Announcing the Foresight Sandbox: executive training in foresight with a focus on contextualizing technology
I am excited to announce that Prescient LLC, the firm I founded last year, has partnered with Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society to provide applied foresight training to help leaders and teams contextualize and anticipate the impacts of emerging technology, so they can plan effectively to adapt, mitigate or innovate in the face of change.
Our first iteration of this course will focus on artificial intelligence. Participants will have the opportunity to combine training in how to use the futurist’s toolbox to anticipate changes in their environment with a deep dive into the many issues that will confront organizations as technology continues to exponentially advance.
The course will be held in the downtown Washington, DC building of Arizona State University. If this already sounds interesting and you’d like to know more about the course, you can visit our course page here:
If you’re still unsure, consider this:
Why focus strategic foresight training on emerging technology?
Technological change presents a challenging paradox for those seeking to anticipate how they must adapt or innovate to succeed in the future. On the one hand, advances in digital technology are transforming industrial paradigms beyond recognition.
Klaus Schwab calls it the 4th industrial revolution; there are other equally dramatic labels that drive home the understanding that this is a moment of epochal change for the entire world, even if its impact will be felt in divergent ways across different societies.
Yet, futurists and other close observers of change also recognize that mere discussions of technological advances are unlikely to bring to the surface the forces that drive these change at scale. For example, changes in the political environment in the United States in the last few years are expressions of complex interactions between economics, technology and society. Technological change created the conditions for the 2008 financial crisis, but in order to anticipate it, you would have had to look at the financial players, cultural values of Americans and the political environment.
What teams need more of—and what the Foresight Sandbox provides—are opportunities to explore systematically and thoughtfully the many ramifications of a pervasive technology and the chance to create an individual organizational approach in response to issues such as:
- Ethics
- Security
- Workforce
- Supply Chain
- Competition
- Individual & Institutional Behavior
This course will complement and help strengthen existing AI strategies, if your organization is proceeding along that road. For organizations that are not at this time adopting an AI strategy, the course provides an opportunity to understand better how AI will change the competitive environment and how to adapt and innovate in the face of those changes.
I invite you to learn more about the specifics of the course and how foresight + emerging technology training can help your organization advance in a changing marketplace. If you have any questions, please contact me at Amy@Prescient2050.com.
