Economic Crisis may be Over

If we could trust economic agents to be rational, it would be fair to say that the economic crisis would end now, with a strong cameback.

America's economy is starting to grow steadly, slow but steadly. The Chinese economy also shows signs of healthy grow. Europe still shows fragilities, like the Portuguese and Spain Economies, but the aid capacity is larger than the risk. Whether EU and FMI came to the rescue of Iberian Economies or not, they are not a risk for EU and the global economy.

This means that the risks are controlled. It also means that the possibilities for growth are really strong.

In this reality, stock-brokers should start buying, and companies should start hiring and investing in acquisitions.

On the other hand, gold has raised too much and might go down, as investors sell gold to buy stocks.

Soros, one of the world top investors has already claimed that this is the moment to sell gold and invest in health and biotechnology. He goes further saying that gold is the last bubble.

But we know that agents are not rational, and the insecurity raised since 2007, made investor more cautious. Maybe too cautious.

Is it possible that we all remain frozen in panic waiting for someone else to start investing?

Disengagement

Some people have the determined idea that younger generations are worse than older generations. Others have the opposite idea. I see myself in this second group.
Nonetheless, this trend, disengagement, tries to resume what younger generations are loosing in terms of personal relations.
By this expression, I mean that younger generations might have less capacity for engagement, which is different than commitment.
It’s easier to understand the meaning of engagement if we think about conflicts. The person who is getting involved in a certain type of battle is engaging.
In a personal relation it’s possible to have commitment without engagement. For example, in a love relation it’s only natural that someone is committed to the relation as long as the other person acts under a certain way, like being faithful. This means that he is fully committed, but not totally engaged.
An example for the extreme of engagement would be someone who knows is being cheated, or even a victim of domestic violence, but still, holds to that relation with every possible effort. Like everything else, the extreme of engagement is bad.
But the opposite is not necessarily better. If our standards for friendship are so high that no one can comply, than it becomes impossible to have long lasting relations.
This concept can be applied to a much wider field than personal relations. It can also be applied to studies, work or a sport.
A top student who is giving a great effort into his studies may change his behavior dramatically when he finds some kind of contradiction like a severe teacher or being in a class where other students are smarter than he is.
What this tell us about future generations, is that they will search for commitments in order to feel like part of something, but it’s becoming ever more increasingly hard to resist to contradiction.
This might mean that we are loosing our capacity to deal with frustration and contradiction.

Maturity in Social Networks

In this particular post, by Social Networks I mean every technology oriented for communicating, including chats, blogs, micro-blogging, comunities and specifically social networks.

All of those tend to have a boom period, when is fashion and cool and everybody wants to give a try. This boom period can be longer or shorter according to the experience it provides to the users. The more complete that experience is, the longer it lasts. This is why Facebook had such a long boom period.

But, sooner or later, they all reach maturity, and a lot of users, abandon it, by shutting down, deleting, or just forgetting about it.

In the boom period, the tipycal user is young, and somewhat of a social geek. On the other hand, after reaching maturity the tipical user is older, with a selective and more professional profile.

A good example for this pattern, would be Twitter. Most teenagers had a twitter account sometime, but found it hard to keep track or a visiting routine. Now most twitters are older, with professional motives.

For everyone who is trying to create the next Big thing, this pattern means a great problem. In order to make it popular and be successful social networks have to be thanked for teenagers, but in order to be sustainable it has to have real advantages for grown-ups.

During the 90’s when someone wanted to look into the future of technologies it was common to look at teenagers. It was assumed that what was being done by teens, would later be done by everyone. But nowadays, we understand that teens can not be a reference for the rest of the society as they are mostly driven by excitement, not utility. If we want to understand the future of a certain technology we should look at 35 year old women, who usually can use technologies, but won’t do it just for curiosity. They will use it, when the utility of a certain technology outcomes the difficulty to use it.

Hire out of the box

Nowadays, Innovation is finally receiving the attention it deserves, and most people agree that Innovation is important. But when it comes to it, are we really up for it?

It’s not unusual to see someone doing things the same way he always did, and expecting different results.

One way to test the readiness to innovate is by evaluating the Hiring Procedure. By observing how a certain person or entity hires, we know if they are ready to innovate and if they will indeed innovate.

It’s not about age, or about a radical look. Nothing tells us that a teenager with blue hair will innovate more than 60 year old person with grey hair.

