Anticipatory action learning: Theory and practice

Anticipatory action learning (AAL) draws from action learning/research traditions and Futures Studies to develop a unique style of questioning the future with intent to transform organization and society. Case studies from futures workshops are used to illustrate the main points of anticipatory action learning. These are: (1) sensitivity to the environment—workshop dynamics and ways of learning/knowing of participants, (2) questioning leads to anxiety in the organization, (3) anticipatory action learning can be easily appropriated, (4) resistance must be named, understood and transformed, and (5) the future is deepened by authentic understanding of the other.     

Teaching about the future

Since 1984 UNESCO has been developing a programme of prospective studies. This programme was re-named ‘future-oriented studies’ and is now centred around three groups of activities: a project on the futures of culture; the development of education and training with special emphasis on disseminating the methodology of future-oriented studies; and the creation of an international bibliographic database called FUTURESCO. An invitational seminar, ‘Teaching about the future’, held in Vancouver, 21–23 June 1992, was a direct consequence of the above. It was organized and hosted by UNESCO (with FUTURESCO and the Canadian Commission for UNESCO). It brought together about 20 professional futurists from Pacific Basin countries to consider a range of theoretical, practical and pedagogic issues associated with teaching futures, mainly at the tertiary level.     

Marketers expressing the future: Scenario planning for marketing action

Thomas Friedman exhorts us to imagine the future [1] - we urge marketers to invent the future, to learn the future faster, and to deliver the future earlier. Marketers are asked to develop scenarios about emerging technologies such as broadband wireless but more often than not have no education or training in scenario planning. Also marketers are often stuck in a strategic planning mindset based on successful replication of past marketing strategies. Strategic management and marketing learning has ventured into futures and foresight methodologies, but with strong focus on conventional macroscopic high-level scenario planning methods.This paper positions scenario planning as a method to express the future vision, both tacit and explicit, of business, products and services in a clear succinct story form, to underpin all elements of a marketing strategy (goals, position and execution). The scenario planning for marketing action (SPMA) model is introduced and discussed incorporating eight principles: moderation and time compression; storytelling led new product and service development; customer orientation; iterative dynamic scenarios; complexity science to foster non-linear thinking; risk weighted scenarios; participant hosted scenario workshops; springboard consolidation.The SPMA method was proven and evolved within postgraduate Executive education courses in Sydney and Bangkok from 2003 to 2007. This approach is fundamental for marketers to gain competences in “learning the future faster”, thus possessing capabilities to imagine and invent the future and deliver the future earlier.     

The sisyphus factor or a learning approach to the future

If, as is normally assumed, the future has yet to happen and is dependent upon preceding events and choices it remains uncertain and alternative futures possible. This appears to make the future plural and different from the past and present, which are usually considered to be singular. The role of Futures Research, in an uncertain future, is not to predict but to assist in making informed choices about issues of significance to the future in the changing present. Effective management of change requires the adoption of a learning approach to the future, some of the characteristics of which are explored.     

Anticipatory effects in the FTSE 100 index revisions

This paper examines the price impact of trading due to expected changes in the FTSE 100 index composition, which employs publicly-known objective criteria to determine membership. Hence, it provides a natural context to investigate anticipatory trading effects. We propose a panel-regression event study that backs out these anticipatory effects by looking at the price impact of the ex-ante probability of changing index membership status. Our findings reveal that anticipative trading explains about 40% and 23% of the cumulative abnormal returns of additions and deletions, respectively. The results are both statistically and economically significant.     

Strategic trading and learning about liquidity

Many practitioners point out that the speculative profits of institutional traders are eroded by the difficulty in gauging the price impact of their trades. In this paper, we develop a model of strategic trading where speculators face such a dilemma because of incomplete information about time-varying market liquidity. Unlike the competitive market makers that they trade against, informed traders do not know the distribution of liquidity (“noise”) trades. Instead, they have to learn about liquidity from past prices and trading volume. This learning implies that strategic trades and market statistics such as informational efficiency are path-dependent on past market outcomes. Our paper also has normative implications for practitioners.     

