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Applied Futures: The Art of the Possible

Applied Imagination: The Art of Strategic Foresight

Applied Imagination: The Art of Technology Innovation

Join us to explore the unique approach to strategic futuring adopted by leading organizations such as Amazon, Apple, ADM, BMW, Google, IKEA, Logitech, McDonald’s, Meta, and Netflix. In this introductory webinar, learn how grounding the unknown with rigorous research, strategy, and analytics can lead to valuable insights. Through real-world examples, you will get a glimpse into how these methods can inform strategic thinking and innovation within your own work.

Join us to explore the unique approach to strategic futuring adopted by leading organizations such as Amazon, Apple, ADM, BMW, Google, IKEA, Logitech, McDonald’s, Meta, and Netflix. In this introductory webinar, you will learn how grounding speculation and ‘the unknown’ with rigorous research, strategy, insights and analytics can unlock and inspire, and lead to innovative new products and services. Through real-world examples, you will get a glimpse into how these methods can inform strategic thinking and innovation within your own work.

1 - INTRODUCTION

SLIDE 2

Thank you and HELLO to everyone.

I’m excited to share with you some perspectives and examples of how I’ve done applied futuring and innovation work in a variety of contexts.

So, I’ve been a talking head

SLIDE 3

An author

SLIDE 4

An engineer

SLIDE 5

A product designer, and professional skateboard photographer

I mention these things because they help me tell a story about the value of seeing the adjacent possible. the things on the edge of possibility. The naescent possibilities that are just barely visible and represent the first seams of a breakthrough moment. And my burden is that there have been a range of lands that I travel through in the pursuit of my work.

SLIDE 6

And what I am going to share with you is something that I’ve learned from these varied experiences, these worlds I’ve traveled through – and its something that I’ve brought into organizations with a similar remit to yours: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, BMW, Google, Google Deepmind (Gemini), IKEA, Logitech, McDonald’s, Netflix to name the heavy-htters I’ve collaborated with.

2 - FINDING THE ‘ADJACENT POSSIBLE’

SLIDE 8 - TEXT ANNOTATION: “THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE” + STUART KAUFFMAN(?) (2 MINS)

What I want to share with you are some lessons and practical insights that you can apply in your own innovation and applied technology work to translate, prototype, test, validate how the trends of today can turn into opportunities and new capabilities for tomorrow.

SLIDE 9

The adjacent possible, as originally framed by Stuart Kauffman in evolutionary biology, describes how complex systems evolve by exploring new possibilities that emerge incrementally from their current state. It’s a compelling way to understand how life builds upon itself through small, logical steps.

But it is also a valuable and generative notion — an idiom and bit of language and way of thinking — that applies directly to the domains of applied technology and innovation. In this field — our field here in this presentation — we are often tasked with not only identifying the incremental possibilities but also imagining and prototyping the breakthrough and revolutionary new opportunities that might not be easily seen, or that might not seem to make sense at first. To achieve this breakthrough ambition requires more than just logic and deduction. It also demands creative ideation, imagination, adopting a sense of wonder and curiosity — and a willingness to workshop and explore the speculative and unexpected edges of what exists “now” in order to imagine what might exist in the near future — next quarter or next year.

SLIDE 10 — TEXT ANNOTATION: “NEW TERRITORIES NEED NEW LANGUAGES” IMAGE OF HITLAB STORY (2 MINS)

What I discovered is that breakthroughs are like entering into a new territory or terrain for which the old language and norms and what makes sense is not big enough for the new territory you’re hoping to inhabit..

It’s almost as if you have to conjure a new language, a new way of seeing, a new way of making sense in order to comprehend this new terrain. This is the essence of the adjacent possible. It’s not just about the incremental, the logical, the deduced. It’s about the speculative, the imaginative, the exploration of it all. It’s about seeing into the new territories that you are about to enter and bringing back artifacts, stories, and images that help make sense of this new territory.

