Future Savvy was the most stimulating futures book I read this year. I was put off at first; it sets itself up as a book about forecasting, and I am sceptical about this (you learn early in futures work that all forecasts are wrong, except for the ones which are right for the wrong reasons). But businesses and governments live by forecasts, and as you go further in, you discover that  Adam Gordon’s intent is to make us appreciate the limits of forecasting.

There are good chapters on the nature of bias (social and personal), on why technology-led forecasts are so often wrong, and a reminder that the ‘blockers’ of change can be as influential as the ‘drivers of change’. Unlike some futures books, it is also clear and well-written.

It ends with a couple of chapters which are designed to improve the quality of our thinking about the future. The first takes some actual forecasts and interrogates their assumptions and gaps. (The forecast for the US housing market to 2013 by the US Homeownership Alliance is self-serving and spectacularly wrong). The second has a useful set of questions the reader can use to test the value of a forecast. As he concludes,

Good forecasting is as much about seeing what won’t change in the future. Even in fast-moving situations, not everything will change.

(The Future Savvy blog is here.)

Liz Walkling, London: The Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson

I have just finished reading this crime trilogy inside a month! The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest are un-putdownable, with a complex, interconnected and riveting plot and a cast of intriguing characters – journalists, security experts, corporate heads and a network of hacking experts. Particularly likeable – even given her multi-faceted role as victim, anti-heroine and the saviour of the day – is the dysfunctional Lisbeth Salander, an extraordinarily gifted computer hacker. These skills enable her to uncover the long-unsolved disappearance of the daughter of a Swedish corporate millionaire, aided by the other central character, Mikael Blomqvist, an investigative reporter.  The trilogy starts and finishes in tight courtroom dramas.  It’s compelling because  Lisbeth’s own story is a true injustice in all the senses of the word, but it’s this that makes her unusual character so likable.  I was sad to finish it and desperately tried to slow down to eke out the pleasure, but the final volume was so gripping that I failed. I was so engrossed I almost missed my tube stop several times.

Claudia Rimington, London: Damien Hirst, No Love Lost

Hirst’s latest exhibition consists of 25 oil paintings, all large, dark and brooding, in two rooms in the Wallace collection. Most of the paintings contain an object associated with death (a skull, a skeleton) and they sit in dark blue spaces.  All similar in feeling, and dominating the two classical rooms in which they are housed, their exhibition space is cold and atmospheric. Though the exhibition isn’t full of cheery subject matter, I would definitely recommend a visit to this before it closes on January 24^th.  What’s attractive about this exhibition is the rare beauty of some of the works.  There’s something strangely compelling about Hirst’s low lit skulls in the dark – the deepness of the colours, the contrast between a sense of humanity and the nothingness which surrounds.

(You can watch a short video where Damien Hirst talks about the works in this exhibition here.)

J. Walker Smith, Chapel Hill:

Let’s say you develop some idea of what the future is likely to hold. Do you then know what to do about it? That’s the question that University of Chicago law professor and prolific public intellectual Cass Sunstein tackles in his thorough discussion of planning for Worst-Case Scenarios. This has obvious relevance for the most frightful worries of our age like climate change, suitcase nukes, anthrax, avian flu and GMOs. But it is relevant as well to every policy action and business decision. Sunstein critiques the Precautionary Principle and Cost-Benefit Analysis to recommend an alternative that he believes better balances risks and benefits. This book is another must-read from Sunstein for anyone doing strategic analysis or scenario planning.

Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, Brian Wasnick (Bantam Books, 2006) Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do, Tom Vanderbilt (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008′)

Behavioral economics is all the rage these days, and the bestsellers Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely and Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein have helped popularize this branch of social psychology. But do we really understand how these classic psychology experiments and even the more recent work in economics apply to real life, particularly to business and marketing? Two recent books make this connection for eating and traffic. Brian Wasnick teaches marketing and nutritional science at Cornell where his lab has done pioneering work deciphering the workings of the ‘mindless margin’ that lies between healthy and unhealthy food choices. Tom Vanderbilt is a science and culture journalist who embedded himself for three years with traffic researchers and engineers to answer questions like ‘why does the other lane always seem faster’ and ‘why are dangerous roads safer’ and ‘why do women cause more congestion than men.’

