And

let me introduce them from my far left we have doctor, do you go by doctor? Doctor Bob
Johansson senior vice president, distinguish fellow the Institute for the
future, IFTF and Bob has been working for a, for 30 years as a forecaster, his term rather
than futurist. He's one of the first social scientists to study the business and
organizational impact of communications and computing innovations. He's an author
of six books. He has a divinity school degree and was one of the, a varsity basketball
player, I believe. Is that correct? I guess that's true to. Long time ago. A long time ago.
And so next to Bob

we have Doug Randall, the senior practitioner and co leader of the
consulting practice at the Global Business Network and Doug works large corporations in a
variety of industries including information technology, consumer electronics, financial services,
transportation and energy as well as a lot of government agencies. You may have heard of
the Pentagon report that he co authored with Peter Schwartz on climate change. The threat
of climate change to a the planet. That was a couple of years ago. Yeah, two years ago. Two years ago. Caused a big
fuss. Yes it did. And great publicity for GBN and next to
to Doug, to my immediate left we have Ms. David Peskawhits. Peskawhits, peskawits, peskawits. Vits,
thank you. Writer in residence for UC Berkeley's college of engineering and more importantly,
to my mind at least, the co editor of Boing Boing, one of my favorite web blogs if not the blog. Do you allow
the term blog for Boing Boing? Oh yeah, absolutely. Sure, we using blogging tools, make it a blog. Right and
also a directory of wonderful things. An affiliate researcher with the institute for the future. Co author
of reality check which I though was a very brave book of predictions about ten years ago now. Gosh, it's been
nine years and we didn't make any predictions. We asked scientists to make the predictions so when the book was wrong we could blame
them and not us. Right, so I think Deep Blue is scheduled to beet Kasparoff next year. That was the
best example. Gary Kasparoff said that there wouldn't be a computer to beat him for many years out and then
six months after the book came out it was all over. A lesson there in
future predictions. Doug was also the co author, sorry, the author of a long running futurist column in Wired? How long
did that run for? That was a good 6 or 7 years from the beginning also called Reality Check. And the winner of the Forthsite prize
in communication for communicating with nanotechnology and another emerging technologies. So a very brief but
big round of applause for our panelists.

Well first of all I want to start with the question of definition because we do have a lot of
definitions floating around, futurist, futurologist, forecaster. I got a little email from Paul Saffo
before we started this who said that I think futurist is just about the dumbest title someone could give
themselves.

So what do you guys prefer for what you do?

I bought the term futurist. I was all about that because I thought it was kind of cool and 70's and kind of colonies on the
moon kind of feel to it. And then when I joined the Institute for the Future I drank the Cool Aid
and decided that was actually, yes, agreed it was a bad term

and as Paul explained it to me and it's very clear really. Often times futurists have a particular
agenda that they are trying to sell in their forecasts and so that just seemed, you know, not something

that you want to be when you are trying to be, you know, objective or to make the future in your
own vision. You know, working with people to do that. Bob can probably comment on that more. Well the word we usually use is
forecaster. The term futurist, you know, the world futures society was founded 1967. Our group, Institute for the Future,
was founded in 1968. We were (inaudible) for grand and at that time there were probably
thirty groups around with the titles that involved future and the term futurist was actually
quite popular and it's gone through a whole series of cycles during that time

but we've generally concluded that it's best for us. We're an independent, nonprofit
research group, think-tank that works mostly with large companies. It's best for us to not be
associated with people who call themselves futurists. So for us it's been trying to distinguish
between a professional activity of trying to make sense out of the future and people who
really are allured by the kind of draw of the future and they're often called nowadays
cool surfers or trend watchers or fashion watchers. That's definitely not what we're doing. We're doing
10 year forecasting.

Yeah, it's interesting. We don't usually call ourselves futurists but I'm sure we've all be called futurists and
it's the media often that calls us the futurists cause it's so convenient and that's. It's sort of what we all want, right, we want
to know what the future is. We like, it would be great if we could have someone show up at
the trade show or conference right here at this table and tell you here's what the futures going
to be 10 years from now. Ten years now be prepared for this and this and this and don't worry about these
other things. And that's the promise, that's the promise of a futures and you know, it just, it just doesn't work.
It doesn't make sense. What we actually believe in doing, at least I'll speak for Global Business Network and for the
work I do is helping organizations, helping leaders make sense
of, understand, prepare for the future and that's very different. That's not about trying to identify what
it will be but it's about imagining what it could be and what the various pathways toward alternative
futures might be and I did use the S there unlike in your title because I think
futures is, is really the key here as opposed to a particular feature. So we think, as you get further away,
5-10-15 years in the future it becomes more and more important to look at multiple
possibilities rather then single ones. And not just from a