SLIDE 10 - WM GIBSON - NEUROMANCER - HITLAB VPL B&W IMAGE

While working on my masters in engineering I was a research assistant at the Human INterface Technology Lab where we were working on establishing Virtual Reality in the first instance — this was in the mid 1990s. At one point I asked for a lab manual and was told to read William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” instead. This was a bit of a shock to me, but I did it. And I realized that the lab was not about the technology, but about the imagination and the language that would be required to make sense of this new territory. The lab and its work was about the adjacent possible. About trying to make VR make sense. And much of the resources were devoted to this, directly and indirectly.

What I mean by my adaptation of the theory of the adjacent possible is to emphasize the anti-deductive, the unexpected and often seemingly unreasonable but nontheless imminently valuable. What I am suggesting is that there is a form of innovation that is speculative rather than deductive. This isn’t paint-by-numbers innovation: its about expansive exploration.

SLIDE 11 - STAR TREK WAS MY SHOW

SLIDE 13 - STAR TREK COMMUNICATOR

SLIDE 14 - STAR TREK TECHNICAL MANUAL

SLIDE 15 - STAR TREK COMMUNICATOR

SLIDE 16 - STAR TREK EAR RECEIVER + APPLE AIRPODS

SLIDE 17 - STAR TREK TV

SLIDE 19 - FRANZ JOSEPH

SLIDE 20 - MECHANICAL AERONAUTICS ENGINEERING ROOM

SLIDE 21 - ARCHEOLOGIST OF THE FUTURE

SLIDE 22 - FUTURES HUMANE PIN & STAR TREK COMMUNICATOR

SLIDE 23 - HEADER: FINDING THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE IN SKATEBOARDING

But first, a related diversion not specifically from the worlds of applied technology but one that I experienced while I was very much involved in applied technology at Nokia for about 8 years.

SLIDE 24 - IMAGE OF MIGHTY IN THE POOL (1 MIN)

Some of you may have caught that I was once a skateboard photographer. Let me tell you about that time.

First to say, I am not a skateboarder, but I did move to Venice Beach in the early 2000s. It was here that I found myself in the midst of a vibrant edgy beautiful world of jumping into backyard pools style proper Los Angeles skateboarding.

SLIDE 25

Since I was a kid I found photography to be a wonderful way for a somewhat well-adjusted introvert to enter into and see other worlds. And this is how I entered into this world, with a simple goal: use photography to find a visual language that made skateboarding and its culture legible to me.

SLIDE 26 - IMAGE OF SHAUN WHITE AT X-GAMES (3 MINS)

At some point I started finding myself hired to shoot at various events. I had no ambitions about being a professional photographer, and I was very much working at Nokia in the Advanced Design Studio. So I found myself at professional events, competitions, and traveling all around the country and even internationally to photograph skateboarding. This to me was consistent with what at the time the Advanced Design Studio was doing — we were always observing, documenting, capturing aand trying to sense-make the world almost in an ethnographic fashion. Parenthetically, we had a fairly sizeable product in the pipeline that was a action sports camera that was a bit ahead of its time.

SLIDE 27 - IMAGE OF LIZZIE AT COMBI (0.5 MIN)

At one point about a year into this, I was asked by Vans, the skate culture fashion brand, to shoot a women’s skateboarding competition at their epic Combi Bowl down south of Los Angeles in Orange County. At first I was a bit reluctant as I knew nothing about women’s skateboarding, but it’s really hard to get permission to shoot there and I thought this would get me a good “in” with their very closed community and permissioned photographers, so I said yes.

SLIDE 28 - AMELIA FRONT ROCK (0.5 MIN)

On the other side of the event I was so impacted by the technical skill, the camaraderie, and the joyful energy that I decided to do nothing but shoot women’s skateboarding for the next year. This was at a time when there were maybe 2 women pro skateboarders and they were well-marginalized by the business and branding side of the sport.

If you look at this situation from a naive point of view you might say, well — you’re missing half of the addressable market. But that’s not the point; the point here is that women’s skateboarding was a nascent possibility, but the business didn’t have the imagination and the language for the vastness of this potential territory and so rather than step into this new unknown land, they just stayed within what they already knew. They were not willing to make women’s skateboarding make sense to themselves, let alone their marketplace.