Underwriter learning about unfamiliar firms: Evidence from the history of biotech IPOS

This study examines the ability of underwriters to properly value unfamiliar firms prior to issuance. I use a sample of IPOs in biotechnology, a relatively new but thriving industry. The first American biotech IPO was in 1980. Through the end of 2004, almost 500 biotech IPOs have appeared in the public market. I find that biotechnology differs from other industries in the attributes of individual firms valued by the market. In particular, R&D and the quality of human capital (e.g., star scientists on the staff) are much more important for biotech valuations. I find also that underwriters appeared not to appreciate this distinction for early biotech IPOs; in those cases, first-day market returns were predictable by firm attributes not used by underwriters to establish IPO issue prices. I also find that underwriters have learned over time, albeit slowly. Over the 20+ years of biotech history, IPO issue prices have become more dependent on firm attributes unique to biotechs while first-day market returns have become less predictable.     

Taking the stress out of stressful conversations.

Stressful conversations are unavoidable in life. In business, they can run the gamut from firing a subordinate to, curiously enough, receiving praise. But whatever the context, stressful conversations carry a heavy emotional load. Indeed, stressful conversations cause such anxiety that most people simply avoid them. Yet it can be extremely costly to dodge issues, appease difficult people, and smooth over antagonisms; avoidance usually only worsens a problem or a relationship. Using vivid examples of the three basic stressful conversations that people bump up against most often in the workplace, the author explains how managers can improve those interactions unilaterally. To begin with, they should approach the situations with greater self-awareness. Awareness building is not about endless self-analysis; much of it simply involves making tacit knowledge about oneself more explicit. It is important for those who are vulnerable to hostility, for example, to know how they react to it. Do they clam up or do they retaliate? Knowing how you react in a stressful situation will teach you a lot about your trouble areas and can help you master stressful situations. The author also recommends rehearsing difficult conversations in advance to fine-tune your phrasing and tone. And the best way to keep from being thrown off balance by difficult conversations that crop up unexpectedly is to develop a few hip-pocket phrases that you can pull out on the spot. We all know from past experience what kinds of conversations and people we handle badly. The trick is to have prepared conversational tactics to address those situations.     

Anticipatory anthropology and world peace: a view from 2050

Norman Geras has written a searing indictment of current first-world policies related to our roles in keeping the world peace and our abilities to respond to human rights violations. This paper is partly a response to Geras's book, The contract of mutual indifference: politics since the Holocaust. Thus, genocide is the peace issue I will discuss here. I will use Bosnia, because I have had two occasions to work there and have talked with Bosnians from all walks of life as well as the humanitarian agents there to help them. Second, the paper will define the character of a fully responsive anticipatory anthropology and I will sketch out the nature of some possible peace futures. A third main purpose of this paper is to contribute to the development of the social science of peace.     

The psychodynamics of meaning and action for a sustainable future

Environmental policy and social research tends to neglect the inner, experiential dimensions of human life. Yet, the ways in which individuals seek to achieve psychological and emotional well-being in their lives is inevitably expressed in behaviour that impacts on ecological (and social) processes.The yearning for this ‘inner human sustainability’ is psychologically rooted and subjectively experienced. Beliefs and worldviews about how best to satisfy it are culturally (i.e. inter-subjectively and collectively) constructed and expressed through behaviour that, in turn, supports or undermines the external ecological and social world. Consumerism and its associated behaviours are inherently unsustainable socio-ecologically and psychologically. Through a psychodynamic theory of human experience, meaning and behaviour, the paper explains why any policy, if it is to be effective in the long-term, must be attentive to psychological, experiential and cultural dimensions of human beings and beliefs about how needs and wants will be satisfied. It also argues that long-term societal and cultural transformation is only possible when individuals take responsibility for their own development, transformation and engagement in the larger social and ecological complex on which they depend. Policy-making, research and education are themselves cultural activities that seek to respond appropriately to changes in the external world within the constraints of powerful cultural (collective) and psychological (individual) values and priorities. A systemic approach to sustainable development requires consideration of the mutual dependence between eco-social and psycho-cultural realities.     

Economic determinants of price informativeness about future earnings

This study investigates how the value-creation process affects the extent to which stock prices incorporate value-relevant information about future earnings. In contrast to previous studies focusing on the value-reporting process, this paper shows that strong product market power accelerates the incorporation of future earnings into current equity prices due to less uncertainty about future cash flows and that intensive long-term investment deters such incorporation because of greater uncertainty regarding future cash flows. The results suggest that firm fundamentals shaped by product market competition and long-term investment explain the price informativeness about future earnings beyond the impact of management’s reporting discretion.     

