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In an interview with Silicon.com, William Gibson declares that he’s given up on envisioning futures:

We hit a point somewhere in the mid-18th century where we started doing what we think of technology today and it started changing things for us, changing society. Since World War II it’s going literally exponential and what we are experiencing now is the real vertigo of that - we have no idea at all now where we are going.

[...]

You can see it in corporate futurism as easily as you can see it in science fiction. In corporate futurism they are really winging it - it must be increasingly difficult to come in and tell the board what you think is going to happen in 10 years because you’ve got to be bullshitting if you claiming to know. That wasn’t true to the same extent even a decade ago.

This helps to explain why recent “science fiction” has shifted toward “science fantasy.” It must be said, however, that the corporate futurism that he refers to is a really bad way of looking at the future. Rather than picking out a preferred future scenario, we should look at multiple futures and prepare for each of them. There’s no reason why any given set of futures cannot co-exist.

That’s why this site is called “Education Futures” and not “Education Future.”

Maybe a new genre of literature and thought will develop, with multiple futures, presents and pasts. More on this later…

The Gallup Management Journal recently published an article on what drives innovation in organizations. Shelley Mika disentangles innovation from creativity and identifies four driving principles of innovation, based on discussions with key thinkers and leaders. All four principles are focused on people:

1. “Finding and fostering talent” — people settle where their talent is similar to others
2. “Managers matter” — and are necessary for the cultivation of talent
3. “Relationships matter too” — positive relationships foster innovation
4. “Keeping the right leaders” — both thought leadership and people leadership are important

Read the article at http://gmj.gallup.com/content/26068/4/The-Four-Drivers-of-Innovation.aspx

Senge, P. M. (1994). The fifth discipline: the art and practice of the learning organization (1st ed.). New York: Doubleday/Currency.

Senge argues traditional organizational leaders need to “revolutionize” their management philosophy toward the highly conceptual approach of systems thinking as the basis for building learning organizations. He adds this “fifth discipline” to four others: building shared vision, mental models, team learning and personal mastery. Learning organizations are defined as “organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together” (p.3).

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