Unicorn Daydreams

  I have a few favorite speculative fiction books that I read every few years. Most of them are simple touchstones of the generation I belong to or remind me of fond days spending an entire day as an adolescent burning through a new book that I’d found. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson (2003), isn’t one of those pre-teen memories, rather it’s a book that I discovered in my twenties while sinking into the culture of software development and coding as I started my first real career. The book describes a deeply dystopian future but includes many startling predictions which have come to pass to varying degrees. Predictions like the rise of corporate conglomerates controlling many aspects of life and the franchising of nearly every service or experience including the Mafia and entire cultures are sufficiently general to be ignored as specific scenario predictions. And then there is Stephenson’s coining of the term, “metaverse”, and his description of fully realized virtual world that ca...

On August 4 the majority shareholders of the company which controls the company that I work for issued a Schedule 13D to the Securities and Exchange Commission which suggested that they were open to a potential sale of the business or other alternatives (FitzGerald, 2023). The form, like most of its kind, was not conclusive, despite media interpretation to the contrary, the majority shareholders did not commit to a sale or to taking any action with respect to the company. All the same, the event caused me to engage in my own form of scenario planning, where in the past I had practiced traditional forecasting with respect to my prospects at the company. The process of scenario planning produces “a portfolio of future scenarios, each representing a different way your … landscape could look in a few years” (Wade, 2012). This approach does not attempt to evolve the current environment along known axes, rather it identifies a range of potential scenarios which might plausibly emerge given t...

Improving System Resilience by Enabling Chaos Introduction Accidental discoveries take many forms, and not all of them lead to scientific breakthroughs on the scale of penicillin or Post-It notes. Yesterday I “accidentally discovered” that my furnace was leaking, and my “breakthrough” today was that my home warranty policy was useless. By nature, an accidental discovery is not the result of careful planning or a series of steps leading towards a profound insight, rather they arise unexpectedly and often as the result of several factors. Considerations which may increase the odds of a profound accidental discovery include expert knowledge in a domain, the serendipitous exposure to another domain of practice, collaborative insights helping to connect the dots, and the addition of random chance leading to an observable and unexpected outcome. In this post I will focus on one accidental discovery that is particularly helpful to my professional field – Chaos Engineering – including a su...

From 2003 through 2005 I lived in Cedar Rapids, IA and frequently drove to our offices in Madison, WI or Des Moines, IA. Since these were regular drives through parts of the country that rapidly become repetitive I looked for ways to occupy myself. At the time downloadable audio books were a relatively new phenomenon, and I became a member of Audible.com where I found unabridged copies of books to listen to while driving. One of the books I remember clearly from that period was James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds , a fairly non-academic book about how combining information from large groups of people can sometimes lead to better insights or decisions. I thought about this book while researching group decision-making methods for this discussion board post, as Surowiecki suggests that one approach to group decision-making involves simply aggregating the decisions of individuals. To avoid suggesting that crazed mobs represent group wisdom, Surowiecki identified several criteria which ...

For this discussion board post I relied on the 2020 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report, Teaching and Learning Edition, and explored the section focused on XR, or extended reality, technologies. This section differentiated between the different types of XR, including augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, and haptic technologies. These technologies are finding growing applications and acceptance within the educational domain as part of supporting experiences that can’t otherwise be demonstrated in a classroom, and as part of making educational experiences accessible to students with disabilities (Brown, et al., 2020). The trend for this technology suggests that all levels of schools are beginning to explore how XR can benefit their learning environment, but that schools are not simply jumping in without a clear purpose. Many XR project descriptions “mention that the institution has set up a lab or a center as the locus for initial XR explorations” (Brown, et al., 2020). The adoption of...

Hi there! I am "Searching for Unicorns", because like many futurists and investors I am always on the lookout for trends and sociological themes that may signal important new directions for society. I believe in the potential of technological change to alter the direction of the human race, though I consider myself a pragmatist (as opposed to optimist or pessimist) in that I think these changes can be both positive and negative. Innovation has the power to open new worlds to humanity, metaphorically and literally. To learn more about futuring and innovation I have enrolled in a doctoral level class called, appropriately enough, "Futuring and Innovation". As part of the class I've begun this experimental blog, wherein I expect to share ideas and reflections on how innovation occurs, how groups can work together to best harness the exploratory power of each individual, and how members of society can infer the potential long-term directions that innovation may lead...