At this year’s World Future Society conference--World Future 2007, in Minneapolis--Social Technologies' futurists shared their views on "Technology Values" and "Integrating Foresight into Organizations."

“I always look forward to attending the World Future Society conferences because hundreds of interesting people gather to talk about a wide array of topics ranging from nanotechnology to the future of consumer finances,” says Tom Conger, founder of Social Technologies, of the conference held July 29-31.

Conger was joined by Chris Carbone, Social Technologies’ director of programs, on Monday, July 30 (4 – 5:30 pm) to speak about the company’s view of consumer-driven “Technology Values.”

“We discussed how technology-related products and services will increasingly be shaped by 12 underlying principles, or technology values, including appropriateness, user creativity, personalization, and connectedness,” Conger explains. “These values represent the characteristics that consumers will look for in products, services, and technologies over the next 10–15 years. Attendees learned what is driving these values, how they are showing up in new products and services, and what this may mean for different business sectors.”

The following day (Tuesday, July 31, 9–10:30 pm), Social Technologies’ Andy Hines, director of custom projects, discussed “Integrating Foresight into Organizations: Three Perspectives for Making Foresight Come to Life.”

“We provided tips and tools for integrating foresight into the fiber of an organization so that it yields actionable results,” says Hines. “We also explored how to audit an organization’s current attitude and approaches to foresight, then dig deeper into how foresight can strengthen the organization’s key processes and ability to address issues, opportunities, and challenges.”

Both sessions were heavily attended.

"It's always nice to get a positive response from your futurist colleagues," says Conger, who looks forward to attending the WFS conference next year in Washington, DC.

 

Monday we took a small side trip, away from the hustle and bustle of Shanghai to the tier 2 city of Suzhou. Chinese cities are  usually divided into between four and six different levels, or tiers.

Suzhou is about 100km from Shanghai and provided some nice contrasts with the tier 1 city. Famous for its gardens, one of our translators joked that Shanghainese say Suzhou and Hangzhou (another neighboring city) are simply two of Shanghai’s gardens. While this might be the sentiment, it is anything but the truth—as Suzhou has some 6 million people.

During the day in the historic district of Suzhou we saw these highlights:

• We hopped on a water taxi and wound our way through a 400-year-old canal with traditional homes butting right up against the water. People were washing their clothes directly in the water, and the tiny streets around the canal area were full of one-room shops selling everything from duck and quail eggs to inexpensive ceiling fans and rice cookers. A true contrast to the ultra-modern malls and boutiques that pepper Shanghai, and the newer parts of Suzhou.
• We toured a Ming Dynasty garden filled with tourists. There were some French, Japanese, and a few Americans, but most were Chinese. Middle-class wealth brings middle-class leisure pursuits, and with car ownership domestic tourism is booming.
• Many of the apartments on the highway to Suzhou and the small houses in the canal area had solar hot water systems on their roof—and the families living there were clearly of modest means. For all the talk in the press about China’s testing and development of alternative energy systems this was the first day that our group saw an obvious use of “green power” technology.
• Finally, Suzhou just had a different feel about it. Driving through the downtown there just wasn’t the glitz and polish you see in Shanghai. The streets were dustier, there were some Western stores and restaurants like KFC, but local brands were predominant, there were more people walking and biking, and there were more Chinese cars than foreign brands.

While many China-watchers are forecasting that consumption in tier 2, 3, and 4 cities is going to be important for the next decade of growth in the country, infrastructure challenges and other factors such as local competition could be limiting factors for multinationals entering these markets. We saw evidence of this throughout our day in Suzhou.

