I recently had the pleasure of co-teaching a one week scenario planning course to a group of students at the University Scholars Programme (USP) of the National University of Singapore. I co-taught the course with three of my favourite friends and foresight practitioners; Aaron Maniam, Stuart Candy and Teddy Zmrhal. These are some of the most talented practitioners I [...]
Category Archives: talks
Back to the Futurist Interview
January 27 12
Alexander Phillips was kind enough to interview me for the very cool “Back to the Futurist” series over at URBNFUTR. The series highlights some interesting ideas on the future of cities and those who think about them. Many thanks to @MelissaSterry and the entire URBNFUTR team for the recommendation. PS – Their bio is a bit outdated [...]
Update from the Oxford Futures Forum, 2011
April 21 11
This week (April 18th) I attended the third Oxford Futures Forum at the Said Business School of Oxford University. Among other things, the Forum aimed to: Forge and support an international community of future-minded practices aimed at actionable knowledge. It was a remarkable gathering of futures practitioners, young and old, with a partial list of [...]
An Interview with GBN
December 29 10
I recently did a Q & A for the Fall 2010 issue of the GBN Bulletin (pdf here). Here is an extract from the PDF, in which I talk about crowdsourced scenarios, urban change, design & strategy. I’ve added links and re-inserted a few of references and shout-outs that didn’t make it into the final edit, [...]
Slides from my recent talk at MIT
April 21 10
I recently was back at MIT presenting some of my research on web-based techniques for collaborative foresight and online scenario planning. Here are the slides from my presentation. The presentation starts with a general overview of scenario planning, then provides an example from some scenarios work I did with the Oxford Future of Cities Programme (in [...]
Harnessing Collective Intelligence for Crowdsourced Scenario Planning
April 8 10
This presentation is about a proposed schema for online, participatory scenario planning systems using crowdsourced or “collective intelligence” approaches. It introduces theories of collective intelligence, complexity, and organizational learning in the context of uncertainty and scenario planning, and provides several examples.
Complexity and adaptive change
December 8 09
Here is Part Two of a recent lecture I gave on complexity, strategy, and organisational development at the LSE Complexity Programme. This segment introduces a model of adaptive change developed at the Stockholm Resilience Institute, which explain empirical change in complex ecosystems. The work has been expanded to other classes of socio-ecological systems, with preliminary [...]
Preparing for and adapting to radical non-linear change
December 7 09
I’ve finally finished uploading clips from the LSE talk I gave last month on management strategies for complexity and non-linear change. This final clip emphasises that the connectivity, interaction and volatility of complex adaptive systems makes non-linear change inevitable and their timing unknowable. I then argue that it is difficult to build resilience in the [...]
Real time data collection, urban parametric modeling and remote control urbanism
December 6 09
This is talk I gave last year at the Resources for Urban Design (RUDI), on the potentials and possibilities offered by new wireless sensor technologies for urban planning and design. A fun and fast overview. Topics covered include: Smart bricks Spimes RFID sensor networks Real time data collection Dynamic ride sharing and transportation Remote control [...]
Adapting Snowden's Cynefin Framework to Encompass Systemic Organisational Change
November 30 09
This is part of my recent LSE lecture on complexity strategies for change. In this segment I introduce Dave Snowden‘s Cynefin Framework of knowledge management, then adapt it to Gunderson and Holling’s resilience work on the Adaptive Change Cycle. The result is a new framework for strategy making in the context of different kinds of [...]
