Charting a New Frontier for Colleges and Universities

Posted by admin on February 25th, 2011
Charting a New Frontier for Colleges and Universities
The great reset has not yet finished its resetting process, and colleges are moving quickly into the crosshairs, with government funding, grants, and student loans all harder to get.
With a mindset steeped in tradition, college leadership is pushing institutions to be, as the U.S. Marines like to say, “the best they can possibly be.”
But being the “best” is meaningless when the rest of the world wants “different.”
At the heart of the matter is an expensive academic infrastructure that is woefully out of sync with the business environment it is preparing students for. For decades, colleges have grown from simple to ultra-complex organisms funded by easy-to-get student loans, propped up by state and federal tax money, tons of grants, scholarships, and other forms of support.
Where most of the business world has spent decades learning how to “do more with less,” colleges have been content to simply do “more with more.” But the money train is coming to a screeching halt, and college officials are spending their days watching the financial cliff draw ever so closer.
While some may see at this as the end of the great college era, it is, in reality, the beginning of an entirely new opportunity. Over the coming years we will be witnessing the grand transformation of colleges and universities. Here are some of the changes they will need to make to survive.
So What’s Changed
The obvious question to start with is simply, “What’s changed?”
Why is it that an education system that has produced some of the world’s top scientists, engineers, and business executive is no longer good enough to serve today’s young people?
The answers can be found in the following five areas:
1. From Information Poor to Information Rich
2. Fierce Competition
3. The Cost to Benefit Ratio is Changing
4. New Times Require New Intelligence
5. Shift from Individual Intelligence to Group Intelligence
The following are but a few of the reasons why changing times demand different solutions.
From Information Poor to Information Rich
In 2008, Roger Bohn and James Short, two researchers at the University of California in San Diego decided to do a study to determine how much information people have entering their brains on a daily basis.
Everyone today is being exposed to vast amounts of information, and their study was intended to quantify the amount of information we are all being immersed in.
But they added a rather interesting twist to the study. Because of the varying forms of information, and the difficulty in comparing video to magazines and newspapers, they decided to convert all information into one standard form of measurement – words.
Based on their final 2009 report, the average person in the U.S. has 100,500 words flowing into their heads on a daily basis. And this number is increasing by 2.6% per year.
So where are all these words coming from?  In rough terms, 41% come from watching television, 27% – computers, 11% – radio, 9% – print media, 6% – telephone conversations, and smaller amounts from recorded music, movies, games, and other information sources.
As it turns out, the average American spends 11.8 hours every day consuming information. Many other countries are posting similar numbers. People today are being exposed to far more information than ever in the past.
Buried deep within the “other category,” constituting far less than 1% is our formal education. Even for students attending college, their classroom studies constitute a relatively small percentage of the information they are exposed to on a daily basis.
Colleges have yet to come to grips with the fact that they are not the only ones who possess the information.
Fierce Competition
Colleges are not only competing with each other for students, they are also competing for dollars and many of the dollar-streams are drying up.
National and local tax dollars are now at a premium and arguments that worked on decision-makers in the past are becoming far tougher to sell.
As a general rule of thumb, people are willing to pay more to get more. Other than some minor adjustments for inflation, they are not willing to pay more to get the same. And they are far from willing to fund the status quo when the rest of the world is getting more for less.
Business and industry is constantly being forced into “doing more for less.” Where many colleges have built their brand around exclusivity and other barriers to entry, there will be fewer students willing to “play by the old rules” in the future.
The Cost-to-Benefit Ratio is Changing
Over the past 30 years, college tuition and fees have risen roughly 450% compared to increases in median family income of only 150%. Accelerating at three-time the rate of inflation, the cost of college has now reached a breaking point.
Yes, for the independently wealthy and those in the higher income brackets, college may still be an acceptable investment. However, for any who are using student loans and going into debt, it becomes a far more difficult cost to rationalize.
Over the next few years a number of low-cost, high-value alternatives will begin to emerge, forcing virtually every traditional college to rethink their existing pricing structure.
New Times Require New Intelligence
In 1981, Professor James Flynn, a psychologist in the University of Otago in New Zealand, produced a study that showed IQ tests were improving over the years. This revelation has become known as the Flynn Effect.
He concluded that our ancestors would do poorly on IQ tests today because they deal with the workings of the current world — a world largely defined by science. The average IQ score has risen approximately three points every decade in the U.S.
This doesn’t mean our ancestors were not very bright. Rather, different times require different intelligences and our ancestors were adept at the kind intelligence needed to adapt to the times they lived in.
IQ tests are also a measure of a person’s ability to cope with the education system they are immersed in.
As the world around us changes, our need for new kinds of intelligence also changes. Education systems that produced stellar results 50 years ago are poorly suited for the diverse, rapidly evolving intelligences needed to thrive in today’s world.
Shift from Individual Intelligence to Group Intelligence
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book “The Tipping Point,” explained how cultural, social, and economic factors converge to create trends in consumer behavior. Later James Surowiecki, wrote “The Wisdom of Crowds” to explain how group intelligence could be used to benefit mankind.
A popular example of group intelligence has been the TV game show, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” Contestants are asked questions from history and popular culture, and when stumped, allowed to query the audience. When audience members are polled for answers during the show, they are correct 91% of the time.
Modern academic fields such as marketing and behavioral finance draw upon group intelligence data to identify and predict the rational and irrational behavior of buyers and investors.
While many in academia are still stuck in the paradigm that every person needs to know every detail themselves, our fluid communication systems enable us to tap into answers “at the speed of need” and the combined thinking of groups is far superior to the lone individual.
