Templosion
Last week, Edie Weiner, President of a futurist consulting group fired up her session organized by the Financial Women's Association here in New York City, by running through a quick demonstration of 'Pick a Number' to show how even large trends can sometimes come with minor outliers based on cultural differences and varied experiences. She got the audience going with provocative questions like :
What is the biggest currency after the US Dollar and Reward points?
Is cybersecurity a myth? (Hint : the answer is in the semantics)
Is an Audit Committee structurally sound? (This one was for the rhetoric that no one and not even a defined group of people can know it all)
Is anyone building businesses while keeping time and technology templosion in mind? (This one piqued my interest the most and have explored it a little here)
Have we conquered virtual reality? Is it still virtual if we 'think' it is real?
Are we ready for flip generation leadership which is upon us because for the first time a number of CEOs will be moving up the ranks and supervising people 20 to 30 years older than them?
Have you recently practiced collaborative consumption?
Ever wonder if everything is going in the direction of nanotechnology and how?
Weiner claims there are two main indicators that can tell us where the future is headed - Where disposable income is spent? and Where the jobs are going? She referred back to her book Future Think and explained how her shop has recently coined the phrase 'Metaspace Economy' which includes inner space, outer space, micro space, cyber space, storage, inter space, design space, time space, play space and green to blue.
She goes into detail at the Big Think site here and at her 2012 TED talk. Weiner's smooth and engaging delivery was evidence of a rehearsed portfolio of facts that she and her colleagues had gathered, studied and extrapolated over the years. Most of these facts are known and discussed by other futurists as well, but there was a term that Weiner added to my vocabulary - Templosion, which she described as the compression of Time into smaller and smaller chunks. She played with the notion of Time being a luxury, being leveraged in novel ways these days, compressing learning, operational and new product development cycles. This made me think of how the term could also be used to describe the lifespan phenomenon that businesses have been facing in the last century. Corporations in the S&P 500 in 1958 lasted in the index for 61 years, on average. By 1980, the average tenure had shrunk to about 25 years. Today, it stands at just 18 years based on seven year rolling averages. I would say this would have all kinds of interesting implications even on an individual level, all the way from investment strategies to career choices.
On the topic of future trends, I would recommend anyone tracking them to subscribe to the Big Think newsletter, which is a compilation of well written multi-disciplinary articles on potential disruptors that might still be on the fringes or in research/experimental stages, but seem to be strong candidates for adoption and scaling up. And for more on templosion, here is an article that someone from Weiner's group wrote up for the NJSCPA. And the famous Sunni Brown doodled up one of the talks Weiner gave here.
The picture above was taken at the pier in Portland, Maine during a family vacation this summer.