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foresight

24 May: Scenarios. Higher education 2.0. And Human development drop.

Posted on May 24, 2020 Leave a Comment

In “Our COVID Future”, Alex Evans and David Steven unpack the three layers and timeframes of the pandemic effect: A 2-year public health crisis, a 5-year economic crisis, and a one-generation crisis of insecurity. Then, they build four scenarios based on whether responses will be polarized or collective, and centralized or distributed. Each scenario shows who has power, who are the economic winners and losers, and how places and people are impacted. Scenarios like those are meant to expand and frame strategic thinking before making decisions. If you see any other similar exercises, please let me know. 

COVID-19 accelerates certain pre-existing trends. One of them is the digitalization of higher education. With confinement and restrictions of movement, higher education has moved online over the past couple of months. Several universities such as Cambridge announced that they will stay online until summer 2021. In the medium term, NYU Stern Scott Galloway predicts that big tech will partner with elite universities to develop hybrid (i.e. online/onsite) models of education affordable to more people. Less prestigious universities will empty out while on-campus experience in elite universities will become a luxury good experience reserved to the richest.

My graph this week is from the UN Development Programme documenting the first-ever drop in human development since 1990. The Human Development Index combining data on health, education and income takes a hit with mortality increasing, school closing and unemployment growing.

My quote this week is from UCL economist Mariana Mazzucato talking about the Green New Deal [7’31’’]: “There is no thinking. Let’s just do it. We don’t have a choice.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: education, foresight, human development

9 June 2017

Posted on June 9, 2017 Leave a Comment

The 2017 Millennial Impact Report just released “Millennial dialogue on the landscape of cause engagement and social issues” completing phase one of this annual study led the Achieve and Case Foundations. Although the study is US-focused and its first phase involves only a small sample of respondents, findings are interesting.  Four main messages. One, millennials do not like to use “activists” to qualify their engagement. They prefer being called “advocates” or “allies”. Two, they do not have clear definitions for “cause” nor “social issue” but generally associate the former with action and the latter with politics. Three, interviewees are increasingly interested in causes promoting equity and impacting vulnerable and marginalized populations. Four, the cause engagement of interviewees has increased since end 2016.

Carmine Gallo’s “Google CEO does not use bullet points and neither should you”. Voila. That’s it. No more bullet point presentations. Share a piece of information and 3 days later people will remember 10%. Add a picture, they’ll remember 65%. I vaguely checked the credibility of this evidence and decided that it did not matter anyway. I have done bullet points and text-heavy presentations before, seen too many, and know that they make me dizzy.

My table this week is from Bruce Stokes’ “Global publics more upbeat about the economy but many are pessimistic about children’s future”. It presents results from a Pew Research Center survey conducted with 34,788 people in 32 countries from February to April 2017. The main message in the richest countries is that even when respondents perceive the economic situation as getting better, they still don’t think children will be better off financially than their parents. Results are not as bad in middle income countries. There is also a generational gap: young people (18-29) are more optimistic about the next generation’s financial prospects than middle age people.

 

 

My quote this week is from Amy Webb in her MIT Technology Review interview “How to think like a futurist”: “If there’s a way to make the future a little less exciting and a little bit more boring, that’s good for everybody because that means that we’re not continually shocked by new ideas, that we’re not continually discounting people on the fringe.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: foresight, workplace, youth

19 May 2017

Posted on May 19, 2017 Leave a Comment

Delivered earlier this week during the Belt and Road Summit, Zheng Bijian’s “China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ (OBOR) plan marks the next phase of globalization” presents OBOR as a global game changer. Indeed, this is the biggest infrastructure plan ever: 65 countries, 62% of the world population and 30% of global GDP. The total investment need is $5 trillion. China already pledged $113 billion, 9 of which in the form of aid to poor countries. More funding will come from the BRICS’s New Development Bank and the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank. Unless you are in the Americas, chances are that what you do is somehow connected to this initiative. I guess, even if you are in the Americas, there will be externalities. Looking at power dynamics in the region, much of the talk focused on India’s lack of support. Next summit scheduled for 2019.

