Slow language

I’m a fan of the poet/novelist Nick Laird’s sometime contributions to the Guardian’s Saturday Review, and last weekend – after a holiday in Italy where he was exposed to the Slow Food Movement – he wrote about how to read poetry now was to be part of a Slow Language Movement‘. A smart sub-editor pulled the phrase into the headline, and although one of the joys of ’slow’ as an adjective is how easily it can be used to form new movements (there are Slow Towns as well), it seems – on the basis of a quick web search – that Nick Laird’s article may represent the first sighting of an emerging issue.

The future of football

You take your futures insights where you find them, and today’s issue of Match – a football magazine to which my son subscribes – has a feature on ‘Footy 2020′ – filling the gap between the end of the Confederations Cup and the August transfer roundabout. The main trends: more ICT (information/communications technology); new materials; more excitement for spectators; more sponsorship opportunities; and greater engagement by fans in their clubs – such as Barcelona’s ownership model.

How regions succeed

Strangely I’ve had a couple of recently written articles released into the wild within a few days of each other. One was written for ‘Made in the UK’, a book sponsored by the BBC about the impact of spreading its production and broadcast facilities more evenly across the UK. My contribution – sandwiched between those of the Director of Vision, Jana Bennett, and David Attenborough – looked at the underlying theory as to how, and why, regions succeed. It’s an area which I’ve done some research and writing about, and some work on, over the last decade. The BBC book enabled me to develop my thinking – which is that successful regions manage create a dynamic in which the local economy interacts with local social betworks and a sense of place – and that public investment is essential to the process.

General Motors and the 200-year company

I’ve written here before about the future of the organisation and also about ways of thinking about long-term futures. These two themes have been brought together for me by some of the discussion about the collapse of General Motors, and also a fine short essay by Kim Stanley Robinson in which he describes capitalism as a “multi-generational Ponzi scheme”. The pressing question, it seems to me, is how to design organisations so they value the long-term future and their long-term past, as a route away from short-term and unsustainable behaviour. The notes here are based on a contribution I was asked to make on the future of the workplace to a meeting organised by the RIBA’s Building Futures programme.

Not so many fish in the sea

It is the first officially-designated World Oceans Day on Monday, and to mark the occasion there are – for one day only – screenings across the UK of the documentary The End of  the Line, based on Charles Clover’s book. Book and film both tell the story of how over-fishing is reducing, inexorably, the ocean’s fish stocks – the news release for the film says that if we don’t change our consumption patterns we won’t be eating ocean-caught fish by 2048.

The noise of a past future

When I was a kid in the late 1960s, the hovercraft and Concorde were trumpeted as the great British technological innovations – the result, perhaps, of Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s modernising meme about “the white heat of technology“. I even seem to recall, although heaven knows I may have imagined this, a set of British stamps which featured both.

This thought was prompted by a few days spent last weekend in the Isle of Wight over the (English) Bank Holiday. The island often seems, well, quite old-fashioned, and the longest running commercial hovercraft services in the UK plies noisily from Portsmouth to Ryde, across a stretch of water also served by a car ferry and a passenger catamaran.

Concorde, which has been out of service now for more than half a decade, was also as famous, or as controversial, for its noise as its speed. The two technologies raise interesting questions aboout how, and when, particular ideas about the future stop being useful.

After recorded music loses its value

The question of what happens when recorded music becomes more or less valueless is a subject I have mentioned a couple of times before (Tony Wilson and others here, Bill Drummond here) . This is a short post to note that Brian Eno has offered some views on this in a recent edition of Prospect. The answers: live music becomes more valuable, as do the non-digital parts of the recorded music package. A couple of brief extracts below the fold.

Banking, greed, and politicians

A post to mention a useful review by Will Hutton of a swathe of books on the banking crisis: Philip Augar’s Chasing Alpha; Gillian Tett’s Fool’s Gold; Paul Mason’s Meltdown; and George Soros’ The Crash of 2008 and What It Means. All good writers, all critics of the pre-crash model of finance capital. Between them they unravel the layers of the systemic failure that led to the crash, a combination of greed enabled by increasingly light regulation – with fraud and deception oiling the wheels along the way. Hutton links the collapse to the 1986 ‘Big Bang’ in London and accompanying deregulation in New York: a “story of ideology, greed, and lack of restraint sanctioned by our politicians”.

Thirty years ago today

It’s 30 years since Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, and there are still arguments about her legacy (at least in some places: the Conservative Home blog, whose picture I also used, has a post headed, “Margaret Thatcher was the greatest peacetime Prime Minister of modern times but Conservatism can’t fossilise”.)

For me, one chart sums up her legacy. It’s the one which shows a large and lasting change in the levels of inequality in British society, which her successors of either political stripe have done nothing to reverse. The vertical lines show the period of Thatcher’s premiership.

The purpose of scenarios

I have an article in the ‘Scenarios Symposium’ published in the latest edition of the Journal of Futures Studies, which has just been published online. The Symposium asks whether scenarios are worth using, and why. The starting point was an article by Graham Molitor – the distinguished futurist who invented the trends ‘S-curve’ – in which he wondered why he’d bothered to use scenarios at all. I argue that the strength of scenarios – when compared to other futures tools – is that they help organisations reduce the ‘variety’ of uncertainty about the future to a point where they can understand it, process it, and respond.