SensemakingStrategizing

Why We Are Optimists

By Patricia Lustig, Partner at Supertrends Institute & Gill Ringland   Reflections We were recently asked to write a chapter for a volume[1] celebrating 50 years after the publication of Future Shock[2]. This 1970’s book envisioned a post-industrial society where the pace of change accelerates at such a rate that it feels threatening. Indeed, the term “future…

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A World of Few Children

By Patricia Lustig, Partner at Supertrends Institute & Gill Ringland   Demographers are starting to talk about global population decline, with alarm. Why is it alarming? We know that the world has gone through periods of catastrophic population decline before, due to volcanic eruptions and plague. These caused population decline by killing large numbers of…

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If you aim for success, you are probably going to miss it. Follow your inner compass instead!

By Norun Laahne Thomassen , Partner at Supertrends Institute   If you aim for success, you are probably going to miss it. Follow your inner compass instead! Striving for success alone might bring you wealth, status, and power, but do not forget about fulfillment. In the long run, success without fulfillment will leave you feeling…

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Living in the Post-Pandemic USA

By Alexandra Whittington, Futurist, Educator & TEDx speaker This article is an excerpt from a report by Partners in Foresight, The Home of the 2020s: Scenarios for How We Might Live in the Post-Pandemic Future.   Scenario 1: Hotel Life Hotels and abandoned malls become pandemic-proof senior citizen communities Travel and retail sectors were never…

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The Content House: How to Make Friends and Influence People … From Home

By Alexandra Whittington, Futurist, Educator & TEDx speaker This article is an excerpt from a report by Partners in Foresight, The Home of the 2020s: Scenarios for How We Might Live in the Post-Pandemic Future.   A “collab house” or “content house” is a house where social media influencers live while creating shareable digital content.…

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Smart Homes, next level: Brain-Computer Interface in the House

By Alexandra Whittington, Futurist, Educator & TEDx speaker This article is an excerpt from a report by Partners in Foresight, The Home of the 2020s: Scenarios for How We Might Live in the Post-Pandemic Future. Should a home literally stimulate the mind? A 2020 global survey by Ikea found that the majority — 78% of…

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Digital Identity is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed

By Tracey Follows, partner at Supertrends Institute In 2015 the United Nations committed itself to achieving seventeen sustainable development goals by 2030. The sixteenth of those goals relates to justice and, more specifically, clause 16.9 commits nations to ‘provide legal identity for all’. This is an important goal and we should remember that over one…

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AI vs. the Future: Three Scenarios for the Post-Pandemic Future

By Alexandra Whittington, Partner at Supertrends Institute Introduction A dramatic game of Go, the match between Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) AlphaGo and the human world champion Lee Sedol in early 2016, captivated the public. Like Kasparov playing chess against Big Blue in 1997, this was a literal game-changer. Why do humans compete against computers at…

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Working together apart – will you be a time owner or a time slave?

Written by Liselotte Lyngsø, Partner at Supertrends Institute If you had the opportunity to work anywhere you’d like. Where would it be? Would you stay in bed, go to a café, pick a co-working space together with like-minded neighbors – stay in your regular office? What kind of atmosphere works best for YOU? Maybe its…

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Playing games with the next generation – What will people want to play in 2040?

Written by Alexandra Whittington, Partner at Supertrends Institute As a futurist, I rely heavily on a skill called Scanning. Scanning is how we start to know the future and begin to expand our time horizon. It gives us a feel for the patterns that influence the future. Scanning is one of the most universal futurist…

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Global politics: a four-dimensional chess game

Written by Bronwyn Williams, Partner at Supertrends Institute International politics looks very different in the post-pandemic world. No longer a simple contest of military and economic might, it’s becoming a four-dimensional free-for-all. And China is winning. Global geopolitical allegiances and agendas are rapidly evolving because of Covid. In the past, military and economic considerations provided…

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Five technologies that will transform the way we work

Written by Tracey Follows, Partner at Supertrends Institute When thinking about the future we particularly think about the technologies that might shape the way we work. From biometrics to blockchain, futurist Tracey Follows shares her predictions for the future of work. 1. Biometrics Perhaps the most obvious and short-term technology that will transform our working…

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“The Great Resignation” – Tapping into the mindset of the employees

Written by Keerthana Sreenivasan, Partner at Supertrends Institute The pandemic has prompted many people to reconsider what employment entails, how they are valued, and how they spend their time. The result is a significant spike in resignations. More than 4 million Americans quit their jobs in April, CNBC reported earlier this year, and almost half…

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Supertrends drive organizational innovation and organizational demise

Written by Nicolai Chen Nielsen, Partner at Supertrends Institute Why Organize? Organizations are the single most important invention of humanity. They have allowed us reach milestones that would be impossible to achieve for any individual. Take the seemingly simple example of producing a take-away cup of coffee. The process includes steps such as: sowing a…

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Building resilience in our world of accelerated change

Written by Elatia Abate, Partner at Supertrends Institute Building resilience in our world of accelerated change The case for a Chief Resilience Officer Earlier this year, I was reading an article in The Economist entitled, “Hail to the ‘Chiefs’” that described how CEOs often create executive roles to face new, big challenges. Essentially, they do…

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How asking the right questions may drive your conversations and innovation

Written by Jens Hansen, CEO at Supertrends Institute Defining questions We often learn by finding answers to our questions. This is especially true when we seek to learn about how best to navigate and benefit from our Future. Questions, however, are not just questions – A certain category of questions is much more helpful than…

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How to understand new technologies and make them work for you

Written by Keerthana Sreenivasan, Partner at Supertrends Institute How to understand new technologies and make them work for you We often read and hear about how a company have benefitted from transitioning fully or partly from an older technology to one of the promising new technologies. Technologies like 3D printing, 5G, cloud computing, big data…

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