Anticipating the future has been a major preoccupation for people from the beginning of time. Creating scenarios as a way to anticipate the future has been popularized in recent decades. We engage in developing scenarios to increase awareness about possible outcomes and to understand the potential costs, benefits and consequences of any decision or action we may take.

In a business context, scenario-based planning is a creative, open-ended exploration of patterns that might emerge in your field. In our Future Scenarios Workshop we help executives anticipate and prepare for the future by exercising their ability to think about opportunities and challenges in context of what may happen in the next month, the next year, or in the longer term. It is a discovery process to help you evaluate uncertainties, triggers and the important forces that have the power to affect the future.

The value and benefits of developing your future scenarios for your organization are multiple:

1. You increase awareness to the range of plausible futures.
2. You challenge your assumptions.
3. You prepare and rehearse responses to specific scenarios.
4. You develop a framework for continued environmental scanning.
5. You create future options for your organization.
6. You identify specific decision points and triggers.
7. You cultivate in-depth understanding and insight about the inter-relationships of active forces in your eco-system.
8. You create a context with which to monitor and evaluate change.
9. You develop analytical tools to support strategic decisions.
10. You engage in a creative process that unleashes and forwards innovation.

© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: Oct.27.2008 :: Future, Strategy :: No Comments »

Excerpt from the Fourth Emerald Key: Radical growth - the Learn-ability leverage
Kaleidoscoping is the practice and capacity to recognize relationships and patterns. You practice active inquiry that seeks to understand the core principles that are the basis of all systems. Kaleidoscoping is the ability to compare and correlate seemingly unrelated fields and apply concepts from one to the other. For example, using the terminology and anatomy of weather systems in organizational behavior and the season’s cycle in the market place.  You discover that building an investment and building trusting relationships are similar – they follow the same principle, both need ongoing deposits.  You observe the infrastructure and activity of a beehive to learn about promoting a culture of efficiency and excellence in execution. Kaleidoscoping is the practice of increasing your capacity to handle complexity, such as in the now 24/7 interconnectedness of the web 2.0 conversation. You kaleidoscope to discover meaning in new combinations and connections and learn to anticipate what is newly emerging. You connect the dots to see constellations where others see stars.

© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: Aug.26.2008 :: Emerald Keys, Entrepreneur, Future, Innovation :: 2 Comments »

Watch this Charlie Rose discussion with Dean Ornish, George Church and David Agus.

My response: The bigger news in recent genetic breakthroughs is not that you will be able to know your medical future, but the knowledge that you have the power to determine which part of your genetics get expressed. This is the important stuff!

60 years ago with the development of antibiotics, medicine went through an arrogant phase. Medical doctors at that time believed we were just a couple of decades away from a disease free world. Few people contemplated then the unintended consequences of antibiotics. It would take a couple of decades for super resistant bugs to appear. I still remember the series of penicillin shots I got 44 years ago. My immune system is even now still recovering from that event.

I admire these brilliant doctors. It’s great that the medical field generates such excitement and new possibilities. But there is a caution toward some humility and wisdom in our next steps. Please don’t tell us personalized gene therapy will eradicate disease. And do tell us more about the preventative choices we can make in our daily lives. We now have a society, mostly in the West, which believes that genes contain a person’s unavoidable destiny. Based on the recent genetic breakthroughs, let us hope that the educational efforts of the next decade help us to understand that we have all the power in the world to determine which part of our genetics will get expressed. Let’s realize we have a part to play in how our destiny and our health play out.

© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: Aug.15.2008 :: Future, Reflections :: No Comments »

The Economist report on Our Nomadic Future begins: “SOMETIMES the biggest changes in society are the hardest to spot precisely because they are hiding in plain sight. It could well be that way with wireless communications. Something that people think of as just another technology is beginning to show signs of changing lives, culture, politics, cities, jobs, even marriages dramatically. In particular, it will usher in a new version of a very old idea: Nomadism.”

Every trend has a counter trend, and each advancement brings opportunities and challenges. These produce a range of individual and societal responses. Responses can be categorized into two brackets:
• “Above the line” enhanced developmental responses
• “Below the line” pathologies

Here are some key technological developments and the trends they are bringing. Following this list are challenges and opportunities, which I call here “challentunities”. The personal responses, as well as the responses of society as a whole will likely produce both “above” and “below” the line outcomes.