quantum physics sense either, right. The way we sort of think it at the Institute for the Future is this cone of
uncertainty which, you know, the notion it is literally a cone. The future is a cone where the closer
you are, the clearer things are going to be, you know, the easier it is to forecast what's happening. The further out
you get it becomes more difficult. So we try to sort of work in that space and narrow that cone of
uncertainty. And there is another sort of cone as well that I notice in a lot of the businesses
that I talk to that some businesses are very good at looking wide. You know, looking at new
verticals for technology or new markets they can get into, this kind of thing

and also some very good looking long regarding a particular technology or a
particular product and I think that, you know, what's really exciting is if you can look, you know long and why and really open up
the realm of possibility and see what is interesting to you and excites you and, and then
identify, as Doug said, the paths to get to these futures that you imagine.

Just a quick add to that. I agree with the cone on uncertainty logic that David expressed but there is also
another angle on that. As you think 10 years out it's actually easier to forecast than it is one year in many
fields. So are our logo, which probably some of you have seen, is intentionally designed so when you
look at it close, it's hard to read but the further you hold it away the easier it is to read and that's kind of the story of
10 year forecasting. As you do it ten year forecast, for example, it's quite clear that at least in the
so-called developed world will have a very wireless, very sensors based kind of
environment and you can describe that context aware environment with a fair amount of detail
now if you use a 10 year lens but if you use a one-year lens there is lots of uncertainty. There is also a sense in
which it's actually easier to do ten year forecasting than one year forecasting and at least the way we do it then
it's in a cycle of foresight to incites to action which we continuously remind our clients about
the purpose of forecasting is not to predict, it's make better decisions in the present. So you go through
that cycle of saying what is that alternative future you want to consider. If that occurs,
what are the insights for your practice, essentially the inputs to your strategy and ultimately
what would you do differently. So the bad news is you can't predict. The good news is you don't have
to be predict, predict to be useful. Well this is a great segway to talk about technique and in particular I want to
start talking about scenario planning which GBN is justly famous for. Is it still, would you consider
GBN the home of scenario planning Doug. Well, so maybe we should define
(inaudible) a tiny bit and acknowledge that we could do a thesis on it. But
basically the concept of scenario planning is that when you are dealing with the unknown, looking at
multiple possibilities rather than a single possibility makes sense and looking at possibilities that
span multiple, you know, really different mindsets is the key. So when we, most organizations do
planning they often look at today's numbers. Look to the future of some
abstraction of today and then add plus or minus 10% and say ok well, you know, that's the future and
those are 2 scenarios or two alternatives. Scenario thinking tries to look at fundamentally
different possibilities. Paying attention to plausibility but not probability. So not trying to
nail a prediction on a particular, you know, quantitative way but rather trying to imagine what could happen
and it's when you start to look to the world in that way that you become more open to, you know,
really fundamental changes and structure and that kind of thing.

So let's use that as our working definition for scenarios. So and the question was about are we the
home for it. How has it evolved? How can I answer that question. Of course we're the only. Scenarios,
think no GBN really, I think, was one of the first organizations to make scenarios
sort of popular in the business climate. I think in today's world of uncertainty, many,
many, many organizations are using scenarios and we are no longer at the core of the,
scenarios, just because, you know, the market for scenarios is so broad. It's, I know a few senior
executives who don't think and talk about scenario thinking.

But I guess I should ask you guys what you think of on that. Where is there are core to scenario thinking?

Well I guess I would say GBN is the core in terms of business scenarios. You guys developed the art
of scenario planning and certainly brought it to the business world and my understanding of the concept
was created by Herman Cahn at Rand for the military in terms of its modern
conceptualization and he wrote the wonderful book which actually you and Peter kind of buried a little in one of
your more recent titles where he talked about thinking about the unthinkable and he really popularized
or conceptualized this process of scenario building. For us, at Institute for the Future, we're
methodologically agnostics so we're an independent nonprofit and our goal is to be aware
of any seriousness method of thinking about the future and to try out as many as we can. So
we do scenario planning although our style of scenario planning is more literary I would say than
GBN's and we have two novelist who write our scenarios and they have characters and
they have dialogue. Where the GBN's style is somewhat different so there are different
variations of a it. And I think that you are hitting on an important point which is that I think
today that organizations are gaining an appreciation for the need to build uncertainty into
their strategies, into their planning processes and that they need techniques and approaches that
work with uncertainty. So in the past you were able to sort of brush it under the rug but today I
think it's very, very difficult to do that and so there are more and more methodologies. I think real
options are financial tool for dealing with uncertainties. Choice structuring is an organizational
decision making tool and there are dozens of approaches and all of these approaches
merge and mean different things depending on, you know, w