SLIDE 29 - NORA VERT RAMP (0.5 MIN)

I decided to do a photo book project to help the world see the language of this unknown land. I became good friends with these 7 women who were the subject of the book. I traveled around the world to photograph them.

SLIDE 30 - IMAGE FROM HSG BOOK

And that was then. Ten years later, two of them competed in the first Olympics to feature skateboarding. Three of them became pro skateboraders — meaning they are able to support themselves with sponsorships, collaborations, shoe deals. One skates for Tony Hawk’s ‘Birdhouse’ brand.

SLIDE 31 - IMAGE OF COVER OF HSG BOOK

What this represents to me is the value of looking at the adjacent possible and having a bit of curiosity to enter into it by expanding the “language” and the ability of others to imagine into what is possible.

SLIDE 32 - KEY TAKE

So consider this an example of a weak signal of a trend, the reluctance of the existing structure to accept it, and the value of seeing into the adjacent possible and providing the visual language that supports bringing about a breakthrough change.

3 OMATA

SLIDE 33 - OMATA FINDING THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE

I want to share with you another example of finding the adjacent possible, this time in the world of product design and entrepreneurship.

SLIDE 34 - OMATA PRODUCT ACTION CYCLING BARS (1 MINS)

Let me tell you now about my time as a product designer, engineer, and CEO/CTO of a little one person backyard garage style startup called OMATA. BTW CEO stands for chief everything officer. And let’s relate this to the idea of exploration, imagination, unexpected outcomes and the adjacent possible.

SLIDE 35 - OMATA SPREAD WITH GARMIN STUFF

OMATA is a company that started with this questions: “What would it be like to have a bicycle computer that wasn’t like a typical bicycle computer, but more like a beautiful, analog, mechanical object that was a joy to use and beautiful to look at?”

SLIDE 36 - OMATA ANIMATION

A computer that was more like art than a data-capturing device. This was a question that was not being asked by the industry, which was all about making there little rectangular plastic things that looked somewhat out of place on a beautiful, hand-crafted, custom-built bicycle. This is the OMATA One, a GPS-based cycling computer that tracks all of your ride data, presenting it in a beautiful modern mechanical way that is a joy to use and a joy to look at. It’s a bit like a mechanical watch, but for your mechanical bicycle.

SLIDE 37 - OMATA PRODUCT IN PACKAGING TOP VIEW

OMATA came from some instinct I have to take the path less traveled, and maybe the path where someone might say “that doesn’t make any sense” or “that’s not how it’s done” or “that’s not how it’s supposed to be done”. I have a bit of a contrarian streak, I suppose. And an intense curiosity that asks itself, “what if?” and “why not?” and “what would happen if I did this?” or “what would it be like to inhabit a world where this did in fact make sense?”

There’s a whole story and lessons about rapid prototyping, rapid innovation cycles, operating with out lots of structure — almost like a skunkworks effort that relied on instinct, intuition, imagination, craft, diligence, a tight distributed network, and a bit of luck.

SLIDE 38 - ANNUAL REPORT

But what I want to share with you is what happened after the first drop of the product sold out and we entered the COVID pandemic. I was in a situation where I couldn’t manufacture any more product as, well — supply chains were an extractive mess, and in any case, there was no possibility of traveling to the factory in Finland for obvious reasons.

So here I am on lockdown in my studio. Entire days are melting together. I’m doing the odd occasional investor call. But, the typical 16 by 9 PowerPoint pitch deck is not the right container for this new territory of modern mechanical luxury products. Nor was there room in the typical and expected 11 page pitch deck to tell a story as big as what OMATA represented. So I decided I needed a bigger vocabulary than what was expected. I need this as I was going to travel into the OMATA future, applying that instinct, and knowledge already developed, the understanding of the addressable market based on the first sales drop, and I was going to bring back some moon rocks in the form of an artifact: the company’s annual report from four years in the future. What I started doing was a bit of futures design: I used the container of the annual report — not of a pitch deck — to help make sense of this new territory.