We had the real pleasure of spending some time with six Chinese families in their homes this week. We met people from a variety of backgrounds and income levels…

• Some families were native to Shanghai, and others had recently moved to the city. There seemed to be some real barriers to integration for new families, as we heard from people that they don’t know their neighbors and don’t really have a lot of friends other than a few from their home province.
• One family had spent substantial time in the US and had plans to return.
• One family had three people living in a single room while another lived in a gated community in a two-story apartment which cost the equivalent of US$500,000.
• As in the shadow shopping exercise, we again heard several of the families talk about food and food safety. A wealthier family, they actually only use powdered milk for their child because a friend has told them that it is safer than fresh milk.
• Families cited energy, the environment, and even overpopulation as some of the challenges that they saw in the future, not just in China but globally.
• We were treated to incredible hospitality and openness as the families shared ideas about their lives and hopes for the future.

Some key takeaways

One of the biggest things that struck many in our group was the extent to which people seemed content with their current lives. Some of us wondered if this was for face reasons or they really were just satisfied, though this seemed quite plausible in a family in which the father had survived a cancer scare several years back. His family was of modest income, but expressed itself in part through some high-quality kitchen appliances and utensils that highlighted his love of cooking.

We noted the general lack of personal expression found within the homes, which were mostly devoid of photos, antiques, works of art, etc. This may be an artifact of the country’s past in which such items were considered bourgeois and often confiscated.

The extent to which people have built their lives around pursuing educational opportunities for their children was quite striking. One of the families had moved to Shanghai to find better educational opportunities for their kids. Another family dreamed of buying a townhouse in the United States just so she and her husband could be with her young son when he attended university.

Finally, the group found a highly pragmatic approach to consumption and consumer behavior. People tended to be fairly conservative and thoughtful, weighing a number of factors and doing a fair amount of research online and in person before buying products. Most also relied heavily on the advice of friends for recommendations on specific products to buy, however.

During our first two days in Shanghai, we’ve covered a lot of territory, sat in a lot of traffic, eaten quite a lot of good food, met some fascinating people, and learned a bit about our first of five trend areas—the rapidly changing retail sector—along the way. We have:

• Gotten an overview of the city at the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum from the perspective of a native-born Shanghainese
• Followed some locals as they shopped for food, electronics, and white goods, discussing their brand attitudes, motivations, and preferences with the aid of some local  market research specialists
• Seen a range of retail options for the rapidly growing consumer class in Shanghai
• Found blue jeans that sell for $2.50, $85, and $300 in their respective establishments
• Heard from a young sales clerk who is paid about $200 per month plus a 1% sales commission
• Learned from the Marketing Intelligence Manager of Yum! Restaurants China about KFC’s nearly 1,900 outlets countrywide
• Visited a new-urbanist retail center north of downtown designed to mix retail and entertainment.

Thanks to a tip today from our gracious morning hosts at Steelcase China, we were able peek in on some of the lively public park life that China’s seniors are known for. The group at far right were dancing to salsa rhythms as their friends at far left played the maracas as music pulsed through speakers.

We’ll continue to report on the highlights of our journey through Shanghai as the week progresses.

Up next: for our module on Upward Aspirations, home visits with Chinese families.

(Images: Rachel Nguyen; Social Technologies)

As Social Technologies’ new leader of corporate communications, I have been going on the road with several S)T futurists—and recently accompanied Andy Hines, S)T’s director of consulting, when he delivered the keynote speeches at the Joint Spring Workshop of Washington, DC Libraries on April 12.

More than 150 librarians packed the L. Quincy Mumford Room at the Library of Congress to hear him speak. The topic: “Envisioning the Future: What Will Your Library Look Like in 5, 10, or 20 Years?”

“We usually get only about 100 librarians to attend our annual workshop; this year we topped 150—I think Andy was one of the reasons we had such a great turnout,” said Kate Martin, chairman of the Joint Spring Workshop and the director of library services for the DC law firm of McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP.

Indeed. When Hines took the stage, he announced: “You are facing the greatest transformation in your industry, perhaps since the fourth century when Alexander the Great founded the Royal Library of Alexandria.”

But new threats also bring new opportunities, he explained.

