Reports from the Knowledge Labs about our recent findings, research topics, and interviews with lifestyle leaders who are creating their own futures.
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How to stimulate your own powers of foresight. Consider the following thought provokers. Ask yourself, in these categories what are the brand new trends and forces? Which are the ones growing in importance? Which current forces are loosing their steam? Which have peaked or are reversing themselves? Which are the "wildcards" about to disrupt us in the future? POLITICAL AND TECHNICAL thought for food: Electronics, Materials, Energy, Fossil, Nuclear, Alternative, Other, Manufacturing (techniques), Agriculture, Machinery and Equipment, Distribution, Transportation (Urban, Mass, Personal, Surface, Sea, Subsurface, Space), Communication (Printed, Spoken, Interactive, Media), Computers (Information, Knowledge, Storage & Retrieval, Design, Network Resources), Post-Cold War, Third World, Conflict (Local, Regional, Global), Arms Limitation, Undeclared Wars, Terrorism, Nuclear Proliferation, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Governments (More/Less Power and Larger or Smaller Scale), Taxes, Isms: Nationalism, Regionalism, Protectionism, Populism, Cartels, Multinational Corporations, Balance of Trade, Third Party Payments, Regulations (OSHA, etc.) Environmental Impact, U.S. Prestige Abroad. SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC Food for thought:
Labor Movements, Unemployment / Employment Cycles, Recession, Employment Patterns, Work Hours / Schedules, Fringe Benefits, Management Approaches, Accounting Policies, Productivity, Energy Costs, Balance of Payments, Inflation, Taxes, Rates of Real Growth, Distribution of Wealth, Capital Availability and Costs, Reliability of Forecasts, Raw Materials, Availability and Costs, Global versus National Economy, Market versus Planned Economies, Generations: Y, X, Boomers, Elderly, Urban vs. Rural Lifestyles, Affluent vs. Poor, Neighborhoods and Communities, Planned or Organic Growth.
Got Knowledge?
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The Journal of 2020 Foresight
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Monday, January 20, 2003
Warm, Resort Migration Shift Driving the Next Real-Estate Boom
Chapter One: Basecamp
By Steve Howard, CKO
The Knowledge Labs
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Basecamp
Chapter Two: The Ridge
Chapter Three: The Outpost
Chapter Four: The Tribal Territories
Top one hundred trends:
100-91, 90-81, 80-71, 70-61, 60-51, 50-41, 40-31, 30-21, 20-11
10 – By 2008 stocks will outperform bonds and real estate investments in exurban, small-town, and resort-town properties should appreciate modestly. (Dent)
9 – From 2008 to 2020 – 2030: the next Great Depression signaling the end to suburban and large-city real estate, as well as commercial real estate outside of small towns. (Dent)
8 – By 2006 PCs will reach 70 to 90% of all households. (Dent)
7 – The Internet will reach 90% penetration of urban and suburban households by 2010. (Dent)
6 – The networked organization – companies that truly run from the customer back – will dominate. Savvy leaders will view every customer as a market and every employee as a business. (Dent)
5 – Work will return to customer focus “(as opposed to an emphasis on functional skills), the resurgence of small, dynamic work teams, and more value placed on creative, right-brain, entrepreneurial skills.” (Dent)
4 – Basic innovation in communication technologies is allowing more people to relocate their homes to small towns and exurbs, and telecommute to business. (Dent)
3 – The baby boomers are moving into their vacation-home-buying years, which, in combination with the first trend, will stimulate demand for property in attractive resort towns. (Dent)
2 – The echo baby-boom generation is now moving into its household formation years, which will stimulate demand for apartments and rental property in the cities, and has already caused commercial property in these areas to appreciate, (Dent)
1 – There is a broad geographic migration towards areas of the country with warmer climates. You can expect the first three trends to be accentuated in the southwestern United States. (Dent)
What’s your take? There are an infinite number of stories that we could tell about the future. Our purpose is to tell those that matter, that lead to better decisions.
Got Knowledge?
Copyright ©2002 - 2006 Aarnaes Howard Associates. All rights reserved worldwide.
