Last night media futurist Gerd Leonhard , Richard Watson, author of Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years, and I caught up for dinner. Gerd is in Sydney for the first time for a couple of events, including The Insight Exchange’s Creating Value With Content on Tuesday (see the event review), and Richard happens to be in Sydney amidst a hectic global speaking schedule.
We had a fascinating discussion, largely on the future of content, and in particular how to leverage our own content. As futurists (I will write a blog post soon on ‘why I am happy to be called a futurist’ – that’s another story) what we sell is content in a variety of formats.
The most prominent monetizable channels we have are speaking, consulting (which can take a variety of forms), and books and reports (which now also can be packaged and sold in multitude of ways). Of course we all throw out plenty of free content on the web as part of the mix.
Since the role of a futurist is largely to provoke new and different thinking in your clients, direct interaction with clients creates the most value. Conversations, questions, and discussions help people to think in new ways. As a result, we spend a lot of times on planes. I am in the process of trying to use up well over half a million frequent flyer miles I have recently accumulated, and I suspect that Gerd and Richard travel even more than I do.
As such, one of the most interesting issues is how to engage directly with people at a distance. Certainly the plethora of remote presentation and video-conferencing platforms available now are useful in creating engagement, but we need to move beyond these.
We have all long been interested in tools such as Teleportec and other 3D, holographic or other ways to create and immersive and highly interactive experiences. Ideally we could work with a major provider to showcase their technologies.
One of the things I have begun to implement with some clients is online workshops. Here I work with a small team which is often distributed, start off with some pointed content, use specialist collaborative tools to discuss the implications as a group, and sometimes facilitate a strategy session through as far as creating an action agenda for the team. This approach can create high-value results for a fraction of the cost of having me run an in-person workshop.
We also discussed ways of bringing our ideas together to offer different approaches to clients. Gerd Leonhard and futurist Glen Hiemstra have recently set up the video channel Where Is It Going? to provide collaborative content and conversations on the future. We all might team up to do something broader. I’ll keep you posted.
Visualization of our activities and model
Our priorities for 2012
