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Chapter Two - Strategic Foresight

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My last post here on the APF blog was difficult to write and involved a lot of soul searching.

So this month I decided to do something more fun. Initially this post was going to be about communicating foresight. But then I thought; why write about how to communicate foresight when I can try to communicate foresight instead? Why not do it with an example? So here we go. Most futurists like to use models and frameworks to help people make sense of the world. The Hero's Journey Fig 1. You've probably seen Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey from his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The Future as a Landscape Fig 2. In Hardin Tibbs' image Star, Mountain, Chessboard, Self the future is imagined as a landscape.

"Seeing the future as a psychological landscape clarifies the elements of strategy, provides insights into key areas of strategic thinking, and helps develop the strategic conviction essential for visionary leadership. " Mixing these two metaphors. Future-landscape-tibbs-a4.pdf. Association of Professional Futurists - Communicating foresight using mixed metaphors. My last post here on the APF blog was difficult to write and involved a lot of soul searching.

Association of Professional Futurists - Communicating foresight using mixed metaphors

So this month I decided to do something more fun. Initially this post was going to be about communicating foresight. But then I thought; why write about how to communicate foresight when I can try to communicate foresight instead? Why not do it with an example? So here we go. Most futurists like to use models and frameworks to help people make sense of the world. The Hero's Journey Fig 1. You've probably seen Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey from his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The Future as a Landscape Fig 2. In Hardin Tibbs' image Star, Mountain, Chessboard, Self the future is imagined as a landscape.

"Seeing the future as a psychological landscape clarifies the elements of strategy, provides insights into key areas of strategic thinking, and helps develop the strategic conviction essential for visionary leadership. " Mixing these two metaphors. From Victim to Leader (Leader values) The Hero’s Journey: A Campbellian Look at the Metaphorical Path (4.86 MB - 190 Pages) What Machines Can’t Do. We’re clearly heading into an age of brilliant technology.

What Machines Can’t Do

Computers are already impressively good at guiding driverless cars and beating humans at chess and Jeopardy. As Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology point out in their book “The Second Machine Age,” computers are increasingly going to be able to perform important parts of even mostly cognitive jobs, like picking stocks, diagnosing diseases and granting parole. As this happens, certain mental skills will become less valuable because computers will take over. Having a great memory will probably be less valuable. Being able to be a straight-A student will be less valuable — gathering masses of information and regurgitating it back on tests. But what human skills will be more valuable? In the news business, some of those skills are already evident. More generally, the age of brilliant machines seems to reward a few traits.

That doesn’t seem too surprising. Continue reading the main story. Introduction.pdf. Pessimist To Optimist - How To Change Your Viewpoint. Pessimist To Optimist – Change The WiringIf you are a pessimist, you see the world to be as bad as it can possibly be.

Pessimist To Optimist - How To Change Your Viewpoint

It is a negative view of life, which is harmful to your health. So, develop a new “explanatory style” to change your gloomy view into a vision of a bright and cheerful world. That view needs an understanding that your happiness comes from within you and that events follow a universal pattern with a stable order. Pessimism is based on an internal conviction that you have no control over events, which occur erratically, without any universally applicable pattern. A change in your convictions will rewire the neural circuits, which support that view. Pessimist To Optimist – Pessimism Is Not Your Choice A pessimistic interpretation of an event is not your conscious choice. Within the instant in which your eyes perceive a group of black and white pixels on this page, your mind interprets them as a set of characters forming a word and locates its meaning.