Familiarity Contraction Principle

Posted by admin on October 27th, 2010

Familiarity Contraction Principle 673

Familiarity Contraction Principle
The first time a person gets into a car and drives to some place new, the discovery process causes a heightened sense of awareness and the perception that time has slowed down. Each subsequent trip to that same destination involves fewer discoveries, less awareness, and the perception of less time spent to get there.
After enough trips, our brain goes on autopilot, and our sense of time collapses even further.
The “Familiarity Contraction Principle” is a concept that explains the perceived reduction in time, but also explains how our familiarity with a specific outcome or end goal will increase both the likelihood that it will happen, and the efficiency with which it will occur.
As we increase the body of information surrounding a specific aspect of the future, we increase our familiarity with it. Our ability to plan and manage our own future is directly related to how familiar we are with it, and that is where we can begin to uncover some truly profound insights.
First a little background. The idea of the Familiarity Contraction Principle was initially proposed by Drew Crouch, a good friend and inspiring top-level executive at Ball Aerospace, during one of our monthly meeting where we set out to solve some of the great problems of the world.
Our initial discussion was surrounding the perceived reduction in driving time, but upon further reflection, the implications began to grow.
Side Note:  The only known exception to this rule is driving through Kansas. For some reason, Kansas is a state that doesn’t let your brain go onto autopilot, and each trip is as long as the first. Maybe even longer. But I digress…
Foundational Bricks of Familiarity
As you will soon see, familiarity is an enormously valuable tool that can be applied to countless situations.
Example #1:  When entering a dark room, your first instincts are to search for queues. If there is a small amount of light, our impulse is to search for visual queues. Once we’ve decided how much we can rely on visual information we move on to our other senses, looking for auditory signals, smells, things we can touch, and perhaps even taste.
If it is a room we have been in before, we quickly race through our memory cells to correlate known information with whatever new information we are uncovering.
Once we reach the other side of the room, we have methodically logged everything we found to be pertinent, so any subsequent trip can take place in far less time.
The speed with which we can move through a dark room is directly related to how familiar we are with it.
Example #2:  A person who works on an assembly line is well aware of the efficiencies that can be gained through repetition.
The craftsmen who work on building clocks gain tremendous efficiency between the first time a clock is built and the hundredth time. After multiple iterations of the same routine, the assembly person instinctively knows where to reach for each subsequent part. They learn how best to grasp and position the new parts to insure the gears are aligned and components are properly seated.
Over time the movements become fluid and instinctive. There is little brainpower needed for each new assembly as the brain shifts into autopilot and the person doing the work simply “zones out,” letting their mind wander as their body simply goes through the motions.
Every manufacturing plant manager is well aware of the value of familiarity.
Example #3:  When children are first introduced to the alphabet, they are shown the letters repeatedly to improve “familiarity” between the character shape and the corresponding sounds used to form words.
The slow methodical process of connecting brain cell to brain cell is an exercise in familiarity-building and also an essential part of learning.
Over time the micro-decisions needed to distinguish characters becomes second nature and our brain jumps quickly past the individual letters and only sees the character groupings as complete words.
Other Familiarity Principles
Here are a couple other ways forces associated with familiarity have been demonstrated:
• Exposure effect – People tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them. In studies of interpersonal attraction, the more often a person is seen by someone, the more pleasing and likeable that person appears to be. Similarly, mere exposure typically reaches its maximum effect within 10-20 presentations, and some studies even show that liking may decline after a longer series of exposures. For example, people generally like a song more after they have heard it a few times, but multiple repetitions can reduce this preference.
• Hindsight bias – The hindsight bias states that people perceive certain events to be more predictable after the fact than they seemed before they had occurred. People believe that a disaster could have been avoided when they are actually misattributing familiar knowledge to a time before it was available.
Familiarity – Not Just About the Past
Contrary to popular thinking, familiarity is not just about the past. Rather, our ability to develop a greater level of awareness about the future can give us a significant competitive advantage.
Every vision of the future begins as a vague concept. If there is enough meat-on-the-bones the idea will begin to grow. But the traditional path for letting ideas grow by themselves tends to be extraordinarily slow. Weeks turn into months and months often turn into decades as ideas languish in their own inability to reach the minds that most need them.
