Category Archives: Futures

How to get to the Future – “The Future’s Triangle”

Futures, Strategic Foresight

The “Futures Triangle” is a great tool for explaining your, or your organisation’s, actions/inactions/reactions toward the time ahead.

This model postulates that there are three forces to contend with:

  • The pull: what is pulling you toward your future? What visions, images, ideals and so on do you have?
  • The push: what are the changes that are happening anyway? What new technology, what social change, what demographic trend will impact you?
  • The weight: what are the continuities? What are those things that are holding you or your organization back, what inertia is there?

And so, thinking through these three factors may well unlock the future you have been seeking.

For more, visit Dellium Advisory, follow on Twitter, connect using LinkedIn, or review my IT-centric blog.

Scenario Planning

Futures, Scenario Planninng, Strategic Foresight

Scenarios. A method that enables an organization to peer into the future with a degree of certainty.

Scenario planning has a long history. According to some historians, scenario planning was birthed in the US military in the early stages of the Cold War and was further developed by Herman Khan. The touchstone for this prospective method is the work done by Wack, among others, at Royal Dutch Shell from the mid 1960’s.

The scenario development process is in essence a two part issue development process. The first part of the process is where the group is split into teams of three stakeholders to run through the issue at hand. The second part is where the teams come back together to form a group consensus around the issue.

Process Overview:

  1. Define the Issue
  2. Determining Driving Forces
  3. Cluster Driving Forces
  4. Identify Extreme, but Plausible, Outcomes
  5. Occurrence Impact – Occurrence Probability Matrix
  6. Scenario Framing
  7. Scenario Scoping
  8. Scenario Development

For more, visit Dellium Advisory, follow on Twitter, connect using LinkedIn, or review my IT-centric blog.

Wilber’s “Integral Theory”

Futures, Futurist, Strategic Foresight

Ken Wilber’s “Integral Theory” (2011) is a comprehensive view of life.  In his words, he was aiming for a comprehensive theory about the fullness of life:

“I sought a world philosophy—or an integral philosophy—that would believably weave together the many pluralistic contexts of science, morals, aesthetics, Eastern as well as Western philosophy, and the world’s great wisdom traditions. Not on the level of details—that is finitely impossible; but on the level of orienting generalizations: a way to suggest that the world really is one, undivided, whole, and related to itself in every way: a holistic philosophy for a holistic Kosmos, a plausible Theory of Everything.”

This Integral Theory, or Theory of Everything, is a four quadrant model.

  • Q1 [Upper Left]: Interior; Individual (“I”, intentions)
  • Q2 [Lower Left]: Interior; Collective (“We”, culture)
  • Q3 [Lower Right]: Exterior; Collective (“Its”, social)
  • Q4 [Upper Right]: Exterior; Individual (“It”, behavioural)

Wilber adds depth and richness to this model through the overlaying onto each of these quadrants succeeding waves and lines of development, as well states and types of consciousness.

This model’s  primary purpose is for developing multiples frame of reference. That is, this model is used as guide to understanding an issue from many orientations. A simple example is money. When viewed from the Upper Left Quadrant money is seen as an indicator of the relative value that an individual places on a good or service. When viewed from Lower Right Quadrant, money is seen as socially acceptable form of facilitating  the transfer of ownership of goods and services.

Whilst there are critics of Integral Theory, from my perspective the shortcomings of this model are around the biases, preconceptions and worldview that one would bring to using this for the purposes of analysis.

Despite the propensity for the influence of personal worldviews and preconceptions upon the operation and of this model, the value in using Integral Theory is that emerging issues are rigorously examined.

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Wilber, K. (2011).” A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science, and Spirituality”  Shambhala Publications. Kindle Edition.

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For more, visit Dellium Advisory, follow on Twitter, connect using LinkedIn, or review my IT-centric blog.