Over the past year, my work as a professional futurist has continued to evolve. I now speak more often about the need for intellectual humility; spend extra time helping clients reframe old questions, as well as asking new ones; and devote additional time to the vital tasks of reading, thinking and reflecting. The reason I…

Last year, Simon Anderson, one of my favorite futurists–and a reverse mentor of sorts—said something that really resonated with me. He said, “2013 is the year the future arrived.” In a literal sense, the future will always be, well, in the future; but let me provide you a glimpse into what Simon was driving at:…

What will the coming decade look like? The honest answer is that no one knows. A glimpse, though, can be found in a promising new start-up, Oculus Rift. Eighteen months ago, Palmer Luckey was a teenager with a clever idea for a new business. Foregoing the traditional path of securing a bank loan, Luckey instead…

It has been said that you could study a grain of sand for a million years and never anticipate how a single grain might trigger an avalanche. With this metaphor in mind, I’d like you to contemplate a single sensor. By itself, it doesn’t amount to much. What happens, however, when 50 billion sensors are…

It has been said that “Big Data” is the “oil” of the new economy. Is this true? I believe it is and I’ll explain using oil as an example. Like me, you were probably instructed to change the oil in your automobile every 3,000 miles or so. This was solid advice in the past but…

As a professional futurist and forecaster, I prefer to read the newspaper from back to front because I often find the most interesting items are buried on the back pages. To this end, this past week I stumbled upon this Wall Street Journal article explaining that Foxconn–the massive Chinese manufacturing company that employs thousands of…

#1. First Heart A-Hack Victim. In January, an Arizona socialite will be charged with murder after it was uncovered she hired a former disgruntled employee of a leading medical device firm to hack into her cheating husband’s pacemaker and deliver a lethal shock to his heart. Shares of the company’s stock will plummet on the…

Nate Silver in his new book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t, makes a profound point: Certainty is actually correlated with making worse forecasts. Let me repeat that: Certainty is actually correlated with making worse forecasts. In other words, the more certain you are of your forecast or prediction,…

There is no difficult way to say this: You’re dead. Like Bruce Willis’ character in the 2001 hit movie, Sixth Sense, you’re dead and you just don’t know it yet. If you hope to resuscitate your life, your company or your organization there’s only one thing to do: Stop conducting business as usual and embrace…

As computers become ever more powerful, it’s difficult for some people to comprehend what will soon be possible. For example, after IBM’s Watson supercomputer defeated Jeopardy’s top two human champions, it might not have been obvious how the same technology would soon be helping doctors make better, faster, more affordable and more accurate cancer diagnosis….