In much the same way a bad food system fails to provide the needed food and nourishment to starving people in remote areas, our idea network has suffered from broken patterns and constant disconnects.
An idea left to survive on its own has little chance of surviving. But an idea combined with hundreds or even thousands of similar or related ideas can quickly reach the point of critical mass.
The Future as a Framework
Done correctly, idea clusters create their own center of gravity. If we create a vision of the future and couple it with the right mechanisms for attracting other ideas, suddenly it takes on a life of its own.
To better illustrate this concept, think of some future concept as a piece of papier-mâché that starts with a wire framework. Each new idea serves as another piece of paper added to the frame, giving it mass, dimension, and realism. Over time the original collection of wires becomes a visual, touchable finished work that we can both physically and intellectually interact with.
Similarly, if we start with some future concept and start telling stories about it, adding illustrations, animations, videos, surveys, and interviews, the entire body of work surrounding the original idea creates its own gravitational pull, making it what I like to call an “attractor.”
Attractionary Futuristics
An “attractor” is an idea that has reached critical mass. We are being drawn towards it.  Future events such as putting a man on Mars, finding a cure for cancer, developing a fusion energy reactor, or inventing a mass-market flying car are all well-known endpoints that have become staples of our culture, and a common theme in media as well as the global conversation. In our daily lives we often discuss these attractors without any awareness that the mere discussion of the topic reinforces its role as an attractor.
Attractionary Futuristics is the science of attractors where the effect that a known future event is having on present-day research is being studied. This is an emerging new science that I am involved in developing at the DaVinci Institute. Our research is currently being focused on identifying known attractors, the creation of new attractors, categories of attractors, range of influence, intensity of the attraction, and the directional vectors of these forces. An example of an attractor in the nanotech field is the creation of the ultimate small data storage particle and the effect it will on the information world.
Past visionaries have given us the mental pictures we hold today of the future.  Sometimes these visions come in the form of illustrations or artwork, other times in movies or video clips, but very often they start as nothing more than an idea tucked into the middle of some book or article that the author mentions in passing.
Known Attractors
One good illustration of this is DaVinci’s artwork. During his lifetime, Leonardo DaVinci dedicated over 500 drawings and 35,000 words to the concept of flying.  He used the tools at his disposal to convey the idea that flying would someday become both viable and practical.  His ideas managed to survive the centuries and eventually came to life, first in the form of Joseph and Jacques Etienne Montgolfier’s hot air balloon, and later with the Wright Brother’s flying machine in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, NC. Even though communication systems were crude, the DaVinci drawings served as a source of inspiration and as a blueprint of sorts for making it happen.
Other notable visionaries who have influenced our thoughts on the future include Jules Verne –visions of submarines and space travel; Gene Roddenberry – visions of cell phones and teleportation;  Arthur C. Clark – visions of talking computers and the space elevator;  Philip K. Dick – visions of flying cars and time travel;  and George Lucas – visions of robots and space travel.
In 1986 the field of nanotechnology was jolted into existence with K. Eric Drexler’s book Engines of Creation and his visions of what may or may not be possible once we have the ability to work with nano-scale materials. While some of his visions for molecular-scale factories and self-assembling machines remain the source of much discussion and debate, his visions served as a significant turning point for scientific research and commercial development.
The Familiarity Contraction Principle and Our Future
Our visions of the future determine our actions today.  Very often the images of the future that we hold in our heads have a profound impact on the way we lead our lives and the decisions we make at work. For this reason it becomes imperative that we continue to improve our visions of the future.
Here are the three core tenants of the Familiarity Contraction Principle:
• The better we become at developing frameworks for clustering our ideas, the more attractors we create
• More attractors will mean better visions and better tools for interacting with the future
• The more familiar we become with the future, the quicker it will happen.
Much like conductors directing an orchestra, people who work inside of a future attractor network will find themselves at the very point where the future is being created. They will become the “attractor reactor” where the future meets the present and life as we know it becomes a footnote in history.
By Futurist Thomas Frey