SLIDE 39 — PRODUCTS ON TABLE

What I did was to take the financial model and projections and ask myself what all those numbers and presumed developments might look like in the future. Rather than boxes with numbers in them, I wanted to make those number visible and visceral. For example, the product roadmap — what are the tangible implications of that? So I speculated about an adjacent possible — a future roadmap. These are more than just product explorations and studies.

SLIDE 40 - PRODUCT SPECULATION IN HAND

There was a story about the imagined company, the imagined team, the imagined product development, the marketplace — all of it. And I used the annual report as a way to make sense of this new territory, to bring back artifacts, stories, and images that help add some meaning to this new territory. It runs to 96 pages. When the pitch deck said abstractly “brand collabs” what exactly would that be? With which brands, for example. And I just used my imagination and intuition and creative illustration and production skills to translate these abstractions into something quite tangible.

SLIDE 41 - Paul Smith OMATA Edition (PHOTO HOLDING IN HAND?)

One of the adjacent possible futures was a collaboration with the fashion designer / icon and cycling enthusiast Sir Paul Smith. I remember seeing what that collab might look like so very clearly in my head so I immediately started visualizing it and sort of pulled this product from some speculative adjacent possible timeline. I was so excited by this image that I posted it on Instagram and tagged Paul Smith. The next day I got a call from his office in London and they said “we love this” and “Paul wants to carry your product, can we do that?” And so we did (I had a reserve of products in storage).

SLIDE 42 - PS RETAIL DISPLAY (1 MINS)

They did this whole retail display and when they launched, the product sold out immediately, so we did another drop. Now, this isn’t just a marketing stunt. There was something more genuine going on as these speculations were grounded by the material reality of the product and the company, and the other speculation — the financial model that tracked the company forward by four years. And think of the financial model itself — it itself is a kind of speculative artifact, isn’t it?

SLIDE 43 - ANNUAL REPORT INTERIOR SPREAD FLIP BOOK

SOMETHING

SLIDE 44 - ANNUAL REPORT COVER AND TEXT ABOUT THE SALE OF THE COMPANY

The other reason i want to share this is that all of this unexpectedly led to a succesful sale of the company to a well-regarded cycling brand. When I asked the new owners what was it that made this deal make sense to them, they referred explicitly to the annual report. They said that it was the most compelling and well-thought out roadmap they had ever seen. And that it was the annual report that made the company make sense to them.

SLIDE 45 - TEXT ANNOTATION: TAKE AWAYS (2 MINS)

The lesson here is that the adjacent possible isn’t just a trend, or a financial projection, and that big ideas that venture into truly new territory require a new language and new ways of making sense. In this case the world — or my Instagram followers — needed help imagining what I was already seeing. And the imagination part is key — a kind of visual imaginary in this case. The annual report helped people see what I was seeing but had trouble describing in words or in a pitch deck.

SLIDE 46 - TEXT ANNOTATION: AI FINDING THE THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE (1 MIN)

Let’s talk about AI as this is clearly a new territory for which we are all stammering trying to find the way to talk about it and its implications across most areas of human activity. Google DeepMind the creators of Google Gemini and a cohort of other researchers, academics, organization leadership, and entrepreneurs asked me to organize a workshop on the adjacent possible of AI, to help them imagine expansively into the future of AI use cases and consequences with a specific focus on alignment, policy, services, user tools, use cases — basically what is it good for on the ground.

SLIDE 47 - IMAGE FROM WORKSHOP (OR VIDEO LOOP?) (3 MINS)

I want to give you a sense of what this kind of activity looks like, as well as the inputs and outcomes. It was a bit like a design thinking workshop with a more creative ideation element to create artifacts from the future. We used a lot of speculative design methods, and a lot of the work was about translating the abstract into the tangible, the possible into the probable, and the probable into something that felt actual. You go into the world of the adjacent possible and you bring back artifacts, stories, and images that help make sense of this new territory. And this is what we did.

