Globally scanning for “Megatrends of the Mind”: Potential futures of futures thinking

This paper focuses on emergent signs of evolutionary change in human thinking that run parallel with many of the exponential changes manifesting in the external world. Weak signals are identified from the early 20th century indicating the emergence of new knowledge patterns. These signals have strengthened in the last 40 years. The paper first identifies new ways of thinking within several disciplines such as science, philosophy, religion and education. New knowledge patterns are then identified in discourses that traverse disciplinary boundaries through transdisciplinary approaches such as futures studies and planetary/global studies. The paper then discusses evolution of consciousness, identifying research that theorises new ways of thinking as being related to individual psychological development and/or socio-cultural evolution. Finally, evolutionary concepts are discussed that attempt to meta-cohere the new knowledge patterns via the terms postformal, integral and planetary. Notably, academic research on “futures of thinking,” “evolution of consciousness” and/or “global mindset change” has been, until now, largely ignored by mainstream academic discourse on evolution, consciousness and futures studies.     

Preparing for the unknown… unknowns: ‘doomsday’ prepping and disaster risk anxiety in the United States

This article examines the collapse-based thinking energising ‘doomsday’ prepping: a growing American phenomenon centred on storing food, water and weapons for the purpose of surviving disasters. Existing understandings of prepping indicate that its practitioners are driven to prepare by peculiar and delusional certainty that apocalyptic collapse will occur in the near future. This view, however, has not yet been tested by empirical research. This article draws on ethnography with 39 preppers in 18 American states to present a new understanding of this phenomenon, as it shows prepping consistently being practiced in the absence of both apocalyptic predictions and certainty regarding the future occurrence of disaster. Demonstrating that preppers’ activities are undergirded by precautionary projections around numerous non-apocalyptic ‘threats’, the article argues that prepping principally responds to uncertain anxieties around disaster risks. Moreover, it establishes that these imprecise anxieties are regularly influenced by preppers’ consumption of disaster-based speculation in mainstream news media – showing that their concerns tend to emerge in response to numerous disaster risks that are widely reported and recognised in wider American culture, rather than marginal conceptions of ‘threats’. The article, therefore, contends that, rather than being a marginal apocalyptic practice, prepping is a phenomenon with clear, previously unacknowledged links to broader risk communications and concerns in the twenty-first century United States – one that must be understood as a reflection of the broader resonance of disaster-based speculation and uncertainty in this cultural context.     

Are futures organisations “ahead of their times”? A view of the World Futures Studies Federation in the 21st century

This paper explores the idea of what it means to be “ahead of the times.” In doing so the paper looks at new generations of ideas; new generations of individualism; and new generations of organisational structures and cultures. Weak signals can already be identified from a century ago indicating new ways of thinking within several disciplines such as science, philosophy, psychology and education. These signs of what many regard as evolutionary change in human thinking run parallel with many of the exponential changes manifesting in the external world. The paper argues for a shift beyond egotistic individualism to collective individualism, laying foundations for major organisational transformation to meet the needs of uncertain futures. The paper suggests that futures studies as a field needs to be sensitive to the developmental and paradigmatic changes that have been occurring both within and across the knowledge spectrum. Finally, the World Futures Studies Federation is examined as a case study to determine whether it is, indeed, ahead of its times.     

The Global Century

No people, however they define themselves, can claim the 21st century as theirs; it can only be dubbed The Global Century. A sweep of the horizon at the end of the twentieth shows ten transformations going on at once — all related to the global spread of knowledge. We can't know what will happen or when, but we already know why. The “information environment” is changing our thinking about globalization, diversity, community, the world economy, the rich-poor gap, and education. Nobody can be in charge, so everybody is partly in charge. The implications for learning are huge, from pre-school to higher education. Education for the Global Century must help citizens think about “the situation as a whole”, think about how to “get it all together”.     

Alice’s dilemma

Mathematician Lewis Carroll used Alice’s adventures in wonderland to introduce what may happen in the singularity of a black hole. Physicists still debate whether the singularity is a window to another universe, like Alice’s mirror, or a deadly trap. Although we are not endangered by black holes, we may soon face another type of singularity, one derived from an overwhelming scientific progress. Extrapolating from last century’s scientific progress, this century will be marked by unprecedented technological breakthroughs. As technologies allow for greater increases in scientific output, the result will be an explosion in scientific progress that will reshape human civilization. We may reach a point, a singularity, where humankind will undergo a deeper change than in the past 100,000 years. In addition to incalculable benefits, technology also yields weapons of increasing destruction. Soon, knowledge may be the only resource necessary to build weapons of mass destruction. Due to the both creative and destructive nature of the human mind, the dilemma is whether the technological singularity will be a bridge to wonderland or if it will mean the end of human civilization.     

