Science-fiction novelist William Gibson – who coined the word cyberspace – sets his most recent novel in the near past as he feels the future becomes exponentially harder to predict. “We have no idea at all now where we are going”, he says in an interview over at Silicon.com recently. He also speaks of the increasing difficulty corporate futurists are having trying to tells company boards which world they will be living in in 10 years time.

But that is a certain kind of futurist and a certain kind of company, living by the question:  ‘What will the world be like … ?’. A whole other kind is asking: ‘What if the world turns out like … or … or … or … ?’. They care less about getting the one and only future right and more about being inspired by and preparing for a manifold of possible futures that might occur. As such, the decrease of predictability or the increase of uncertainty of developments and their possible consequences, sounds like a  plea for looking ahead by means of alternative futures, as in scenario-based thinking, participatory (en)visioning etc. Diversity of viewpoints, a manifold of imagined, possible futures shape a thousand tomorrows … a new reality of complexity we need to learn to deal with in new ways.

Via LunchoverIP

This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 17:55 and is filed under business, foresight, future. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.