What must be seen is the relation between the mind-set carved by experience and the mission at hand.

If we hire someone who is a specialist at a certain task, innovation is not likely to happen. If that specialist comes from a more modern enterprise, it might bring the old-fashioned one half-way, but it will hardly bring it ahead. At the limit, it can innovate by aggregating competences from both companies.

If you really want to innovate and overcome competition, then you must hire out of that specific market, finding someone who doesn’t have the orthodoxies from your industry, but excels at the skills you want to introduce.

A good example for this paradox is Hospital Service Management. When asking most people who they would hire to run the hospital Service, usually the answer is something like Hospital Manager. Of course, someone like this won’t worry about the operational part, leaving it to the doctors, but won’t innovate as well. He will just focus on managing the money, operating logistics, and hardly anything else.

Instead, if you want to innovate in the service of the hospital, the right person to hire would be a manager from a 5 star hotel. Such a manager, wouldn’t concern about operational procedures, but would be extremely demanding in anything related to service, costumer care and professional-patient relation. His service standards are so high that he wouldn’t even had to be concerned to innovate. His mind set would only be to implement what he considers to be acceptable, and he would still innovate much more than any field expert.

So If your organization wants to innovate, it’s not enough to think out of the box. You have to hire out of the box.

Technologic integration – Myth or Reality

There has been some discussion whether technologic integration is an urban myth or reality.

Usually consumers are always expecting integration. Will facebook integrate with google? Mobile with computers? Wikipedia with Forums?
On the other hand, innovation brings us new disrupting concepts constantly that are not integrated with existing technology.

My previous post, explains the difference between patterns and trends, and this should help us better understand this dilemma of integration.
If we look at integration as a trend, we really can’t get nowhere. Are technologies more integrated today than they were five years ago? I can’t answer this question correctly and I doubt that anyone can. The problem is that we don’t have a way to measure integration.

Instead, if we look at patterns, the answer becomes much more clearly. Whenever there are new disruptive concepts or technology they are usually disintegrated from the existing ones. It makes only sense, that the settled players are not negotiating with the new arising players.

But once that new technologies or players are settled and they find their space close to the consumer, then all the others want to integrate.

So there is a clear pattern. When something new appears it’s disintegrated, and over time it tends to integrate. This doesn’t answer if the future will present us with more integration or disintegration, but it tells us that what today is disintegrated will be integrated in the future.

So if innovation keeps growing there will be more disintegration, but if innovation slows down, than integration will occur.

Patterns Vs Trends

Usually Futurists don’t concern enough about the difference between trends and patterns, talking about both as if they were the same. But they era actually different and we should take those differences in consideration, in order to form better methods which are the basis for our work and investigations.

A trend is a change with a direction that is generally kept in a certain period of time. That period could be longer or shorter, and sometimes it can be interrupted to be continued later, but this is the mais idea. Increasing or decreasing trough time.

A patter is a repetition based on a condition, and is usually stated as “When A occurs, B occurs”. That repetition may be global and with no time limit, or it may be limited to a certain context. An example for a pattern could be “morning is the time of day with more stock market transactions” or “Monday is the day when more heart attacks occur”.

If we look at the first example we may transform the sentence so it doesn’t look like a condition, but it always maintains that relation between two events: morning and transactions.

If we look at the second condition, then it becomes clear that the country where this statement was made is a Christian country. This only happens because Monday is the first day of work, so in a country were Sunday was a working day, then Monday wouldn’t be the day with more heart attacks.

Back to the methods, the reason why is important to distinguish trends from patterns is that both of them have different methods to be detected and validated.

The best professionals to identify and validate patterns are not futurists, but historians and scientific investigators. Probably historians are better at discovering patterns, and scientists are better at validating, understanding and defining the conditions for patterns.

Trends on the other side, are usually better detected, understand and validated by futurists, or field professionals. The reason why historians and scientists are not so useful at identifying and studying patterns is that they are mostly focus on the past being limited to identify and study emergent change.

On an horizon scanning, both elements should be considered. Usually futurists tend to focus on trends, asking “what change is happening”, but we must never neglect patterns that comes in “How does change happens”, or “Why does change happens”.