Navigating towards sustainable development: A system dynamics approach

Traditional fragmented and mechanistic science is unable to cope with issues about sustainability, as these are often related to complex, self-organizing systems. In the paper, sustainable development is seen as an unending process defined neither by fixed goals nor by specific means of achieving them. It is argued that, in order to understand the sources of and the solutions to modern problems, linear and mechanistic thinking must give way to non-linear and organic thinking, more commonly referred to as systems thinking. System Dynamics, which operates in a whole-system fashion, is put forward as a powerful methodology to deal with issues of sustainability. Examples of successful applications are given.Any system in which humans are involved is characterized by the following essential system properties: Bounded rationality, limited certainty, limited predictability, indeterminate causality, and evolutionary change. We need to resort to an adaptive approach, where we go through a learning process and modify our decision rules and our mental models of the real world as we go along. This will enable us to improve system performance by setting dynamic improvement goals (moving targets) for it.Finally, it is demonstrated how causal loop diagrams can be used to find the leverage points of a system.     

The transmodern hypothesis: towards a dialogue of cultures

For a Brussels Seminar at the European Commission, a “double hypothesis” was proposed: that we are in transition to a transmodern way of thinking that combines intuition and spirituality with rational brainwork; and that 21st century conflicts will likely be not between religions or cultures but within them, between premodern, modern, and transmodern worldviews. Non-Western thinkers find this framework useful: it opens a door to criticism of the worst aspects of modernity without being “anti-Western”. Western reactions are more mixed, some critics wanting to maintain a high fence between religion and governance, others welcoming the transmodern concept as helpful in relating states to religions, and in analyzing conflicts involving beliefs about belief. “Transmodernity” turns out to be a rich tool of analysis, with important implications for European foreign policy in the century to come.     

Futures studies and management development

Futures studies can make significant contributions to management by improving background information, stimulating new ways of thinking and providing decision inputs. Professor Dror shows how good futures studies, replacing the criterion of subjective certainty by that of objective uncertainty, pinpoint changes in management needed for long-term planning.     

Sociocultural vectors of effective risk communication

Kasperson’s reflections on the ‘state of the art’ in risk communication thinking and practice set out an ambitious programmatic vision of how future progress in effective risk communication might be achieved. In this critical but supportive response, I first outline two perspectives on how progress in risk communication might be evaluated. This is followed by some discussion relating these issues to the sociocultural nature of risk communication thinking and practice, and the normative basis of underlying assumptions and ideas of effectiveness. It is suggested that inasmuch as the practical application of effective risk communication requires knowledge of human thinking and behaviour, then further considerations of some sociocultural regularities, contingencies and varieties in risk communication thinking and behaviour within particular contexts should also have practical applications.     

The future of human benefit knowledge: Notes on a World Brain for the 21st century

In the late 1930s, H.G. Wells proposed an “adequate knowledge organization” or World Brain, where ideas would be received, sorted, summarized, clarified, and compared. At the same time, sociologist Robert Lynd questioned ever more “bricks of data” on the growing pile of social science, and called for more synthesis and long-range thinking. Despite proclamations about emerging “knowledge societies,” little has been done to organize the broad and messy realm of human benefit knowledge that encompasses the overlapping policy, planning, futures, and leadership “communities.” The problem of the narrow brickmaker mentality still persists, along with more infoglut, more rapid obsolescence, more fragmentation, more label profusion, and even more nationalistic division. A World Brain for the 21st century should have at least seven features: timely abstracts of key books/reports/articles in several languages, comprehensive coverage, identification of not-yet-published books in the publisher's pipeline, regional and national nodes for collection and dissemination, overviews of sectoral and cross-sectoral issues, user-friendly features, and ample publicity. An appreciative environment must also be built, encompassing more and better technology assessment, ongoing “Top Ten” booklists for each sector and issue, annual prioritizing of issues, integrative research units at universities, more effort to promote civic education, more debates, more attention to good information design, and a higher status for high-quality human benefit thinking.     

The 2001 HBR list. Breakthrough ideas for today's business agenda

Business is shaped by ideas. But how do you separate enduring ideas from passing fancies? In this, the first edition of the annual HBR List, our editors spotlight five break-through ideas that are truly shaping the future of business. EVEN A GREAT BUSINESS MODEL IS NOT ENOUGH: The rise and fall of dot-coms left markets reeling and CEOs scratching their heads. The most important lesson of the debacle: squishy thinking about "business models" is no substitute for a distinctive strategy. CHANGE IS CHANGING: In recent years, pundits have urged executives to incite revolutions within their companies. But a growing group of experts now suggests that the best companies actually evolve through incremental change--change that builds on rather than subverts their heritage. EGO MAKES THE LEADER: By looking deeply into executives' psyches, we are beginning to unlock the enigma of leadership. While there will never be a single recipe for successful corporate stewardship, an understanding of the human ego can shed light on leadership's most fundamental components. ONLY CONNECT: In business organizations, what's really important about people is not their individual skills but the relationships they form with one another. By investing in "social capital," companies can often push their performance to a whole new level. THE BIOLOGY CENTURY DAWNS: In the twentieth century, product innovations tended to spring from physics. But in the new century, biology may be the central source of innovation. From genomics to biomimicry, the study of life promises to change what companies sell and even how they operate.     