Group intelligence helps eliminate “weakest link” problems with an emerging workforce that is able to adapt to whatever situation we find ourselves in.
Old world academia was built around snapshots of intelligence, with each one creating another block in the foundational base of modern thought. With the rate of these snapshots increasing exponentially, we can now witness the strobe light effect of shifting intelligence transforming into a full motion picture of real-time brilliance.
Helping Colleges Survive
Colleges are being pushed in a number of directions but the big dividing points will be oriented around in-person vs. online, and for the in-person side of the equation, doing the things in-person that cannot be done through online education.
1. Lower Pricing for Online Education. Online education can be delivered far more efficiently than using a dedicated classroom to coordinate time and location schedules for all those involved. Over time online education will become well-designed commodities that can be delivered far beyond the walls of a single university. The lower cost of online education will then be used to offset the cost of the on-campus experience. In many situations, students will be allowed to select the ratio of online vs. in-person classes to give them better control of the costs. As this transition takes place, individual tuition cost will begin to decline, but overall student populations will begin to expand.
2. Classroom Shift – From Lectures and Tests to Group Experiences. As colleges begin to wrap their mind around “doing the things in-person that cannot be done through online education,” existing campuses will transition into interactive experiential learning centers. Students today tend to resent the one-way flow of information. They no longer wish to be “lectured to.” They want to participate. A whole new generation of tools and equipment are being designed to shift people from mere “absorbers of information” to full-blown “experience participants.”
3. Group Experiences – Relationship-Building. One of the greatest values of the college experience is the life-long relationships that develop in the campus setting. This benefit is lost with most online education systems. Social networks allow students to form “weak relationships” with people around the world, and weak relationships have their own advantages. But working and living side-by-side with people is the foundation for “strong relationships” with far greater degrees of interest and caring. Strong relationships remain the foundational underpinnings of business communities, and colleges serve as an ideal Petri dish for new relationships to germinate and blossom.
4. Closing the Gap between Experts and Students. Education has traditionally consisted of the two fundamental elements of teaching and learning, with a heavy emphasis on teaching. Throughout history, the transfer of information from the teacher to the learner has been done on a person-to-person basis, with a teacher lecturing to a group of students. This approach, however, requires the teacher to be an expert on every topic that they teach, and great inefficiencies lie in the slow and painful process of creating new experts. Modern communication systems enable students to eliminate the teachers in the middle, and learn directly from the experts. As an example, a scientist that makes a breakthrough can now broadcast their findings directly to students around the world.
5. Transition to One-Hour Learning Modules. With the pace of society ratcheting faster every year, fewer and fewer people find themselves able to schedule their time around a class that meets 3 times a week for the next 12 weeks. Many students are lost because they are not able to mesh their schedule with the archaic you-need-to-adapt-to-our-schedule attitude of colleges. Colleges that organize their offerings around flexible one-hour learning modules will have a far easier time attracting students. Some learning experiences may involve a grouping of 2, 5, or even 10 units, but the majority will transition towards a basic one-hour learning modules. One-hour units will then be combined to form traditional college credits.
6. Hyper-individualized learning systems. Learning what we want, when we want it – shifting away from a prescribed course agendas to ones that are hyper-individualized, self-selected, and scheduled at times that sync well with the student will dramatically change levels of motivation and participation. Since each student comes with their own unique mixture of skills, desires, and preferences, the sooner a student can focus in on the traits and talents they excel at, the quicker they will be able to find a meaningful direction for themselves.
7. College-Level Learning Camps. Many kinds of learning camps are already in existence, but we will see an explosive growth in college-based camps oriented around personal experiences. Marine biology is best learned through working with marine life in all its many forms. The best way to learn history is to travel to the battlefields, take tours of the castles, walk through the ancient ruins, dress up in the ancient clothing, and sleep overnight in a wigwam or cliff dwelling. The best way to become a plumber is to work with a skilled plumber and perform hands-on work fixing real world problems. Learning camps, ranging from one-day camps to multi-week camps, will begin to proliferate around specific topics. Some camps will be more academic-related areas of study such as math and science, while others will deal with more skill-related topics like woodworking or auto repair. Each camp will have its own identity, use its own in-house experts, and will focus on a specific learning experience.
8. An Era of Constant Experimentation – In the end, colleges will need to enter an era of constant experimentation. The steady shifting of technologies, attitudes, and lifestyles demand a symbiotic relationship be formed between colleges and their students. And this will never be a static relationship.
Final Thoughts
Headlines around the world are painting a grim picture ahead for higher education. It doesn’t take bionic ears to hear the moans of anxiety emanating from college boardrooms as they not only wrestle with declining revenue streams, but also a shift in demand for higher ed.
Here are a few of the more recent headlines:
• “Default rate for repayment of for-profit college loans hits 25 percent” – Washington Post – Feb 11, 2011
• “Declining by degree: Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?” – The Economist – Sept 2, 2010
• “Once the Leader, U.S. Drops to 12th in College Degrees” – New York Times – July 23, 2010
• “Placing the Blame as Students Are Buried in Debt” – New York Times – May 10, 2010
• “Why Did 17 Million Students Go to College?” – The Chronicle of Higher Education – Oct 20, 2010
• “There Are 5,000 Janitors in the U.S. with PhDs” – Gizmodo – Oct 22, 2010
• “The Ivory Tower is Headed for a Fall” – ColoradoBiz – July 19, 2010
The last headline is an article I wrote that includes many other statistics and indicators.
As the same time though, the stage is being set for many new opportunities, and these new opportunities will pave the way for a few visionary leaders to emerge, and an entire new era of next generation academia to explode around us.
By Futurist Thomas Frey