Then Hines tasked the audience with crafting a strategy to guide them in the exploration of new markets, products, and services—and ultimately in meeting emerging customer needs. To help them accomplish that mission, he shared methods and ideas from what he calls his “futures toolbox.”

The tool he deemed most valuable was the futures wheel, which enables groups to visualize a problem and logically think through possible solutions.

“Start with the challenge, then think how that impacts your industry, your organization, and finally, you,” he advised. “Consider the things you absolutely must attend to. Then consider the events and changes that may not happen, but which would be important if they did, and come up with a Plan B, just in case.”

After the speech, Martin applauded Hines. “Our industry is undergoing such a seismic change, the ground is literally shifting under our feet. We need tools and ideas so that we can stay on top of changes and trends. Andy taught us something very valuable today.”

Roberta Shaffer agreed. As executive director of a resource-sharing consortium of federal agency libraries, she believes, libraries—and librarians—need to be much more cognizant of both macro trends and future planning techniques.

“Andy’s advice certainly will help us bring all of the issues facing our industry to the fore,” Shaffer said. “His discussion regarding thinking about the future, and viewing the problem as a futurist would, enabled us to consider how we might position ourselves for continued success.”

I had the pleasure of hosting a panel at the annual SXSW Interactive conference in Austin on March 13 with three fantastic panelists: Rachel Matney of Target, Andrea Shortell of MTV and Timo Veikkola of Nokia. The topic of discussion was "technology values" for the future, and focused on the panelists' views of how values such as appropriateness, connectedness, convenience, efficiency, personalization and user creativity are reflected in their own businesses and the needs of their particular consumer bases.

SXSW is always a blast as crowds from the worlds of film, games, music and the Web converge in Austin's eclectic setting to hash out burning issues and explore the creativity of others. Our panel faced a packed room, and each speaker presented a unique perspective -- with many themes emerging in common, despite very different businesses in retail, communications and entertainment. One key message is that the consumer has the same expectations from these different facets of their lives and interactions, and increasingly very different businesses will need to focus on core human needs and expectations, as consumers see few boundaries between the sectors that serve them.

Listen to the podcast of the panel here.

I am attending LIFT07 at the moment in Geneva, where I was fortunate enough to be able to run a workshop Wednesday for 40 participants on Technology Values. The group I spent three hours with was fun, insightful, and provocative and represented a great array of backgrounds, cultures and perspectives.

In discussing the 12 values I presented, the conversation frequently turned to countertrends and, in particular, efforts to reach balance between what technology can provide and our human needs. It was agreed we are well into a broad trend to create technologies that better reflect and address human needs and values, but the group collectively asserted in their comments and questions the tension between addressing personal needs on a one-to-one basis via technology and letting technology bring new capabilities to the mass market.

One focus of the conversation was the value of appropriateness – in this case the “adaptivity” of technology, or how we can create products and services that learn quickly what our needs are and present the most suitable level of complexity, service, personalization, etc. for the context of their use. In other words, when I pick up a new digital camera, can it somehow detect that I am a new user, not familiar with its most complex offerings, perhaps older and not as dexterous, and adjust its function to my needs at that moment, while “unfolding” more complex functions as it detects my level growing of comfort?

The concepts of appropriateness and adaptivity resonate with the idea of balance. We increasingly want and expect products and services that provide us what we need or want at a given moment or in a given context, but the idea that functionality and flexibility are polar opposites of simplicity (often interchangeable with “dumbness”) seems false to us now. Technology is not just a means to do more, but it ought to be a means to do more right. Participants at the workshop felt we may not have to give back the benefits of technology simply to restore balance in life.

Don’t miss your opportunity to be attend part of IIR’s annual Future Trends Conference taking place November 6–8 in Miami, Florida.   This year's conference is focused on applying visionary information to business now and the agenda is loaded with forward thinking corporate leaders and trend-tracking experts, including Social Technologies founder, Tom Conger.