Evolution of education: From weak signals to rich imaginaries of educational futures

This paper proposes that all aspects of educational futures are affected by the new thinking patterns and ways of knowing that have been emerging over the last hundred years as part of the parallel processes of evolution of human consciousness and major global societal change.Throughout the 20th century, significant developments can be mapped in most, if not all, of the major academic disciplines. Secondly, the move to transcend disciplinary specialisation, via inter-, multi-, and trans-disciplinary approaches is strengthening. Thirdly, at a higher order theoretical level, these developments are explicitly theorized in the discourses associated with postformal reasoning, integral theory and planetary consciousness. In spite of all these developments in other disciplines and knowledge fields, the institution of mass public education, with its underpinning industrial worldview, has been pretty static since its inception two hundred years ago. Finally, the paper identifies three minor, but significant, waves of evolutionary emergence in education over the last hundred years that if articulated and nurtured could strengthen the development of evolutionary pedagogies for the 21st century.     

From space to time : The music of old earth and new time

With this article I.F. Clarke resumes his series on the long advance towards modern ways of looking at the future. Two hundred years ago, he says, the world still managed well enough with the old short-scale measure of time. According to that system the beginning of human life dated from the creation of Adam and Eve on the afternoon of Friday, 28 October 4004 BC. Then came the first palaeontologists who pushed back the origins of organic life by millions of years. Their discoveries changed the perceived role of Homo sapiens in earth history as decisively as the Renaissance astronomers transformed all thinking about the place of our planet in the universe. The dominant evolutionary ideas of the 19th century joined with the evident technological advances to confirm the idea of progress as the most favoured doctrine of the age. It is still with us.     

Investment decisions when utility depends on wealth and other attributes

The problem of optimal investment under a multivariate utility function allows for an investor to obtain utility not only from wealth, but other (possibly correlated) attributes. In this paper we implement multivariate mixtures of exponential (mixex) utility to address this problem. These utility functions allow for stochastic risk aversions to differing states of the world. We derive some new results for certainty equivalence in this context. By specifying different distributions for stochastic risk aversions, we are able to derive many known, plus several new utility functions, including models of conditional certainty equivalence and multivariate generalisations of HARA utility, which we call dependent HARA utility. Focusing on the case of asset returns and attributes being multivariate normal, we optimise the asset portfolio, and find that the optimal portfolio consists of the Markowitz portfolio and hedging portfolios. We provide an empirical illustration for an investor with a mixex utility function of wealth and sentiment.     

Postnormal network futures: A rejoinder to Ziauddin Sardar

Sardar's “Welcome to Postnormal Times” describes the chaotic, contradictory and uncertain climate today, and analyses the failure of progress, modernisation or efficiency to provide ethical, political or even trustworthy economic solutions to the instability of the present. Missing in his analysis is the role of knowledge, especially as it is migrating from individuals to technical networks. This paper argues that recent developments in the networking of knowledge point towards a new constellation in which networks are emerging as major powers alongside the nation and the market, the two pillars of global political economy in the 20th and early 21st century. It responds to Sardar's challenge to imagine the future by imagining the political consequences of recognising non-human agencies as political actors.     

试析新世纪企业财务管理发展趋势

21世纪我国财务管理理论将会向多个领域学科交叉发展,可以预见,在新世纪里,财务理论将汇集金融、自然科学、社会科学、各门类科学的优秀成果而生成崭新的综合学科。同时,财务管理实务也将会有长足的发展。     

20TH century future-think : The many shapes of wars to come

As I.F. Clarke noted at the start of this series, new technologies and the growth of populations were the primary factors that encouraged the first speculations about ‘the progress of society’ in the 19th century. In the 20th century an ever-growing body of trend analysts and forecasters has sought to keep pace with the accelerating speed of technological development and the consequent increasing complexity of life throughout the industrialized nations. So, I.F. Clarke will seek to show in the next two articles that war and the possibilities of warfare have been most potent factors in the growth of future-thinking ever since the end of World War I. His narrative follows the classic lines of Greek tragedy—from the hubris that grows out of the dream of power to the nemesis-to-come in anticipations of burning cities and a world inherited by the insects and bacteria.     

Rethinking knowledge: ‘Islamization’ and the future

The Islamization of knowledge debate is central to Muslim futures, focusing on the nature of Muslim identity, modernity and ways of thinking about present and future Muslim reality. The debate, however, has become interwoven with factors that have marginalized Muslim identity—both for participants and observers. This article views Islamization as a civilizational project of rethinking, taking the Qur'an as the frame of reference. Institutional and conceptual approaches are analysed. The development of new disciplines of knowledge within Islamization is seen as having three parameters—an emphasis on holism, the centrality of risk and uncertainty, and acknowledgment of ignorance. Although Islamization involves critique of western civilization, it may seem rejectionist, but synthesis is the aim. The Islamization discourse is at present mainly theoretical; practice requires time and effort.