rethinking colleges 457

The great reset has not yet finished its resetting process, and colleges are moving quickly into the crosshairs, with government funding, grants, and student loans all harder to get.

With a mindset steeped in tradition, college leadership is pushing institutions to be, as the U.S. Marines like to say, “the best they can possibly be.”

But being the “best” is meaningless when the rest of the world wants “different.”

At the heart of the matter is an expensive academic infrastructure that is woefully out of sync with the business environment it is preparing students for. For decades, colleges have grown from simple to ultra-complex organisms funded by easy-to-get student loans, propped up by state and federal tax money, tons of grants, scholarships, and other forms of support.

Where most of the business world has spent decades learning how to “do more with less,” colleges have been content to simply do “more with more.” But the money train is coming to a screeching halt, and college officials are spending their days watching the financial cliff draw ever so closer.

While some may see at this as the end of the great college era, it is, in reality, the beginning of an entirely new opportunity. Over the coming years we will be witnessing the grand transformation of colleges and universities. Here are some of the changes they will need to make to survive.

Read the rest of this entry »

business trends, future scenario, historical perspective, new strategy, powerful idea, prediction, social trends, technology trends 12 Comments »

Embracing Our Inner Cyborg

Posted by admin on February 17th, 2011
Embracing Our Inner Cyborg
It recently occurred to me that I was pulling my iPhone out of my pocket several times an hour to check information. Over the past few months I‘ve become very self-conscious about the addictive nature of information and the OCD-like mannerisms that follow, and this constant checking-in is only one of several habit-changers I’ve noticed that accompany smartphones.
Information is like a drug that we naturally crave. Whether it’s the rumor mills of the past where gossip flew from one person to the next or today’s smartphones, we all have an insatiable need-to-know.
While many feel we need to curb the excessive nature of this addiction, I tend to fall into the other camp, wanting to improve the flow of data to the point where it is far more pervasive, yet at the same time, seamless and invisible.
But that’s where it gets crazy, because as smartphones evolve, they become an integral part of who we are. They become the digital nerve center for our physical existence.
Science fiction writers have long warned us of the dangers of half-human, half-machine cyborgs. Yet, as we invite this piece of networked intelligence into our lives, we begin to see this integration of humans and machines in a whole new light. Let me explain.
Exploding Marketplace
According to industry projections, the number of mobile broadband subscribers, which was 600 million at the end of 2010, is expected to almost double in 2011 to a billion and climb to five billion in 2016. Mobile network capacity will need to increase 20 to 25 times to handle the growing load.
The Chinese telecom company, Huawei, is predicting their traffic levels will rise 500 times by 2020.
Even with these dramatic numbers making their way into industry reports, as you read through the remainder of this article you will begin to understand why even these predictions are far too low.
Personal Area Networks
In the mid-1990s, IBM researcher Thomas Zimmerman began exploring the idea of Personal Area Networks, or PAN technologies, which used the natural electrical conductivity of the human body to transmit digital information.
Since then the concept has evolved into wireless personal area networks, or WPAN, made possible with wireless network technologies such as IrDA, Bluetooth, UWB, Z-Wave and ZigBee.
Adding wireless to the equation, any two WPAN-linked devices within several meters of each other can communicate as if connected by a cable. Smartphone capabilities can then be dramatically enhanced with the simple addition of sensors, cameras, and other peripheral devices.
Evolving the Smartphone
Today’s smartphones exist as self-contained communication tools, but that will begin to change as a wide assortment of peripheral devices enters the marketplace. Here are a few examples:
• The Sony Ericsson LiveView is a small display screen that can be worn as a watch or piece of jewelry and communicates wirelessly with your smartphone. It eliminates the need to constantly pull out your phone as information can be accessed with a simple glance of the wrist. Rumor has it that Apple will soon turn their Nanos into a similar interactive slave device for the iPhone.
• Mobisante, a company based in Redmond, WA, has recently introduced an ultrasound probe as a smartphone peripheral device. The current prototype connects to a Toshiba TG01 smartphone, but plans are in place to connect to others.
• Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania are developing silicon-and-silk implantable devices which sit under the skin like a tattoo. Already implanted into mice, these tattoos will carry micro-LEDs, turning your skin into an interactive screen. Your skin will appear normal until the display is turned on, but once on, keyboards and other interactive controls will appear on your arm.
These type of innovations are just scratching the surface of what will be possible as every new wireless device creates a tremendous new opportunity for app developers to expand on the original intent.
Adding Sensors
As soon as the iPhone was introduced with motion sensor technology, creative people around the world began asking the very simple question, “What other things can we do with motion sensors?” And the answers they’ve come up with are more than a little ingenious.
So without waiting for smartphone companies to incorporate features into their phones, remote sensors with wireless signaling can open up opportunities in a spectacular fashion. To stir your thinking a bit, here are a few sensors that come to mind:
• Pressure Sensors:  Anything that our physical body comes into contact with such as shoes, football helmets, pillows, chairs, and mattresses will be prime candidates for pressure sensors.
• Chemical Sensors:  Are oxygen levels too high or too low? Why did this lotion burn my skin? Are there signs of mold and mildew in the carpet?
