On December 4, 2024, the CEO of one of America's largest healthcare insurers was shot dead on the streets of Manhattan. Angry people, living in a world that is filled with inequality and feeling squeezed on every side, will eventually snap. This is not something we want, nor is it a call to arms. But it is a possible future scenario that CEOs of large companies might need to be as careful of their personal security as many politicians currently are.

The antidote is to build future-proof businesses that see doing good as good for business. This isn't just a cute tagline - it is a core pillar of the DNA of a future-proof business.

Our team at TomorrowToday helps organisations to understand what a future-proof DNA looks like, and to identify the drivers of disruptive change taking us into that future. Contact us to discover more about our work:

It could happen. Sometime in the future. Data centres use an incredible amount of electricity and water. Towns that incentivise these data centres to locate nearby for jobs and tax benefits might find themselves dealing with unrealistic demands for power and water - to the point where a data centre could sue the town to continue providing them with water even if it means the people living in the town get cut off.

For more details of just how much power and water data centres use, listen to Paris Marx’s 4 part mini series on the Tech Won’t Save Us Podcast: https://techwontsave.us/episode/241_data_vampires_going_hyperscale_episode_1 

It's September 2082, and we mark the 50th anniversary of the official start of what has become The Great 50-Year Global Drought. Cities have been emptied, country borders changed, wars fought and entire economies gutted... and there seems to be no end in sight. 

This episode of ThrowForward Thursday is based on historical facts. Back in 1177BC, a 300 year drought caused the almost complete collapse of multiple civilisations in the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean areas. You can listen to Dan Snow's History Hit podcast, as he interviews Eric Cline, the author of '1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed':  https://podcasts.apple.com/in/podcast/the-bronze-age-collapse/id1042631089?i=1000664352855 

It's a sobering lesson from the past. It's an alarming possibility for our future. 

Slightly late this week, this is a special edition of ThrowForward Thursday, answering a question sent to us: "Where do you get all your ideas?"

This episode I talk about our team's TIDES model of disruptive change, that helps us decide what to look for. These are the five most disruptive forces we believe are shaping the world, and we are constantly on the lookout for examples of change in these areas.

Next week, we will take a look at WHERE we look, to help you and your team get better at scanning the horizon for yourselves.

This is a longer episode of TFT than normal, but I hope you find it useful and insightful, as you develop your ability to think like a futurist.

Our story starts 20 years, as a fungal infection wiped out the world's frogs. It continues today as we see a resurgence in malaria and other tropical diseases because the frogs are not eating insects. And we realise that this is an all-too-familiar story of how our actions are damaging fragile ecosystems.

We therefore look to the future, hopeful that we can find a way to stop the harm, reverse the damage and restore the environment.

The end of frogs? Let's hope not.

READ MORE ABOUT THIS:
* https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/amphibian-apocalypse-frogs-salamanders-worst-chytrid-fungus
* https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47735823 
* https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/bd-frogs-apocalypse-disease/585862/ 
* https://www.grid.news/story/science/2022/09/23/malaria-cases-surged-in-central-america-after-a-fungal-pandemic-wiped-out-frogs/ 

VIDEO: Throwforward Thursday 71: The End of Water (and three possible solutions)

We all know that the world has a huge problem with water. We don't have enough of it in the places we need it. There are at least three solutions that could change this, and could be available by the middle of this century: we could make water, seed clouds and scale up desalination programs. But each of these solutions has massive problems that need to be solved before they're usable.

However we do it, we will have to ensure we do not reach the end of water. That would be the end of life.

I don't know how far into the future we need to go before we find the end of emails, but in my opinion it can't come soon enough. Emails need to go the same way as faxes, telegrams and telexes. It won't happen with one single replacement solution, but rather with multiple different apps and options that replace the overwhelming inboxes we deal with today.

Why don't you start now to do what you can to reduce emails for your team, your clients and your business?