李开复话说未来行业的引爆点

要关注引爆未来的五大领域 记者:有人说中国互联网红利终结,"以量取胜"出现瓶颈.您作为中国风险投资行业的资深风险投资家,能否谈谈在过去的一年VC行业在投资项目上有什么变化?     

Anticipatory policymaking in global venues: Policy change,adaptation, and the UNFCCC

The subfield of public policy depicts policymaking as reactive process wherein public officials respond to existing social problems. While this depiction holds true in many cases, it fails to account for instances where policy change occurs in anticipation of emerging threats or hazards. “Anticipatory problems” are projected to occur in the future, and it is the prospect of their occurring that generates policy debate. This paper examines the policymaking pattern engendered by anticipatory policy problems, highlighting the ways in which they challenge and support existing assumptions about the process of policy change. To illustrate this distinctive dynamic, this paper will present a case study examining the evolving debate over climate change adaptation policy within United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).     

Gylany: the balanced future

Futurist projections indicate that androcracy is rapidly taking us to an evolutionary dead-end. But the two projected androcratic futures—a totalitarian future or no future at all—are not our only alternatives. There is the third alternative, the humanistic future to which the concept of gylany, both the balanced core and the logical requirement of our cultural evolution, provides the key.     

Family learning in the workplace: nurturing lifelong learning

Lifelong learning must become a reality for all employees if we are to create and sustain organizations which can survive in the knowledge economy of the future. But how do we engage those who never access training and development opportunities at work? In this article it is argued that these people may be attracted back to learning by offering them opportunities at work to learn with their families.This different method of facilitating lifelong learning is examined here. The benefits to business and the wider community of encouraging families to learn together at work are explored. It is concluded that the addition of family learning in organisations to our current range of training and development activities can engage a new constituency in learning at work and can model the importance of lifelong learning to a new generation of future employees.     

普华永道全球主席谈未来经济增长点

和往年一样,2011年冬季达沃斯论坛召开前夕,普华永道会计师事务所（以下简称“普华永道”）发布了其第十四期《全球CEO年度调查报告》。该报告向全球69个国家的1201名商界领袖进行调查．并与31名CEO进行了深度访谈,在此基础上,报告亮出了崭新观点：增长在望——新兴市场前景加强CEO信心。借普华永道全球主席戴瑞礼（Dennis M．Nally）访华之际,《国际融资》记者就读者关注的全球经济发展趋势等热点问题,在普华永道北京金融街办公室独家采访了这位国际金融服务行业中的权威人士     

How we talk when we talk about nano: The future in laypeople's talk

Nanotechnology is an example of postnormal technoscience ‘in the making’: its concrete products and applications are currently only starting to trickle into the marketplace. In this paper I use nanotechnology as a case to examine how uncertain technoscientific futures are represented in lay talk. I engage with this question through a close analysis of focus group discussion around nanotechnology, describing the cultural and linguistic resources that participants draw upon in doing this, including personal experience and expertise, analogies and comparisons, and fiction and popular culture. These are, I suggest, the key discursive tools with which laypeople can weigh up and evaluate emerging technologies. However, I also argue that these are used flexibly to create different kinds of arguments in different conversational contexts, and use the example of nanotechnology as ‘the same’/’different’ to illustrate this. In concluding I reflect on the implications of these findings for scholars of public opinion and attitude and for those who frame policy on emerging and uncertain science and technology.     

Cyberspace as product space Interactive learning about interactive media

A bewildering range of new interactive consumer media products are emerging, many of them under the label ‘Interactive Television’. This is the source of a great deal of industry excitement. The future of television is opened up beyond the vistas of countless new channels, to new or enhanced types of television service such as video on demand, surfing the Internet, and teleshopping. There is considerable uncertainty attached to market forecasts about them, to views as to which of the various products on offer will succeed in the mass market—even to notions of what exactly consumers might want to use these products for. Rather than offer a pat set of answers to these questions, the present paper approaches the matter of these new products through the perspectives provided by innovation studies and, in particular, new evolutionary economics. Drawing lessons from such products as videotex, audiotex, and optical disc multimedia, it outlines implications for interactive television.     

Memories and methods: conversations with Ashis Nandy, Ziauddin Sardar and Richard Slaughter

The history and development of futures studies is explored in interviews with three leading futurists. Ashis Nandy, Ziauddin Sardar and Richard Slaughter provide a personal perspective on their involvement in the field and the World Futures Studies Federation and reflect on future possibilities.