• Reflectivity: Will this paint cause my house to heat up or cool down? Do these windows let light in or reflect most of it away?
• Heat Sensors: These sensors will give us an understanding of all the micro-environments we exist in showing temperature variations inside and outside of clothing, above and below blankets, and in houses along pipes, windows, and any external walls.
• Moisture:  Are these plants too wet or too dry? Is there a moisture leak in the ceiling? Does the diaper need changing?
• Vibration: Any piece of machinery that starts vibrating in an unusual manner is giving signs that something is wrong.
• Frequency:  The sound and noise environments we exist in play an important role in our health. An ability to map and trace frequencies throughout our day will give us amazing insight into both the audible and non-audible communities of sounds we find ourselves in.
• Smell and Odor: Should I enter that perfume shop or will it make me sick? Where is that odor coming from? Is this food fresh or stale?
• Spectrometer:  Does this soil have the right kind of fertilizer? What kinds of chemicals are present in this makeup? Is there a chance carbon monoxide may be present?
• Speed: How fast is that horse running? How fast is that bird flying? At this pace, how long will it take for this snail to work its way over to the window?
Remote Cameras, Remote Microphones
Adding a remote camera or microphone to a smartphone will undoubtedly unlock an entire Padora’s Box full of possibilities.
Already city-wide deployments of over 100,000 cameras are becoming common in countries like China and India. However, these will seem like small numbers once a new breed of wearable cameras comes into existence and people become the mobile surveillance units of the future.
The price of wireless cameras and microphones are plummeting, and along with our ability to link these devices to our smartphones will come a new generation of deployment strategies.
You can expect to see ideas for swallowing devices to record their journey through our digestive system, imbedded devices that are permanently placed under our skin, cameras grown into trees, microphones imbedded into concrete, and much more.
Remote sensing tactics will begin to permeate business strategies as each new discovery will cause planning sessions from even a few months earlier to become instantly dated.
Next Generation Peripheral Devices
Wireless communication between peripheral devices and smartphones will be tricky at first as each new signal and frequency will be plagued with its own sets of interferences. But with a little fine tuning, the range of new capability will become truly breathtaking.
Here are but a few possibilities to help peak your imagination:
Looxcie wearable Bluetooth camcorder smartphone compatible
1. Personal Coaching Device:  Adding a video and audio feed to a smartphone will enable a personal coach or trainer to see what you’re seeing and hear what you’re hearing even though they may be thousands of miles away. Coaching devices will help you through business negotiations, deal with difficult people, and even work through traumatic and emotional events.
2. Smart Shoe Monitor:  Linking our smartphones to the pressures and movements inside our feet will open the doors to countless ideas on how to mitigate pressure points and eliminate pain and sensitivities. This will also lead to better tools for analyzing our gate, running styles, distance covered, daily routes, and far more.
3. Intraoral Camera:  People currently do not have the ability to see their teeth. Yes, you can look into a mirror, but there is no way to closely inspect your own bicuspids. Simply connecting a lighted camera-wand to a smartphone will radically improve our own understanding of what’s happening inside our mouths. Sales of dental hygiene products will skyrocket along with this single innovation.
4. Wearable Tech:  Look for a new breed of high tech fashion wear to hit the market that carefully integrates sensors, cameras, displays, and controllers into the fabric of the clothing. As a smartphone peripheral, this clothing will be both inward focused on bodily functions and outward focused on the surrounding environments. The trick will be to make it durable enough for cleaning, comfortable to wear, and fashionable enough to make people want to be seen wearing it.
5. Smart Dashboards:  Future dashboards will serve as the convenient interactive display for personal smartphone. Smart dashboards will soon begin showing up on bicycles, riding lawnmowers, boats, tractors, cars, and snowmobiles.
6. Game Controllers: Smartphones are destined to become the game consoles of the future, connected to a wide variety of peripheral devices to serve as controllers. Many games will transition from a solitary experience inside a darkened room to a highly-engaging, interpersonal experience that happens in the real world, albeit highly augmented real world.
Meshing the Data
The number of linked sensors, cameras, and complex peripheral devices will soon be exploding around us, and we will soon see efforts to link this information into a cohesive intelligence layer that we can interact with in our daily lives.
As you might imagine, attempts to improve the sphere of knowability for purposes of convenience will be confronted with serious resistance from those wishing to maintain a distinct layer of privacy for our protection. These will be tough decisions to wrestle through and the resulting public policy decisions will have far-reaching implications.
On the Path to Cyborg
Hollywood has gone out of their way to paint a very grim picture of cyborgs. Usually they are the ones who turn out to be the villains and get killed in the end.
With the current path we’re on with smartphones becoming the entry point for a far greater mesh network, the world of “The Borg” on Star Trek doesn’t seem all that far away.
Contrary to what sci-fi movie directors would have us believe, we are all going down this path willingly. Our ability to interact with the information opens doors for us like never before.
Over time, the sophistication of smartphone peripherals will evolve to things inconceivable by today’s standards. And yes, there will be some dangers of machines and devices getting out of hand.
At the moment though, we still have to overcome the momentum of all the negative energy that filmmakers of old have put into motion. As for me, I plan to be a happy cyborg. Feel free to join me. I’m sure there will be a lot of us to hang out with.
By Futurist Thomas Frey