Danny Hernandez’ “How our company learned to do better predictions about everything” is what I shared when asked about best practices to improve organizational data literacy. Let me be clear here: I don’t know anything about best practices in that area. But I read this interesting article the day before I was asked the question. The company is Twitch, an Amazon offshoot. It invested in growing the predictive skills of every single staff member irrespective of functions and ranks. An initial phase warmed up employees by asking them to play with past company metrics, like “how much do you think our sales grew last quarter?” Once they got comfortable, they were asked to make predictions that would impact their work, like “how confident are you that you can complete this project in 3 weeks?” At first, Twitch employees were not excited: they did not believe in predictions, were afraid of making bad predictions, and thought that there was not enough evidence to make good predictions. But after the training, 96% of them said they would recommend it to a colleague. This initiative improved Twitch’s collective forecasting capacity. And it boosted efficiency as employees got better at evaluating ideas, defending funding proposals, and setting expectations. Other good ideas I heard this week: have data days in your teams or spend 10 minutes everyday on data issues. I am adding the latter to my daily routine.

CBinsights’ “From virtual nurses to drug discovery: 106 artificial intelligence startups in healthcare” maps the growing AI health market which is revolutionizing the whole industry from direct assistance to patients, to diagnosis, to drug discovery and mental health treatment.

 

My quote this week is from Elon Musk’s “The future we are building – and boring”: “I am not trying to be anyone’s savior. I just want to think about the future and not be sad.“

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: AI, china, data, finance, foresight, health, technology

Informed action in an age of uncertainty: Can horizon scanning play a role?

Posted on April 11, 2017 Leave a Comment

[Originally published as a Disrupt & Innovate blog post. Written with Eva Kaplan, Innovation Specialist with UNICEF Jordan]

In early 2015, as Ebola was still ravaging West Africa, and markets experienced high volatility, our unit at UNICEF began our annual predications blog by announcing an end to predictability.  At least in this we were correct: volatility has only amplified since and, in retrospect, 2015 seems like a more stable time.

In reaction to this context of rapid change, UNICEF’s Policy Planning Unit sought to systematise our use of methodologies to anticipate emerging trends—both those with negative and positive potential. One such methodology is Horizon Scanning, which involves scanning a wide variety of information sources for trends and clustering them according to predefined categories.  At UNICEF, we use STEEP + H categories (Social, Technological, Environmental, Economic, Political + Humanitarian). Horizon Scanning allows us to pick up on so-called weak signals that might be pointing to the next mega-trend. However, identification of emerging trends is not the same as taking action.  Indeed, a classic bottleneck of Horizon Scanning work in large organisations is the “and-then-what?” phase. Using concrete illustrations where our scanning exercises had impact and helped spur innovation, here are a few lessons that we hope can initiate a discussion with other organisations developing similar functions:

Get your message out there. UNICEF has over 12,000 staff members located in 190 countries.  In order for any of them to take action on our work, they have to know about it.  Over the years we have developed a number of knowledge products with various formats and degrees of analytical depth. We recommend having a range of options to share your Scanning work—some can be written analysis (e.g. our Horizons, a quarterly digest on trends affecting children) and some can be conversational (e.g our Conversation with Thought Leaders series involving senior management). In general, we know that colleagues don’t always have time to read heavy reports. We try to keep it short and fun, with links to further analysis.

High-level support matters. In 2015, UNICEF’s Executive Office asked us to explore the use of unconditional cash transfers in emergency settings. Our work consisted in identifying peripheral trends affecting the role, household and systemic impact, and operational modality of cash transfers.  For example, one line of inquiry was related to trends in digital money that were revolutionising access to finance, from bitcoin to GiveDirectly to Tencent. We proposed solutions that would leverage these trends to define new financing modalities, allowing for instance direct peer-to-peer transfers for emergency affected populations. Having high-level buy-in from the beginning made it easier to convene colleagues from across UNICEF to gather existing knowledge and experience, test our initial ideas, and get the early buy-in required to turn them into action.