The first time a person gets into a car and drives to some place new, the discovery process causes a heightened sense of awareness and the perception that time has slowed down. Each subsequent trip to that same destination involves fewer discoveries, less awareness, and the perception of less time spent to get there.

After enough trips, our brain goes on autopilot, and our sense of time collapses even further.

The “Familiarity Contraction Principle” is a concept that explains the perceived reduction in time, but also explains how our familiarity with a specific outcome or end goal will increase both the likelihood that it will happen, and the efficiency with which it will occur.

As we increase the body of information surrounding a specific aspect of the future, we increase our familiarity with it. Our ability to plan and manage our own future is directly related to how familiar we are with it, and that is where we can begin to uncover some truly profound insights.

Read the rest of this entry »

business trends, future scenario, new strategy, powerful idea 8 Comments »

City of the Future – Part One

Posted by admin on October 20th, 2010

City of the Future 484

City of the Future – Part One
Great communities are founded on great ideas. At the same time, our most admired communities become a magnet, attracting the brightest minds. The relational effect is clear: Bright minds make a community great, and great communities attract bright minds.
In the future, communities will be designed around ways to stimulate new ideas using such things as creative environments, imagination sparkers, and inspirational architecture.
They will also be designed around new ways for people to meet people. Future communities will be judged by their vibrancy, their interconnectedness, and their fluid structures for causing positive human collisions.
Yet, at the same time, there is a diminishing value to physical proximity. In the middle of this relationship, with all things proximate, is where we can begin to comprehend how cities are changing, and how they will continue to change in the future.
The Diminishing Value of Proximity
To understand the city of the future, we must first understand the importance of proximity. As we try to uncover the driving forces of change, we need to look at the changing dynamic of our personal relationship with the physical community we find ourselves in.
In the past, we decided where to live, work, and conduct business based on how close we were to key assets. Very often that decision was based on things like:
1.) Income streams
2.) Goods & services
3.) Schools
4.) Friends & family
5.) Activity centers
6.) Weather
7.) Crime rate
8.) Airport
9.) Cultural opportunities
10.) Recreation opportunities
However, our need for physical proximity is changing.
We live in an increasingly interconnected society and, at the same time, an increasingly mobile society. Our ability to communicate instantly on a thousand different levels with people all over the world, coupled with an increasingly efficient travel network to drive or fly great distances causes us to place lesser importance on the community around us.
With more and more people figuring out ways to work from their homes, either through remote employment, project-based work, home-based or Internet-based businesses, their relationship with their physical community changes.
8 Dimension of Human Connectedness
When thinking about the city of the future, jobs and income streams are not the only consideration. But that is where we will begin.
The city of the future will form around eight dimensions of human connectedness, the interface created between people and their surrounding community. A well-connected community will be a vibrant community where ideas are exchanged, energies are exchanged, and people become extremely loyal to the networks that connect them to the rest of the world. While it is now easy to communicate with people all over the world, we can only physically interact with people and places locally.
Human connectedness involves much more than just communication. And it’s not just about business life, family life, or what we do for entertainment. It is all of that and much more.
For the purposed of this discussion, we will look at human connectedness from eight different perspectives, with the final part looking at the role of city government and how it is adapting within these parameters.
Every dimension of human connectedness is an information sphere that requires its own unique user interface.
There are many ways to look at the human interface, but for the purposes of this analysis, our dimensions of human connectedness have been divided into the following eight categories:
1.) Education & learning
2.) Money & income
3.) Culture, events, & entertainment
4.) Health & fitness
5.) Goods & services
6.) Sports & recreation
7.) Love & relationships
8.) Government
Before going into each of these areas in more detail, one of the key drivers is our move into an increasingly fluid society.
Flowing to Areas of Least Resistance
With transportation becoming easier, making us a more mobile society, and with cell phones and the Internet speeding up our digital communications, our cities are becoming a much more fluid environment.
Much like water that flows downhill using the path of least resistance, businesses and social structures have begun to move from areas we find less appealing to areas that are more appealing.
Using this line of thinking, we can envision many decision points where transitions are starting to occur:
• With so many obstacles in out paths, we tend to take the route with the least number of gatekeepers.
• As the cost of owning and operating a physical business continues to climb,  many have begun to migrate their business operations into the digital world.
• Too many laws will force businesses to move some of their operation underground, or at least under-radar.
We buy where it is easy, we eat where it’s convenient, and we relax where it is comfortable.
It is easy to dismiss all this as general laziness. But it gets to a far more fundamental motivation driving human behavior – respect.
We patronize places that respect our time, respect our needs, and respect our status.
For each of us we set our minimum quality standards, and once those have been met we look for other attributes such as convenience, friendliness, and speed. When we hear words like “complicated,” “arduous,” or “painful” we tend to run the other direction.
We spend our time, our attention, and our money where it is most respected.
1.) Money & Income
Unbeknownst to most, the 8,000 pound gorilla hovering in the background of our economy is the shifting population base. Any fluctuation in the number of consumers changes the demand-side of the supply and demand equation.