Embracing Our Inner Cyborg 1

The emerging market for smartphone peripherals is set to explode

It recently occurred to me that I was pulling my iPhone out of my pocket several times an hour to check information. Over the past few months I‘ve become very self-conscious about the addictive nature of information and the OCD-like mannerisms that follow, and this constant checking-in is only one of several habit-changers I’ve noticed that accompany smartphones.

Information is like a drug that we naturally crave. Whether it’s the rumor mills of the past where gossip flew from one person to the next or today’s smartphones, we all have an insatiable need-to-know.

While many feel we need to curb the excessive nature of this addiction, I tend to fall into the other camp, wanting to improve the flow of data to the point where it is far more pervasive, yet at the same time, seamless and invisible.

But that’s where it gets crazy, because as smartphones evolve, they become an integral part of who we are. They become the digital nerve center for our physical existence.

Science fiction writers have long warned us of the dangers of half-human, half-machine cyborgs. Yet, as we invite this piece of networked intelligence into our lives, we begin to see this integration of humans and machines in a whole new light. Let me explain.

Read the rest of this entry »

business trends, future scenario, new strategy, powerful idea, prediction, technology trends 9 Comments »

12 Laws of the Future

Posted by admin on February 10th, 2011
12 Laws of the Future
For several decades now I have been contemplating our relationship with the future.
Many of my colleagues think of me as that crazy guy who assigns human attributes to this thing we call the future.
On occasion you can hear me uttering phrases like, “I know it’s going to be a great day because the future is clearly happy with me today.” Or, “no, that’s not a good idea because the future is probably going to push it off a cliff.”
At one point I even tried to convince my wife that the future wanted me to buy a new car, but she wasn’t buying it.
So why is it so important to study the future? For starters, we all have a vested interest in it. We will all be living in the future.
The Physics of Time Vs the Physics of the Future
“As physicists, we believe the separation between past, present, and future
is only an illusion, although a convincing one.” – Albert Einstein
From everything I’ve studied, past observers have focused on the concept of the future as being a consequence of time, rather than a stand-alone force of nature. So, is the future merely the result of the movement of time, or is the future itself a definable force?
Since all of the formulas we use to make sense out of our physical existence are logic-based constructs within a known framework of understanding, I would propose that we revise our thinking about this abstract phenomenon we refer to as the “future.”
While many will have difficulty wrapping their mind around this concept, I would like to propose the notion that the laws of time are different than the laws of the future. No, I’m not going to try to prove this point with an endless array of mathematical formulas. Instead, I will present you with a uniquely different vantage point from which you can draw your own conclusions.
The History of the Future
In researching past “laws of the future” I came upon three examples that illustrate how we, as humans, view our relationship with the future. Each of these “laws” requires much more explanation so I’ve added some links so you can probe their thinking further.
1.) Sir Arthur C. Clarke liked the number three, and his Three Laws of the Future helped to make him famous. But they evolved over time. Here is the final version of Clarke’s Laws of the Future:
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Clarke often joked that Newton had three laws, and so three were also enough for him. Additionally, his friend and colleague Isaac Asimov, with whom he sometimes competed, had his Three Laws of Robotics. However, in the 1999 edition of Profiles of the Future, Clarke added one additional law: “For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.”
2.) Mary O’Hara-Devereaux, Ph.D., is an internationally renowned futurist and author specializing in the future of work. She presented her four “laws of the future” at the WorldatWork’s 2007 Annual Conference:
1. If something is unsustainable in the long run, it will come to an end.
2. If something big is going to happen, it has to start somewhere.
3. People overreact to short term ramifications of innovation but underestimate its long term effects.
4. Beware of conventional wisdom because it is usually wrong.
3.) Jim Dator, is a Professor, and Director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii at Manoa. Here are “Dator’s Laws of the Future” in abbreviated form.
1. “The future” cannot be “predicted” because “the future” does not exist.
2. Any useful idea about the future should appear to be ridiculous.
3. “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”
The last statement was first made by Canadian futurist and philosopher, Marshall McLuhan.
12 Laws of the Future
We live in a very backward-looking society. We are backward-looking because we have all personally experienced the past. When we look around us, we see evidence of the past everywhere we look. The past is very knowable.
And yet we will be spending the rest of our lives in the future.
It’s almost as if we are walking backwards into the future.
My job as a futurist is to help turn people around and give them some understanding of the driving forces that are forging the world of tomorrow.
As a way of making the future understandable, I have assembled a series of “12 Laws” to both expand our thinking and put it into a usable framework for others to work with.
1.) The future is one of nature’s greatest forces. It is a force so massive that the entire universe is being pulled forward in time simultaneously. We have no choice in this matter. The future will happen whether or not we agree to participate. There is no known way for us to either speed it up, slow it down, or even try to stop it. The pace with which the future is unfolding is constant, and at the same time, relentless.
