World Future Society 2015 Professional Members Forum
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
1 like•658 views
Slidedeck on the 2015 WFS Professional Members Forum "Software Sandbox" morning session, presented by Dr Wendy Schultz, Infinite Futures, and Dr Richard Lum, Vision Foresight Strategy.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Similar to World Future Society 2015 Professional Members Forum
Similar to World Future Society 2015 Professional Members Forum (20)
More from Wendy Schultz
More from Wendy Schultz (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (9)
World Future Society 2015 Professional Members Forum
- 1. SOFTWARE SANDBOX Exploring Six Software Platforms that support futures research & foresight Dr Wendy Schultz, Infinite Futures Dr Richard Lum, Vision Foresight Strategy
- 2. SOFTWARE SANDBOX 1. Shaping Tomorrow 2. Factr 3. Sensemaker 4. Futurescaper 5. Co:tunity 6. Sharpcloud
- 3. AGENDA, AM MORNING: 9.30 – 12.30 • Lessons learned – challenges? Support? • Existing software - examples • Wishlist – mapping what we’d like • Sandbox explorations • Feedback 12.30 Lunch
- 4. AGENDA, PM AFTERNOON: 13.30 – 15.30 Advising clients in and about a VUCA world 1. How do you, as foresight professionals, assess the time horizon of this VUCA world? Does it go on forever? End in 5 years? What comes next? 2. What concrete recommendations do you make to clients about how to thrive and be effective in these conditions? Thank you and safe journeys home!
- 5. LESSONS LEARNED • What challenges in data collection and sensemaking do futures research and foresight pose for the practitioner? • Which of these challenges in futures practice could be addressed by crowd-sourcing, asynchronous feedback or brainstorming, emergent impact and systems mapping, etc?
- 6. Pro Members’ Comments • Information overload; being able to categorize, store, retrieve • Scanning for appropriately weak signals out of the mass of signals • Cross checking • Continuous environment scanning and categorizing and make some sense out of it • Big data somehow • Disconnect in the data collection process • Easier to collect, harder to see patterns • Being able to find other people’s analysis of the trends • Not having a sense of what you have missed, despite the mass of data available • Holes in data • What are the main emerging issues all over the world • Global map with bubbling emerging issues, kind of real time • To be able to sort and link the data you already tag/find • To be able to map it • More and more big gaps between those with big data and those that don’t • Able to coordinate between different outlets • Able to collect ongoing data
- 7. Quality + Design Criteria for Scanning • Quality: What makes excellence generally? – ‘Gold standard’ suggested by Bishop + Gyford: a scan ‘hit’ identifies an emerging change that is objectively new even to experts, that confirms or is confirmed by additional scan data, and that has been identified in time for social dialogue, impact assessment, and policy formation. – Scanning should produce results that challenge ‘business as usual’ assumptions and paradigms; a scan ‘hit’ will problematise the present. • Design: What’s the aim for this specifically? – Security / risk preparation + response? – Policy / programme / service / product formulation? • What are the trade-offs between quality and design? – Academic rigor in terms of foresight may produce complex, provocative output difficult to communicate and use effectively. – Too great a focus on user comfort, culture, and expectations may undermine the core purpose of scanning and thus its effectiveness.
- 8. Design tensions radar diagram
- 10. Design tensions: implicit trade- offs
- 11. Scanning Basics • Sell-by date: robust evidence loses freshness fast – rolling updates are critical: scanning must be an on-going process. • Ubiquity and diversity: change erupts everywhere, and most surprisingly from the fringes – so including the outliers, marginalised voices, and tail ends of the bell curves is a must, even if embarrassing. Learn to manage the risk of the ridiculous, because you need the ridiculous. • Downside of density: constantly refreshed scan data from broadly diverse perspectives, coupled with conceptually robust analytic tools, is an ideal – but too much data is indigestible without analytic tools which often render the scan usable only to experts. • Curation is critical: people create sense, and triage and sense-making, performed continuously, can help manage data density via triage and pattern formation – provided the theoretical and conceptual tools are explicitly designed into the scanning and futures process.
- 12. Scanning Basics, continued • Training, training, training: this is the only path to consistent, high-quality scan input – and output. After all, what does the ‘expert’ in ‘expert model’ mean – topic expert, or futures expert? The greater the topical expertise, the less likely that someone is a useful futures thinker – disciplinary blinkers get in the way. Scanning requires mixed discipline team coordinated and trained by a futures researcher. • Where’s it going? Scanning only makes sense in the context of an integrated futures process – scan data exist to generate impact cascades, cross-impact matrices, transformations to systems maps, scenarios, visions, strategies, and innovations. If the scanning system doesn’t have throughput to all of these tools built in, it will not succeed.
- 13. EXISTING SOFTWARE What are some easily adapted common software platforms?
- 14. SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS • Easy capture via browser button widgets • Twitter - > Paper.li ( www.paper.li ) • Get some random into your life – StumbleUpon ( www.stumbleupon.com ) • Collect, compare, and converse with your community – Pearltrees (www.pearltrees.com ) – Pinterest ( www.pinterest.com )
- 19. GAMES participatory assumption re-arrangement • Card Decks – mVIP (http://www.mobilityvip.com/deck/index.html) – Future eXplorer (https://www.timescape.io/water-for-life) • Online MM – SuperStruct (http://archive.superstructgame.net/) – Urgent Evoke (http://www.urgentevoke.com/) – MMOWGLI Blackswan (https://portal.mmowgli.nps.edu/blackswan-blog)
- 20. http://www.mobilityvip.com/deck/index.html mVIP: Mobility Vision Integration Project
- 24. https://portal.mmowgli.nps.edu/game-wiki/-/wiki/PlayerResources/About+MMOWGLI MMOWGLI Black Swan
- 25. SOFTWARE WISHLIST: VISION • What other platforms are you using? • If we were to envision our ultimate futures research and foresight software platform, what would it look like? What should it be able to do?
