Bulletins via News from the Future: Gamers Win?

Office-verses and Gamers are here. 

From:  IFTF News from the Future  

IFTF Distinguished Fellow Bob Johansen, Joseph Press, and Christine Bullen co-authored:  "Gamers Will Have An Edge In The Officeverse,"     for Chief Executive (2/6/23).

IFTF's Post Financial Futures Forecasts using GPT-3

Worked for years with IFTF (Institute for the Future) in the enterprise.

The Institute for the Future passes along this new GPT-3 Forecast Model, a nice use example.   I will pass along additional findings.

From IFTF: 

We also conducted a groundbreaking experiment using our forecast provocation and OpenAI's GPT-3 to generate over 1,400 live, unique scenarios of post-financialization futures. If you missed it or would like to try out a scenario again the link is here.  

This is an experimental prototype exploring the use of GPT-3 to help augment and customize IFTF’s human forecasting process to broader audiences and more interactive contexts. 

IFTF has pursued this experiment in the spirit of building our literacy of the capabilities and challenges of large language models, and this experiment should not be construed as an endorsement of OpenAI or GPT-3.

IFTF is not responsible for content produced by the large language model GPT-3. The content provided by GPT-3 does not reflect the opinions or views of IFTF.  (Nor of Franz Dill) 

Be sure to mark your calendars for the next IFTF Ten-Year Forecast series event coming up on June 1. We'll be announcing details on expert speakers and special interactive futures immersions very soon.  

Thank you for being a part of IFTF’s TYF community as we look toward shaping a better future!

Our mailing address is:  Institute for the Future,  201 Hamilton Avenue,   Palo Alto, CA 94301  Iftf.org

Imaginable

 Now reading game designers Jane McGonigal's just published:  " Imaginable: How to see the Future Coming and feel ready for anything - even things that seem impossible today"    Had met her at a meeting some time ago and was impressed.   We were looking at how to integrate games with company process decisions.  I see she works with IFTF  , which we also worked with at the time.

Amazon's description:

  An innovative guide to living gamefully, based on the program that has already helped nearly half a million people achieve remarkable personal growth.

In 2009, internationally renowned game designer Jane McGonigal suffered a severe concussion. Unable to think clearly or work or even get out of bed, she became anxious and depressed, even suicidal. But rather than let herself sink further, she decided to get better by doing what she does best: She turned her recovery process into a resilience-building game. What started as a simple motivational exercise quickly became a set of rules for “post-traumatic growth” that she shared on her blog. These rules led to a digital game and a major research study with the National Institutes of Health. Today nearly half a million people have played SuperBetter to get stronger, happier, and healthier.

But the life-changing ideas behind SuperBetter are much bigger than just one game. In this book, McGonigal reveals a decade’s worth of scientific research into the ways all games - including videogames, sports, and puzzles - change how we respond to stress, challenge, and pain. She explains how we can cultivate new powers of recovery and resilience in everyday life simply by adopting a more “gameful” mind-set. Being gameful means bringing the same psychological strengths we naturally display when we play games - such as optimism, creativity, courage, and determination - to real-world goals.

Drawing on hundreds of studies, McGonigal shows that getting superbetter is as simple as tapping into the three core psychological strengths that games help you build:

Your ability to control your attention, and therefore your thoughts and feelings

Your power to turn anyone into a potential ally, and to strengthen your existing relationships

Your natural capacity to motivate yourself and super-charge your heroic qualities, like willpower, compassion, and determination

SuperBetter contains nearly 100 playful challenges anyone can undertake in order to build these gameful strengths. It includes stories and data from people who have used the SuperBetter method to get stronger in the face of illness, injury, and other major setbacks, as well as to achieve goals like losing weight, running a marathon, and finding a new job.

As inspiring as it is down to earth, and grounded in rigorous research, SuperBetter is a proven game plan for a better life. You’ll never say that something is “just a game” again.  ... ' 

IFTF: News from the Future

We and our executives worked with and provided corporate insight and data  for the Institute for the Future  https://www.iftf.org/home/ for years, here a pointer to their work, will have links posted here monthly:   

News from the Future Curated by The Institute for the Future ,  provided by Bob Johansen

May 24, 2022 — Issue #74

What's new from @IFTF's News from the Future? Read the new signals and research here! https://tinyurl.com/243vrw6b  .... ' 

IFIF Design Futures Class

 I worked with IFTF for years as part of their connection to our big enterprise,   connecting with our  top corporate level.    Were always very thought provoking and useful.  Here an intro, click through for much more details and registration. 