12:23 PM
DNA Construction Kits, Hydrogen Hybrid Autos
Chapter One
By Steve Howard, CKO
The Knowledge Labs
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Top one hundred trends: 100-91, 90-81, 80-71, 70-61, 60-51, 50-41, 40-31, 30-21
20 – Around 2020, real advances begin to be made in the field of biological computation, where billions of relatively slow computations, done at the level of DNA, can be run simultaneously and brought together in the aggregate to create the ultimate in parallel processing. (Schwartz & Leyden)
19 – By about 2005, animals are used for developing organs that can be donated to humans. Super productive animals and ultra hardy, high-yielding plants bring another veritable green revolution to countries sustaining large populations. (Schwartz & Leyden)
18 – So-called DNA computing looks as though it will bring about big advances in the speed of processing sometime after 2025 - certainly by the middle of the century. (Schwartz & Leyden)
17 – Once the realm of science fiction, nanotechnology, this microscopic method of construction becomes a reality in 2015. (Schwartz & Leyden)
16 – Scientists and engineers figure out reliable methods to construct objects one atom at a time. Among the first commercially viable products are tiny sensors that can enter a person's bloodstream and bring back information about its composition. (Schwartz & Leyden)
15 – By 2005, technology previously confined to aircraft's onboard electric systems successfully migrates to automobiles. These cars use natural gas to power the onboard generators, which then drive the electric motors at the wheels. (Schwartz & Leyden)
14 – They also make use of super strong, ultra light new materials that take the place of steel and allow big savings on mileage. (Schwartz & Leyden)
13 – Then comes the third and final stage: hybrids using hydrogen fuel cells. The simplest and most abundant atom in the universe, hydrogen becomes the source of power for electric generators - with the only waste product being water. No exhaust. No carbon monoxide. Just water. (Schwartz & Leyden)
12 – Within 10 years, there are transitional hydrogen car models that extract fuel from ordinary gasoline, using the existing network of pumps. (Schwartz & Leyden)
11 – By 2010, hydrogen is being processed in refinery-like plants and loaded onto cars that can go thousands of miles - and many months - before refueling. The technology is vastly cheaper and safer than in the 1960s and well on its way to widespread use. (Schwartz & Leyden)
10-1
What’s your take?
Got Knowledge?
Copyright ©2002 - 2003 Aarnaes Howard Associates. All rights reserved worldwide.
7:29 AM
Sunday, January 19, 2003
The Outpost Summary
Chapter Three
By Steve Howard, CKO
The Knowledge Labs
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Three: The Outpost Foresight Journals
Much of what Americans value most today -- Yankee Ingenuity and good old-fashioned Know-How – we owe to our unique pioneering spirit. The Lewis and Clark Expedition is one of America’s great sagas. It touches the American spirit. It appeals to the adventurer and explorer in all of us… Just as its mission was to acquire knowledge two hundred years ago, we too can fill in the blanks of the uncharted territories. We meet Lone Eagle in his outpost to get a glimpse of some of the blanks over the next two decades from within Cabo San Lucas’ tourist cell network.
In a tropical paradise less than 1000 miles from the U.S. Mexican border, we enjoy the relaxed atmosphere, great food and drink – where the land ends and the fun begins – where you can golf, fish, snorkel, swim or dive, kayak, surf or sail. From the days of the original beachfront resort – the Hotel Hacienda Beach Resort, in a sleepy little fishing village --number of hotels rooms available has exploded – almost doubled in the last 5 years. But, does it fit the guidelines for investing in the so-called portfolio of tangible and intangible assets. The word on the street estimates is will take 15 years before Cabo hits world-class resort development status.
Over the next two decades from 2003 to 2020, just in terms of an economic climate, we anticipate a correction, boom, bubble, burst, bust, correction, and that long bear / depression. Which translates into more urgency to make the most of the next 5 or 6 years and then figure out how to hang on for a decade. The next 5 or 6-year boom can open up your opportunities – before it’s too late -- not just for lucrative jobs or entrepreneurial ventures, but for a real change in lifestyle. How will technology allow us to live in a place we might not have considered? Will a 30-year timeshare turn out to be a good investment?
Got Knowledge?
Copyright ©2002 - 2003 Aarnaes Howard Associates. All rights reserved worldwide.
2:25 PM
Saturday, January 18, 2003
Basecamp Summary
Chapter One
By Steve Howard, CKO
The Knowledge Labs
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Basecamp
Chapter Two: The Ridge
Chapter Three: The Outpost
Chapter Four: The Tribal Territories
Chapter One: Basecamp Foresight Journals
Hindsight is like walking down a street and falling into a hole in the sidewalk. We can repeatedly fall in, walk around, or walk down another street. Got Knowledge? How do you know which street to choose? How can you choose the right path for you without doing a little soul-searching and a reflection on lessons you’ve learned?