2.) The present is separated from the future by an invisible “field of knowability.” Everything in the present is knowable, but in the future, nothing is completely knowable. We can personally witness, experience, and make sense of the present, but on the other side of this interface lies a veil of understanding that we don’t yet have.
3.) Each of us experiences the unfolding of the future differently. Every person is on their own personal journey. We each have our own ringside seat as we personally watch the field of knowability reveal itself to us in a unique and different manner. We are the star of our own hyper-individualized storyline.
4.) The future is non-existent until it exists, but we create our own approach vectors. The energy that exists in the present creates an inertia that flows into the future. The inertia that is in place as we leave the present is still in place as we enter the future. If we witness the act of someone throwing a baseball, using a superfast strobe light, each billionth of a second motion is tied directly to the next billionth of a second motion. Our inertias give motion to the present and direction to our future.
5.) The future is being formed amidst a backdrop of existing inertias. On a personal level we are each dealing with the inertia of our body and the inertia of our mind. Both are constantly in motion. At the same time, our personal inertias are taking place inside the context of every other person’s inertia, as well as the inertia of every other thing around us. Nature has its own sets of inertia, with the forces of nature providing the inertia for every living and every non-living molecule in the entire universe.
6.) The “unknowability” of the future is what gives us our drive and motivation. The fact that the future is unknowable is a good thing. Our involvement is the game of life is based on our notion that we as individuals can make a difference. If we somehow remove the mystery of what results our actions will have, we also dismantle our individual drives and motivations for moving forward.
7.) Predictions are based on probabilities, and most of our future is being formed upon a foundation of stable slow-changing elements that can be predicted with a high degree of probability. As humans, we tend to focus on the volatile and ignore that which is stable. Buildings, trees, and mountains change very little from one day to the next. Only rarely do they undergo a radical transformation quickly. The earth’s orbit around the sun, the speed of light, the changing of the seasons, the schedule of tides, the frequency of quartz crystals, and the laws of gravity are all predictable with a high degree of probability.
8.) The future is not a human-centric force. Without human influence, the future tends to be very cold and unforgiving. The future doesn’t care whether you’re happy or sad, employed or unemployed, married or single, personally content or emotionally adrift. The future is like a machine, impervious to our wishes, ambivalent to our goals. Only humans care about these things.
9.) Amidst a backdrop of existing inertias, the future is ours to create. We do not have direct control over the future, but new inertias can be created and existing ones can be influenced. The future is constantly being formed in the minds of people around us. Each person’s understanding of what the future holds will influence the decisions they make today. As we alter someone’s vision of the future, we also alter the way they make decisions in the present.
10.) Thinking about the future will cause it to change. The very act of thinking about the future creates a new inertia, and this inertia changes our energy flows into the future. The “future part of the brain” is like a muscle that rarely gets exercised. But the more we use it the better we get at leveraging the powers and energies of the future.
11.) The future is filled with power and energy. The inertia of all matter in the universe is like a massive river of power and energy flowing from the present into the future. As humans, we only have the ability to affect a tiny microcosm of change. But our seemingly insignificant existence can have massive implications.
12.) Every avalanche begins with the movement of a single snowflake. Our ability to tap into and leverage the power of the future is directly tied to the number of times we think about it. The more we think about the future, the more we expand our understanding of it. And the more we understand the future, the easier it becomes for us to interact with it.
My goal in creating these “laws of the future” is to prompt a conversation that will help further refine our thinking. I’m looking for feedback about what you agree with, disagree with, and what needs more explanation. So please, let me know your thoughts.
“The future is where our children live”
Our desire to leave a legacy is a uniquely human attribute. But our legacy becomes meaningless if we don’t have new generations of people to pass it on to.
To many this may sound like an obvious statement, but to those in the business world, there is a constant battle being waged over the needs of the present vs. the needs of the future. It’s very easy to place short-term profitability ahead of long term problems.
At the same time, the future cannot be our only priority otherwise we lose our ability to function in the present. And here is where it gets confusing. Near-term futures invariably take precedent over long-term futures, but our ability to prioritize importance is directly tied to the context of our own inertias.
Our thinking about the future cannot be made against a simple black and white, right vs. wrong backdrop. Every microcosm is a part of a larger microcosm, and I tend to agree with Mary O’Hara-Devereaux when she says, “Beware of conventional wisdom because it is usually wrong.”
By Futurist Thomas Frey

Futurist Thomas Frey's 12 Laws of the Future

For several decades now I have been contemplating our relationship with the future.