Larissa Persons, New York:

5×2 is the story of an unhappy marriage told backwards in five parts. It begins with the divorce. And it ends with the couple, Marion and Giles, meeting for the first time. Each of the five ‘chapters’ focuses in on a particular scene from their lives together. We see the couple hosting a dinner party while their young son sleeps. We see the birth of their child. We see their wedding. Each scene peels away another emotional layer and offers another insight into the individuals and their relationship.

Ozon exploits the construct of reverse chronology to the full. So the film is not about what happens – after all we know the end from the beginning – but rather is about why it happened. And by the time you get to the end (of the film) it is clear that the roots of the couple’s demise are there, plain for all to see, right from the start of the romance. You can see the drivers that created the future.

And while the construct turns the viewer into a clinical observer of the dissection of the marriage, the details revealed and the style of the narrative are almost disconcertingly intimate. This serves to ensure that you become intensely involved in the story itself and with the two main characters, rather than simply remaining an innocent bystander. The film therefore manages to be gripping, despite its removal of conventional suspense.

It’s not exactly an enjoyable 90 minutes, but I found 5×2 powerful and memorable. It’s also got an excellent soundtrack, courtesy of Philippe Rombi.

Jo Phillips writes:

The latest edition of HenleyMail (our free regular think piece email) is now available to read online here. There’s a chance to consider responses to the economic downturn in both the lead article by our UK managing director on how brands can adapt to a recession, and a perspective from Yankelovich in the United States on undermining the ‘fear factor’. There’s also an article on some of the work we have been doing on long-term futures – sharing some of the learnings and indeed the challenges that arise when we look to expand our strategic horizons in this way.

After over 60 issues, this is the last edition of HenleyMail – but only because we’re changing the name. As a result of our merger and rebrand, from now on the newsletter will be known as Futureproof. If you’d like to receive it you can sign up here.

The picture at the top of this post is ‘Hard Times’, by the 19th century painter Sir Hubert von Herkomer. From The Victorian Web.

Editor’s note: Walker Smith, who runs The Futures Company’s Yankelovich division in the United States, has sent a long post reflecting on the 40-year context of Barack Obama’s Presidential victory this week. The conventional wisdom is that blog posts should be short and pithy. But we think that from time to time it’s better to give an argument the space and time it needs to unfold. Walker’s short essay is one of those occasions.

Walker Smith writes:

Barack Obama’s victory on Tuesday night was not unexpected. Three weeks out, political pundits knew that Obama had a lead that has never been overcome in modern political history. (Horse race political junkies will enjoy my favorite campaign resource, www.fivethirtyeight.com.) The real drama came an hour later when Obama took the stage with his family to honor this historic moment in his moving victory speech.

Chicago’s Grant Park, the scene of the victory rally, is a beautiful, expansive park bordering Lake Michigan that to this day still stirs up grueling memories for Baby Boomers like me, of the police violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The question that hangs over Barack Obama’s election is whether it really does represents the end of a 40-year cycle of deep political and cultural division, even though his electoral victory was built on effective party-political organisation rather than cutting across party-political lines.

In 1968, demonstrators set up their staging ground in Grant Park during the Democratic Convention for protests against the Johnson administration’s Vietnam policies. With characteristic irony, Yippie leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin dubbed it A Festival of Life.; instead it became a series of violent confrontations between protestors and police that reached a climax the night that Hubert Humphrey won the nomination with a nationally televised 17-minute frenzy of police brutality in front of the Hilton Hotel. Throughout the violence, protestors chanted “the whole world is watching” to the police, and, indeed, later that night, as Connecticut Senator Abraham Rubicoff put George McGovern’s name into nomination at the convention, he famously denounced the “Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.” His view was subsequently confirmed by the Walker Commission convened to investigate what happened. In its findings, the Commission called it police riot.

Now, four decades later, Obama was preparing to celebrate victory in the very place that, to many of us, was Ground Zero for the culture wars that have defined our lives and our politics ever since. This serendipitous symbolism was not lost on any of us – Democrats all – gathered around the TV. Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope that it was time to move beyond the Baby Boomer “psychodrama” born of “old grudges and revenge plots hatched” in the 1960s. Obama wrote that he yearned for those things that “bring us together as Americans.” And here he was Tuesday night, bringing us full circle, ready at last to close that chapter of American history.

