A fascinating crash course in demographic studies, and why this is important in order to anticipate the future...
Sunday, November 30, 2014
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
The impact of automation and robotics on the labor market
Seems like a lot of bright people are seriously investigating the impact of automation and robotics on the labor market nowadays. According to most, we're heading some serious storms in this regard. Not only is automation destroying plenty of blue-collar jobs, but with the avenge of smarter devises and self-learning software, even white collar jobs could suffer from this trend in the long-run.
However, as Andrew McAfee brilliantly explains in this TED talk, as automation first and foremost benefits the corporate profits, it will no longer do so in the future if this keeps on destroying jobs - companies will simply have no consumers to sell their products to if all jobs would disappear. This somehow pleas for a guaranteed minimum wage (or a different way to re-distribute corporate profits, if you'd ask me, this could be done in other ways than a minimum wage).
The vision of labor-free citizens that spend their time thinking, discussing, making art and designing new things while robots do the hard work, is reappearing. Sounds pretty sixties and tech-utopian, perhaps. But why not? Whether we want it or not, we are already facing a completely new logic in the way our society gets organized. Trends like 3D printing, climate change, crowdsourcing, sharing economy etc etc already are impacting the very fabric of our society. If you project all of these trends on a larger scale (okay, a very dangerous thing to do for any forecaster) you see a completely new society emerge.
How exactly this will unfold is obviously very hard to predict. No doubt the path to this transition will be painful for many, as is the case with all transitions of this magnitude. But if we're all looking in the same direction, it might lead to something better at the end... it just might...
However, as Andrew McAfee brilliantly explains in this TED talk, as automation first and foremost benefits the corporate profits, it will no longer do so in the future if this keeps on destroying jobs - companies will simply have no consumers to sell their products to if all jobs would disappear. This somehow pleas for a guaranteed minimum wage (or a different way to re-distribute corporate profits, if you'd ask me, this could be done in other ways than a minimum wage).
The vision of labor-free citizens that spend their time thinking, discussing, making art and designing new things while robots do the hard work, is reappearing. Sounds pretty sixties and tech-utopian, perhaps. But why not? Whether we want it or not, we are already facing a completely new logic in the way our society gets organized. Trends like 3D printing, climate change, crowdsourcing, sharing economy etc etc already are impacting the very fabric of our society. If you project all of these trends on a larger scale (okay, a very dangerous thing to do for any forecaster) you see a completely new society emerge.
How exactly this will unfold is obviously very hard to predict. No doubt the path to this transition will be painful for many, as is the case with all transitions of this magnitude. But if we're all looking in the same direction, it might lead to something better at the end... it just might...
Thursday, February 13, 2014
The art and science of prediction (Nate Silver's 'The Signal and the Noise')
“This book
is less about what we know than about the difference between what we know and
what we think we know”, writes Nate Silver somewhere at the end of his book. He
could not have phrased it more beautifully. Our brain is a remarkable
instrument that, when it comes down to predicting almost anything, contains a
substantial amount of techniques to mislead us. Of course, these techniques
often helped us to survive in tougher times, but they fail us miserably in the
area of future-watching. Just as an example: apparently we have a bad habit of
neglecting certain risks just because they’re too hard to measure…. Not sure
how far this will get us in terms of survival, however…
The solution? Statistics. According to Nate Silver, that is. He’s not saying statistics can
predict everything (or, for that matter, anything) –‘all statistic models are
faulty, but some are useful’- but at least it can provide us with a more
accurate picture of the (possible) future(s).
Chapter by
chapter Nate applies this thought on very specific subjects, ranging from the
American elections (his specialty), to weather forecasting, earthquakes,
economic growth and climate change, to more tangible topics such as poker,
chess, or beating the stock market (which, he concludes, is impossible).
Fascinating
material, and some conclusions linger on for quite some time. For instance: the
level of uncertainty of prediction increases when the system we study is
non-linear and dynamic (which sounds intuitive at first, but is very often
forgotten, for instance when governments predict next year’s GDP), or when the
data we start with is not accurate enough (like with weather forecasting). We
also need to watch out not to ‘overfit’ our models (adapting it with the data
we have at hand), as we often do with predicting earthquakes. Sometimes we can
use models developed for one system onto another system, like applying the
power-law distribution we use for earthquakes onto the event of future
terrorist attacks (which results in a somewhat bewildering conclusion).
The central
thought Nate Silver uses across his book is the formula of Bayes which, for the
curious people among you, looks like this:
[xy] / [xy + z(1-x)]
Where
X = the
initial likeliness you would attribute to an event.
Y = the ‘positive
possibility’ (the likeliness of an event without taking x into account)
Z = the ‘negative
possibility’ (the likeliness of the event not taking place).
Believe it
or not, but with this formula you can even calculate the likeliness that your partner
is cheating on you! The key figure in the formula is the ‘x’, the likeliness you
grant to an event accuring –which implies that the overall likeliness gets more
accurate as you gather more experience or knowledge about the event (if your
partner cheated on you in the past, the ‘x’ would increase, and hence the
overall likeliness in a particular event as well).
