Author: Joshua Polchar
When I was young, my parents resisted getting a microwave oven, believing it would encourage us to eat unhealthy and poor-quality food. It wasn’t until years later, when a friend actually bought them a microwave, that they relented, and started benefiting from the quick-fix cuisine it offers. They haven’t abandoned proper pots and pans, but they’ve found a way for tradition and expedience to coexist. Fast forward to today, and there’s a similar shift happening...
Strategic foresight and innovation policy analysts Josh Polchar and David Jonason discuss what is really needed to make foresight adequate, proportionate, and regular. Strategic foresight experts are sometimes a bit like dentists. For us, the “surgery” of strategic foresight interventions is a main part of our profession. It’s what we specialise in, and it can be highly interesting and rewarding to work with organisations who can benefit. But we make a mistake when we present...
Joshua Polchar, Strategic Foresight Lead at the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation, reflects on the panel on which he spoke at European Forum Alpbach 2022, and offers perspectives on how governments can deal with the crises they’re facing without inadvertently missing the warning signs of new ones. Looking at current events, it feels like governments are in constant firefighting mode. How can we make sense of what’s going on without losing perspective of the...
Back when I was an exchange student in France, I lived in an apartment shared by nine people, all from different countries and cultures. We had a large kitchen and lived on the city’s main square, so it was a prime location to host some of the best house parties. Imagine: nine people each bring a dozen friends and you’ve easily got over a hundred people in your home! One of the things that most...
Will in-person work be a distant memory 15 years from now? Will ministries’ offices only exist in cyberspace? Or will AI-powered bots become the norm when interviewing potential job candidates? While the answers to many questions like these are impossible to know today, one thing is certain: working in the future will be very different from what it is now. This will not only be determined by new innovative technologies, the disappearance of certain jobs...
What if our minds could move through time as easily as our bodies can move through space? In the movie Arrival (minor spoiler alert!), linguistics professor Dr Louise Banks learns an extraterrestrial language that expresses ideas in a timeless and nonlinear way. Through some science-fiction magic grounded in a grain of truth, Banks gains the ability to perceive time itself differently, and experiences flashes of future moments of great personal and…
As a devoted fan of the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) for over 20 years, the coronavirus pandemic brought a big disappointment for me in 2020: the cancellation of the most important week of my year. As I had done in Kyiv, Lisbon, and Tel Aviv, I planned to travel to Rotterdam to see the live shows and embrace dear friends from all over the world in this joyful and camp annual extravaganza of music and...
In April 1912, an icon set sail from Southampton, heading into the future and making history at the same time. The Titanic, “ship of dreams”, was the height of technological achievement. Retrospectively referred to as “unsinkable”, she might as well have been called “future-proof”, such was the confidence she commanded. We all know what happened. We also know the main lessons learned: lack of lifeboats, a chaotic evacuation, and doubts over whether a floating wooden...
On 15 October 1987, renowned British meteorologist Michael Fish presented his usual television weather forecast, jovially remarking: “Earlier on today, apparently, a woman rang the BBC and said she heard there was a hurricane on the way. Well, if you’re watching, don’t worry, there isn’t!” He proceeded to give his analysis, which acknowledged the possibility of high winds but gave no major cause for alarm. That night, an extratropical cyclone with gusts exceeding…
New Year’s resolutions are so frequently unfulfilled that it has become a cliché to cynically write them off as futile. We create them in the hopes of creating innovation in our lives, but often they fall short of the novel, implemented, impactful action that innovation implies. Why does this happen? Many would argue it’s to do with the resolutions themselves—their scope, ambition, execution, and definition. A quick internet search will find you countless advice articles...