The 1900s were a very fertile century where the earth’s population grew from 1.6 billion people to 6.4 billion within 100 years. Never before in history had the human population exploded like this, and we all became conditioned to think there would be a never-ending supply of young people, and a never-ending supply of demand for real estate.
But a strange thing happened along the way. As doom and gloom predictions started painting scary scenarios of an overpopulated earth where food shortages threatened the very existence of humanity, the full impact of birth control technology, invented in the 1960s, began to take effect.
Today, the population in the U.S. has begun to level off, while at the same time nearly all of Europe and major parts of Asia are in serious decline. Since people create the economy, the lack of people creates just the opposite. This drop in demand will manifest itself in many areas, including a drop in the demand for real estate, as well as other goods and services.
The Coming Free Agent Workforce – According to Daniel Pink, author of Free Agent Nation, “In the past, the standard working arrangement was that employees gave loyalty and the organization gave security. However, that bargain is now kaput.”
Analyst Christopher Dwyer of Aberdeen Group estimates freelance workers already make up 20% of the labor force, a figure that will rise to 25% as early as next year.
Steve Armstrong, operations manager for Kelly Services believes the expanding use of contract workers, is at least partly fueled by some Americans who see more flexibility, and even security, in freelancing it. He see young workers who saw their parents lose jobs the past couple of years take on more of a free-agent mentality.
Since September, the number of workers taking temp jobs has risen by 404,000, making up 68% of the 593,000 jobs added by private employers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the same time, many laid-off workers who have been unable to land a permanent job, have transitioned over to independent contractors and consultants.
The Coming Surge of Entrepreneurship – At the same time that free agents are becoming a business-of-one, we are seeing a much larger wave of entrepreneurial activity.
Traditionally it could be predicted that for every 100 people who join the ranks of the jobless, seven would attempt to start their own business. Some find business niches, others invent and still others find a better way to do something markets are already craving. Ingenuity and daring often are the catalyst for setting business and commerce in motion. Though nothing stimulates the entrepreneurial mind like the lure of cash, but this time there is little to be found.
However, entrepreneurs are not ones to accept “no” for an answer. The online digital world is an engine that requires little startup capital. Profitability for a new online business can often be achieved even for those with little or no money. For this reason there is little wonder why more and more talent is shifting away from physical products toward the online marketplace.
Losing the War of Electrons – Cities don’t realize it but they are losing the war of electrons. Cities operate in the physical world and electrons represent everything in the digital world.
Starting a business in the physical world requires permits, inspections, licensing, tax collection, and monitoring. Constant monitoring. Time delays can often drag on for months. Cities have acted as the perennial gatekeeper and their relationship with the business community is often described as adversarial.
However, in the digital world there are few gatekeepers, and the time it takes to be up an operating is measured in minutes and hours, not months and years. Yes, there may be a requirement for licensing and tax collection, but it tends to be far less painful.
People have a choice, and when they weigh their options between a physical business or a digital one, most often the digital option comes out on top.
As the business world shifts away from bricks and mortar, cities are left with little to claim as their own, and, with a declining sale tax base, very little revenue to pay for the services the residents have long come to expect.
Business Colonies
In the future, businesses will operate in a far more fluid manner with talent and projects converging for short periods of time. In much the same way the movie industry works, where a single movie project will attract camera people, script writers, lighting and sound people, actors, and makeup artists, future business projects will attract various skills for temporary assignment. Once the project is complete, team members will disband and form around other projects.
Operating as a free agent often involves a number of challenges that not all are equipped to handle. As a support mechanism for their growing numbers, business colonies will begin to form around such diverse industrial sectors as photonics, nanotech, biotech, IT niches and many more.
Often times the colonies will be formed to support large corporate players in a specific industry. As an example, companies like Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo could easily spawn gamer colonies as a way to drive the development of new games for their consoles.
Over the next few years, experimental colonies will proliferate, testing a variety of operational and support systems. Free agents who join as members of the colony will be attracted by the prospects of steady project flow. Project leads will be drawn to the available talent pools. And host cities will be most interested in generating jobs and employment for their constituencies.
Future of Economic Development
The current efforts most communities are now using to attract companies to relocate into their city will need to be re-thought.
As the number of people telecommuting increases, there are little assurances that the relocation of a company will bring many of its people along with it. Yes, many of the old school employers still require all of their workers to show up in the office every day, but even those who are most determined to resist this trend are showing signs of softening.
According to the Telework Research Network, 40% of U.S. employees hold jobs that that could be done at home (50 million), and half of all U.S. businesses are home-based (16 million).
Digging deeper into the statistics, 40% of federal employees are eligible but only 17% do so. Similarly, 36% of private sector employees are eligible but only 16% do so. This indicates vast room for improving both the telecommuting interface and for the numbers to increase.
Alternatively, instead of focusing on the whole company, economic development professionals may want to focus on recruiting key individuals who have the option to live anywhere. Many people who telecommute bring with them two essential ingredients – a budget and hiring authority. In the future, any person who can choose where they want to live, and comes with a budget and hiring authority, will become a prime target in the new age of economic development.
Coming soon – City of the Future – Part 2
By Futurist Thomas Frey

