Foresight Research and Strategy
I regularly lead large-scale, multi-client research projects that get delivered in multiple formats including video, reports, visual maps, and at in-person conferences and workshops. This work includes designing a bespoke research process for each project, assembling and managing the project team, assigning, reviewing and editing contributions, developing the overarching narrative, and presenting the findings to sponsoring organizations.
Below are some recent highlights:
Toward Climate Positive Organizations
The climate crisis will be perhaps the most critical force of the next several decades — and the decisions we make in the 2020s will be essential to our ability to shape our long-term future. The climate crisis demands that we act with urgency in a time of unprecedented challenge and complexity, and it means we must think in a longer-term timeframe than we usually do.
Organizing for Future Readiness
A combination of advances from biotech, energy, and materials science are maturing and will open new frontiers in innovation and organizational strategy as well as profound new risks.
To take advantage of these advances, organizations will need to look beyond a single innovation and imagine new ways to combine advances to become resilient to shocks and prepared to take advantage of unexpected opportunities.
The Age of Distributed SuperPowers
Power, the ability to shape consequences, is being distributed and remade in ways that are fundamentally reshaping the operational environment. In this year-long research project, we analyzed how three extreme forces--climate change, automation, and institutional volatility--will impact the decade ahead and create new risks, demands, and opportunities.
Remodeling Trust
Whether shopping for a favorite brand of baby food, diagnosing a perceived illness, or deciding where to invest, issues of trust emerge at every step. In this project, we analyzed how an emerging set of future forces is challenging traditional forms of trust and creating new questions about how we will need to build trust with each other. As part of this work, we examined how these forces will impact long-standing models we use to build trust.
Toward an Internet of Actions
Over the next decade, advances across the technology stack will combine to reveal a world where inanimate objects speak to us, bots act on our behalf, and networked machines negotiate with each other, hopefully with our best interests in mind. But what values should we encode into these intelligent objects and networked terrains? What do we really want from these billions of intelligent, autonomous machines who will soon share our business, social, and civic spheres? Optimizing technical systems for a variety of values and goals will open up opportunities to use technology in surprising and innovative ways.
When Everything is Media
As the smart phone has matured--with relatively stable user experiences and slowing growth--tech leaders and innovators are increasingly asking: What's the next big thing? In this 2016 research, we looked at the emergence of AI, VR/AR, wearables and more to argue that rather than one "next big thing," we should prepare for a decade where communications will be seamless and ambient. As this takes place, communications strategies will need to be reimagined to match our intentions for communications with our technical abilities.