Many of my colleagues think of me as that crazy guy who assigns human attributes to this thing we call the future.

On occasion you can hear me uttering phrases like, “I know it’s going to be a great day because the future is clearly happy with me today.” Or, “no, that’s not a good idea because the future is probably going to push it off a cliff.”

At one point I even tried to convince my wife that the future wanted me to buy a new car, but she wasn’t buying it.

So why is it so important to study the future? For starters, we all have a vested interest in it. We will all be living in the future.

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historical perspective, new strategy, people making a difference, powerful idea 14 Comments »

The Coming Transparency Wars

Posted by admin on February 3rd, 2011
The Coming Transparency Wars
The Economics of Transparency
A report issued Tuesday by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety boasted of the fact that red-light cameras were responsible for a significant drop in highway fatalities at the intersections where they were posted.
With this one well-crafted report, a document proving they save lives, the red-light camera industry established a beachhead in American society.
Naturally there was no mention of the lives that have been destroyed, marriages ripped apart, or the economic drain on the communities surrounding them because of the onerous fines imposed. Saving lives virtually always trumps the carnage of enforcement.
The issuance of the red-light camera report follows a repeatable pattern in business where a controversial enterprise with substantial cash-flow devises a brilliant strategy for justifying their existence.
Transparency creates its own economies. Whether or not red-light cameras are a net-positive or a net-negative for society is less important than the fact that we are making a dramatic shift towards micro-monitoring human actions.
With every new technology that expands the realm of human transparency, enterprising people quickly follow with systems designed to capitalize on any human deviation from the newly established norms.
The Coming Age of Micro-Transparency
With improved sensor technology, it’s easy to envision parking spaces that come with their own enforcement. Once parked, you have 45 seconds to pay for the space. If you park outside of the lines, you will be fined. If your car remains even one second past the time you agreed to, you will also be fined. Any piece of trash that lands in your space during your parking time will also be cause for additional penalties.
To some, this is a highly needed “take-ownership-of-your-actions” accountability standard to be imposed on everyone around us. To them, the world will be far better place if people are held to a higher standard.
To others, the risk of penalty far outweighs their value to society. They will choose to avoid activities that require them to park in spaces with that kind of liability.
Compare that type of parking space to one where you can come and go as you please and you are seamlessly charged for time spent parking. One is a services-rendered model, the other a compliance-driven with penalty model.
In a society where both models are allowed to exist, transparency becomes the arch enemy of anything with penalties. Since people are an inexact species driven by emotions and spur-of-the-moment decisions, any attempt to over-regulate the humanness of our actions will be met with extreme resistance.
As we move further down the transparency spectrum, it’s not difficult to imagine surveillance systems that monitor us constantly.
• Computer systems that monitor the flow of information we are consuming and every transaction we make.
• Traffic drones that monitor our cars, with the ability to log every speeding violation, both going too fast and going too slow, illegal turns, lane changes, emission checks, noise violations, and even prolonged hesitation at stoplights.
• Surveillance drones that examine our individual actions, citing us for missing a trashcan when we throw something away, use foul language in public, or even disciplining our kids incorrectly.
Again, every breakthrough in transparency-related technology creates its own economies. If allowed, each level of personal intrusion will be accompanied higher and higher thresholds for compliance…. until we reach a breaking point.
Radical Transparency
While a few inspired individuals have pushed the notion of radical transparency, living in a world where we are all equally exposed to the nth degree, this is simply not an achievable objective.
Yes, I will agree that in most cases, people who live in glass houses will not throw stones at others who live in glass houses.
However, in an imperfect world, transparency cannot be distributed equally, and those with less transparency will always have a significant advantage over those with more.
In a peace-loving community that exists without any guns, the person who arrives with a gun, and is willing to use it, has a significant advantage over everyone else.
Similarly, in a business environment where everyone follows the rules, the person who is willing to ignore the rules has a significant advantage over everyone else.
At some point, when the designated elite can hide behind the veil of privacy and others cannot, transparency becomes a lethal weapon.
Rule-Breakers are Our Heroes
“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.” – Truman Capote
Browsing through some recent college course catalogs it occurred to me that for all of the colorful characters in the history books, no one is currently teaching classes on the fine art of rule-breaking.
Virtually everyone who makes it into the history books is a rule-breaker. Yet for all the accolades we heap upon past rebels who zigged left when everyone else zagged right, those luminaries responsible for much of the world we live in today, we have not bothered to turn rule-breaking into an noble profession.
As counter-intuitive as it sounds, someone needs to create the official rules for becoming a rule-breaker. We can learn much from the inspired paths of these past contrarians.
Our Need for Rules
Before plotting a strategy for breaking rules, we first need to understand the reasons behind the rules, and the risks that come with breaking them.
Rules create order. They create the inter-relational fabric of society around which all of our actions are woven.
When rules are too harsh, and crudely enforced, they cause people to live in constant fear, forcing a regression of arts and sciences.
When rules are too lenient and loosely imposed, they provide an equally poor structure for the advancement of culture and knowledge.