Wednesday, Nov 8 at 2:20 pm

Keeping Global Trends Fresh & Local

Joanne Horvath, Director, Insights & Foresights, Cadbury Schweppes and Tom Conger, Futurist & Founder, Social Technologies

Registration for this event is still open and all Social Technologies guests are entitled to a 15% discount, using our discounted registration code: SPKRM1837TC. Register today by calling 888.670.8200, emailing register@iirusa.com, or visiting the website http://www.iirusa.com/futuretrends.

If you’re planning to attend this year’s Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) Compete to Win conference in Atlanta, Georgia, October 21 – 25, don’t miss your chance to see Social Technology speakers Don Abraham, Chris Carbone, and Scott Smith.

Monday, Oct. 23 at 9:00 am: Top 20 Consumer Trends
Don Abraham, Futurist & Director of Development, and Chris Carbone , Futurist & Director of Research, Social Technologies

Tuesday, Oct 24 at 2:00 pm: Roadmaps for Future Product Ideation and Development
Scott Smith, Futurist, Social Technologies

Conference participants can receive a special discount for a limited time only by completing registration online by visiting www.pdma.org/2006 and entering the code PRN50. Further information can be obtained by calling 866-223-2579.

I am presenting next week on introducing ethnography to non-practitioners in a futures research context with Andrew Greenman of Nottingham University School of Business at EPIC 2006: Ethnographic Praxis in Industry in Portland, Oregon on Tuesday September 26. The paper, titled "Embed: Mapping the Future of Work and Play: A Case for 'Embedding' Non-Ethnographers in the Field," is based on a Futures Expedition Andrew and I developed for a Social Technologies' Futures Consortium meeting last summer in London. EPIC is the annual gathering of "people who are actively thinking about the theoretical and methodological development of ethnography in industry practice."

The aim of the London expedition was to take themes developed in our one-day meeting, which looked at the future of Europe through the lenses of work and play, and explore them in the field in a way that introduced professionals not familiar with the tools of ethnographic observation to ways of "looking anew" at their surroundings for indicators of change. Our half-day expedition (pictured here) took us from Canary Wharf through Brick Lane to Clerkenwell in London, a route that revealed how zones of work and play are changing, how cultures are intermingling to drive that change, and how messages derived from change are fed back to the "street."

If you are planning to attend EPIC, please drop me an e-mail or stop by our presentation on the 26th. For those interested in the Embed Futures Expedition, a PDF of the expedition "map" can be downloaded here (5MB).

(Image: Social Technologies)

Joanne Horvath, Director, Insights & Foresights, Cadbury Schweppes, and Tom Conger, Futurist and Founder, Social Technologies, are giving a joint presentation titled “Keeping Global Trends Fresh and Local” at the 2006 IIR Future Trends Conference in Miami, FL on Wednesday, November 8.

Cadbury Schweppes, with the support of Social Technologies, has developed an ongoing foresight capacity. The process continuously identifies and prioritizes global trends and then synthesizes those trends into strategic opportunities. The global trends are made more useful and relevant by providing fresh, local evidence in a highly visual, database-driven extranet.

Registration for this event is still open, and if last year is an indicator, it promises to be an excellent networking opportunity and a chance to learn best practices in foresight. The conference runs from November 6-8.

S)T futurist and director of our Technology Foresight program Steve Millett, recently authored "Futuring and Visioning: Complementary Approaches to Strategic Decision Making," which will be published in Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 34, No. 3, 2006, pp. 43–50. Steve is a Contributing Editor to Strategy & Leadership, an international business management journal published in the UK. The article explores the fundamental differences between futuring, which focuses on external environments, and visioning, which concentrates on an organization's internal core competencies, assets, and goals.

Steve also recently made a presentation on anytime, anywhere social network technologies to 2016 at the annual meeting of the Professional Insurance Agents Association of Ohio in Columbus. Steve's session looked at how emerging trends in ICT and generational changes in society are creating new opportunities and challenges for the insurance industry. The presentation was followed by an idea-generation session of the most attractive opportunities for the industry to pursue.