- 26. Pro Members’ Wishlist • Find breakthroughs in evolution • Dealing with timelines, trends and things visually on the same timeline; building timelines • Collection priorities • Analysis priority • Something that culls(?) stories, lets you move stories around • Neural net software that would scan all available news sources for weak signals • Software like personal brain, picks the best from all of our information platforms • Anyone using Watson to do some of this stuff? • Identify experts related to the scan hits that we get • Have something that can do a form of archeology [to unearth older but good ideas that have fallen out of fashion] • Something to do normative futures; to make collaborative work easier and to put it in front of everyone (on the screen)
- 27. FORESIGHT PLATFORMS • BIG and BIG MONEY: Morphological Analysis – scanning, systems analysis, scenarios, strategy – PARMENIDES EIDOS (https://www.parmenides-foundation.org/application/parmenides-eidos/ ) – SINGAPORE RAHS – Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning System (http://www.rahs.gov.sg/public/www/home.aspx )
- 29. http://app.rahs.gov.sg/public/www/content.aspx?sid=2955 RISK ASSESSMENT AND HORIZON SCANNING
- 30. SANDBOX EXPLORATIONS • DISCOVER change and develop insights – SHAPING TOMORROW: Swiss Army knife – great array of tools including ‘auto-scanning’ ( www.shapingtomorrow.com ) and extracting insights – Factr (http://www.factr.com/ ) share datafeeds; co-create insight • CROWDSOURCE change – Sensemaker CrowdSensor and MassSense – Futurescaper (http://www.futurescaper.com/ ) co-create scenarios • MANAGE UNCERTAINTY and make strategy – Co-tunity (http://www.cotunity.com/ ) asynchronous brainstorming – SHARPCLOUD: visual foresight decks (http://www.sharpcloud.com/ )
- 37. SANDBOX SOFTWARE COSTS • DISCOVER change and develop insights – Shaping Tomorrow: £9600 + VAT / year – 12 user licenses; or credits – Factr: still in alpha; contact them • CROWDSOURCE change – Sensemaker CrowdSensor and MassSense: in development – Futurescaper: • scan = £95 / $150 / €140 per month per admin + £25 / $39 / €35 per month per scanner; • survey = £670 / $990 / €920 per engagement • MANAGE UNCERTAINTY and make strategy – Co-tunity: for 1 analyst - €299/m; for 3 - €499/m; for 10 - €999/m – Sharpcloud: $800 / £500 / €700 per year; multi-year discounts
- 38. FEEDBACK (tbc) • Is there any software that will automatically generate a vocabulary? (see the wordcloud in Shaping Tomorrow) •
Editor's Notes
- Radar diagram: formatting the design tensions as a radar diagram illustrates some larger structures: The tension dyads actually represent continua of practice Each dyad implies design trade-offs – these are rarely explicitly acknowledged in design goals, and in consequence surface later in critiques and lack of fitness for purpose. Five of the dyads cluster to create a ‘degrees of freedom’ meta-dyad, illustrated on the following slide. Degrees of freedom: an essential tension in scanning emerges between the need to control content production to assure quality, and the need to absorb data from diverse perspectives to assure timely identification of change as it emerges and to minimise blind spots. Content control: this encompasses robustness of evidence; experts as scanners and annotators; credited contributions; and a content focus specified for/by policy-makers; often resulting in definitive reviews of the state of change relevant to a topic. Perspective diversity: this encompasses stimulus and provocation for transformed assumptions; socially networked or crowd-sourced scanning; near anonymity of contributions; and content available for a broad audience and multiple functions; often accessed as a rolling update of emerging change.
- Consistency vs culture shift: Using a trained team of futures researchers is most likely to achieve consistently annotated, high-quality (see the Gold Standard) scan hits – but disconnects scanning – and futures and foresight – from the organizational culture. Embedding a solid foundation for futures and foresight within an organization by distributing the scanning function across departments and people can create organization-wide learning and culture shift, but risks inconsistencies in scanning and annotation unless the volunteers are well-trained. This might however ameliorate lack of futures-awareness among policy-makers. Data density vs hits and misses: Crowd-sourcing scanning can produce massive data densities and granularities quickly and regularly – but risks data too dense too absorb, requiring triage and curation, as well as more misses than hits for specific topics due to the wide scatter of input contributed. Expert-generated, issue-focussed scanning produces leaner scan sets that are easier to digest and disseminate – but risks misses in data identification due to experts’ cultural and paradigmatic biases and filters, unless the process incorporates conceptual tools (eg, Verge, CLA, Three Horizons, etc) specifically designed to prevent this. Image vs capacity to spot surprises: Scanning – and futures and foresight – is designed to spot emerging change and potential surprises, for good or ill. The greater the capacity to spot truly transformative change – the category of surprises popularly known as ‘black swans’ – the greater the probability that some of the scan data is perceived as ‘ridiculous’ – especially by uninformed laypeople and the popular press, to the distress of policy-makers and politicians. The more authoritative the data on which a scan report is based, the more likely it is to be outdated vis-à-vis emerging change; the more authoritative the topic experts contributing to the scan, the more likely the scan will be constrained by academic credits and credentialling – the people within the current paradigm, not the people challenging and transforming it. This can only be addressed by including perspectives from the margins, fringes, and frontiers.