Recently in Scenarios Category
A few days ago I spoke at the opening dinner of a strategy offsite for a professional firm, on the topic of ‘Thinking About The Future‘. It is a very common style of engagement for me, being briefed to set the broadest possible mental frame for executives before their in-depth discussions on directions for the
Scenario planning as a management discipline has a long and rich pedigree. It is just one of a wide variety of tools and processes that have been developed to help executives and organizations build strategies and succeed in an uncertain world. However almost 15 years experience in applying a wide variety of strategic futures tools
Continue reading Scenario Planning in Action: What, Why, Success Factors, and Process
Towards the end of each year I share some thoughts on what awaits in the year ahead. It is actually a lot easier to look years into the future than just a single year, as while we can readily discern broad trends, the major events in a year are usually unforeseeable, though they may express
Continue reading 12 Themes for 2012: what we can expect in the year ahead
I caught up with fellow futurist Kristin Alford last week, yet another first time face-to-face meeting after a long time interacting online. It seems most of the people I meet these days are people I know from Twitter. Kristin pointed me to some of what her company Bridge8 is doing in creating animated videos about
Continue reading Animated excursions into the future: the extraordinary implications of utility fog
Back in the late 1990s I did considerable work applying scenario planning to financial risk management, using qualitative approaches to managing risk as a complement to quantitative methodologies such as Value at Risk. However financial institutions were generally very slow to acknowledge the value of anything not fully quantified, so I shifted my attention to
I recently gave a presentation at an offsite meeting of the leadership team of a global professional services firm. I was asked to speak about the future of business, and to be provocative, which is usually my objective in that kind of situation – it’s not very valuable if you can’t get people to think
Continue reading Why high performance organizations will thrive on uncertainty and lack of control
I am writing this in the air over the Rockies, flying back from a scenario planning workshop I ran for a client yesterday. Over the last dozen years that I have been running scenario planning projects I have observed that corporate interest in scenario planning is cyclical. The time horizons that executives think in tend
Continue reading 4 reasons why an increased pace of change means greater unpredictability
The current edition of Fast Thinking magazine has a feature article titled ‘Know Future’ on “the future of futurists”. It looks at the history and background of the profession and goes on to interview a number of prominent futurists. It quotes me: Ross Dawson says becoming a futurist is pretty straightforward. “You can claim you
The future of enterprise technology is a massively important theme, which impacts organizations, vendors, governments, and indeed society at large. Taking each of these perspectives provides a different view on how the space is evolving. One of the most interesting perspectives is from the very center of the fray: the IT department itself. It needs
I have just attended a very interesting presentation by Stuart Candy on prototyping possible worlds. Stuart joined global design firm Arup six weeks ago after finishing his Ph.D on experiential futures at Hawaii’s Research Center for Futures Studies. Below are some of my live notes from his presentation plus a few reflections. Stuart uses the
Continue reading Experiential futures and the intersection between design and foresight
Madston Black, a top-tier leadership development consultancy, recently engaged me to do some executive briefings on the future of business as part of some of leadership programs they are running for major Australian organizations. For two of their major client leadership development programs, Madston Black also brought out Professor Ron Heifetz, Founder of the Center
A couple of weeks ago I flew to Perth to participate in a scenario planning project for a mining company. As I struck up conversation with the person next to me, it turned out we would both be presenting and contributing to the same workshop. I was kicking off the two-day workshop with a broad
Continue reading Infographic: Used mobile phones yield 1000 times more gold than gold ore
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About the Blog author
Ross Dawson is globally recognized as a leading futurist, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, strategy advisor, and bestselling author. He is Founding Chairman of AHT Group, which consists of 3 companies: consulting, publishing, and ventures firm Advanced Human Technologies, future and strategy firm Future Exploration Network, and events company The Insight Exchange.
Ross is author most recently of Getting Results From Crowds, the prescient Living Networks, which anticipated the social network revolution, the Amazon.com bestseller Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships, and Implementing Enterprise 2.0. (click on the links for free chapter downloads). He is based in Sydney and San Francisco with his wife jewellery designer Victoria Buckley and two beautiful young daughters.
Books By Ross Dawson (Incl. Free Chapters)
Articles and Reports
Future of Media Report 2008
Future of Media Report 2007
Future of Media Report 2006
Executive Insights into Enterprise Social Network Strategy
Future of the Media Lifecycle
Future of Media: Strategy Tools
Executive Insights into Enterprise 2.0
Web 2.0 Framework
Trend map 2007+
Extinction Timeline
SAP White Paper: Service Delivery Innovation
White Paper: The Seven MegaTrends of Professional Services
CNET/ University of Virginia White Paper: How Technology Purchasing Decisions Are Really Made
PM Network magazine's lead article on virtual teamwork (440KB), featuring Ross Dawson on the cover
Microsoft Strategic White Paper: How To Lock-in Your Clients (1.1MB)
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