Strangely
enough this thought process can be applied to virtually any system (or
prediction), though dependent on a number of factors it can produce totally
different outcomes, with different levels of accuracy. The world will never be
predictable, but with a sensible use of statistics it can become a little more
so…
Fascinating
reading…
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Meet the new Meat
...have to love this quote, just because it makes you think "A vegetarian in a Hummer is more ecological than a meat eater on a bike"... meat has some future though:
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Why CSR is moving to the core of corporate strategy
It still
strikes me that people look surprised when I talk to them about CSR (Corporate
Social Responsibility). To many, CSR is just a fashionable word for ‘greenwashing’,
a handy way to disguise activities that are far from ‘responsible’ at all.
Others see CSR as an argument to attract a new breed of clients, or a way to attract
Generation Y employees who –according to plenty of surveys- would prefer to
work for a socially responsible employer.
To counter
this skepticism I often explain that CSR is increasingly getting to the core of
corporate strategy. Even better: in many industries CSR has become an
imperative. To show why, let us take a look at this graph:
The vertical axis shows the source of motivation for CSR: is this imposed by society, or is it a company’s own initiative? The horizontal axis shows the impact of CSR on a company: does it involve its core business, or does it only impact the ‘business periphery’ (the context) of a company?
We now obtain
4 segments, each reflecting a different behavior to CSR:
The lower
left segment (‘must do’s’), where CSR is imposed by society but touches the
business’ context, is where we find activities that companies must comply with.
A fair treatment of employees, honest communication, compliance with the law,
etc. Nothing too exciting here.
In the
upper left segment (‘good to do’) we find the numerous corporate foundations
that each company from a certain size feels obliged to possess. This space is
pretty crowded, and hence offers little room for competitive differentiation. In
a certain way this segment is responsible for the skepticism I talked about
earlier: what good can we expect from the foundation of an oil company when,
due to bad practices, the mother company causes a natural disaster?
But it
starts to get really interesting once the CSR activities touch the core
business of corporations. The lower-right segment (‘major threat’) is clearly a
danger zone companies would want to avoid. Think of how BP had to review its
activities after the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Or think of Coca Cola,
whose products were boycotted for years throughout India because of its bad
management of water in a plant in the Southern State of Kerala. This factory
was located in a region that is increasingly suffering from water shortage,
hence the anger of the local farmers for Coca Cola’s water spoilage, and
ultimately the boycott throughout India. To be fair with Coca Cola: they since
reviewed the water usage of their
factories, and even win sustainability awards with it. In each threat lies an
opportunity…
Now to my
point: in order to still gain competitive advantage from the overpopulated ‘corporate
foundation’ activities, and to avoid the threat of society imposing changes on
companies, more and more companies move to the upper right segment (‘major
opportunity’), where the core activities of a company are used to do social
good. Google.org is a good example of this, since it uses plenty of Google’s tools
at the disposal of aid organizations after a natural disaster. Some would call
this a clever way to position its products favorably (‘cause marketing’), but I
just wonder how many day-to-day users of Google know about this initiative…
Other
examples include the many traditional energy providers who increasingly put
sustainable energy at the core of their long-term strategy. Or take technology
company Siemens, that recently completed a reorganization where each business
unit now focuses on resolving one specific societal challenge (ageing population,
mobility, sustainability, etc). But the most impressive example is probably
Umicore, who transitioned from a (dirty) mining and natural resources company
into a world-class recycling company, and now consistently appears in the lists
of most sustainable companies worldwide.
This
movement becomes inevitable in many industries. The two ‘forces’ we discussed
are driving companies to put their core products at the service of their CSR
activities. But there is a third force at play: in this segment companies face an
increasing competition from social entrepreneurs, who very often threaten the
overall business model of the industry, and at any rate are eating market share
from traditional players. Pure providers of green energy are a good example of
this, but also the multiple initiatives that have to do with the ‘sharing
economy’, which are forcing traditional players to at least ask themselves the (vital)
question whether they should join or fight this movement.
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
The future of democracy: towards a 'participative' democracy?
I recently
had the chance to read the essay of David Van Reybrouck ‘Against elections’
(‘Tegen verkiezingen’, in its original title). As far as I can see it has not
yet been translated in English, which is a bit of a shame, since it poses some
pressing questions on the current functioning of our democracy, as well as its
future.
The
starting point of the essay is quite comprehensible: there are two vital criteria for exercising
‘power’ (in the democratic sense, that is): efficiency and legitimacy. Most Western democracies are in crisis on
both these criteria. Elected powers are decreasingly regarded as the safeguard
for an efficient organization of society; and in many cases the very basis of
their power is questioned. Result? Ever fewer people are participating in the
elective process, and those that do tend to vote in an increasingly volatile
way.
This is
what Van Reybrouck calls the ‘democratic fatigue syndrome’, and according to
him this fatigue mainly results from the fact that we tend to assimilate ‘democracy’
with ‘elections’ all too often.
Elections,
however, are a relatively new phenomenon, at least in relation to democracy.
