Thinking Futures

Doing Environmental Scanning Part 6: Reporting Your Scanning Findings

Maree Conway — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:22:08 +0000

This is the final in a series about doing environmental scanning. In the previous five posts, we’ve discussed focusing your scanning, setting up your scanning team, how to start scanning, recording what you are finding and analysing your scanning output. This sixth post is about reporting your scanning findings within your organisation. This is a [...]

Deepening the Conversation

Maree Conway — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 01:37:39 +0000

The nub of foresight work is conversation that lets people better understand what is happening ‘out there’ in the external environment so they can respond today to ensure their organisation survives in to the future. However, the conversation needs to be high quality, not the tick the box kind of conversation that often happens in [...]

A personal online learning story

Maree Conway — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 10:57:37 +0000

It was a sad day for me yesterday. I decided to withdraw from a professional doctorate in higher education after about 8 weeks. I started a tradtional PhD a while ago, but withdrew from that because of a whole range of factors, best left to the past. So, I was excited to finally make the [...]

“Future Proofing” – our quest for future certainty

Maree Conway — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 23:52:49 +0000

There’s an article in the May 2011 issue of Strategy Magazine from the Strategic Planning Society called Making the shift: why the future of work is here now, written by Lynda Grattan from the London Business School (full reference below). It talks about major forces ‘that will fundamentally shift much of what we take for granted about [...]

Toss our the planning rulebooks

Maree Conway — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 12:30:16 +0000

I read an interesting post from Herman Trend Alerts last week on Creativity – the Most Crucial Factor for Leadership Success. Right at the end was this phrase: Continuous Strategic Planning will be an ongoing process, rather than an annual one, so that the organization may respond to fast changing market conditions. Now, I don’t [...]

The Future of Design and Design Thinking

Maree Conway — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 06:10:48 +0000

The Association of Professional Futurists next #futrchat will be held on Thursday, 21 July at 4:00-5:00pm ET, 9pm BST, Friday 6:00am Sydney. The topic is the future of design. A big one, but an important one when interpreted broadly. During 2010, a colleague – Elizabeth Rudd of FutureNous – and I did some work on [...]