As they are today, in 1968 Americans were scared, fearful and uncertain. It is a year that is generally regarded as a pivotal year in American history, as 2008 will surely also come to be regarded. No financial crisis engulfed the nation then, although, unrecognized at the time, the stock market was in the early years of a long bear market that would not end until 1982. Instead, 1968 bore witness to a rending conflict of politics and culture that erupted almost weekly into violence, including the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. These events bred the dread and apprehension that ushered in Richard Nixon as President, kindling an era of conservative Republican leadership at the helm of government that would be interrupted only twice, and with little impact, until Obama’s electoral landslide Tuesday night.

In his speech, Obama echoed the past as he looked to the future. He quoted Lincoln and he made recognizable allusions to ideas and speeches of both FDR and JFK. But he also made explicit rhetorical use of phrasings and imagery from two well-known speeches of Dr. King.

When Obama spoke of that night people being able “to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day,” he was borrowing from Dr. King’s 1965 speech from the steps of the Capitol Building in Montgomery, Alabama at the end of the march that began with highly publicized violence in Selma. King said that day that the wait for prejudice to end would not be long because “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” In echoing King, Obama, too, was inspiring us to stay committed as we work together for a better nation and a better world.

Similarly, Obama borrowed from an even more uplifting phrase of Dr. King’s when he told us that even though “the road ahead will be long” and “our climb…steep,” he was sure that “we as a people will get there.” These remarks echo very closely the closing lines of the last speech Dr. King gave before he was killed. “I want you to know tonight,” King said, “that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.” In Obama’s speech on Tuesday night, there was perhaps no clearer statement of his belief that Americans can rise to the challenges before us and overcome them as a nation, and maybe even as part of the world community.

Obama takes office at a crossroads in American history. Cultural and political observer and New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote of this on Election Day. Brookes argued that there is a confluence of three eras now coming to an end – the end of the long economic boom that began in the 1980s, the end of conservative dominance in recent American politics and the end of Baby Boomer supremacy in American society.

While there are many problems to be fixed, Brooks foresees the emergence of a new America. America is free to reinvent itself, because, suddenly, the country is unfettered by the forces that have determined the direction of the country for the past few decades. Barack Obama, he believes, is the man for the moment.

This is the kind of promise that has always animated Americans. Yet, there is a dread that weighs upon the American spirit these days. It is seen in the utter collapse of confidence and self-assurance as measured by every poll conducted over the last three months. It is seen in the yearning for leadership and integrity expressed by so many as they left the voting booths on Tuesday. It was in evidence Tuesday night as millions of Americans literally danced in the streets in dozens of cities after Obama’s victory. It was the reason for the crash in retail sales reported on Thursday. Americans are spooked and as a result they have retrenched. Before any new era can be opened, the American verve must be recharged.

This is a tall order for Obama. He invited us Tuesday night to share that vision with him, and for that moment we did. There were no dry eyes in our group that night. Even my Republican friends, to a person, have said that they, too, had a lump in their throats. But Obama’s job is going to be tough.

For one thing, Obama’s victory was not achieved by cutting across party lines. Journalist Bill Bishop has studied and written extensively about the yawning partisan divide in American society. (We’ve blogged here before about his book, The Big Sort.) In his initial analyses of the county-by-county voting patterns across the country, he finds that Obama did in 2008 what Bush did in 2004. Each built margins of victory in their respective strongholds – blue counties for Obama and red counties for Bush – that were large enough to overcome their deficits elsewhere. It’s true that in red counties Obama closed the size of the losing gap that Kerry had in 2004, but Obama won by winning the blue counties by huge margins. Only the rare red county in 2004 actually turned blue in 2008. In short, despite Obama’s unifying rhetoric, his success was created in a highly partisan way.

In fact, America has not made a 180-degree ideological turn. Instead, Americans are just plain worried about the economy, and the state of the economy determines Presidential election outcomes. Ray Fair is a Yale economist who has shown that in Presidential elections the change in the incumbent party can be predicted from the economy alone (using inflation and two measures of GDP: his 2008 assessment is on his website). No surprise, then, that James Carville hung that famous sign in Clinton headquarters during the 1992 campaign – “It’s the economy, stupid.” The economy elected Obama. If this election had been about national security, McCain would likely have won in an electoral landslide.