Total connectivity trends

1. Ubiquitous and permanent connectivity (planet-wide Wi-Fi hotspot)
2. Faster cellular networks with wider coverage
3. Total gadgets synchronization and migration
4. On-the-beach, in-the-park office - the placeless office (Work from anywhere)
5. No entry barriers
6. Everybody doing everything on the move
7. Blurring and integration of the productive and the social (work & Life)
8. High fidelity voice recognition (freeing up your hands)
9. Omnipresent video conferencing takes the Internet’s cyberspace out of the box and into live conversation.
10. Online personal cameras making each person a potential TV reporter in real time.

These connectivity trends have created and most likely will continue to create physical, psychological, social and moral “challentunities” - challenges and opportunities:

Societal (Lower Right quadrant) “challentunities” will include:
1. Space - as you are freed up from your desk and office, space will be redesigned. Closed, private, dedicated spaces will be replaced by multi functional spaces wherein people work, socialize, play, meditate, study and discover. Boardrooms, town hall meetings, schoolrooms will become less brick and mortar, less geographically centered and more responsive to real time needs.
2. Home - work spaces in homes will be re-envisioned and reconfigured. Just as the TV migrated from the living room and appeared in the kitchen, bedroom and yes, even in the laundry room so, too will the connectivity expand beyond the desktop or laptop into the very walls of our homes. Appliances will morph into multi-utility centers of controlling the domestic ecology, monitoring our energy usage and relieving the homeowner from some of the more mundane iterations of work and home maintenance as well as provide ultimate accessibility to unlimited reference.
3. City - city centers, work centers, social services, utility and essential infrastructure will be redefined with population movement less dependant on industrially based mega centers or large metropolitan service industries.
4. Transportation - the car, its usage and traffic will be redesigned (converging with the imperative of energy shift away from oil). The increasing number of telecommuters and the expanding work week where individuals are ‘working’ whether or not they are actually at the office will transform traffic patterns.
5. Work - what you do at work, how you do your work, who you meet with at work and how meetings are held, how they happen and what can be achieved in them — will change and be redefined. Job descriptions and responsibilities will also flex and shift into new parameters as discoveries and innovations are incorporated into the workplace.
6. Company - the company and the corporate entity will be redesigned. Market economy in the way it’s been practiced in the last 70 years is reaching an inflection point. World wide access, merging interests, and foremost global, planet-wide interests will reshape corporate agendas. The dictatorship of the “quarterly profits” is reaching a point of inefficiency and ineffective measure. The greater imperatives of society and planetary economy will drive the evolution of the corporation as well as the framework of the market.
7. Media – It’s already here but only utilized by one percent. Imagine every person having the potential and power to become their own transmitting cable channel in real time.
8. Nation - possibly the way of the republic, its politics and its participative democracy will be re-defined, as WE THE PEOPLE discover our greater power. Our integration with the world economy and environmental interdependence will increasingly bring change and new perspective into our national priorities.

The Cultural (Lower left quadrant) “challentunities” will include:
1. Being fully present - in a world of total connectivity the biggest challenge, and the biggest blessing and gift is to be fully present. To have a completely engaged communication is to be at the point – to be fully present in your conversation.
2. Isolation - total connectivity can mean total isolation with its challenges and pathologies, the reduced need to interact in person can affect social skills and aptitudes.
3. Family - its ways and meaning, how it evolves, its ability to stay connected and sustain itself will be challenged and revitalized.
4. Friends - their place in your life, how you stay connected and interact will change and evolve. The increasing speed of everyday transactions will continue to force people into sound-bite relationships, prioritizing when and how to connect in a deeper way.
5. Community - how it is defined, what it can influence, what it does and means to you as an extension of family and friends, work and active participation will evolve as our priorities shift .
6. Meaning-making - the dynamics of how individuals and groups interface, connect and co-create will evolve. We will discover new ways for individuals and groups to co-create and make-meaning together.
7. Language - All of these aspects will lead to further evolution of language and ways of sharing meaning. Both written language and, even more so, oral culture will continue to shape-shift and evolve to describe concepts that are newly appearing as we move into the future.

Internal dimension (Upper left and right quadrants)

As virtualization liberates people from the cubicle prisons, and “the tyranny of place gives way to the tyranny of time”, the big leverage point is mindshare: the algorithm of mind-place and mind-time. The key opportunities and challenges “challentunities” will include:
1. Freedom - are you leveraging total connectivity to greater freedom and greater self control or are you becoming subject to it?
2. Recharge - are you able to “turn it off” and have down time? Are you able to rest and recharge?
3. Autonomy - do you enjoy increased autonomy or do you find growing dependency?
4. Prioritization - how do you optimize prioritization and decision making in a data saturated shape-shifting environment?
5. Engagement - where is your mind at any given time? How do you best engage your whole brain/mind?
6. Service - what is your mind processing? What are you serving?
7. Clarity - are you able to maintain clarity and focus? How do you go about it?
8. Alignment - how do you maintain and upgrade alignment to goals, aims and your most essential values?
9. Presence – are you able to be fully present in the here and now?
10. Purpose - are you finding a way to replenish and re-connect to what matters most, to your purpose?

© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: Apr.29.2008 :: Future :: 2 Comments »

I clearly remember my first landing practice in Fighter Pilot course. My flight instructor demonstrated the pattern around the airbase from take off, upwind, crosswind, downwind, base and final approach to landing. He then handed the control over to me. My first approach to landing the plane was a huge overshoot. I was so surprised that in my next attempt, I seriously overcorrected. My second approach resulted in a substantial undershoot. We needed to push the throttle hard to get to the runway and not land in the sand, six hundred yards short. Apparently, I was not very original in my miscalculations. In fact the Overshoot—Undershoot error seems to be a pattern for most people on many fronts. Perhaps it is human nature or the nature of our brains. I was reminded of my overshoot – undershoot landing experience by Paul Saffo, Six Rules for Effective Forecasting, July 2007 edition of Harvard Business Review who writes:

“Ironically, forecasters can do worse than ordinary observers when it comes to anticipating inflection points. Ordinary folks are simply surprised when an inflection point arrives seemingly out of nowhere, but innovators and would-be forecasters who glimpse the flat-line beginnings of the S curve often miscalculate the speed at which the inflection point will arrive. As futurist Roy Amara pointed out to me three decades ago, there is a tendency to overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term. Our hopes cause us to conclude that the revolution will arrive overnight. Then, when cold reality fails to conform to our inflated expectations, our disappointment leads us to conclude that the hoped-for revolution will never arrive at all—right before it does.”

In essence this is the pattern behind every boom and bust cycle. Here is what Richard Russell author of The Dow Theory Letters says about this: “In all history, stocks have always been subject to two major forces. These two forces are as follows - the first force is the one that takes stocks ever-higher to overvaluation. The second force is the one that reverses at the top, and then takes stocks down to undervaluation. How stocks get from undervaluation to overvaluation and then back to undervaluation, that’s what we struggle with. We call the move from undervaluation to overvaluation a primary bull market. We call the journey back to undervaluation a primary bear market.”

Luckily I’ve learned to land the Fuga and then the Skyhawk safely and had many good landings with an occasional little undershoot or overshoot. Still, I observe all around me the tendency of people to vacillate from over optimism to over pessimism. The auto industry followed this pattern in the early 20th century with companies appearing like mushrooms after the rain. Later, the story became how most of them failed and went bankrupt. Then, within a few years the Big Three (GM, Ford, Chrysler) had taken on a much bigger chunk of the American economy than anyone could have imagined just few decades earlier. The same identical pattern played out in the dot com bust.

Where is the cycle now? Are we now in an overestimating or an underestimating phase? What is mass psychology underestimating or overestimating today? Where are you overshooting or undershooting? Here are 10 areas to reflect on:

1. Internet 2.0 - How will it change the nature and character of participative democracy? Are you underestimating the long term societal and geo-political change the Internet will bring?
2. The Chinese Dragon – are we in the overestimation phase to be followed by a bust of the Shanghai stock market? Or is mass psychology underestimating the power of the dragon?
3. The Indian Tiger – is the tiger’s ability to catch up with the dragon underestimated?
4. The Commodities Bull market – Started in 2001 but is it still in its infancy?
5. The crash of the dollar – is its impact and future deterioration underestimated or overestimated at this time?
6. Peak Oil – is the energy crisis and peak oil an underestimated challenge? Are the innovation and economical opportunities these challenges will unleash under or overestimated?
7. The Golden Years – are we over or underestimating the societal transformation and the redefinition of the golden years by the Boomers entering the fourth phase of life:
   1st: birth to 21
   2nd: 21-42
   3rd:42-65
   4th: 65-105
8. A New, “New Age” – What is the power of new pragmatic and integral idealism that is beginning to appear with young people all around the world?
9. Peace in the Middle East – Is the possibility of peace and its power to transform the region and the whole world over or underestimated?
10. Latin America – Is it currently highly underestimated in its social, economic and spiritual power?

Please add and share your thoughts about what we might be over or under estimating at this time.

© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: Jan.01.2008 :: Future, Money & Market Behavior, Strategy :: No Comments »