This outstanding collection of essays offers thought-provoking insights on a range of future-shaping issues, such as harnessing the powers of a coming “digital transformation,” creating more livable cities, dealing with the impacts of immigration, transforming school systems to meet the needs of the future economy, solving the drug-abuse problem through systems thinking, and overcoming traps in thinking about the future.
Customer Reviews
Backcasting and forecasting: what are the trends from yesterday towards tomorrow?:
Major trends that affect how we work today and how we will have to work in the future.
–If we want to stop killing ourselves by the tens of millions in violent conflict, we’re going to have to get much smarter, because our genes haven’t been able to solve that by themselves.
–However, Mulhall’s vision of being “surpassed by our own creations” is not so clear. Being “smart” also has to do with intuition and imagination or is driven by intention, purpose, and the amazing power of curiosity. In this sense, machines are not now nor may never be smart, while humans are. Intelligence is the source of knowledge that helps people make imaginative and intelligent choices. Intelligence is the essence of order: defining the knowable and the known, the predictable, the expectable, and the dependable. “Smartness” on the other hand, has the flavor of the unpredictable, of opportunity, the unknown, and the surprise of innovation. NO change, no innovation, no scientific breakthroughs, no groundbreaking engineering insights, and no new expressions of art take place without this smartness. Smartness is just another word for “creativity with purposes”.
–In every organization, trying to avoid traps in future thinking and being thirsty for success, whether operating in business, administration, education, or the academy, it would be good to have a kind of disturbance generator (DG) to keep you awake in front of the turbulent future(s). The tasks of a DG include asking odd questions concerning the basic assumptions and modes of operation in the organization from the future perspectives, identifying new important weak signals in the operating environment–in the economy, technology, world politics, societal issues, environment, values, etc.–having potential impacts on the organization’s development, and producing innovations related to products, services, customers, modes of operation, strategies, and scenarios.
–The 21st century is being recognized as the “century of cities”.
More than half of the world’s population now live in cities, and the importance of urban environments has become even greater over recent decades. Cities are the key centers of human activity and the engines of economic growth throughout the world, a world that has been dramatically transformed and is more complex, more competitive, and better connected than ever before.
–”Home-basing” will be the next phase of disaggregating our vertically integrated Industrial Era enterprises, following “outsourcing” and “off-shoring”.
–If given free time, humans tend to become unhappy, disordered, and unproductive. Surprisingly, people tend to find work more satisfying than free time. When we focus our minds we feel better.
Mental order leads to increased happiness and productivity.
Quite a disappointing book…at least from the standpoint of thinking creatively!:
I am quite disappointed by this book. I find the contents, even though they are future-relevant, do not stand up to the title of ‘Thinking Creatively in Turbulent Times.’
Out of the rag-tag collection of twenty nine articles in this book, all from different contributors, I reckon only three pertains to thinking creatively. They are:
- Traps in Futures Thinking & How to Overcome Them, by Mika Mannermaa;
- Innovating for the Future, by Patrick van der Duin;
- Creativity, Innovation, & Visionary Thinking: Becoming All You Can Become, by Lynn Ellen Burton;
The rest are the typical stuff you would find in most publications from the World Future Society (WFS), as they pertain to how social & technological developments are shaping the future.
The back page of the book boldy carries this message: “The world changes so quickly it’s hard to keep up. New inventions and innovations alter the way we live. People’s values, attitudes, and beliefs are changing. And the pace of change keeps accelerating, making it difficult to prepare for tomorrow…” To reinforce this message of theirs, I would have expected more contributions in the book to help readers to think creatively in such turbulent times.
In other words, I would want to read more about ‘process’ information instead of overwhelming ‘content’ information.
I dont know. Maybe WFS is just trying to use a catchy title to attract readers to this particular publication.
I have always held the WFS in high esteem & many of their other publications I owned turn out to be great stuff. ‘Futuring: The Exploration of the Future’ by Edward Cornish is one good example.
