Posts filed under 'future'
Influential Boomers
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”.
Add comment 1 February 2008
In with the old?
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…
Add comment 7 January 2008
Green influencers
Clare Archer writes:
To mark Energy Savings Week, which finished yesterday, the Energy Saving Trust commissioned us to research the role of word of mouth and community in promoting ideas about saving energy. Our research showed a strong correlation between people who were informed about ‘green ideas’ and their level of connectedness to other people in their communities – creating a kind of virtuous circle. From this we developed a index – working in conjunction with another consultancy, Wildfire – which allows any individual to calculate the power they have to influence others to save energy, on a scale of 1 to 100, by answering a few simple questions. The EST has shifted its strategy to focus on the power of communities to influence change.
There’s coverage in a number of publications – for example in Metro and Marketing Week.
Add comment 29 October 2007
The future of civil society
Andrew Curry writes:
We’ve just finished an extensive project with Carnegie UK’s Commission of Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society in Britain and Ireland, looking out to 2025. We ran eleven workshops across the five jurisdictions, involving several hundred people, and we used the innovative causal layered analysis method to build the scenarios, to help us get to shifts in values. The reports are out soon, and we’ll blog more then.
For the moment the Commission’s chair Geoff Mulgan has written a piece on the findings in today’s Society Guardian. Too bad that our credit for running the process – and for the futures quotes – got lost on the sub-editors’ table.
Add comment 24 October 2007