“Anchors” within the organisation are needed to translate Scanning into action. The team that scans cannot always, or even usually, be the team that takes action.  In the case of the cash transfers study, three teams took the ideas forward: the global emergencies team, the social policy team and the innovation team. For instance, the innovation team took the lead in initiating private sector partnerships to improve the delivery and monitoring of cash transfer programming at a global level while the social policy team of UNICEF Jordan took the lead at field level by initiating action around each of the ideas presented in the paper.

Absorbing the risk/learning curve is key. In some instances, the Scanning team may absorb some of the initial risks and uncertainty associated with new ideas. Early 2009, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, UNICEF Scanning function started engaging in conversations on the need to use real time data to monitor the impacts of the crisis on the most vulnerable, and was instrumental in the creation of the UN’s Global Impact and Vulnerability Alert System that later became the big data initiative UN Global Pulse. UNICEF’s engagement in Global Pulse activities was originally led by the scanning team working closely with the innovation team to better understand the risks and opportunities associated with the data revolution. Eventually that function was anchored in the innovation team. Monitoring the advances of big data and machine learning, the scanning function initiated another round of conversations inside UNICEF in 2014, led UNICEF’s engagement in the Secretary General’s Independent Expert Advisory Group on the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development, and used that opportunity to ignite the development of UNICEF’s new data strategy, later anchored in the Division of Data, Research and Policy.

The need to “bring it home”.  People who do Horizon Scanning develop an ability to “connect the dots”—i.e., to see and understand how different elements can impact each other. When flagging emerging issues, the Scanning team should spell out their potential relevance to the work of busy decision makers throughout the organisation, and be clear about why they should care. For instance, in our work around the rise of automation and artificial intelligence in the labour market (not directly within UNICEF’s mandate), we make the connections to the education system, which needs adapt to focus on skills like creative problem solving that cannot be replicated by machines (well within UNICEF’s mandate).

Patience. The goal of Scanning is to keep up with the pace of change.  But that may not always be possible. Game-changing innovation based on emerging trends should be understood as a long game—it often requires organisational culture shifts, steep learning curves, and new skill sets.  Seeing impact at scale may take some time. For example, we initiated our work on the new data landscapes in 2009 (what we now refer to as the “data revolution”), and only last year we saw this translated into the development of a new UNICEF data strategy.

Here we have focused on lessons from where we have seen Horizon Scanning make the needle move. Of course, issues we surface aren’t always translated into action. Often, blockers to action are essentially the opposite of our lessons of success. When we have not found an anchor or clear business owner within the organisation, we have not seen action. When we have not made the connections to UNICEF’s bottom line as loudly or as clearly as we should have, we have not seen action.

One additional issue stands out: for an organisation such as UNICEF, which has an emergency, life-saving mandate as well as a longer term development mandate, we have seen that the opportunity cost of managing the rising number of protracted crisis is often the actions which have a 5 – 10 year view. As an organisation, we fully understand that failure to anticipate will leave us ill prepared for new crises.  What we face is a question of trade-offs and balancing acts. We actively seek, therefore, not only new methodologies for understanding new risks and opportunities, but also new operational modalities for taking action. This brings us outside of Horizon Scanning and into other key areas of work—e.g. longer-term financing mechanisms, or strengthening resilience programming.