More people - especially young people - around the world are choosing not to get married, not to have long-term relationships, not to have children, and to have less sex. No, it's not the time of free "drug, sex and rock 'n' roll" anymore.

We are not predicting the actual "end of sex", but possibly a significant shift in sex "as we know it" today, with many opportunities emerging for sex toys, sex aids, sexual health and sexual fulfilment industries.

There's nothing rude or crude in this video, but it might still cause one or two blushes to consider how sex might change in the future. If you're interested in even more insights, a research report from our team at TomorrowToday called The Future of Sex is available at https://www.graemecodrington.com/post/throwforward-thursday-69-the-end-of-sex

This is the final part of my conversation with Easy Equities' Carel Nolte, and we finish our series with a chat about what we can do to improve investing in the next few years. Carel really knows his stuff, and the insights generated from over a million users at Easy Equities means they're probably got the most up to date insights to share.

As always, we also talk about wine, and you'll hear my disappointment in not being able to introduce Carel to a stunning new wine - only because he already knows it, and agrees it is stunning. We both agree that this is a perfect way to end our series: to discover that something we thought was not yet experienced is actually already available. The future is here already.

OK... maybe we stretched the wine and investing analogy just a bit, but I hope you appreciate the insights and enjoy the conversation.

We use sand for pretty much everything we can see around us - including the glass in the screen you're watching this on. And we are running out of sand. This is a bigger issue than you probably realise, and about as important as running out of water will be for our way of life.

More reading and resources:
* https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a39880899/earth-is-running-out-of-sand/
* https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is-running-out-of-sand
* https://allusesof.com/nature/25-uses-of-sand/

WATCH:
* https://youtu.be/CcQfkH-7w2k

We are all caught up now...

Carel Nolte of Easy Equities and myself, Graeme Codrington, continue our conversations about the future of investing - and wine - by talking about what can go wrong.

We touch on the problems of unrealistic returns, overblown promises, day trading, lack of research (and what "research means" to the average investor), and staying the course as an investor. We discuss whether we agree with Warren Buffett's investment advice about making sure you don't pick losers rather than trying to pick winners, and what to do when we really want to panic about the markets and losing money.

In the end, it comes down to having a plan, being consistent and believing in yourself. And knowing when to call it quits - like we had to do with our corked wine.

Carel Nolte and I continue our conversations about the future of investing, with some interesting ways to diversify your portfolio by investing "offshore". It's not always what you think (for example, most of the Top Ten stocks on the Johannesburg Stock exchange make almost all their income "off shore").

We then sample a corn wine from the Netherlands, and hastily retreat... because we still had two more videos to record, and that corn wine would have finished us.

This is video 6 of 8 - next week we will look at what can go wrong when investing, and will finish the week after that with what could go right in the future of investing.

If you're based in South Africa, and want to check out Easy Equities, you don't have to change your current broker or any of your current products, but you might find it to be the best online platform you can use for investing in SA and off shore. Check it out via: https://bit.ly/3Pdd2qN (I get some referral credits if you do... thanks).

Apologies for the delay in releasing these Easy Future Conversations to the podcast. Here are a few bonus episodes to catch up with the YouTube feed. 

We are half way through the conversations I had with my friend, Carel Nolte, about the future of investing, what he's learnt from his work at Easy Equities, and our love of wine.

Carel hijacked this segment by forcing me to try a Rose wine (he believed he had found one that I would like). So we start with the wine, but then Carel expertly leads the conversation into a discussion about the future of investing, how we decide what approach we should take with investing, and provides some insights into what his team at Easy Equities have found from the analysis of over one million trading accounts (including how they design their platform and constantly improve the user experience).

And, yes, we did have fun with this one...

Sports News Headlines for 4 September 2039: Jet Pack Drone Racing League Suspended

Just ahead of the first African Olympic Games in 2040, the latest Olympic sport of Jet Pack Drone Racing has been dealt a blow as two more deaths results in the suspension of the European League. 

What might the future of dangerous sports look like? How do we push the boundaries of human endeavour while minimising risks?

