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Joel Fariss's avatar

Yes, and...

Trend mapping is a great forecasting technique, if not the foundation of forecasting as one approach to understanding tomorrow, today. Yet if the entirety of our vision for 'what could be' is grounded in 'what has been,' then I'm afraid our future will look very derivative. So yes, there is much understanding to be had in understanding history, *and* we need to embrace and practice generative imagination. Sometimes the ideas we need, the ideas with the most transformational potential, will be ideas without precedent. To address the confluence of crisis we face as a species, my hunch is that we need to untether ourselves from precedent and deductive thinking to allow ourselves to explore radical ideas that no one has thought of.

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Technically Catholic's avatar

Tomas, you might find the work of Daniel Burrus to be interesting. He differentiates between cyclical trends and linear/exponential trends for understanding the future.

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