The wounds of 1968 have not healed yet, and the fears of 2008 loom large. But Barack Obama brings a different temperament to the Presidency. He believes in possibilities because he himself is living proof of the power of those possibilities. He gives other hope and faith in those possibilities when he echoes the inspiring words of American icons; heroes, really. If America is to emerge as a different place, it will not be because America has become something different already. It will be because Barack Obama has the audacity it takes to rally the nation in a unifying way behind a hopeful, confident vision of possibilities. He has begun this already. So far, it’s working. As my friends and I said to each other as we went our separate ways Tuesday night, we must keep faith with what Obama reminds us is our quintessentially American strength, the belief that, yes, we can.

The photograph at the top of this post is from the Boston Globe’s campaign blog, Political Intelligence.

Rachel Kelnar writes:

I went to two really interesting futures events last week and was struck by the extent to which some emerging learnings were common to both, despite having expected beforehand that the topics would have little in common.

First, I attended a debate at the London Transport Museum (LTM) on the future of transport – ‘Survive or Thrive: What will urban life be like in 2055?’ The LTM used the intelligent infrastructure scenarios which my colleague Andrew Curry and I wrote for the UK Government’s Foresight Programme as the starting point for this discussion. I also participated in ‘Museums in the Long Now’ – a roundtable exploring the future of the museum, organised by the Cultural Leadership Programme at City University and Compton Verney, with funding from the London Centre for Arts and Cultural Enterprise (LCACE).

An emerging theme of both sessions was ‘we are where we are’ – that if we were to design a transport system for the UK, we would not set out to design what we currently have, and neither would we fund or develop our museums in the way we do now. However, ‘we are where we are’ – and we therefore have to temper our views of the future with the reality of this starting point. We don’t have the luxury of a blank slate.

However, it’s important that this doesn’t limit us in terms of what we strive for, and both sessions used scenarios to help participants resist the temptation to think too short term, or too negatively.

Another interesting reflection for me was the potentially changing role of museums. They are generally considered windows to the past and this is pretty uncontroversial. But, if museums are to remain relevant in the future, they perhaps need to do more than reflect on what has already happened. They need to start providing a window on the future as well. The LTM has certainly embraced this idea, with the Future Generator, which allows every virtual or real museum visitor to explore how their choices can impact the future of London and the type of city we will all live in. It’s about putting the Museum at the heart of the debate about our transport system, sustainability and the London we might have in 2055, and pleasingly, it’s also based on the scenarios we were involved in writing.

Discussing the Museum of the Long Now, it became increasingly clear that many museums may well be a natural home for such futures exploration. They are naturally places where people go to learn – to be challenged, provoked, and to understand a culture, a society or a particular event in our history. This mindset is a good one for thinking about the future of our culture and our society – because thinking about the past is the first step to thinking more effectively about the future.

This shift is not without its challenges – it requires, for example, that museums get a bit more comfortable with conflict than many are at the moment. If museums can successfully place themselves at the heart of our future – regardless of the issue – than they are helping to cement their role in our lives going forward. We are where we are – but we don’t have to be stuck here.

Joe Ballantyne writes:

Back in the late 90s, and even more recently, globalisation was all the rage. Some people thought this was a jolly good thing and it would make us all rich and free, while others thought it was a really bad thing. which would lead to greater poverty and environmental damage. Either way, almost everyone agreed that we were careering towards a brave new globalised world, ruled by the free flow of capital between nations, and characterised by global institutions and global flows of people and goods.

Fast forward a decade, however, and things start to look quite a bit different. Countries like India, Russia and China are much wealthier and more powerful than ten years ago, the expansion of international groupings such as the EU seems to have all but halted, and the ongoing drama of the credit crunch suggests that financial deregulation has reached its limits. Protectionism is a recurring theme in the Democrat candidates’ contest in the US, and the chief executive of Deutsche Bank was recently quoted as saying that he “no longer believes in the market’s self-healing power” – and when the head of a major bank starts saying that financial markets need some sort of state intervention, you know something’s up. The public seem to think so: most of us admit a growing suspicion around the role free markets in the economy.

