Seizing Signs of Change

The Scenario Planning team is organizing a series of “Seizing Signs of Change” sessions in which participants explore how to become more observant scanners of weak signals and identify the key signs of future trends.

In his book “Inevitable Surprises”, futures thinking guru Peter Schwartz notes that we live in turbulent rather than predictable times. While emphasizing that we cannot know the consequences of future events in advance, he notes that there will be more surprises; we will be able to deal with them; we can anticipate many of them. However, given the noisiness that characterizes the current reality of information abundance, how can we recognize and decode the right set of “weak signals”?

1) What current world events could have been anticipated had we been more attentive to weak signals?
2) What important nascent signals perceived today can change the future?
3) What major events might occur in the future based on identified signals?