Social Technologies recently completed a succesful one-day meeting of Futures Consortium members at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC. The event focused on technology values, a term Social Technologies developed to describe what it sees as some of the basic, underlying principles that products and services need to embrace if they are to align with consumer needs now and in the future.

We think it is a unique and valuable take on the topic, as one doesn’t commonly hear “technology” and “values” used together in this way—more often one hears about “consumer values,” or “personal values” such as honesty, ambition, or creativity. Products and services, too, may be regarded as having “values” that help define them and make them attractive to consumers. These are the kinds of concepts—such as simplicity, personalization, and intelligence—that made the list of 12 tech values.

Prior to the meeting, we framed the research for the Technology Values series. This involved creating an inventory of roughly 150 consumer needs and desires, and then going through a futures mapping process to establish the themes of the study. This approach allowed us to look at technologies through the lens of what consumers might actually need and want in the future—rather than simply investigating what might be possible based on current developments in R&D labs or some other strictly technological point of view. In the end it allowed S)T to create a body of work that will help Futures Consortium members:

• understand the consumer needs and values that will shape technologies going forward
• recognize the drivers of the 12 technology values
• discover emerging technologies that support these values
• discern how the 12 technology values may play out and impact specific business sectors

Briefs on the 12 technology values will be available for Futures Consortium members in coming weeks.  

 

The Seventh Annual Axelson Center Symposium for Nonprofit Professionals was held May 17, 2006 in Chicago. This year’s theme was “Nonprofits and Innovation:  Surviving and Thriving in an Age of Change.” The Symposium drew hundreds of nonprofit leaders from across the Midwest.

Nonprofits face significant change. The distribution of wealth is shifting nationally and globally, America is aging, stakeholders’ time and attention are fragmenting, and new communication technologies bring both benefits and risks. S)T founder Tom Conger highlighted these and other trends and their implications for the nonprofit sector as he introduced the closing plenary session of the Symposium. A recurring concern is the future of nonprofit leadership. Many executive directors are Baby Boomers who are nearing retirement. Will the sector be able to attract young leaders? Emerging leaders will need an even broader range of skills than their predecessors, as the nonprofit sector explores new business and governance models and new relationships with the private sector.

Social Technologies also provided a full day “innovation boot camp,” in cooperation with The Innovation Group using their Seeds of Innovation® workshop, a basic introduction to innovation management at the individual, team, and organizational levels.

Social Technologies presented the workshop for interested Axelson Symposium participants at a pre-symposium event on May 16, and also offered two hour-long breakout sessions on scenarios and scenario thinking for nonprofits. Scenarios help people and organizations understand at a gut level how existing and emerging forces can cause the future to unfold in multiple directions – for which they can then prepare. Scenarios can enable nonprofit leaders to identify priorities for their organizations, think creatively about new opportunities, and make effective strategic decisions.

 

Social Technologies’ Global Lifestyles and Technology Foresight projects continually highlight emerging consumer needs and desires—and important technologies that can help fulfill these needs. In looking across the insights from these two projects we see common principles emerging in the technology sphere.

We view these principles—such as protective, or personalized, or assistive—as concepts that will have broad future impacts across many business sectors. These principles—or “technology values”—will serve as the core of discussion and exercises in our upcoming meeting of the Futures Consortium in Washington, DC, on June 7.

Our current research seeks to identify the most important technology values based on an analysis of consumer needs and desires across Worlds 1, 2, and 3. In addition, by looking at the discrete technologies that support these technology values, we hope to illuminate the technological landscape of the future.

The event will provide attendees with an opportunity to hear explore technology values and their impact over the next 10-20 years through conversation and interactive exercises. For more information, please contact Don Abraham at +1 202 223 2801 ext 112 or via e-mail.