The Search for Answers in an Era of Deep Change, Four Noises and The Uncertainty Weathervane

“May you have the hindsight to know what you've learned and where you’ve been. May you have the foresight to know where you’re going and what might be possible. May you have the insight to know when you’ve gone too far or not far enough. And may you have the crossight to avoid the blindspots and find the magical new-to the world in-between. ” Sean Moffitt

For anybody that knows me well, they'll know that I frequently go the extra mile to distill what is really going on "out there" in the world. It can be annoying but I can't shake the belief that just enough is the enemy of great research and intelligence. So instead of doing what the conventional researchers and garden variety change agents do:

• I canvass global all-stars in all outskirts of the planet, not just the people that are closest or most familiar to me,
• I scour for the best, most interesting and frequently opposable minds related to a subject, not the most popular, most published or best trafficked ones,
• I find comfort with asking a set of questions or challenges that make me swim in ambiguity at the start of an intelligence effort, not try to orchestrate the facts to support my ingoing, unwavering view,
• I offer up many conclusions and options as outputs, frequently ranked as a guide, to allow people to apply thinking to their own situation, not proclaim the one reductionist thought that while sounding smart really blurs what's really being felt cross-spectrum and,
• I synthesize a torrent of inputs and research approaches, not the one that gets spit back from ChatGPT.

And why do I make this effort (sometimes unheathily so)?

Facts, truth, opinions and dogma are at war with each other in our current uncertain and polarized world. Each vie for influence and intersect together inside how people think about a given issue or topic. There is a collossal difference between "your truth" and "the truth" (or at least a smart bet at THE truth). Oprah has done us no good service by popularizing this phrase into our lexicon. Sure it may be great to feed starving children based on your truth - a convenient arrangement of views, but what if your truth supports being a racist, or believing in a flat earth, or steering your company into an abyss.

Time and time again, I see personal belief in the forms of obstinate thinking, soundbyte-y trends or attractive ideologies that dismiss evidence or ignore facts and that subsequently lead to poor quality decisions and outcomes. You may be entitled to your opinion or your truth, but let's call it for what it is. The collaborative intelligence I produce gets closer to understanding how the world really operates. One of the reasons is it's not just me, it's us. It's the hivemind. It's the swarm intelligence and when warranted, it's stepping out from the scrutiny of established views.

Distinguishing between hard evidence, soft evidence, strident opinion or whimsical belief is the essential work for smart leaders and the sweat equity of intelligence experts.  Applying the difference between truth and belief, between the preferred, probable and possible, between the fashion, cycle and sustaining trend, is the domain of the leading sensemakers, foresighters and researchers.

What stands in the way of these intelligence whisperers is a litany of cognitive biases preventing us from seeing the truths that may be staring at us right in front of our faces. In writing my upcoming book Futureproofing: The Future Beyond Innovation - I actually codified forty-eight of these that impede our ability to - estimate, decide, prove, attribute, recall and influence- the world around us.

Four Sources of Intelligence Noise

Too often I find four sources of noise that provide little service to the advancement of the world's intelligence:

• the speaker/authority noise - those stage pros who land on a catchy set of words and arguments, that whether right or wrong, is immaterial to the performance and entertainment they put forward and the resulting adulation they receive

• the celebrity/activist noise - people with a following that may have passion or conviction on a particular movement or topic, but rarely a balanced view of the facts

• the bad actor noise - in the hopes of advancement, winning or scoring points, these are the people that leave evidence, facts and truth aside for the intentional sake of sewing doubt and casting shade on facts and truth

• the average person on the street noise - although solid as one of many inputs, the average person will simply not be the lightning rod of insight you yearn for; they will not be the imagineer of the future; and they will certainly fall short of being the architect who can configure the complex world that lies in front of us. That sounds harsh, but Ricky Gervais puts it even harsher and funnier terms.

A Carousel of Research & Intelligence x 21

Moving into 2024, I have parsed out my intelligence life three ways and across twenty-one areas:

Futureproofing Foresight Ventures - in my independent practice, I have a rotating set of seven serial innovation and disruption-focused studies in which two of them get their day in the sun every year plus some passion plays:

• The Emerging Technology 30 & The Digital Periscope©,
• The Customer Zeitgeist©,
• The Corporate Innovation Playbook©,
• The Business Model 52©,
• The Hockey Stick Benchmark Index©,
• Scale & Growth Field Guide©
• The Metatrends© and a one-off
• NovoDwell© - The Future of Homes and Home Life

Cygnus Ventures' The Radar Collection - future focused studies - the next six up are:

• The Biocene Report©,
• The Future of Multi-Realities©,
• The Future of Cities©
• Consumer Futures©
• The Future of Money and Defi©
• Sustainability Scenarios©

... and the focus of this post...

Cygnus Ventures' Weathervanes - hindsight, insight, foresight and corssight on today's most relevant topics

• Uncertainty - Getting Upstream from Massive Change©,
• Post-Pandemica - What Really Happened with COVID, and What Did We Learn©,
• AI Realities - What are We Actually Using AI For and Where is it Headed©
• The DNA of Organization Next - What Does Organization Mean in the Future and What Shifts are Required to Support Them©
• The Regenerative Economy- An Honest View of What's Possible in. a Regenerative Economic Rewiring©
• The Happiness Report - What Makes Us Professionally Happy and is there and ROI to That? ©
• The Future of Money and DeFi - What's in your Future Financial Wallet?©

Hit me up if you would like to collaborate on any of these. Now onto the feature film of this post.

The Uncertainty Weathervane

The first out of the shoot from the list above is Uncertainty. In November, I have the pressing need to produce the outcomes from our Uncertainity Weathervane.

Uncertainty has been a driving force in what we think, why we believe and how we act, especially as our economy, shitting cultural values, emerging technology and recent pandemic tear at what used to be with what things are now. We thought it might be time well spent studying the topic more deeply.

Is it a research report? Is it a book? It it a community? Is it an event? Well, it's all those things...

We are going to produce a research report that will be the biggest and hopefully best take on this under-evaluated paradigm if a never normal, permacrisis, superCAFFEINATED Uncertain world.

We have already written the book and our second edition is coming out in December:

We are building a Navigators of Uncertainty community that continues to involve our inner circle network on various endeavours attached to this Uncertainty effort.

We are hosting a set of events that convene impoirtant forums on the discussion of Uncertainty as a concept, catalyst, new frontier of intelligence, content and methods.

Now we want to answer our 12 key questions that will be the foundation of an intelligence report published for November.

Only respondents will get access to: toplines of the report, an opportunity to collaborate on deeper research, attend the earliest sharing of results on November 23rd with the potential opportunity to be on our podcast and have the option to author an article of our expanding Uncertainty catalogue.

Take our Uncertainty Weathervane survey here

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