At the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas, there's one particular session where people start queueing around four in the morning to get a seat. It's not one of the big-name music performances or a movie screening with awards buzz, it's a keynote by Amy Webb.
Webb, who is the founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute (FTI), is a futurist. She's a professor of strategic foresight, a data and research-driven field that unpacks what could be in an increasingly complex world. Webb's 2024 Tech Trends Report, which is downloaded more than a million times every year, is made up of just under a thousand pages of insights businesses rely on to navigate the future.
Predicting what comes next may be big business but it's not necessarily new. While modern futurists use data to forecast possible future scenarios and spot emerging opportunities, the science of probability - long-term planning - has been around since the 1940s.
And before futurology became an academic field and job role, science fiction authors like H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Arthur C. Clarke, were recognized as futurists with an uncanny ability to foresee the world to come. Today, there are a number of well-known futurists sought out by industry giants (and the government) to steer business strategy and adapt to disruptive change. Businesses are hiring futurists to tell them the things they don't want to hear so that they can prepare for unforeseen inevitabilities.
Meet the futurists
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der June - July 2024-Ausgabe von Forbes Africa.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der June - July 2024-Ausgabe von Forbes Africa.
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