IFTF Design Futures

Institute for the Future (IFTF) is pleased to offer a training with our team of award-winning design futurists to learn to imagine and prototype informed alternatives to the future, and design new offerings and policies for the next decade.   Creating artifacts from the future is one way IFTF uses design t ostart the futures thinking process. They are the first prototypes of a world to come. The artifact from the future, at left, creates a plausible vision of what direct-action climate activism might look like in 10 years.  .... 

Expand your design practice with foresight:

Combine professional design practices with foresight methods and tools to identify forces of change, signals, and alternative futures.

Recognize biases and assumptions about the future:

Identify the visions embedded in products, strategies, and media, and learn how to redesign them.

Build future worlds:

Describe future contexts with evidence-based world building and user journeys to anticipate problems, dilemmas and opportunities of the next decade.

Prototype experiences of a future world: Design experiential scenarios to feel life in the next decade, and engage audiences in tangible ways.

Design a new offering for the future:

Use a future values canvas to create innovative revenue and impact models for people and systems  ...

Live, multi-session instruction conducted by IFTF researchers and award-winning design futurists, Jake Dunagan, Ilana Lipsett, and Jacques Barcia

Immersion in design futures, thinking skills, methodologies, and processes

IFTF Design Futures Toolkit

Full set of proprietary PowerPoint presentations, Personalized strategic Foresight-Insight-Action plan for post-training application, Networking with a diverse cohort of foresight practitioners and designers, Official certificate of completion of IFTF Design Futures Training  .... 

Further Intro to IFTF: Institute for the Future

Worked with IFTF for years, mostly as a representative of  a big company,  promised I would try to reconnect and present some of their work, here is a start, more things of interest to follow: 

IFTF Intro

MAKING THE FUTURE WITH FORESIGHT

Institute for the Future (IFTF) brings people together to learn the tools of foresight in order to make the future—today. Whether you’re a community leader in a struggling neighborhood or a movement-builder who wants to mobilize global crowds, or a strategic leader in a large organization, we have the foresight tools, methods, and research that informs critical new insights that ultimately lead to action.

Institute for the Future is the world’s leading futures education and training organization. For over 50 years, businesses, governments, and social impact organizations have depended upon IFTF global forecasts, custom research, and foresight training to navigate complex change and develop world-ready strategies. IFTF methodologies and toolsets yield coherent views of transformative possibilities across all sectors that together support a more sustainable future. Institute for the Future is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization based in Palo Alto, California.  ... .' 

IFTF Newsletter and more

 Starting soon this blog will start to selectively share content, with my comments, from The Institute for the Future  (IFTF)  newsletters. They are a group we consulted with in the big enterprise since at least the 80s, and I later wrote for.  Always interesting and insightful for me.       Want to have someone to help you stay in touch with leading edge tech?  Connect with me ....                          

Institute for the Future

Some time ago I wrote for the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto. 

Here is their current online presence, just revisited. 

MAKING THE FUTURE WITH FORESIGHT ... 

Someone from the IFTF interested in collaboration?  Contact me.     Franz 

End of Silicon Valley as We Know it?

Just Saw Tim O'Reilly's column from March.   Provocative thoughts.  Good read.   Been a person who dove into the valley in the 90s, working with the Institute for the Future and others. See my IFTF tags for the time.   Also with Stanford in the area of AI.   With big companies there, like IBM, HP, Cisco, MSFT and Intel.  Later we had representatives stationed there.  And with the half dozen AI startups there at the time. They had very impressive buildings.  Even invested in a few of them.  It has changed a lot,  and will again.  Will change, may morph to something very different, but the power of innovation will survive. 

The End of Silicon Valley as We Know It?   Radar / Radar Column  

Four ways the party may be coming to an end

By Tim O’Reilly, March 11, 2021

Learn faster. Dig deeper. See farther.

High-profile entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, venture capitalists like Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois, and big companies like Oracle and HP Enterprise are all leaving California. During COVID-19, Zoom-enabled tech workers have discovered the benefits of remote work from cheaper, less congested communities elsewhere. Is this the end of Silicon Valley as we know it? Perhaps. But other challenges to Silicon Valley’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora.

Understanding four trends that may shape the future of Silicon Valley is also a road map to some of the biggest technology-enabled opportunities of the next decades:

Consumer internet entrepreneurs lack many of the skills needed for the life sciences revolution.

Internet regulation is upon us.

Climate response is capital intensive, and inherently local.

The end of the betting economy.

Inventing the future

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” Alan Kay once said. 2020 proved him both right and wrong. The coronavirus pandemic, or something worse, had long been predicted, but it still caught the world unprepared, a better future not yet invented. Climate change too has been on the radar, not just for decades but for over a century, since Arrhenius’s 1896 paper on the greenhouse effect. And it has long been known that inequality and caste are corrosive to social stability and predict the fate of nations. Yet again and again the crisis finds us unprepared when it comes.