So how did the global theorists – from both the left and the right – so misjudge globalisation? There’s a whole thesis to be written on this, but some pointers could be:

• Many of them were working in internationally-focussed institutions such as universities or global banks – which probably blinded them to the attitudes of the majority who weren’t globetrotting, post-national types.

• Many of them had come to believe the widely canvassed idea that financial power will always trump state power – where as in fact, nationalism is a tremendously strong driver of domestic politics and therefore of political change.

• The Brits in particular lived in a country which had probably gone further than almost any other towards developing a ‘post-national’ identity, embracing the market and minimising the role of national symbols such as the monarchy, religion and so on. But what happened in Britain wasn’t replicated elsewhere.

One of the things we say in futures work is that if the filters you see the world through are too strong, they act like the blinkers on a horse – and create blind spots which make it harder to see signs of change. It’s interesting to think of other blindspots our assumptions about the world might create for us.

The picture was taken by David Eppstein.

]]> http://blog.thefuturescompany.com/2008/04/24/blind-spots-on-globalisation/feed/ 1 thenextwavefutures David Eppstein, Containers, 2001 http://blog.thefuturescompany.com/2008/04/16/the-next-age-of-the-train/ http://blog.thefuturescompany.com/2008/04/16/the-next-age-of-the-train/#comments Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:00:42 +0000 thenextwavefutures http://henleycentreheadlightvision.wordpress.com/?p=201 ]]>

Andrew Curry writes:

This is one of those unexpected pieces of data. According to figures just released by the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC), more miles were travelled by train in the UK last year than in any other year, at least in peacetime. The total mileage – just over 30 billion passenger miles – topped the previous record figure set in 1946. In fact, rail has been growing much faster than car mileage since 1995; the reasons include greater road congestion and rising car costs, investment in new trains, and more accessible information and booking (through online, for example).

ATOC marked the occasion with a booklet, The Billion Passenger Railway (opens in pdf). As it happens, it has been involved in a recent scenarios project we’ve run for the rail sector on the future of a sustainable industry, and through this I was invited to contribute a picture of rail in 75 years time – a story I thought might well be about European connections. That future scenario, ‘A Europe of City States’, is below the fold.

Image by Atlan at his Cityscapes and Skyline Photos blog.

Europedia Le Monde September 2083

Dateline : Mayors’ Convention, Vienna

The annual gathering of the Mayors’ Convention in an Inter City Express (ICE) terminus complex in a leading European city is always a good time to take the mood of the modern Europe. For the Mayors are both the beating heart and the economic engines of the re-shaped Europe, in which nation states have largely lost all but administrative powers.

If co-operation is the public face of the Convention, the smell of competition is always in the air. These women and men know that membership of the Convention is not bestowed lightly; it goes only to the 30 cities which have the most dynamic economic, social, and cultural influence across the Union as a whole. A year or two of poor performance and another contender is knocking at the door.

With the internet long hamstrung by crime and fraud, and air travel the preserve of the hyper-rich, the cities which keep their place at the table are those which have solved four problems, according to Vienna Mayor, Kristal Stangl, the host of this year’s event.

“We must make sure that our cities have enough energy to function, to be sure, and that resources like water are secure. There must be enough food. They need to be good places to live. A lot of cities can make these things happen, even in our present conditions of scarcity. But the economic part is about getting the best brains to work on the complex problems which need to be solved to build new knowledge and value. That needs good transport links, and the cities which invested in high speed rail in the first part of the century are the best placed to compete”.

Some cities have slipped off the map as the European periphery has grown and the core shrunk. Most of the ‘Euro-30’ come from the ‘Golden Diamond’ between London, Hamburg, Krakow, and Marseilles. Some long-standing rivalries have been settled; Madrid is no longer a member, while Barcelona holds on to its Convention status. Rome plays second fiddle to Milan. Manchester’s high speed link to the tunnel has helped it stay in the club, while Glasgow’s failure to gain one has exiled it to the fringes.