Now that we can get food delivered to us from any restaurant to anywhere, we don't have to rely on the room service offered to us by the hotel we're staying in.

OK... this isn't really a "future prediction" as it is a potential reality already. This week's "lesson from the future" is less about hotels, food delivery and room service, and more about the potential of unexpected competition in your own industry.

But, if you do find yourself in a hotel and don't like the room service options, don't forget you have choices these days.

Antibiotics changed our world 100 years ago, probably adding about 20 years to average lifespans as we dealt with infections and disease. But bacteria are continuing to adapt and are fast outpacing our antibiotics. It is very likely that by 2050 our current antibiotics will be useless, and that could dramatically change how we manage healthcare. We need to use fewer antibiotics, in ourselves and in our food supply; and we need to look for alternatives to antibiotic use to combat bacterial infections. 

Why do we still have rush hour traffic - with EVERYONE trying to get to work and school at the SAME TIME every working day? It's 2022 and we know about flexible working, and public transport and even the potential for AI-managed traffic systems (via traffic apps or driverless cars). This is not so much a prediction as a hope and plea that we rid the world of the curse of rush hour traffic as soon as possible. 

One of the dumbest things we do in business is force people to retire, simply because they hit a specific date in the calendar, even though they might be excellent contributors and still want to continue working. As individuals, most of us already know we can't afford to retire in our sixties (especially if we are going to live much longer than previous generations). And many of us would rather save to give ourselves flexibility and dignity, rather than merely to be able to afford to stop working. 

The concept of retirement needs to change, for individuals and organisations. 

The fourth (of eight) conversations with Carel Nolte about the future of investing where we talk about alternative investment options, asset classes for the future, and how we can get children interested in investing. 

As always, we also talk about wine, and this time chat about an interesting blend made by an interesting wine maker, Erika Obermeyer. If you're not a fan of the wine conversation, skip a few minutes to the end to hear Carel talk about getting future generations involved in future investing. 

If you're based in South Africa, check out Easy Equities as a platform - use https://bit.ly/3Pdd2qN (no obligations, but full disclosure: I earn just over $2 if you activate an account after you've had a look. If enough of you do that, I can afford another bottle of Erika's wine). 

Imagine a world in which we don't eat meat from animals. No, not a world with no meat, but a rather a world where our meat is grown in labs, rather than on animals. And no, not fake or artificial meat (from soya or plants), but rather meat grown from animal stem cells, indistinguishable from "real meat". In fact, it IS real meat. 

If we can do this, and ensure that it is healthy, economically viable, sustainable and ethical, the question is: would people eat it. I think they will. And I think it's coming sooner than you think. 

Welcome to Throwforward Thursday. Welcome to tomorrow's world, today.

In this mini-series, my mate, Carel Nolte and I talk about the future of investment, the importance of wealth creation and I get to dig into some of Carel's insights from his work at Easy Equities (a South African investment platform that you can check out here: https://bit.ly/3Pdd2qN - no obligations, but full disclosure: I earn about $2.50 if you activate an account after you've had a look).

We also talk about wine, because Carel and I never talk seriously about anything without wine...

This is our third conversation, and Carel suggested we go back to the basics - to the very foundational principle of investing: DIVERSIFY. But he explains (in between sips of a fantastic red blend wine with lots of interesting, diverse grape varietals in it - see what we did there...), that maybe diversification can mean something different now than it did in the past.

I hope you're enjoying these conversations as much as I did when I had them with Carel.

We are all afraid of something, whether it is snakes, spiders, sharks, the dark, heights or something else. Could technology provide solutions by helping to train our brains to respond in different and less fearful ways?

