What's New – 26 March 2020

New Homepage

We’ve refreshed our homepage for Shaping Tomorrow’s 17th birthday with a more modern treatment.

Our latest Trend Alerts now take a more dynamic, centre stage. And, we have now added the ability to add Alarms here for both ourselves and our clients to spread the word about rapid evolving and unexpected changes happening right now. They will appear only when particularly urgent e.g. Coronavirus.

We have also added new links to better help you 'Shape Your Future' with:

• our unique Gapfinder tool that helps you spot your strategic blindspots in minutes
•  initial access to the embryonic global futures communities we are starting to build
•  more visible access to our future Surveys that help you determine your organizational fitness and to quickly ask your stakeholders ‘What’s Next?’

Metrics

We have brought more of our metrics up to the same standard as the Trend Waves chart including the robot’s ability to analyse more of the key points automatically.

We still have a few remaining metrics to convert to this now standardized format and to compare time periods.

Publish

We’ve been working towards creating a world-first capability to produce real-time, fully comprehensive, automatic strategic foresight reports.

We are finally at base camp with the arrival of the new metric enhancements.

Clients can now ask our robot, Athena, to make a slide presentation on any topic in the time it takes one to get and drink a cup of coffee. Completing the form below is all that is required for the robot to produce a draft report that follows the same format as our regular Trend Alerts like those available on our homepage.

Clients can use these presentations as is, modify them to their needs or insert the slides into other presentations.

We are now looking to improve the robot’s cognition and analysis capabilities still further. Let us know your own ideas for improvement here.

Snapshots

We are grateful to Vanessa Brown, Red Cross and Marie McAuliffe, International Organization for Migration, for suggesting the promotion and further development of our Snapshot capability and integral Fake News checker. Snapshots can now be accessed from the small button that appears right after each forecast.

The revised Snapshots now look like this:

We have added a new cross-check of web sources and near duplicates that we have previously removed while editing from the Shaping Tomorrow live system. The latter will only appear if there are near duplicates associated with a forecast.

Members can now also better validate fake news and biased sources and report offenders to Shaping Tomorrow for potential visual flagging or permanent banning.

Intelligence

We’ve put back the SWOT strip here after realizing the error of our ways. Apologies.

Driving Forces

We have added a Feeds word cloud here by popular request.

Renaming

We have renamed several buttons to be consistent across the service:

•  Spline > Trend waves
•  Leaderboard > Influencers
•  PESTLE > PEST

What’s Next?

We are working on giving Athena more of a voice and virtual presence. We already have a working test on our mobiles where Athena can respond to a verbally asked question in real-time just like Amazon’s Alexa. And similarly, we are working on a screen-based, wall mounted or VR system where Athena can listen, speak and offer visual metrics and foresight in team meetings and to individual members.

Simulations and games are also next on our list as well as continuing to improve Publish and the standardization of all our metrics

Plus, we continue to move towards zero human editing. That too was greatly enhanced in this release.

Happy futuring,

The Shaping Tomorrow team