What you already need to know about 2016 / ABC Local Nightlife
This time of year is always a great time to take stock of what we have achieved in 2015 and what we may get up to, have and want in 2016, and tonight in my regular on air Nightlife radio segment Jennifer Fleming of ABC local and I did just that.
2015 had a lot of firsts, ranging from incredible pictures of Pluto, Tesla’s car software upgrades, Jeff Bazos and Elon Musk both successfully landing space crafts back on earth and windows 10 sedate launch are just some of my highlights, others include a machine that turns human waste into drinking water and sneaker technology designed specifically for people.
2016 was where we headed next with a look at the technology horizon and the rise and rise (pun intended) of drones and their various uses; driverless cars; personal robots (or personal assistants) like Jibo, Pepper, and Furo that are set to come to a home near you in 2016, the collaborative or sharing economy including Uber, airbnb and others and Artificial Intelligence becoming more common with apps and devices predicting what you may want to know and providing it to you on your mobiles and other tech ahead of you asking for it, or even thinking about it.
We also turned our attention to food trends including foraging which is the search for ultra local edible weeds, plants and produce, shared tables, glocal and others.
We were joined on-line by numerous listeners including: John who wanted to know if driverless cars could be used by the visually impaired – answer not yet and most probably not until 2030, but definitely in the mid future horizon; Johnathan who was looking for cattle mustering drones (and if you’re interested in them drop me an email to morris@businessfuturist.com and I’ll send you some links); Laury who rightly corrected us and asked us to use the term quadcopter instead of drones and Dan who wanted to know what fueled drones and kept them in the sky and on track.
A really good chat, great callers and a terrific subject, well worth a listen (41 minutes 24 seconds) and then I’d love to hear your predictions for 2016.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What does ‘what you already need to know’ mean as a foresight approach, and why is it more useful than prediction?
The ‘already need to know’ framing captures a core foresight principle: most of the significant changes that will affect an organisation or individual in the next 12 months are already visible as signals before the year begins; they are not hidden or unknowable — they are the logical consequences of decisions already made, trends already underway, and forces already in motion; the organisations that struggle most with change are not those that lacked access to signals but those that failed to act on the signals they had; and the value of a year-ahead briefing is not in revealing surprises but in synthesising the signals that are already present and connecting them to the decisions and preparations that are overdue. This is the Immediate Futures™ methodology — not speculation about distant possibilities but discipline about attending to what is already arriving.
Q: What 2016 signals were ‘locked in’ before the year began?
The signals that were locked in for 2016 before January 1 included: the US presidential election cycle, which was already generating the polarisation and media dynamics that would shape 2016 political discourse; the consequences of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, which would need to be translated into domestic policy and corporate commitment; the continued automation pressure on routine cognitive work, which had been building since 2012 and would accelerate with each year’s AI capability improvement; the structural shift in retail toward online commerce, which was already eliminating categories of physical retail that would not recover; and the demographic retirement wave of Baby Boomers from leadership positions, which was transferring organisational power and institutional knowledge at a pace that few organisations had adequately planned for. None of these were surprises. All required preparation.
Q: How should organisations use year-ahead signal synthesis to improve strategic readiness?
Effective use of year-ahead signal synthesis requires: a genuine commitment to acting on the analysis rather than using it as content for a planning offsite and then filing it away; identification of the specific decisions that the signals should inform — not ‘the workforce is changing’ (too abstract to act on) but ‘by Q2 we need to have decided how we will handle X’ (specific and actionable); assignment of ownership for monitoring and responding to each significant signal; and a review cadence that tracks whether the predicted signals are materialising as expected or shifting in unexpected directions. The organisations that benefit most from foresight are those that treat it as an input to decision-making rather than a supplement to the annual report.
Q: How can I book Morris Misel for a year-ahead outlook, strategic planning, or leadership foresight keynote?
Contact the booking team at morrismisel.com/event-organisers.
This time of year is always a great time to take stock of what we have achieved in 2015 and what we may get up to, have and want in 2016, and tonight in my regular on air Nightlife radio segment Jennifer Fleming of ABC local and I did just that. 2015 had a lot [].
When signals like What you already need to know about 2016 / ABC Local emerge, organisations that engage early have the advantage of choosing their response rather than reacting to events. That gap between those who prepared and those who did not is where competitive positioning is actually made or lost.
The most important question is not whether What you already need to know about 2016 / ABC Local will matter, but how quickly it will matter in your specific context. Leaders benefit most from mapping the ripple effects early — not just the direct impact but the second and third-order consequences that arrive later and hit harder. That is the practical work of foresight.