OUTCOMES: There was at least one outcome that has become a rapid prototype and is now in the hands of a team of engineers and product designers that is a new mode of AI interaction beyond the Chat mode, which came directly from one of the speculative design sprints we did during the workshop.

SLIDE 48 - SPEECH TO PARLIMENT

And there was also fun: an AI policy maker from the UK government had a speculative design in the form of a parlimentary speech introducing AI shadows for MPs called Chromewell’s that were AIs that would help them with their various tasks and responsibilities. And in the sphere of democratic representation.

SLIDE 49 THE SLIP OF PAPER WITH THE FORMULA

There was also a formula that came out of one of the breakout groups that had folks excited and eager to have a call with their team back home. I don’t know what it means — some kind of fresh insight into a difficult problem where a sociologist at Princeton had been working on using LLMs to tackle a thorny aspect of embedding data for research he has been working on. Things like this happen.

SLIDE 50 - TOMORROW’S NEWS TODAY PHOTO TOP & MUSIC REVIEW(3 MINS)

We created this artifact — a speculative newspaper from an AI future that took the activities, research agendas, trends of AI across a variety of cultural sectors and translated it into a legible, familiar, quite ordinary and immersive form: a newspaper from an AI future, where AI is just a normal aspect of everyday life in some fashion.

For example, here’s a front page article that speculates about Digital Twins, something that the folks from LinkedIn are very actively exploring and are curious about. ANd another article on the future of music in an AI world, speculating about musicians who create models that are effectively infinite albums that are generative and responsive to the listener’s mood and environment. The CEO of a large data aggregator in the streaming world was trying to wonder into the impacts of AI on their business, so we used the idiom of the Billboard brand to explore the implications and discuss strategic considerations on the business of music, data, AI and entertainment.

SLIDE 51 - APPLIED INSIGHTS NEWSPAPER ADVERTISEMENT (1 MIN)

And here’s an advertisement for a whole bunch of AI-enabled products and services. Product advertisements are wonderful ways of capturing the hopes, fears, dreams, curiosities, habits and hobbies of a culture. And over here is an article implying, and capturing discussions about how sports might be implicated by AI implying that there are simulated sports with player performance crafted by some kind of intelligence model made by performance studios.

SLIDE 52 - APPLIED INSIGHTS NEWSPAPER MODEL MAKERS STUDIO (1 MIN**)

We wondered about predictive injury forecasting with AI models and imagined what a product of that might look like. And no world building is complete without the miscreants and malfeasants, so we imagined what kinds of criminal activity might exist, such as this speculative notion of “prompt frontrunning”, in which hackers are able to inject and alter prompts and subsequently the action and activity of LLMs and AI systems.

SLIDE 53 - KEY TAKE AWAYS

And a note that the immersion effect is key to making the adjacent possible legible and tangible, and a skill that is required for truly expansive imagining. Obtaining a thorough sense of being in the breakthrough future where your ideas is applied and in use in these kinds of ways requires a sense of immersion in that world.

SLIDE 54 - TEXT ANNOTATION: CONCLUSIONS (1 MIN)

Most times the adjacent possible representing a big breakthrough is unexpected even as it may be right in front of us.

SLIDE 55 - WHEELS ON LUGGAGE

Wheels on luggage is my favorite example. It’s so obvious, but it took a long time. And now to have luggage without wheels is the unexpected thing.

SLIDE 56 - JOGGING

SLIDE 57 - JOGGING

SLIDE 58 - JOGGING

SLIDE 59 - JOGGING

SLIDE 60 - JOGGING

Hopefully by now you see some of the contours of how to see and how to prototype, evaluate, track and translate trends, identify any relevant opportunities and begin to test and validate the opportunities at the vanguard of technological possibility.

SLIDE 61

This is Brian Eno, the artist and musician.

SLIDE 62

Brian Eno and Peter Schmid collaborated on this Oblique Strategies card deck and combined their thinking in 1970. It was created to help breakthrough creative blocks. The cards are filled with aphorisms and directives that are meant to help one think differently, to see the world in a new way, to break through the constraints of one’s own thinking.