INSEAD’s public policy professor Regis Bertrand argues that nations are no longer tthe right size. “Europe has taken over migration and manages the single currency. Solving the energy and food issues has required a much more local focus. But the economic aspect needs both good local environments and long-distance connections. The fact that ICE sponsors the Convention isn’t just good marketing. It is a shared interest.”

London’s representative at the Convention, Mayor Nasr Hysen, an economist by background, says it comes down to labour markets. “With closed borders and a single economic framework, labour has to be able to move around, to follow work. But often this migration is temporary, for a few weeks or months, for a project. That’s why rail links are so central. But you need to remember that a lot of the money that’s earned goes back to their homes. It’s not perfect, but it helps to equalise incomes across Europe.”

Looking forward, the overall direction may be back to the future. Bertrand observes that ‘In the 19th century the railway built the nation state by standardising time and reducing regional differences. By the 22nd, as long as Europe can maintain the security of its borders, Europe will be more like the city-states of the Holy Roman Empire”.

Andrew Curry writes:

One of the best-known quotes about futures work – “the future’s already here, it’s just unevenly distributed” – is by the novelist William Gibson, and it’s one of several quotes we sometimes use to introduce futures concepts at workshops. But it’s become dulled by familiarity; a couple of months ago, at a workshop with our sometime collaborator Wendy Schultz, she wondered out loud if there was another way of making the point that there were almost always clues around us as to how the future would evolve, as long as we listened for them (“weak signals”, in futures jargon).

So Russell Davies’ recent post suggesting that the Gibson line “needed flipping around” raised a wry smile. I think the problem is that the line has become so familiar to practitioners that it has floated free from its meaning – it signifies that the speaker does some futures and and knows that very familiar William Gibson line. But it still has meaning for audiences who are new to, or unfamiliar with, futures’ work, who haven’t heard it before; they get it straightaway. It’s about the listeners, not the speaker.

As for the quote: Gibson himself has suggested an alternative:

“Glancing sideways is becoming more generally recognized as about the best way of doing what we used to call futurism.”

[Thanks to the end of cyberspace for the link to this].

Image of William Gibson by Fred Armitage with thanks to Wikipedia

Siân Davies writes:

Henley Centre HeadlightVision is just embarking on a merger with the US research company Yankelovich – the market leaders in understanding the changing values and behaviours of US consumers.

While we’ve been negotiating I’ve had the good fortune to immerse myself in much of their research. One publication which stood out for me was ‘Generation Ageless‘, by J Walker Smith and Ann Clurman, Yankelovich’s leading commentators on generational marketing. Yankelovich coined the term ‘baby boomers’ in the 1960s when they first started collecting data on this influential generation. As Walker and Ann say: “Without notice or warning, in defiance of all trends and expectations, Baby Boomers exploded onto the American scene, and in the process changed everything”.

Reading Generation Ageless I was reminded of the extent to which the Baby Boomers have fuelled the growth of the US economy and many of the brands that are ubiquitous today. Would McDonalds be a global powerhouse in 2007 if suburban Baby Boomer kids and their families hadn’t developed a taste for fast burgers and fries in the 1960s? The 78 million Boomers in the US, together with all those aged 45+, account for 54% of total consumer spending. This represents a huge and complex market. Even minority Baby Boomer pursuits represent lucrative market niches, from dog walking to alternative health therapies.

The Baby Boomers still drive trends in the US, and are now changing ageing, as they have changed everything else in their orbit. But as the boomers age, and new generations come through, will ‘boomer’ brands such as McDonalds manage to adapt – or will new power brands come crashing through?

Jo Philips writes:

I was struck by the following quote when reading the historian Theodore Zeldin today:

“What to do with too much information is the great riddle of our time. My solution is to look at the facts through two lenses simultaneously, both through a microscope, choosing details that illuminate life in those aspects that touch people most closely, and through a telescope, surveying large problems from a great distance.”

Zeldin’s argument reinforces Michelle Singer’s previous post on understanding both macro- and micro-narratives to build a robust picture of change. History also helps. Recently in an office workshop we looked back to images from 50 years ago to see what had changed and what had stayed the same. Some of the findings were quite surprising, and it made me think about the importance of a grounding in history to imagine the future. Perhaps the New Year newspapers’ reviews of 2007 are as important for understanding future change as their predictions for the year ahead…