Foresight Snippets – No. 17
[Originally published] October 2001
Special Issue: Wild Cards
- Suddenly, the World Changes…
- Britain Says It Is Taking Asteroid Impact Threat Seriously
- Searching for ET at Home
Scanning Retrospective, No. 16
Foresight Snippets – No. 16
[Originally published] September 2001
- The 200-Year Present
- Life Extension and Immortality
- Scientist Says Mind Continues After Brain Dies
Scanning Retrospective, No. 15
Foresight Snippets – No. 15
[Originally published] August 2001
- Feeling Poorly? It Could Be Affluenza
- Tired of Fast Life? Try “Slow Food”
- The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Children — Truax vs The Lorax
- The Ghost in the Machine
Scanning Retrospective, No. 14
Foresight Snippets – No. 14
[Originally published] July 2001
- An Increasingly Thirsty Future Leading to Water Wars?
- Privatising the Water of Life
- Cloud Catchers
Scanning Retrospective, No. 13
Foresight Snippets – No. 13
[Originally published] June 2001
[The Snippets moved to a monthly schedule as from June 2001]
- Back to the Future 2: 2001 — Memories are Made of Glass
- You’ve Heard of GMOs; What About GMAs — Genetically Modified Athletes?
- Thunderbirds are GO!
‘Futures Intelligence’
In an earlier post I mentioned the term ‘futures intelligence’ in the context of the activity of gathering information about the future and undertaking what I like to call ‘futures intelligence analysis’. (Obviously, this is done with a view to utilising it for decision-making processes, such as setting strategy or developing policy, which is generally the end goal of any sort of intelligence analysis, futures or otherwise.) Here I want to expand briefly upon the multi-faceted concept of ‘futures intelligence’ itself, and two complementary ways that I think the term can be used.
Scanning Retrospective, No. 12
Foresight Snippets – No. 12
[Originally published] 15 May 2001
- The Hot New Medium: Paper
- The Antibiotics Crisis
- Homeopathy — Thanks for the Memory
Scanning Retrospective, No. 11
Foresight Snippets – No. 11
[Originally published] 30 April 02001
- Memes and Cultural Evolution
- The OECD Environmental Outlook is Released
- The Clock of the Long Now
Scanning Retrospective, No. 10
Foresight Snippets – No. 10
[Originally published] 12 April 2001
- Trends Affecting Education for the Next 10 Years
- Dolly Cloners Abhor Human Tests
- An Oath for Scientists?
Scanning Retrospective, No. 9
Foresight Snippets – No. 9
[Originally published] 30 March 2001
- Einstein.tv
- Waves Run This Power Plant
- The Singularity
Scanning Retrospective, No. 8
Foresight Snippets – No. 8
[Originally published] 15 March 2001
- Research in the Business World
- Cashing In on the Future
- Privatising the University — the New Tragedy of the Commons
Scanning Retrospective, No. 7
Foresight Snippets – No. 7
[Originally published] 28 February 2001
- Would You Like a Mobile Phone With That?
- Cloning: Could Humans Be Next?
- A Framework for Making Sustainability a Practical Reality
Citation managers for futures scanning
During our futures scanning – doing what I like to call ‘futures intelligence analysis’, which therefore makes us ‘futures intelligence analysts’ – we need a way to capture and retain the information about the scanning ‘hits’ we find.
Scanning Retrospective, No. 6
Foresight Snippets – No. 6
[Originally published] 14 February 2001
- A University That Wants Students to Stay Away from Class
- Report: On-line Training ‘Boring’
- Setting Standards for Web-Ed
Scanning Retrospective, No. 5
Foresight Snippets – No. 5
[Originally published] 30 January 2001
- The Untethered Campus
- A Hydrogen-Fueled “People’s Car”
- Living Under the Hole in the Sky
Scanning Retrospective, No. 4
Foresight Snippets – No. 4
[Originally published] 15 January 2001
- Does Reading Harry Potter Cause Global Warming?
- Oops! A New Bio-Weapon
- Back to the Future: 2001 — Is Tablet Computing About to Go Mainstream?
Scanning Retrospective, No. 3
Foresight Snippets – No. 3
[Originally published] 15 December 2000
- What price the “.tv” domain?
- You’d better be good! Darth Vader is coming to the lecture hall
- Everything old is new again: phone numbers vs URLs
Scanning Retrospective, No. 2
Foresight Snippets – No. 2
[Originally published] 27 November 2000
- Cellular Phones: Are They Safe to Use?
- You’re Hired — Now Stay Home!
- Lasered Lawns
Scanning Retrospective, No. 1
Foresight Snippets – No. 1
From the Foresight & Planning Unit
[Originally published] 17 November 2000
by Joseph Voros
- Universities Begin Creating Palm-Sized Versions of Campus Web Pages
- GM Goat Spins Web-Based Future
- Stick Your Finger in Your Ear and Go “Ting-a-Ling-a-Loo!”
Futures Scanning – A Retrospective View
The background
In August 2000, I was hired as a strategic foresight analyst in the Foresight and Planning Unit (FPU) of the (then) Office of the Vice Chancellor at Swinburne University of Technology. Part of this role was to conduct futures ‘scanning’ – by looking at the education ‘landscape’ through a ‘foresight’ time-frame much longer than is usual in conventional strategic planning; in our case, it was 10-20 years out. This obviously means that today, in 2021, the ‘future landscape’ being ‘scouted’ back then has since come to pass and become history. Hence the motivation for this experiment – to look back at what were picked up then as impending signals of change, and to compare what was reported in those days as future possibilities with what eventually came to pass as historical actualities. It has taken two decades to reach this point of being able to conduct such a ‘retrospective longitudinal assessment’ – and hopefully it should prove to be both interesting and instructive. It may also allow some real-world-data calibration of the utility of the heuristic principles for scanning described in the previous post. Continue reading “Futures Scanning – A Retrospective View”
The Voroscope 