anthropologists to seek out “edge cases”: examples of emerging technologies and behaviour that have yet to become widely adopted, but have the potential to go global. As the sci-fi novelist William Gibson once put it, “the future is already here—it’s just unevenly distributed.
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