In her acclaimed SXSWedu 2016 keynote, Jane McGonigal critically examines a billboard from a 1930's world fair that lured people with the promise of "seeing the future".
"This is not what real futurist does," she warned. "A futurist does not see the future. They make the future."
She then goes on to ask the attendees at SXSWEdu to imagine all the conceivable options the future may have in store ten years from now. She chooses ten years because it's close. We can easily envision ourselves ten years in the future: where we will be in our careers. Simply put, our actions today have a foreseeable impact on ten years in the future.
Instead of seeing the future though, Jane invites us to choose the future we want and get started working to make it happen. But how do we forecast future events. Let's walk through Jane's lessons together shall we.
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No. They are not these invisible radio waves that transmit future oracles to our passive brains. On the contrary, these signals are observations or clues that stand out to us as we go along in our day to day business. Signals are quirky trends we notice in the news or the blogs we read, they can be a term or a buzzword that keeps reappearing in our favourite Reddit feed or interesting new habits you observe in public spaces. Things that make us go hmmm...
Pulling different signals together to create a forecast
Next, we need to look at these signals collectively and creatively to make a forecast. Jane implies that forecast is less like a vision or an oracle and more like an action plan to be acknowledged, revised or discarded. She reminds us that "we're not making predictions. We're finding out what's
The deaths per year done by guns, 80% of them are gang related. If I Grow Up, written by Todd Strasser shows the life of a male kid growing up in the projects in Chicago. DeShawn wanted didn’t want to join the gang and stay in school. But his family didn’t have money or food. His friend that was in the gang had a bunch of money. So DeShawn joined the gang because in school they didn’t teach them much, and the money that his family got was a lot more of it when he got in the gang. I think that DeShawn had a choice not to join the gang because he could get a job, could have gotten a better education, and other people have gotten out of the projects.
The future is shrouded with multitude of mysteries which humanity is not able to precisely discern; however, predictions or depictions of this concealed future can be very effective in highlighting a problem which the future may hold. Author Ray Bradbury seemed to have had this in mind, writing Fahrenheit 451 in 1953 for the very purpose of cautioning the novel’s readers not to create a future resembling the one in the book: a dystopia set in the distant future in which books are censored and book owners’ possessions, burnt. Here, the society’s people are consumed by the new, futuristic (from the perspective of a man writing in the 1950s) technology which provided entertainment provoking little thought, such as television watching, thereby
Edward Bellamy’s book Looking Backward was a projection of American thinking at this time that compounded on widely held belief of millennialism. This book mainly focused on a fictional future utopia one that many Americans wanted to believe in and develop. In this fictional story “… all now enjoy the most favorable conditions of physical life; the young are carefully nurtured and studiously cared for; the labor which is required of all is limited to the period of greatest bodily vigor…” This paints a picture that many want to come true, a picture that many people would go out and act upon and make it happen expand to encompass other spheres of influence and reach all over the world. Bellamy himself thought that America could influence the world going far enough to write about it in his book thinking that his new system of government would draw attention to America and other countries would want to replicate this new efficient system. In some ways he was right he was able to influence many Americans to look toward a brighter future, and this book even gave rise to many movements as “Mr. Edward Bellamy, a novelist by profession, is the recognized father of the Nationalist Clubs,” this book gave Americans hope and a global purpose to accomplish, to create a perfect society.
Each of us has a slightly different way of defining the word “future”. For some of us, “the future” refers simply to time. To a date. To a random assortment of letters and numbers. For others of us, however, “the future” takes on a completely different meaning.
Greenleaf, Robert K. “Futurist Lessons from Thomas Jefferson.” Futurist 31.2 (1997): 68. General Science Collection, ND. Web. 11 Dec. 2013.
...e outcomes. Additional forecasts on what happens next will also support the scientific standard for prediction of future events.
bits like this help to shape Jane into a Lady and who she will be when
Good morning, listeners, and thanks for reading. Welcome to the Future Forum. I am Millie Shane. An exciting topic for us to discuss today is the challenges for the future. What concerns could our future generations confront?
54). The first step in forecasting is to develop the opportunity or threat with different alternative conclusions, which is most useful when using a brainstorming method (Ginter et al., 2013, p. 54). In addition, there is a need to identify the associations between the tendencies, changes, predicaments, and or likelihood of events and the environmental categories (Ginter et al., 2013, p. 54), such as the judicial/political environment of the Affordable Care Act. In doing so, it will allow management to see the possibilities of how these issues can affect the future of the company. In turn, this allows the management team to build a better strategic plan, so that the healthcare business has longevity in the fast-paced environment. However, one must assess all the information proposed from the scanning, monitoring, and forecasting of the potential threats or opportunities to the healthcare
Morrow, Ed. "He Dreamed the Future." World & I. Jan. 2004: 244-255. SIRS Renaissance. Web. 03 Nov 2013.
We are part of a journey that has been progressing since the beginning of time. However, we as a society always seem to be looking past the present to some climactic end -- the finish line, the future, when in reality, there is no finish line. Society always looks to the future for the answers to today's problems, believing that the future holds something exciting that the present lacks. This is not the way we should be thinking! We should be asking ourselves, "What finish line are we hoping to arrive to?" Or better yet, "Do we want to arrive at a finish line at all?"
me on a volunteer project I did in high school. The summer after my junior year
I don?t know what the future holds, but I know who holds the future.
My personal vision of the future is not something I have taken a significant amount of time to ponder in the past. I have general ideas of where I see myself both personally and professionally in future but have not identified specific steps to get there or pondered why I want to be in that situation. When taking on this somewhat daunting task of identifying my future self it is important to identify my driving values, philosophy, dreams, and my personal calling. Self-reflection on these characteristics and preferences are key to a developing a successful picture of the future.
... the future and as many have stated, including Joel Barker (2009), “the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.”