As we continue to learn, we look forward to sharing experiences with other organisations engaged in similar activities.  Please feel free to share your lessons and views on ours!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: foresight, innovation

13 January 2017

Posted on January 13, 2017 Leave a Comment

Iris Bohnet’s What works: Gender equality by design is the book I was waiting for on the topic. Using a behavioral economics lens, Bohnet systematically compiles evidence from businesses, universities, and governments about what works and does not, and offers super practical steps to boost gender equality. The book first unpacks the unconscious biases we all suffer from. It then shows that changing mindsets is not the solution. $8 billion are spent yearly in diversity training in the US alone with no evidence of success. It also argues that going it alone is hard and risky. Bohnet’s central thesis is that de-biasing our environments by design is what yields the most impact. And she offers 36 research-grounded design suggestions to increase inclusivity in the workplace. They include: adopting a Gawande-inspired interview checklist, getting rid of self-evaluation in performance assessment, using people analytics to screen job applicants, having quota to appoint counter-typical leaders, using a point system to measure workload, using public rankings to motivate and compete on gender equality. A fundamental pre-requisite to these recommendations is the collection of staff data to understand where inequalities are and how they evolve. Despite its title, the book’s thesis and solutions apply to inequalities beyond gender. If you are committed to increasing diversity in the workplace, read this book and experiment with some proposals, or pass it on to someone in your office who is in a position to move the needle. I am doing just that.

Peter Fabricius’ “Peering into a murky crystal ball; where will Africa be in 2030?” shares the main findings of a recent Institute for Security Studies (ISS) seminar on Africa’s future. Under each of the three ISS-designed scenario (baseline, optimistic, pessimistic) Africa misses most SDGs by 2030. The main factors responsible for this outcome are poor governance and service delivery. Prospects drawn from the UK Ministry of Defense’s analysis of regional strategic trends to 2045 for Africa are more upbeat. Here extreme poverty is defeated by 2045 when Africa’s numbers catch up with the rest of the world. In this scenario, positive drivers of change are external to the region with a global economy increasingly reliant on African youth’s cheap labor. This illustrates how a foresight exercise can bring different perspectives. What matters is not to get it right but to unearth different possible futures so as to be ready no matter what.

Uber’s Movement is on my list of visual tool this week. It is new and shiny. It is launched in the midst of long-lasting (data sharing) disputes between Uber and regulators. And it could transform urban planning.  But I also need to flag this graph from the WEF Global Risk Report plotting the 2017 global risk landscape because the top risks, once impact and likelihood are aggregated, are environmental. This report has been published for 12 years and this is a first.

 

 

My quote this week is from Facebook’s Fidji Simo in her “Introducing: the Facebook Journalism Project”: “We will work with third-party organizations on how to better understand and to promote news literacy both on and off our platform to help people in our community have the information they need to make decisions about which sources to trust.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, foresight, gender, risks, SDG, trust, workplace

24 March 2016

Posted on March 24, 2016 Leave a Comment

“Global_Risks_and_Opportunities_Survey_Report” analyzes the results of a perception survey conducted with 460 UNICEF staff working across the globe. The highest risks children experts see in the 15 coming years are climate change and environmental degradation, rising inequalities, and political instability and conflict. The main opportunities they list are science and technology, the elimination of contemporary scourges, and the exponential power of girls. It was interesting to see that some key areas of UNICEF’s work like education and communicable diseases were not ranked high on the lists of risks and opportunities; and that, overall, respondents were very technology-optimistic. All background data including some regional perspectives, are available here.

 

 

There is a growing interest of international organizations (IOs) in foresight work. Foresight units are popping up in IO headquarters and an increasing number of field and regional offices are looking at ways to integrate foresight in their planning exercises. This is really exciting. This year, our unit is teaming up with the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) to take stock of global trends and their impacts on children, develop scenarios and hold a couple of foresight workshops with country offices. There is also a push to further integrate foresight work in UNDAF business. The rationale behind this is captured in Tully’s “Applying foresight and alternative futures to the UNDAF”. Some countries, like Montenegro, have already undertaken interesting foresight exercises, see here. There are expectations that some of the 39 countries starting to craft their UNDAF in 2016 will also do so. This is a space to watch.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: foresight, opportunities, risks, survey, UN

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