Menu

About the SUMMARY REPORT

Objective
The Summary Report has been designed for  a fast understanding of the potential future of your selected topic with little embellishment, apart from the highlighting of the key drivers of change mentioned in the text and to make it easily shareable with others. It gives you granular detail on trends, forecasts, innovations and change that will shape tomorrow's society, your business, and yours and your children's lives. It blends data, news, analysis and insights in the form of FORECASTS for you to quickly spot trends, pick promising innovations and mitigate risks before they may happen.

The displayed verbatim FORECASTS shown here are automatically scraped daily from articles, reports and social media using embedded AI developed by Shaping Tomorrow and ForeKnowledge and using text analytics from Intellexer. Latest items gathered in the last week are highlighted as [New].

Intellexer is a text analyzer that summarizes web pages and documents and instantly pinpoints the most relevant information from the FORECASTS in the form of Twitter-like, bulleted statements.

If you don't find your interest topic listed on the front page you can use the SEARCH box to instantly find associated FORECASTS and then summarize your findings.

How It  Works
The Summary Report uses the latest verbatim FORECASTS gleaned from the Web (Bing) and Social Media (Twitter) on a daily basis. The sources used are professional sources added by ourselves, our clients and more recently, our self-learning robot (8000+).

It is only a summary of a small population of latest forecasts and is no substitute for the full FORECASTS you can obtain here to inform your future strategy. We caution you not to rely solely on the summary in this regard but to use the full FORECASTS for a full picture of emerging change in your interest topic. With the full FORECASTS, you can refine your search to specific countries, regions, sectors, organizations, time horizons or just statistical indicators.

Clients can establish their own private summary FORECASTS at will.

False positives
The robot extracted FORECASTS can augment human intelligence by helping avoid common cognitive traps.

However, the Summary may contain contradictions or suggest different futures. This is deliberate systems thinking and designed to highlight future uncertainties that may require you to consider various potential scenarios in your deliberations.

Occasionally, Athena - our robot, may get it wrong or picked up a near-duplicate and we missed her error in our editing. Robots and humans are both fallible. Let us know please when that happens and we will fix it for the benefit of all.

Similarly, the text summarizer can misinterpret words when relating to topics. For instance, 'generation' is used in so many sentences that the summarizer finds it tough to distinguish between 'Generation Z', Power generation etc. Just ignore the misinterpretations and concentrate on the relevant forecasts for your interest topic.

Remember, Newton's Third Law: "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction". So look at each forecast simultaneously from both perspectives and try to see both the opportunity and risk it contains, for that is where you can innovate or mitigate emerging change before it happens.

At this stage our editor pays just a little attention to the veracity of the FORECASTS deleting only those known to be wrong or untruthful e.g. "an asteroid will hit the Earth in the next month!" The editor endeavors not to introduce personal bias into the forecasts however much they deviate from personal views.

What is more important is to present you verbatim future ideas and let you and your associates check for truthfulness at the next stage described below.

Using the Forecasts

  • Literature review

Either on your own or preferably with a group of interested associates, identify the key drivers and issues that will affect your organization in the future.  Also look for opportunities to innovate, threats to manage and uncertainties to exploit before your rivals.

Our clients mostly establish 30 minutes sessions for up to ten people. Each is tasked with reviewing a different private, key topic FORECAST for the organization from the full forecast. (Usually not a topic they are responsible for, but one that heavily impacts on their work). They get 2 minutes each to describe what they saw that week. Then the group takes 5 minutes to look for common threads and patterns among their differing vantage points. The last five minutes is used to discuss next steps on moving these forward.

If a burning question arises it can be documented here and then answered by working through the relevant plan and act methods on offer to reach an informed decision on the best way forward.

Keep checking back on this Summary and 'more topic FORECASTS' to adjust your plan as circumstances change.

  • Shallow dive report

Paste the Summary page to a Word document and format your report as you wish. We use this popular format for our Trend Alerts. Then supplement or amend the Summary FORECASTS with  'more topic FORECASTS' by using the Export function. Top and tail the report with reasons why the reader should be interested in the report and links to more resources and helpful services. The time taken to produce our Trend Alert is now 90 minutes compared to over 5 hours using previous manual methods.

  • PowerPoint Presentation

Again use the Summary page and 'more topic Indicators' to create a presentation on the future of a topic. Here is one we recently made for the Australian Public Service Commission using the Indicator search term - talent or HR or "Human Resources" or "Shared Services". The time taken to produce is now 2 hours compared to 40 hours previously. This example is unembellished with evocative design and imaging at the request of the client.

  • Decide

Use the Decide button, in the center-panel dashboard to obtain the full forecast in spreadsheet form and generate an Options analysis form. The spreadsheet will provide a full listing of forecasts around the subject you are interested in. Before reading the spreadsheet first be clear about the future question you are trying to answer. Then mark relevant verbatim forecasts for further evaluation in a fast pass through all those presented or determine your responses in the Options analysis form.

When finished, now return to those you have selected and use as your evidence in a report, slide presentation, article or scenario planning exercise, eliminating duplicates or similar forecasts and organizing in a summary the way you want it.

This method can be done collaboratively by splitting the spreadsheet into pieces and asking individuals or teams to find key drivers, opportunities or risks.

Statistical relevance
The Summary Report does not currently show the statistical relevance for design reasons and because the Intellexer software is designed to highlight in bold the most mentioned drivers from the FORECAST texts. 

Statistical relevance, as well as impact and likelihood assessments, are now available for each FORECAST under the 'Assess' button and within the dashboard under Decide.

How the forecasts are created
For a detailed understanding of how our robot, Athena, creates these FORECASTS please click here.

Improving the summary    
Do give us your ideas and desires for how to make the Summary Report most relevant to your work using the free-form message box below. Thanks in anticipation.

Login