The answer, of course, is YES, and it is already happening. Check out: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/13/no-fear-the-new-zealand-virtual-reality-app-helping-conquer-phobias

If you have any questions for our team about the future, or have an idea we can use in our weekly jumps into future, drop us a note at http://www.askaboutthefuture.com

This is the second conversation with my mate, Carel Nolte, where we talk about the future of investing, specifically about the ways in which we can build intergenerational wealth. The so-called "American Dream" from a century ago was that if you worked hard, your children could live a better life than you did. This dream should be the mantra in Africa for the next few decades, and it involves thinking differently about what we do with our money, the land, employment and investments. There are no simple solutions here, but these are the right conversations, and Carel brings some wisdom from what his team at Easy Equities are seeing as ordinary South Africans build wealth and a future. Carel and I also savour a fantastic Cape Blend from Idiom wines, that helps us prove the point about leaving an investment to grow better over time. 

There are a lot of diamonds in the world - a total of about 6 billion carats (weighing around a million kilograms), with around 140 million carats mined every year. But known reserves will run out within a decade or so. That won't be the end of diamonds, though. We can now make diamonds in labs. Not "fake" diamonds - we can make real diamonds. But do we want to? Do you care, if you don't know the difference? Either way, we are facing the end of our current relationship with diamonds in the very near future. Diamonds - it seems - are NOT forever.

More of a hope than a prediction, this episode of ThrowForward Thursday has a rant warning attached, as we imagine a future where companies have stopped outsourcing their supplier management to procurement services that make it incredibly difficult to sign contracts, send invoices and get paid for the products and services rendered. Stopped because - maybe - it has been made illegal to outsource procurement!

The cost savings companies make by outsourcing procurement services are completely outweighed by the brand and reputation damage they incur as suppliers are made to jump through time-consuming and costly hoops just to get paid. 

Let's imagine a future where companies are driven more by creating a great environment in which to do business than they are by cost-cutting efficiencies. 

One day late, but that's because I spent yesterday with my good mate, Carel Nolte, talking about the future of investing and what he has learnt from his work at Easy Equities - an innovative investing platform based in South Africa. This is a quick introduction to a new series of 8 videos of Carel and I talking about the future of investing. Over the next 8 weeks, I hope you enjoy listening in to our discussions.

Here is a quick bonus episode of the Future of Work podcast, sharing an insight I discovered in a report from O/Slash. There's a hidden and surprising reason young people don't want to come back to the office: they waste a lot of time being tech support for older colleagues.  Here's how to fix that, and build a better team culture.

Report available: https://www.oslash.com/google-it-first 

Sometime in the 2030s, artificial intelligence-driven algorithms will prove to be better at picking stocks and managing investment funds than human beings - removing emotion, trading faster with more information, and course-correcting better than we can. We didn't think computers would beat us at Chess or Go - we were wrong. "Playing the market" might very well be something left to smart machines, as we see the end of... investment brokers
and fund managers. 

• https://www.scotsman.com/news/environment/insect-numbers-almost-halved-by-agriculture-and-climate-change-3661659
• https://www.ecowatch.com/insect-population-decline-2649925146.html
• https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/insects-apocalypse-dave-goulson/
• https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2002547117

A few days late this week, Throwforward Thursday jumps to the year 2050, where we might have no more cocoa trees in the world. And that would mean the end of chocolate as we know and make it today. There are things that can be done to ensure this doesn't happen - let's make sure we do them. We don't want to live in a world without chocolate, do we?

This week we start a new series about things that are going to end in our lifetimes, and how that will impact the world we live and work in. No, it's not going to be doom and gloom - some of these things can be replaced, and some we can do without anyway.

But our focus is actually going to be on how to prepare for deep structural and disruptive change, with foresight, innovation and adaptability. Please make suggestions for what should be on our list of things coming to an end at http://www.askaboutthefuture.com

Some jobs in the future will require special skills, restricted to those people who have agreed to augment their human skills with additional functionality of robotics. This could be anything from exoskeletons that increase strength and endurance to bionic senses and even enhanced mental processing skills.

Cyborgs - human/machine hybrids - are coming.

Breaking news in 2037: the thawing of Arctic ice releases a 40,000 year old virus that doctors have never seen before. Another unintended consequence of global warming, and a reminder that our world is changing dramatically right now.

