The “Futurist Club” Experiment

I recently run a low-fi experiment that successfully helped to motivate a group of people to actively think about emerging technologies. Here’s the detail…

The Careless Prey Gets Eaten First

Science & technology has been the driver of human evolution in most cultures for millennia. Keeping up with how tech evolves has become an unnatural yet nonnegotiable criteria for evolutionary fitness since the day when we figured out how to start a fire.

But what counts for the individual also applies to communities — such as companies: to keep up with change, we need to actively watch and monitor. Committing to watch doesn’t imply committing to act — it means committing to staying informed and to rely on a more successful form of decision making.

Working with tech companies for three decades, I have been fortunate enough to be part of early adoptions of digital publishing, CAD/CAM, computational mathematics, video streaming, IoT, AI, remote health and of course mobile/web. The patterns for winners and losers repeat. Some lost because they invested too early but most lost because they were not watching and invested too late. Yes, this is common knowledge and yet, it surprisingly seldom leads to the commitment to proactively watch and monitor.

The Experiment

With this in mind, I recently run an experiment at ThoughtWorks Australia, labelled the “Futurist Club”. In contrast to a Sci-Fi Club, we focused on where reality is going in the next 2-5 years, not where it might go in 5–50 years.

Collecting news, facts and figures from media, gatherings and conferences into a set of low-fi cards, I created a set of independent “glimpses” into the future.

The Club was open to anyone interested. We met every fortnight over lunch and spent 30 minutes using these glimpses to hear about and to discuss changes emerging in technology. We would pick a random glimpse, read it and clarify each other’s questions. Then we randomly picked a question from another set of cards. The question helped us to kick-off and frame an open discussion about the glimpse. After 5–10 minutes we would start again with another glimpse.

Participants involved many roles such as operations, sales, HR, recruitment, UX, DEV, QA and BA. This diversity led to great topics and various perspectives. It also made sure that the discussion didn’t get too technical and therefore remained relevant to the company community as a whole.

Glimpses existed on commercial XR/AR/VR, IoT and drones as well as 5G, digital health, smart speakers, robotics, AI etc.

Success and Outcomes

The feedback on this experiment was very positive and encouraging. Participants enjoyed how their minds started to become curious and exploratory — and keen to hear more. Several members commented that they started to see glimpses into the future outside the Club.

We noticed a consistent pattern of ethical and privacy concerns due to the high impact and invasiveness of most emerging technology. Being technologists at core, we sensed that in the near future we will have to make very challenging decisions between using exciting technology and living up to our ethical values.

As it is most often the case with successful ideas, I am puzzled to what made this work so well. Was it the shininess of new technology, the relevance of the information, the disruption of day-to-day thinking, the low-fi format of the meetings, our natural instinct to evolve or all of above ? Regardless, it seemed to prove the hypothesis that staying informed is value-add and easily achievable.

Encouragement

I’d like to encourage the reader to experiment in a similar way within your community. I imagine that this format could work in industries outside tech, such as retail, health, manufacturing, finance, transport etc.