In each case, though, the long-predicted future is still not foreordained. It is up to us whether we are steamrollered by events beyond our control or whether we have the collective power to invent a better future. Awakening may have come later than we might have wished, but crises like the pandemic and climate change can still be massive drivers of innovation. If entrepreneurs, investors, and governments step up to solve the hard problems that we face today, the future remains bright. But one thing is certain: the inventions we most urgently need will take us in a very different direction than the consumer internet and social media revolution that is coming to an unsightly end.

The coronavirus is a case in point. The explosion of biomedical invention that it has accelerated may well have impacts that extend well beyond the pandemic itself. mRNA vaccines have given us a promising path to COVID immunity, developed in record time. Moderna’s vaccine was created within only two days after Chinese scientist Yong-Zhen Zhang released the genetic sequence of the virus! And mRNA vaccines are also easily tweaked, raising the possibility of even quicker response to mutations, and even the creation of a framework for rapid development of many more vaccines. We are starting to see the payoff of radically new approaches to biomedical innovation, and in particular, the way that machine learning is turbocharging research. During 2020, more than 21,000 biomedical research papers made reference to AI and machine learning. .... '

David Brin Interviewed on Resiliency

We connected with David Brin a number of times through IFTF.  He is a well known futurist, physicist and Scifi Author.   Also consultant to NASA and NIAC.  Thoughtful piece I am reading.     Resilience  is the ability to bounce back from disaster. Of course disaster has a number of levels of severity, and yours may not be apocalyptic.  Broadly we found resiliency considerations, measures and systematic methods worthwhile regardless.

Unfortunately no free link here to full text, but worth the cost or looking it up on CACM.

An Interview with David Brin on Resiliency
By Peter J. Denning, David Brin 
Communications of the ACM, June 2019, Vol. 62 No. 6, Pages 28-31
10.1145/3325287

Many people today are concerned about critical infrastructures such as the electrical network, water supplies, telephones, transportation, and the Internet. These nerve and bloodlines for society depend on reliable computing, communications, and electrical supply. What would happen if a massive cyber attack or an electromagnetic pulse, or other failure mode took down the electric grid in a way that requires many months or even years for repair? What about a natural disaster such as hurricane, wildfire, or earthquake that disabled all cellphone communications for an extended period?

David Brin, physicist and author, has been worrying about these issues for a long time and consults regularly with companies and federal agencies. He says there are many relatively straightforward measures that might greatly increase our resiliency—our ability to bounce back from disaster. I spoke with him about this.  ...

(Abstract)

How Will People Interact with Machines

I see my former collaborators at IFTF have been working on this problem:

Forecasting How Humans Will Interact with Machines by 2030
By: Chris Preimesberger | July 12, 2017

The Dell-IFTF report forecasts that emerging technologies, supported by massive advancements in software, big data and processing power, will reshape lives and that society will enter a new phase in its relationship with machines. .... "

IFTF Writes A Handbook for the Maker City

I note that the Institute for the Future: IFTF, a nonprofit company I worked with for years, wrote for as well, has a Maker City Project underway.   They are publishing a handbook on the topic chapter by chapter.   The aim is to create urban revitalization using a combination of 'maker' mentality and technology.  You can see the some of the usual cities mentioned, but also many medium sized cities.

  See the free handbook here, now up to chapter 5, with quite a lot of detail.  A little too much expectation that you can regulate and influence all the things involved.  Too many west coast reasons.   Interesting read.  Will try to follow.

Bob Johansen Books

I was reminded that Bob Johansen, former colleague, also at the Institute for the Future (IFTF) and frequent consultant to us, writes at Berrett Koehler Publishers, is in the process of writing a new book.  " ... I’m writing a new book that starts off where my 2009 book, Leaders Make the Future left off. ... " .  Looking forward to it.   More on his books, some of which I have reported on here, at his BK Site. 

Center for Creative Leadership

CCL:  Achieve What Matters Most
Leadership development is ALL we do. For more than four decades we have leveraged the power of leadership to transform individuals, teams, entire organizations and societies to achieve what matters most to them — with results that are powerful, measurable, and enduring.

Our innovative solutions are steeped in extensive research and experience gained from working with tens of thousands of organizations and more than a million leaders at all levels — across six continents and more than 130 countries. We draw from a world of experience across cultures, industries and disciplines, helping you with your real world challenges, and measuring the impact of our work.

Financial Times
Ranked among the world's Top 10 providers of executive education by Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Financial Times, you can be confident we will deliver the results that matter most to you. .... 

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) has named IFTF Distinguished Fellow Bob Johansen as their H. Smith Richardson Jr. Visiting Fellow for 2016. This prestigious fellowship is a great honor for Bob, who teamed with CCL on the second edition of his groundbreaking book Leaders Make the Future: 10 New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World. CCL President and CEO John R. Ryan wrote the foreword for the book, which includes a CCL self-assessment and other original content.