Corporations are formed around rule structures that guide people through their working days. Like many other aspects of life, company rules can either be a net-positive or a net-negative. Too often businesses create layers of rules that keep bright people from doing new things.
To executives, power is about what they control. For the workers, power is freedom, and freedom is about what they can unleash.
Rules create stability, but rule-breakers are constantly looking for the next revolution they can unleash.
An Interesting Thing Happened on the Way to My Failure
“Restlessness is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress.
Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.” – Thomas A. Edison
Rule breakers need to be able to make mistakes, but transparency increases the pain threshold for making those mistakes.
Its sounds good when business people talk about wearing failure as a badge of courage, and how we can improve our success ratio by failing faster and failing smarter. But, in all likelihood, the next generation of transparency won’t even let us get to that point.
As Thomas Edison so aptly reminds us, there are valuable lessons to be learned from the things that don’t work.
Failures are not inevitable, and failure to one person is success to another.
When the learning process that comes from failure is aborted prematurely, the failure is destined to repeat itself.
The Coming Collision of Transparency Advocates and Rule-Breakers
Transparency is entering our lives at a relentless pace.
As we continue to transform into human information nodes, we find ourselves constantly radiating information. And this information is being detected, logged, and analyzed for use in unusual ways.
1. In the design of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has invariably chosen to err on the side of transparency. While there are always options for controlling individual privacy, the default settings tend to be the more open choice. Datamining of Facebook profiles has become a growing source of concern.
2. Major retailers are investing heavily in creating shopper profiles from tracking signals emitted from cellphones and other handheld devices. While the individual remains anonymous, their movements are tracked throughout the store with a careful record being kept of any action that may signal an interest in a particular product.
3. The Wall Street Journal published a report on the use of cookies, and the growth of consumer-tracking on major Web sites. In this report, they analyzed big websites and found that many dropped more than 100 cookies into visitors’ computers, with a 64-cookie average on the 50 largest sites.
4. Video surveillance has become a huge industry as camera prices and installation cost continue to drop. Intelligent surveillance cameras now have built-in features like instant analytics. This means that less video data needs to be streamed to a central location for viewing, which reduces the chance of bandwidth constraints and requires less human monitoring.
5. Low cost thermal security cameras are a fairly new phenomenon. Innovations in sensor technology have led to a significant reduction in the cost of producing thermal cameras, paving the way far more thermal video surveillance.
6. China is now setting the pace for the world in video surveillance. City-wide installations of over 100,000 cameras are not uncommon, dwarfing even the largest projects in Europe and the U.S.
As transparency grows, we are approaching a logical breaking point. When we do, look for the small-time rule-breakers of the past to become the full-scale turbo-charged rule-breakers of the future.
The driving forces of those wishing to monetize transparency will find themselves in a full-scale cyber-war with those who have reached their limit. And it may involve much more than online battlefields.
Testing Our Limits
Growing up as young people we are constantly testing our limits. We are testing the limits of how much we can eat or drink, how little sleep we can get away with, how fast we can run, and even how many people we can date simultaneously. We structure competitions, such as track and field events and academic challenges, around finding who has the highest limits.
Without testing our limits, we can’t possibly know what they are.
We are all terminally human, and our learning styles and thought processes vary tremendously from one person to another. As such, we need enough runway to fall on our face a few times before we understand our limits.
The world is changing and limit-testing is our way of informing us how to behave in the future. Our understanding of these evolving new rules are valuable insights worth learning.
Transparency has an insidious way of encroaching on our space and exposing our foibles to the rest of the world.
Those with the greatest upside potential also have the greatest risk of downside exposure.
Most of humanity has a built-in lemming gene that causes them to go with the flow. But once the pain threshold reaches a certain point, even the lemming genes won’t contain the fury.
Strap yourself in, it’s about to get messy.
By Futurist Thomas Frey

glass house 675

A report issued Tuesday by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety boasted of the fact that red-light cameras were responsible for a significant drop in highway fatalities at the intersections where they were posted.

With this one well-crafted report, a document proving they save lives, the red-light camera industry established a beachhead in American society.

Naturally there was no mention of the lives that have been destroyed, marriages ripped apart, or the economic drain on the communities surrounding them because of the onerous fines imposed. Saving lives virtually always trumps the carnage of enforcement.

The issuance of the red-light camera report follows a repeatable pattern in business where a controversial enterprise with substantial cash-flow devises a brilliant strategy for justifying their existence.

Transparency creates its own economies. Whether or not red-light cameras are a net-positive or a net-negative for society is less important than the fact that we are making a dramatic shift towards micro-monitoring human actions.

With every new technology that expands the realm of human transparency, enterprising people quickly follow with systems designed to capitalize on any human deviation from the newly established norms.

Read the rest of this entry »

business trends, future scenario, historical perspective, prediction, scary future, technology trends 6 Comments »