New Yorker cartoon by Paul North.

After the financial crisis in 2008, our labour chief Mr Lim Swee Say coined the phrase “cheaper, better, faster” to communicate his vision for Singapore’s next phase of economic growth. That phrase is another way of saying that our economy needs to become more efficient or productive. Singapore has been well known for its legendary efficiency, from the way we shuffle large numbers of visitors through our airports and containers through our seaports, to the way our public services are run. However, a singular focus on efficiency… [Read More]

New Yorker Comic by Liam Walsh.

Manuel Kiessling wrote in a recent post ““We need to work longer” – Why this is not what you want to say”:
Let’s face it, doing about 30% better isn’t going to get you anywhere significant. And I’m not even going to start talking about why working 30% longer of course won’t bring anything significant in your company up by 30%, especially not the “doing better” – much has been written about this already.
Here is what I propose: Ask your people that you want them to become 300%… [Read More]

I have egg on my face. I have been wrong on many accounts in my years at FG and I’ve learnt something valuable each time.

I was quite opposed to blogging in end ’06 when then lead strategist Dawn Yip suggested it. I think I swore very loudly that it was a f**ing waste of time. Well, shame. I dabbled in blogging quietly on the side, got hooked and it took on a life of its own.

I hated large scale big ass projects, believing they compromised the “edginess” of real foresight work. But… [Read More]

One of the better books I’ve read on thinking about thinking is Steven Johnson’s “Where good ideas come from.” One of the seven practices is the liquid networks of ideas. To quote him, “We take ideas from other people, from people we run into in the coffee shop, and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new.” He identifies the architecture of the environment that allows for lots of different ideas to be together, with people of different backgrounds and interests, to jostle with each other, to bounce… [Read More]

I have had this nagging dilemma as some of our designed stories of the future take root and spread.

Human beings are wired to stories, which is why in FG we choose stories as carriers for insights. But real world complexity cannot be adequately described by stories. Tyler Cowen famously said everytime we resort to a story of good vs evil to describe the world, our collective IQ falls by ten points!

Are we selling complexity short by resorting to stories, should we instead build up our organisation’s capacity to function well in complexity?

Sometimes… [Read More]

I want to switch topics and touch now on connections which I feel of the three Cs (content-competencies-connections) we have not yet got it down pat. When it comes to content, we are able to hold our own but where the more prominent international foresight experts, like Peter Schwartz, excel in is a mixture of charisma and generosity in being THE central node to a wide network of experts to call upon, or help to put you in touch with.

Human networks are great to call upon to answer hard questions. But human… [Read More]

The future is a space of competing memes.

The more accepted a meme is, the higher the probability it becomes the actual future. This is the market space, and it is important to get your meme out there.

Behind this is another Steve Jobs quote: “Real CEOs ship.” If you don’t ship, you don’t get anything. Your mind can be stuck, but sometimes you just need to push through. Get it out of the door asap 80% done. You will make mistakes anyway. Best get the first one out of the door so the… [Read More]

Even if we get future pattern entrainment “right”, we have to contend with two issues. The first is that foresight impact by definition takes some time to mature. Insights can be forgotten in the daily operational grind. The second is organizational. Turnover is high at xx percent. We have to start “nature video”-izing from scratch with succeeding batches of middle and senior management. This is still a source of periodic angst for FG.

We have tried to work around this issue by focusing on products.

When FG started, each project final deliverable form was… [Read More]

Big-ass projects are normally arrowed down from above. They tend to be framed around nearer concerns and younger foresight practitioners may view them with disdain or suspicion that they aren’t “future-y” enough as compared to more cutting edge foresight work. I shared that view in my starting year, but I’ve changed my mind. Instead, I’ve found out that these projects tend to be broad and ill-defined enough for us to skillfully inject “future-y” foresight thinking to segue into current interests that our clients are already primed to accept.

Let me give the analogy… [Read More]

The Mad Hatter of the Disney animated film Alice in Wonderland had this inspired idea of a “un-birthday”. I thought of penning down in several un-valedictory posts some thoughts of what I’ve been lucky enough to learn in my almost five years in MTI’s Futures Group. I’m not particularly erudite, but I do want to share some lessons on what did and did not work.

EVERYONE NEEDS THEIR “CHUNGKING EXPRESS”

What on earth does that mean? Wong Kar Wai, the HK cinema auteur, revealed in an interview he was stuck two years into the… [Read More]