When we use the Iceberg analysis, we usually justify smaller trends with bigger trends, but on a macro scale trends can not be totally justified by other trends. That would be the same as saying that “change happens because change happens”, which doesn’t justify how go from inaction to action. Only pattern analysis can justify the first existence of change. For a very simple example let’s consider that we have a lion and a zebra in the same space. The pattern says that if a zebra in a Zebra are in the same space, the Lion will chase, and the Zebra will try to escape. From that point Change is justified, and other changes will occur over time. If the lion is faster than the distance between both will decrease, but if they run at the same speed, then over time exhaustion will increase. So patterns are at the bottom of the study and trends are at the surface of change.

The patterns and trends that we identify in scanning must be crossed during the analysis. Futurists always ask how patterns will be changed by patterns, but it’s really important to analyze how patterns interfere with existing trends.

Will Facebook last Forever ?

Last night the news about young people abandoning Facebook dropped as a bomb. The article was based in a study of interviews made to teenagers, where they presented a lot of arguments to quitting facebook and social networks in general.

First, I must say that the way we use the expression “social networks” for everything really bothers me. Suddenly everything on the internet is a social network, even the internet itself. Supposedly a social network is something were individuals publicly add each other simultaneously as friends.

Linkedin is the pure social network, which serves the purpose of social networking exclusively. And most people do not spend hours a week in a social network, unless they are something like a head-hunter or a sales person. Most of us are just part of a social network so someone else will find us, or maybe in a certain situation it may be useful to track someone else.
So it is not fair to say that Social Networking is dying, it’s just there when we need it. There is no need to go there every day.

Now, Facebook is much more than a Social Network. It has micro-blogging, picture and video sharing, groups, fan club, and a lot of applications like Quizzes or games.

The great platform for micro-blogging is Twitter, which does nothing else than that one purpose that is micro-blogging. Now, kids and teenager don’t like micro-blogging. It’s usually skilled professionals who use it to share and learn from their professional community. For example, Foresighters use it all the time for trend-hunting. One particular difference between micro-blogging and social networks, is that in micro-blogging adding is not simultaneous. Person A might be following B, without B being following A.
Micro-blogging is not dying either. Sure it has passed that fashion momentum, but now it’s used by who it is supposed to be.
You might want to remember all of this, next time someone says that Google Buzz is a social network.

Now, before I get into the dying of Facebook and Social Networks let me explain the concept of layered information. All of us, at a conscient or inconscient level, assume that some information is more important than other. So, a more important information would be a top layer. It’s fair to assume that most people would have this order: personal talk, phone, email, and micro-blogging. Of course, this is not the same for everyone, as some of us would consider s.m.s. over e-mail and others the other way around.

After all of this let’s look at facebook and bring that question “Will facebook last forever?”. Considering that in internet terms, “forever” means something like a decade.
Facebook is a social network, which represents no reason to visit it often. But then it has micro-blogging in it, with the problem that you don’t choose who you follow. You just choose who is your friend. When we think about all that useless information, there really is no reason to go there, because all those posts about who likes what are at the bottom layer of all the information we receive daily.

A few months ago, Facebook Quizzes were really cool and funny, but we got tired of it really fast. That is something else that will not keep our attention, whether we are teenagers or grown-ups.

Groups and Forums is something that facebook never had great success. A lot of people sign in, or push the “I like” button, but then forgets about it. So that is not the way either.

And now, facebook has something that scares all teenagers away: their parents. In a place where all your friends talk about your personal life, and everybody comments, you don’t want your parents around. It’s not about being a teenager. Nobody likes to have their parents snooping around their personal life. No matter what age we are.

So this leaves one reason to go back to facebook often. Yes, you are right. That reason is Farmville, or mafia wars, or whatever networking-game you are playing.
The problem with networking-games is that they are only fun for a certain amount of time, even when you are addicted to games. This is why we have so many games with a name ending in vile or city. They all want to be the next big game, but always very similar to the ones already existing.

So, if facebook, doesn’t want to perish into oblivience, it has to find something else that Is appealing and great. To survive, facebook will have to find the next big thing in order to call the teenagers back in.

Or maybe Facebook will be the new grown-ups platform, which is the most probably scenario. In the internet world, teenagers are the early adopters, and grown-ups follow them. And big corporations will be there announcing their products and services, and a lot of professionals will try to organize lobbying events, and debate their activities. And we will have a lot of people over 30 playing Farmville.

Oops. That is not the future… It’s now