When we look at what is vastly considered the birth-state of democracy (the Athens
of the ancient Greeks), we see that this democracy was to a big extend based on
a lottery. A lottery among a small selection of citizens, surely, but still,
this had some considerable advantages. For instance: since the ‘power’ of
decision takers was by definition limited in time, they were more inclined to
take measures that reached further than their tenure of this power (instead of
just taking short-term measures to make sure to get reelected).
But this
system of lottery has been with us ever since. The leaders of the city-states
of Venice and Firenze were selected through a combination of lottery and elections.
Philosophers like Montesquieu and Rousseau even warned that a system based on elections
would ultimately benefit the aristocracy. This probably explains why the lottery
method disappeared altogether from the constitutions of the US and France after
the revolutions: the people writing these constitutions had nothing to gain
from a system based on lottery… It leads to the somewhat bewildering conclusion
that the system of elections was never meant to be democratic in the first
place!
But things
are changing. We see an increasing amount of initiatives based on ‘participative
democracy’. In Texas (above all places!) a decision about investments in wind
energy originated from the feedback of its citizens; in Japan the population
took part in a decision about the pension system; and in Iceland the
inhabitants contributed to the development of a new constitution.
These
initiatives (and multiple others, most of them can be found on the website www.participedia.net) were not merely referenda,
but genuine efforts to take decisions on a collaborative basis. This could lead
to a a complete new model for our democracies, such as the very sophisticated ‘multi-body
sortition’ method developed by Terrill Bouricius.
This is not
necessarily the ‘ideal’ state of a democracy –arguably there is no such thing.
But what’s for sure is that a more participative form of democracy is preferable
over an election-based one, and as the increasing number of examples show, the
idea is catching on.
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
The classroom of the future: delusion or necessity?
I have followed a lot of discussions about the use of technology in classrooms lately. Personally I thought it was a no-brainer: if schools want to educate pupils in how to function in society, they need to reflect this society as well as possible, right? Well, skeptics have a point as well: don't we want schools to reflect values that don't necessarily have anything to do with technology? Additionally there's a practical side to this: how to pay for it all if education already eat huge portions of an ever shrinking budget... and how fast can we realistically educate teachers on how to use technology efficiently in the classroom?
As always the answer will lie somewhere in between these two opposite visions.
So, first: is there a need for using technology in the classroom? I would think so, if only because it enables great improvement in efficiency of teaching, and in personalizing the pace and content of the classes to each individual pupil:
So how might this integration of technology in the classroom look like? If you want an extreme example, look at this vision of HP:
In comparison, Intel's view of the future classroom contains pretty much the same elements of smart computer usage, gamification and collaboration, but somehow looks much more feasible on the short term than HP's:
Looks impressive, right? But obviously it will take a while before getting there, I'm afraid... In the meantime, we'll have to go step-by-step, and perhaps this example of a school in a remote community in Arizona, shows how small-scale introduction of technology can already lead to huge improvements (be aware that this is an advertisement by Samsung, but try to watch behind the ad here):
...to be continued, no doubt ;-)
As always the answer will lie somewhere in between these two opposite visions.
So, first: is there a need for using technology in the classroom? I would think so, if only because it enables great improvement in efficiency of teaching, and in personalizing the pace and content of the classes to each individual pupil:
So how might this integration of technology in the classroom look like? If you want an extreme example, look at this vision of HP:
In comparison, Intel's view of the future classroom contains pretty much the same elements of smart computer usage, gamification and collaboration, but somehow looks much more feasible on the short term than HP's:
Looks impressive, right? But obviously it will take a while before getting there, I'm afraid... In the meantime, we'll have to go step-by-step, and perhaps this example of a school in a remote community in Arizona, shows how small-scale introduction of technology can already lead to huge improvements (be aware that this is an advertisement by Samsung, but try to watch behind the ad here):
...to be continued, no doubt ;-)
Monday, January 6, 2014
59 Megatrends Fact Sheets 2015, invaluable input for your planning and innovation sessions!
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But the vital thing for this to be successful is to keep the fact sheets digestible for everyone. After all they are meant to stimulate ideas, not to be academic papers. This is why we've kept the fact sheets simple and light!
Each fact sheet contains:
Buy the full 2015 updated document now in order to save hours of research and get fresh insights for your planning or innovation session!
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These fact sheets can be used as a briefing document prior to your session, or at the start of the session as an eye-opener. Sometimes these fact sheets are hung all across the room of a brainstorm session, to provide the participants with fresh ideas and insights!
But the vital thing for this to be successful is to keep the fact sheets digestible for everyone. After all they are meant to stimulate ideas, not to be academic papers. This is why we've kept the fact sheets simple and light!
Each fact sheet contains:
- 1-2 revealing charts or tables explaining the trend. In this 2015 version, over 98% of the charts used are from after 2011;
- 'Key Facts': a short description of the trend en/or its impact;
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List of megatrends covered in the 2015 version:
Major changes of the 2015 version:
- lighter, more readable 'look & feel' of each sheet;
- 4 megatrends added in comparison to 2014 version, 1 deleted;
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This document is exclusively for internal use by the acquiring company.
Get some sample fact sheets here:
This document is exclusively for internal use by the acquiring company.
Get some sample fact sheets here:
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