What’s New – 5 September 2019

To celebrate Athena’s 6th birthday, we’ve added the following enhancements to our service.

Trends and Consequences: we’ve added automatic ‘Trends’ and ‘Consequences’ to Athena's repertoire complementing her existing ‘Causes’ and ‘Solutions’ analyses. The latter now appear at the top of the page instead of the bottom. These are now all offered for free to our 20,000 public members and appear first on the opening page below. 

Actions: A new ‘Actions’ button leads to Forecasts, Metrics, Tools and Intelligence, that are now only available to subscribing members.

The new system now allows us to extend our video-led training to cover Forecasts, Metrics, Tools and Intelligence separately, by clicking the Learn More link above.

SWOT: by popular request, we now provide detailed narrative analysis of the SWOT classification with just 1 click.

Simplified pages and navigation: we’ve made further strides in simplifying our database page as follows:

• The Glossary and Library can now be found in the Guide section on the left. 

• The App can now be under the Other Services banner on the left.

• Feedback has now been moved to the left-hand navigation bar too.

• Challenges now only show global issues to non-subscribing members. Subscribing members can continue to see all issues.

Source topics now match the Lexicon: Athena's growing knowledge base of 3,300 keywords in her Lexicon is now linked to the Source keyword listing meaning her topic inputs match her outputs. She will add more keywords continuously and simultaneously now to her Lexicon and Source list.

Since Athena’s birth in September 2013, her knowledge base has grown to nearly 100,000* metadata words covering key people, authors, organizations, countries, cities and topics gleaned from 37,500 sources to find over 360,000 verbatim forecasts. You can expect further acceleration of her extraction capabilities in the months and years ahead.

*Her 100,000 metadata words compare to most adult native test-takers with a vocabulary range of about 20,000-35,000. 

New Spline Chart: For the first time, Athena is auto-writing the story of the graph at the top of the metric. She already takes unstructured text from the web and social media in the form of forecasts, aggregates those forecasts into metrics and is now offering her interpretation of the visualization in text form.

This new chart also fundamentally alters the possibilities for clients to develop their own metrics. Clients can now modify Athena’s interpretation and save the metric and their notes to a report.

The spline now can show 10,000 forecasts on a fast machine thus improving knowledge and confidence about emerging change.

The changes to this chart are significant because we plan to spread the new capabilities to all our other Metrics as the next step in creating a 1-click, customisable report.

Design Futures: We have added Design Futures to the toolkit, led by Marco Bevolo PhD, previously with Philips Design, who now inspires and connects makers and thinkers to design a bright future, by human-driven strategy. Marco facilitates classic and collaborative design thinking tools including Redefine, Double Diamond, Reverse and Leapfrog methods among others.

Happy futuring,

The Shaping Tomorrow team