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Why a ‘Knowledge Base’?
Few observers would deny that the world is facing a multidimensional challenge. The success of our species, the technical power at our disposal, economic contradictions, social and cultural polarisation, reduction in biodiversity and, above all, the mounting impacts upon the global environment have created quite new problems of understanding, control,...
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Over the last few years a great deal has been written and said about the relative merits of ‘old fashioned’ books and the proliferation of digital devices - sometimes called eReaders. My own attitude did not impel me to rush out and buy one; rather, I decided to wait for a while and withhold judgement. This worked for some time but I eventually realised that I had to try out the new...
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Given continuing reverberations from the GFC, the near-default of the USA and serious structural issues within the EEC, many are hoping for a more stable and less crisis-ridden outlook. The near-universal desire is for a return to ‘healthy economic growth’ to boost confidence and stimulate a world wide economic recovery. Wherever you care to look, a resumption of growth is seen as...
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In 1998 I travelled to Greece at the invitation of the Greek government. The trip emerged from suggestions put forward by Spiros Makridakos, a Greek futurist connected with INSEAD (a business school) in France. Makridakis suggested that, since the Greek oracle had been influential in ancient Greece, the site at Delphi was a fitting place to convene a world-class meeting during 2000 to consider...
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In one of many provocative and interesting articles (Blind to the Dangers, The Age, 2nd April, 2001) Melbourne-based writer Kenneth Davidson posed a question that still lacks a satisfactory answer a decade later. He asked: when is Australia going to produce leaders who can think at least two of the three steps ahead about the issues that are central to our survival as a rich nation? He went on...
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The global environment is constantly emitting an infinite number of ‘signals’ about many, many processes. No individual, no organisation, can pay attention to more than a tiny fraction of them. In addition, the early signals of potentially influential phenomena are usually small, indistinct and hard to separate from the background ‘noise.’ Yet the earlier they can be...
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Have you ever wondered why organisations usually ‘get the future wrong’; why the term ‘futures’ has become synonymous with financial derivatives and why your company or organisation has little or no in-house foresight expertise?
Many of the current methods for introducing futures techniques and thinking into organisations do not work, or do not work very well. A bit of...
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On the 14th of January, 2006, two newspapers, The Australian and The Age, carried very different accounts of the inaugural meeting of the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate. The conference brought together representatives from Australia, the US, China, India, Japan and Korea which, it was reported, together account for about half the world's energy consumption and...
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Forty years is a long time in publishing, so the journal Futures is to be congratulated not only for having survived this time but also for having continued to break new ground and to maintain its role as the ‘flagship’ journal of the field. That said, the field it represents has passed through several stages and is currently in a state of what might be called ‘structural...
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