How would your business respond to another pandemic lockdown? What would the impact of a global health emergency be on your infrastructure, supply chain, and market. These are scenarios worth considering as you build antifragility into your business.

Contact our team at TomorrowToday for more assistance in building future-ready, antifragile organisations. 

It's our first anniversary edition of Throwforward Thursday, and Graeme reflects on the three main reasons why our team puts together these videos every week (spoiler: it's to help you get better at thinking about the world of tomorrow, and improve how you prepare for it today). 

Twenty years ago, the senior executive team of most businesses was the CEO, COO and CFO - Executive, Operations and Finance. We've since added many new functions to this senior leadership group, including HR, Marketing, Technology, Information and more. But what will the C-suite look like 20 years from now? There are four key pillars to the future of most businesses that probably need new focused executive leaders. Here are eleven suggested new functions for the C-suite of the future. 

Using two blockbuster movies from twenty years ago, we look forward at the future of data, predictive analytics, algorithms, and the ethics of how our data is used.

Science and art combine to show us what can go wrong, and remind us that the human spirit cannot be reduced to an algorithm.

This week's Throwforward Thursday episode was delayed out of respect for the lives lost in last week's deadly floods in South Africa (over 400 lives lost as of recording on 18 April 2022). These floods are the result of climate change and extreme weather, and are just one further deadly reminder of what our future holds. We cannot pretend that any of us will remain untouched by extreme weather. Each incident we experience should spur us on to make the changes and choices required to save our planet.

The Metaverse is rubbish - at least the version currently being hyped to us by retailers and employers. Join Graeme in the Throwforward Thursday studio to see what we DON'T want the Metaverse to be. Oh, and there are dragons. You might want to check this week's podcast out on YouTube - there are some important visuals that will help make sense of it. Go to http://www.youtube.com/graemecodrington 

My final Throwforward Thursday podcast about Dubai Expo looks at my first and last moments at the Expo, where I realised it wasn't just about a fantastical vision of the future for my imagination, but was more an invitation to engage with heart and hands in what we can - and should - do to build a better world right now. This one has lots of video elements, so maybe check out the YouTube video as well as listening to the podcast. 

Plumbers (and all the tradespeople) of the future will be high tech. Drones, robots, and more will be integrated into what they do.

(PS. Tradespeople are always busy, never out of work, and will be able to charge top dollar for their high tech work. Maybe think about this before you default to choosing university as the only option for yourself or your child after school.)

'Bionic' means Humans and Technology not just working with each other, but augmenting and even integrating to supercharge our outputs. There are three obvious ways this could happen: (1) Robotic exoskeletons and human/robot hybrids, (2) software and applications augmenting human intelligence, and (3) techno-diversity where technology becomes part of our diversity quotient. 

We need to move from a goal of automation to a mindset of augmentation.

NOTE: The book referenced in the video is David McCandless, "Information is Beautiful". See his excellent website: https://informationisbeautiful.net 

This week we jump to a future when sports are no longer categorised simply into "men" and "women". I refer to this as "gender" as that's the common label, but more technically it is sexual biology that is important, and we know that this expresses itself on a spectrum rather than just in two big categories. We need to find a way to express this in sporting categories too, like we do with weight classes in some sports or physical ability at the paralympics. There are no simple and obvious solutions, but I imagine a future where we have gone through the tough culture wars on this issue and found something that works. I hope you can imagine that too.

Sports that are played outdoors and can be affected by the weather will be impacted by climate change. Whether that's not having enough snow at the winter Olympics, or not enough water at the summer version, or it's about the temperatures being too hot to be safe for athletes, the future of sports has to take into account shifting weather patterns. Your business needs to do the same, of course.

Let's talk about the future of the Olympics (Part 1 of 3), and imagine sports competitions with no restrictions. Competitors can do whatever they want to their bodies to enhance them and get maximum performance out of them. I'd pay to watch that. Would you?