Great communities are founded on great ideas. At the same time, our most admired communities become a magnet, attracting the brightest minds. The relational effect is clear: Bright minds make a community great, and great communities attract bright minds.

In the future, communities will be designed around ways to stimulate new ideas using such things as creative environments, imagination sparkers, and inspirational architecture.

They will also be designed around new ways for people to meet people. Future communities will be judged by their vibrancy, their interconnectedness, and their fluid structures for causing positive human collisions.

Yet, at the same time, there is a diminishing value to physical proximity. In the middle of this relationship, with all things proximate, is where we can begin to comprehend how cities are changing, and how they will continue to change in the future.

Read the rest of this entry »

business trends, historical perspective, new strategy, prediction, social trends, technology trends 7 Comments »

Eight Fundamental Drivers Controlling Our Future

Posted by admin on October 13th, 2010
Eight Fundamental Drivers Controlling Our Future
As a futurist I spend much of my time searching for failure points.
Why failure points? Because they are the unforgiving anchors around which society changes directions.
In the U.S. we are now witnessing a record number of failures taking place. Just look around. Failed businesses, failed systems, failed jobs, and failed marriages.
Some failures are easily predicted, where a known problem looms larger and larger until a solution is found. Most, however, are not so easy. In many respects, failures are nature’s own system for checks and balances.
Failures attract attention. Much like a car accident causing a gawker’s block along the highway, failure attracts onlookers, some with offers to help, others moving quickly to avoid being painted with the same failure brush.
So what causes failure? Turns out that failure is just one relentless driver being perpetuated by a series of other relentless drivers. As we lift up the hood on this eight cylinder engine, here is what’s really going on.
To be sure, there are many forces driving the world around us, and each one of these drivers is like a hand grenade generating a blast zone of forces pushing in multiple directions. However, these particular forces concentrate an unusual amount of energy in the directions I’ve indicated here to keep this cycle in motion.
1.) Mortality drives urgency
2.) Urgency drives purpose
3.) Purpose drives our quest for knowledge
4.) Our quest for knowledge drives technology
5.) Technology drives complexity
6.) Complexity drives failure
7.) Failure drives conflict
8.) Conflict drives mortality
As we begin to study these linkages, we are able to uncover fascinating relationships which help enormously in explaining the nature of humanity and the world we live in.
Mortality Drives Urgency – The fact that we will someday die gives us only a short runway of time to get things done. The clock is ticking. We either get things done today or we lose a significant piece of the time we have left before we die. Even though people are living longer today than 100 years ago and we have a slightly longer runway, the urgency we feel is still a prevalent force in everything we do.
While it’s true that competition and our need for status also drive urgency, the constant trickle of sands falling through the hourglass leaves us feeling like our own lives are slipping through our fingers. The sound of our own mortality is a sound few can avoid listening to.
Counter to what some believe, living forever may indeed be counter-productive. People who live with no end in sight may well lose their motivation for “doing anything important today.”
Urgency Drives Purpose – How many times have you heard someone ask, “Why am I doing this?”
It’s a very common concern because most of us simply despise doing anything dubbed “meaningless.”
Baby-boomers are getting older. As this massive bulge in the population moves into their retirement years, many are feeling the regrets of not having lived up to their own expectations, and in doing so, are searching for higher meaning. In what Forbes Magazine publisher Rich Karlgaard describes as the “Age of Meaning,” the former hippie generation is now searching for a higher calling, and they want it now.
Purpose Drives our Quest for Knowledge – To find meaning and purpose, we need more knowledge.
In today’s world, information is infinite, but knowledge is finite. According to a 2010 report by the Global Information Industry Center, the hours we spend consuming information has grown 2.6 percent per year from 1980 to 2008 to an average of nearly 12 hours per day.
At the same time, our ability to sort through the growing storehouses of information and find those shimmering glints of needles-in-the-haystack information is a relentless quest. It is a quest we cannot do alone, and so we turn to technology.
Our Quest for Knowledge Drives Technology – Human frailties and our own physical limitations drives us to find technical solutions.
