The Signals Are Talking

A seasoned futurist, the author heads the Future Today institute, which notably publishes an annual report on technical trends and innovations that are about to change the world. Where “the sun is new each day”, how do we make the difference between an anecdotal novelty and the sign of a change that could durably and deeply affect the ways in which we exchange, work, live? Most leaders fail to do so, hence the monumental mistakes in strategy that large groups such as Digital Equipment did not survive. Others succeed in spotting the emerging trends’ signals, in adapting their activities and finally manage so everything changes for them and around them without any shift in position or prosperity, such as Nintendo that has been leading the gaming world for over a century.

This book is both a thorough thought about the future and a practical guide to look differently at the present and find there our bearings. The thinking stems from a sharp outlook on the difficulty of our mind to accept and understand change. It invites us to get out of the conceptual and temporal frameworks in which we often lock sectorial forecasting, little likely to spot technological or societal disruptions. The guide provides practical advice and a proven method to project ourselves in the future. The strong scientific background of the author, combined with her obvious passion for numbers and data processing, do not prevent her from insisting on the importance of the human dimension in decision-making: an algorithm will never replace intuition and courage.