SLIDE 63 - REPETITION IS A FORM OF CHANGE

The oblique strategy is to look at an opportunity sideways, from an oblique angle. This is the essence of the adjacent possible. It’s about seeing the world in a way that is not the norm, not the expected, not the usual. Allowing space for serendipity and unexpected encounters and collaborations.

SLIDE 64 - HONOR THY ERROR AS A HIDDEN INTENTION

It’s not a direct path, but an oblique path. Where what feels wrong is taken as an invitation. It’s a path that requires a bit of imagination, a bit of curiosity, a bit of a willingness to step into the unknown and to see what might be there.

SLIDE 65 - TEXT ANNOTATION: ENO DOCUMENTARY SCREENING PHOTO (1 MIN)

Speaking of Brian Eno, we recently collaborated with Gary Hustwit, who’s recent documentary on Brian Eno we screened here in Los Angeles in collaboration with our friends over at the culture brand Brain Dead. “Why?” you might ask.

SLIDE 66 - MARCUS, GARY, JULIAN

Eno’s work as a musician and artist is consistent with this notion of exploration and the adjacent possible. His work is understood as applying technology to the generation of new forms of musical expression. He’s considered the father of generative music - that is music that is algorithmically generated. And this form of generative exploration is very much resonant with the work that we do in applied technology and innovation.

SLIDE 67

It’s also because Gary Hustwit in his motivation to document Brian Eno’s work asked himself a simple and earnest question: why does a film have to be the same every time you see it? This is precisely the kind of wonderfully earnest, beautifully child-like question that allows you to step into some new breakthrough territory with a sense of wonder and curiosity. The value of this approach is clear in the success of the film, now up for an Oscar, toured globally, and very likely the highest grossing independent documentary — with no distributor except Gary and his modest team, a website, a mailing list, and a lot of air miles.

SLIDE 68 - TEXT ANNOTATION: KEY TAKEAWAYS (2 MINS)

• Breakthroughs require new ways of seeing: Seeing into the new territories that you are about to enter requires new language, new ways of seeing, and a way to vividly imagine and sense into the newness of the breakthrough new territory.
• Imagination is key to seeing into the breakthrough. It cannot just be about the availability of a technology or a trend. You have to see the breakthrough world on the ground — in a grounded, tangible way. Ask yourself what would be different and how specifically and put it in the hands as if this world existed. Ask yourself, what’s for breakfast in a world in which AI is just taken for granted. How do you get to work in this breakthrough world? A helpful metaphor: Imagination is like a muscle, it needs exercise. It needs to be stretched, it needs to be worked out, it needs to be used. It needs to be flexed. It needs to be used in a way that is not just about the abstract, but about the tangible, the real, the grounded, the actual.
• Observe the world closely: George Perec, the French writer, had a wonderful exercise where he would sit in a cafe and write down everything that he saw pass before his field of view. I see this as a kind of exercise of the powers of observation, like kettle bells for the brain. He also asked us to question our teaspoons, find the miraculous in the everyday.
• Imagining the extraordinary as normal, ordinary, and everyday is an additional technique. Imagine AI when it is in a bedside table, or on a cereal box, or in a pair of shoes.
• See the world sideways / obliquely. This technique is about looking at the world from a different angle, from a different perspective. It’s about seeing the world in a way that is not the norm, not the expected, not the usual. It’s about seeing the world in a way that is unexpected, and surprising..
• Do the opposite of what is expected or what everyone else says is normal. Not because you expect it to lead to a breakthrough — but because you are on the look out for the unexpected which comes from exploring. We do this in order to bring a childlike wonder and imagination to the exploration, unheeled by the structures associated with traditional incremental innovation strategies. is to tap into the kind of expansive imagination the child has that is often sadly diminished with age as we try to fit into some kind of normative world, because sticking out — thinking different — as the wonderful Apple ad campaign said — is often punished. But it’s the key to the adjacent possible.

SLIDE 69- THANK YOU + BRANDING (15 MIN)