Well for one, you can take Alex’s advice and hire yourself as a coach. Or you wait to interview Grey Owl, a modern day Sun Tzu in a cabin retreat. What a great way to reflect on what’s really important! How can anyone achieve effortless, predictable results in an age of constant confusion and uncertainty? Grey Owl illuminates how the laws of nature are at work – dynamic variables in an interdependent system.
Everybody’s call to adventure starts with creating a purpose, no matter if they’re thrown into the unknown, or if they willingly seek it. Finding a new mission or new meaning is really the experience of illumination described by Joseph Campbell.
Since beginning less time people have wanted to know where life will take them, what can be made of it, how to overcome barriers, and where hidden treasures can be found? Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” described the Tao of the Adventure – how to expand and manipulate tactical advantages in a variety of life altering situations.
How do you begin a modern day adventure ? According to Pathfinder, most begin as a learning expedition formed in Basecamp. Maps found in past journals describe expeditions to the Ridge, Outpost, and into the Tribal Network.
The creative minority views its past, present, and future life in the center of an ever-changing interdependent system. One learning expedition sketched out a future-by-life-design map of overlapping concentric circles filled with over 40 variables.
We, therefore, have many possibilities. But we can't live more than one life. It's all we've got. Our life is as temporary as footprints in the sand of time. Selecting what fits us best is complex.
Are we in one of those periods that occur every 200 or 300 years when people don't understand the world anymore, when the past is not sufficient to explain the future? And, if we are, what can we do about it in Basecamp?
What if you’ve been abruptly ripped from your job unexpectedly? What then? What does the creative minority do then? How do they navigate significant events, the disturbing and satisfying, the highs and the lows?
What if the creative minority actually contributes to its failures through inattention, bad habits, and personal weakness? What if there were conditions beyond its control that conspired against it?
What if time moved on and creative minority didn’t – if what made it successful in the past has been rendered obsolete by today’s standards? The opportunity-driven creative minority adjusts faster and sheds outworn perspectives more readily than the rest of us. In doing so, they cultivate higher levels of resilience.
Why? Humans travel through life without the benefit of a fixed velocity.
We move at a variable rate that fluctuates according to our capacity for assimilating new information and influences. How well we absorb the implications of change dramatically affects the rate at which we successfully manage the challenges we face, both individually and collectively.
Lost Explorer’s journal documents his trials and tribulations as he “rightsizes” his life. While out of necessity he jumped right into the tribal territories, he gained enough momentum to back track to Basecamp to sort out his initial lessons learned.
For first timers, using an outplacement firm can be overwhelming. Lost Explorer describes features and benefits, why it’s not “placement”, and how to make the most the services and resources.
Pathfinder -- in describing past and future trends, business cycles, and turning points – tells the story of how the original learning expedition formed at a baby boomer bootcamp. Lost Explorer, Lone Eagle, Pathfinder and Trailblazer find a common mission in Dana Point harbor while comparing notes about predictable generation-driven economic booms with innovation, spending, saving cycles.
It’s the old not-seeing-the-forest-for-the-trees phenomenon. We have undergone extraordinary changes in the last thirty years in terms of the alteration of the old rules and regulations of our lives. Around the bonfire, they wish they had anticipated some of those changes. They marvel at what might have happened if they had known, for sure, about just one of those major changes? Watch out for the “Mother-of-All-Depressions”sometime between 2010 and 2025!
Turbulent changes in the current of our life – its pace, pattern and scale – challenge our notions of what is real. Mastering new rules is like trying to cross a white-water river. If you can anticipate the rocks below the water, if you can anticipate the whirlpools and the changes in the current, if you can anticipate the landing on the other shore, you have a much better chance of getting across that river successfully.”
How do you anticipate when social and technological changes force turning points and breakpoints? How did the rise in dominance of a scientific “mindset swallow up the world,” so as to render a rock invisible? Technology and media shape the very fabric of culture with unintended consequences – shaping the way we view the world and how we see ourselves in it. And, keeping us from seeing what is really going on in it. What we don’t see can and will hurt us.
What about past economic turning points and political overtones for the first half of the twentieth century – up to the early 1970s? We examine productivity, inflation, deflation, recessions, depressions, government surpluses and deficits. Are there any patterns connecting post “bubble” recoveries in the past -- ending in 1901, 1929, and 1966 -- to the most recent bubble at the end of 1990s?
Coming into the early ‘70s, US companies faced little foreign competition at home. The industrial revolution hit on all cylinders producing great quantities of products destined for the mass market. Supply outstripped demand, so prices fell with increasing competition. So, pinched on the one side by Japanese competition and, on the other, by dependence on Middle East oil, the US economy had to reinvent itself.