How can we think faster, see things outside of the range of normal human vision, hear things on the other side of the world, or process information that baffles the normal mind?
Virtually every invention known to mankind is an extension of human senses or human capabilities.
The more information we consume, the greater our need for technology, and that’s where things start getting complicated.
Technology Drives Complexity – Technology drives many things, but when it comes to complexity, technology acts as the great enabler.
Rather than managing 100 accounts on paper, we can now manage 1,000 accounts with a computer. Rather than spending 10 hours sorting through 20,000 books in a library, we spend 10 minutes sorting through 2 million books online.
Technology extends our reach, but it also extends our ability to devise complex systems for managing it, and complicated solutions to our problems.
Complexity itself is neither good nor bad, but it increases fragility and too much complexity pushes us beyond our ability to manage it. And that’s where things begin to fail.
Complexity Drives Failure – The more complicated something is, the more likely it is to fail.
Yes, in abstract terms, complexity adds function. And some measure of complexity is both necessary and beneficial.
However, according to complexity management firm Ontonix, 80% of companies that fail experience at least one year of rapidly increasing complexity.
Complexity tends to function like a self-perpetuating organism. Complex systems tend to expand until they reach a breaking point, and that is where the conflict begins.
Failure Drives Conflict – Yes, failure causes many things, but failure is very emotional, and emotional intensity leads to conflict.
Our first reaction is that failure is bad and conflict resulting from failure is even worse. Yet at the same time, failure is a time of renewal, a new branch growing where an old branch just died.
Conflict arises from our resistance to failure, and in many case we need to resist because failures are not inevitable. We only appreciate that which we struggle to achieve, and virtually every conflict clears our mind about the importance of what we are struggling for.
Conflict Drives Mortality – Every conflict gives us another look into the frailties of being human.
Conflicts are riddled with confusion and doubt, second-guessing and regret. They are the friction from where the rubber-meets-the-road on this turning wheel.
But most conflicts come from within. As famed country singer Garth Brooks says, “The greatest conflicts are not between two people but between one person and himself.”
In the end, we ask what we were fighting for, and that, in turn, drives our own feeling of mortality.
So What Can We Conclude?
It was several weeks ago when I first sketched this out, trying to decide if it was indeed meaningful, and whether this kind of insight could be helpful.
In the back of my mind I kept asking, “Is this cycle inevitable” and “Can it be stopped?” Perhaps, more importantly, “Should it be stopped?”
We each have many wheels to contend with. Our family wheel overlaps our business wheel, and those overlap our social and side-projects wheels.
With global databases of information skyrocketing and technology improving access to it, the wheel is turning at a faster and faster pace.
Every imbalance in the wheel causes a ripple effect throughout the rest of the wheel.
Are we better off trying to eliminate conflict and failure, or trying to optimize it? With the new mantra being “fail fast and fail often,” we have begun to accept the inevitability.
Is purpose more important than knowledge, or does strengthening one driver simply create an imbalance that strengthens the other?
Is our quest for knowledge making us smarter, of just more confused?
As you can see, I have far more questions than answers, so I’d like to hear your thoughts. If possible, please take a few moments to write down some of the ideas that formed in your head as you read through this.
I look forward to hearing your insights.
By Futurist Thomas Frey

Fundamental Drivers 429

As a futurist I spend much of my time searching for failure points. Why failure points? Because they are the unforgiving anchors around which society changes directions.

In the U.S. we are now witnessing a record number of failures taking place. Just look around. Failed businesses, failed systems, failed jobs, and failed marriages.

Some failures are easily predicted, where a known problem looms larger and larger until a solution is found. Most, however, are not so easy. In many respects, failures are nature’s own system for checks and balances.

Failures attract attention. Much like a car accident causing a gawker’s block along the highway, failure attracts onlookers, some with offers to help, others moving quickly to avoid being painted with the same failure brush.

So what causes failure? Turns out that failure is just one relentless driver being perpetuated by a series of other relentless drivers. As we lift up the hood on this eight cylinder engine, here is what’s really going on.

Read the rest of this entry »

business trends, new strategy, powerful idea, technology trends 10 Comments »