Doug Engelbart Institute

Doug Engelbart Institute:  Brought to my attention, we worked with Doug a number of times through the Institute for the Future.  Doug was the inventor of the computer mouse.  Also of the system Demo.   Lots more at the site.

The Reciprocity Advantage

Reading The Reciprocity Advantage: A New Way to Partner for Innovation and Growth.  by Bob Johansen and Karl Ronn.  Nicely done with real life enterprise examples, including IBM, TED, Microsoft, Google Apple Store and more.

I like in particular an outline about how each company partnered and what the partnership exchanged.  Also what assets where involved.   Then  the scaling advantage involved.  I also like the emphasis on experimentation being done to figure out what the real value is and how it will be developed.   Included in that is how 'gameful engagement' can be used to figure out how the partnership will work.   The latter parts of the book provide direct  'How to' steps.  Well done.

" ... Bob Johansen, best-selling author and Distinguished Fellow at IFTF, has partnered with innovation expert Karl Ronn to uncover what they believe will be the biggest innovation opportunity in history in their forthcoming book, The Reciprocity Advantage. Through illustrative examples from leading organizations and an eye to the future, Johansen and Ronn present a four-part model that shows how organizations can give away assets to form partnerships, leading to collaborative experimentation and scalable new business opportunities.  ... 

" ... Johansen and Ronn explain that reciprocity, an old concept, will be reimagined within a future context of connective technologies, generational shifts, and new organizational models to provide a distinct competitive advantage. To win in this world, businesses will need to  (1) uncover their right-of-way, the underutilized resources they already own that they can share with others; (2) find partners who can help them do what they cannot do alone; (3) experiment to learn through cloud-based systems; and (4) scale the results, but only when the business’ reciprocity advantage is desirable, viable, and ownable. If it’s not scalable, it’s not worth doing—and the authors describe technologies that make scaling up faster than ever. .... " 

More and ordering information.   Video.   @Reciprocityadv

Reciprocity Advantage: Innovation and Organization

New book by my two former colleagues: The Reciprocity Advantage.

" ... Bob Johansen, best-selling author and Distinguished Fellow at IFTF, has partnered with innovation expert Karl Ronn to uncover what they believe will be the biggest innovation opportunity in history in their forthcoming book, The Reciprocity Advantage. Through illustrative examples from leading organizations and an eye to the future, Johansen and Ronn present a four-part model that shows how organizations can give away assets to form partnerships, leading to collaborative experimentation and scalable new business opportunities.  ... 

" ... Johansen and Ronn explain that reciprocity, an old concept, will be reimagined within a future context of connective technologies, generational shifts, and new organizational models to provide a distinct competitive advantage. To win in this world, businesses will need to  (1) uncover their right-of-way, the underutilized resources they already own that they can share with others; (2) find partners who can help them do what they cannot do alone; (3) experiment to learn through cloud-based systems; and (4) scale the results, but only when the business’ reciprocity advantage is desirable, viable, and ownable. If it’s not scalable, it’s not worth doing—and the authors describe technologies that make scaling up faster than ever. .... " 

More and pre-order information.   Video.   I plan to read and comment here later.

Reinventing the Hospital, The Game

From my long time favorite collaborative future consulting group:   Insititute for the Future (IFTF).  A favorite topic, reinventing health care.  I know of a number of related trials underway, lets do more.

It's Official: Over 4,500 Ideas for Reinventing the Hospital
On January 8—9, IFTF ran the 24-hour Future of the Hospital game on Foresight Engine, our collaborative forecasting platform, to help reinvent the community hospital. .... "

Leaders Make the Future

Bob Johansen
IFTF Distinguished Fellow
Institute for the Future
124 University Avenue, 2nd Floor
Palo Alto, CA 94301

Author of Leaders Make the Future, Second Edition  Ten New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World.

At Procter & Gamble we worked with Institute for the Future starting shortly after its founding.  They often came in to give talks to our executives, and we used their training and brainstorming methods to understand new ideas.  They were also instrumental in introducing to key Silicon Valley companies and entrepreneurs.  Bob Johansen was their CEO during many of the years we used them.  A great experience.   I just reconnected with him, and I note the second edition of his book.. More information and pointers to it above.  I will follow with more on his book.

IFTF Releases their 2020 Future Map

I blogged for the Institute for the Future for several years.  They consulted with our C-suite and we were often asked to follow up.   They are always saying some interesting things.  We followed their future map each time it was published.  Here is the latest: Public Release: The Future of Science, Technology, and Well-being 2020 Forecast Map