We asked people from all walks of life – artists, lawyers, professors, human capitalists, IT professionals, Executive Management, Marketing, Finance, Operations, IT, Sales, Service, Engineering – to tell us what they foresee in the future for the world of work. Here's the Top 100 countdown:
Most Baby Boomers won't save enough of a nest egg to afford a comfortable retirement. A new industry will be created to cater to the Boomer need for experience. They will speculate to acquire wealth. By 2010 social consciousness as a movement will burst upon the center stage.
Aging Baby Boomers will spend the rest of their lives trying to look younger. Women will outlive men, who will die from heart disease, cancer or a stroke. Many elderly boomers will be cared for by their nieces, as 1 million boomers will live to be 100 years old.
The last of three boomer generation age groups to hit peak spending years drives the economy for the first decade of the new millennium. Boomers will move business away from production of standardized products on the assembly line to delivery specialized and personalized products and services produced at the front lines of organizations as close to the customer as possible.
Only one in 50 will be promoted to top management in large companies. Advancements will be few with opportunities confinded to narrow knowledge-work specialties. Roughly 85% of workers will be employed in firms with fewer than 200 people. Self-employed workers will continue to grow at 4 times the rate of salaried workers.
A permanent military establishment grows, yet the use of smart weapons reduces the number of military personnel required. Compulsory national service becomes more popular for both sexes. Regional and national economies interact more transparently on a global basis, yet the bimodal distribution pattern remains.
The economic boom from 2003 to 2010 gives way to a decade long deflationary period requiring careful investment strategies and shifting allocations in 2006, 2009, 2015, and 2020.
The basic science is now in place for five great waves of technology - personal computers, telecommunications, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and alternative energy - that could rapidly grow the economy without destroying the environment.
Scientists and engineers figure out reliable methods to construct objects one atom at a time. Among the first commercially viable products are tiny sensors that can enter a person's bloodstream and bring back information about its composition. By 2010, hydrogen is being processed in refinery-like plants and loaded onto cars that can go thousands of miles - and many months - before refueling.
Basic innovation in communication technologies is allowing more people to relocate their homes to small towns and exurbs, and telecommute to business. The echo baby-boom generation is now moving into its household formation years, which will stimulate demand for apartments and rental property in the cities, and has already caused commercial property in these areas to appreciate.
Got Knowledge?
Copyright ©2002 - 2006 Aarnaes Howard Associates. All rights reserved worldwide.
7:21 AM
Wednesday, January 15, 2003
PCs, Telecommunications, Biotechnology, Nanotechnology, Alternative Energy TechnoWaves
Chapter One: Basecamp
By Steve Howard, CKO
The Knowledge Labs
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Basecamp
Chapter Two: The Ridge
Chapter Three: The Outpost
Chapter Four: The Tribal Territories
Top one hundred trends: 100-91, 90-81, 80-71, 70-61, 60-51, 50-41, 40-31
30 – The basic science is now in place for five great waves of technology - personal computers, telecommunications, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and alternative energy - that could rapidly grow the economy without destroying the environment. (Schwartz & Leyden)
29 – Everything comes with a small, cheap silicon brain. Tasks like handwriting recognition become a breeze. (Schwartz & Leyden)
28 – Around 2010, Intel builds a chip with a billion transistors -100 times the complexity of the most advanced integrated circuits being designed in the late 1990s. (Schwartz & Leyden)
27 – By 2015, reliable simultaneous language translation has been cracked - with immediate consequences for the multilingual world. (Schwartz & Leyden)
26 – By about 2005, high-bandwidth connections that can easily move video have become common in developed countries, and videophones finally catch on. (Schwartz & Leyden)
25 – People working in all kinds of fields the professions, education, government, the arts - begin pushing the applications of networked computers. (Schwartz & Leyden)
24 – Understanding of our genetic makeup triggers a series of breakthroughs in stopping genetic disease. Around 2012, a gene therapy for cancer is perfected. (Schwartz & Leyden)
23 – Five years later, almost one-third of the 4,000 known genetic diseases can be avoided through genetic manipulation. (Schwartz & Leyden)
22 – The same deeper understanding of genetics leads to much more precise breeding of plants. By about 2007, most US produce is being genetically engineered by these new direct techniques. (Schwartz & Leyden)
21 – By about 2005, animals are used for developing organs that can be donated to humans. (Schwartz & Leyden)
20-11
What’s your take?
Got Knowledge?
Copyright ©2002 - 2006 Aarnaes Howard Associates. All rights reserved worldwide.
9:43 AM
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