What's New - 16 March 2021

We are delighted to launch the world's first completely digitized, strategic foresight and collaborative response system in Shaping Tomorrow's 18th birthday week. Our robot, Athena, can now publish full foresight reports on any topic in minutes, without human intervention, and facilitate collaborative workshops in hours, rather than the months required by traditional projects. All at the lowest market prices. Check out the launch details here.

Welcome page

When you login you now have the choice of viewing the existing Driving Forces page, free scans covering over 350 ready-made global challenges, or for you to search for your own topic.

Figure 1: New welcome page

Simplified navigation

The service now majors on our flagship Publish capability. Just search on any topic, click Publish and complete the dialog box in less than a minute. Click Save and our robot will produce you her full foresight analysis on your topic in less than the time it takes you to drink a coffee.

Figure 2. New database page

Publish

We have added several new automatically produced slides to Publish

• Threats  / Opportunities visualisation by PEST
• Hope Index
• S-Curve

And simplified the order dialog page.

Refine and Respond

When you search for a topic the system will reveal the Refine and Respond buttons as before. See Figure 2, top right.

Left-hand navigation

All other services are now on the left and, for the first time, entirely free to use.

Driving Force Page

A new donut graphic analyses the shape of our database in terms of SWOT, Scenarios, PEST, S-curve, CLA and 3 Horizons. See Figure 2, Bottom right.
A What's Next? Dropdown has been added to the Driving Force analyses.
And, a new Related Questions link has been added at the bottom of the forecasts to challenge your thinking,

Scenarios

We have re-labelled Scenarios / Discipline as ‘Scenarios / ‘Routine' for clearer language.

Behind the scenes - a transformation!

Two years ago, we set an objective to reduce human editing to zero. At that time, the machine was 50% accurate and required the editor to check every forecast which at the time ran at 400+ per day. At the end of last year, the machine was 70% accurate because of numerous improvements. On 23 December 2020 we taught the machine to present forecasts where she was doubtful of her work (30%) and the editor stopped reviewing the 70% correct forecasts saving her considerable time. Simultaneously, we were then able to double the number of daily forecasts extracted by our robot.

We then found that of the 30% doubtful items (240 per day) the machine had been accurate 67% of the time and that these could be fixed by software enhancement.
Last weekend this enhancement was put live.

We have now introduced a sampling process for the editor to look at 20% of forecasts to ensure that humans remain in charge of the process.

What's Next?

We have a long list of improvements in the pipeline, but our main pages are now unlikely to change any time soon. Our three key projects are:

• Internet of Behaviours: Being able to alert our members to change affecting them even before they search.
• Machine Reasoning: Creating a system to answer any question our members might have, moving from providing information and knowledge to understanding and wisdom.
• More video guides: replacing our static PowerPoint guides with dynamic video representations.

Happy futuring,
The Shaping Tomorrow team