Staying with the futures theme – I’ve just come across a great looking project at CSIS called 7 Revolutions. The project’s aim is to promote strategic thinking and long term planning by identifying and analysing the most significant global trends out to the year 2025 and beyond. Do the quiz (some of the answers will undoubtedly surprise you). 7 Revs is quite similar to Tad Homer-Dixon’s 5 tectonic stresses, which in turn has similarities to James Martin’s chunky book on The Meaning of the 21st Century.
It’s become fashionable to think about the future. The UK Government has been doing interesting work on international futures up to 2020; the US National Intelligence Council are beginning their project on global trends to 2025; Chatham House is holding a conference on Security and Defence Futures; a new report ‘Uncertain future’ from the Oxford Research Group is published tomorrow (will blog about it); and there is a conference at Oxford University on different approaches to futures thinking later this year. By December, we may have the future all wrapped up.
Yet herein lies the problem. Scenario planning, futures thinking may be all very exciting, with academics and policy wonks becoming animated when some earnest character near the back row asks nervously about the growth of tupperware sales in the Asian market in 2013. But unless scenario planning exercises are actually used to inform government / business strategy, they become fruitless exercises in speculation. We need to move beyond the scenario planning work and begin to use these interesting and insightful exercises to inform current and future strategy.
