ParaChange

Radical Innovation requires the ability to think differently. Like any other skill or talent, this needs to be developed by deliberate and regular practice.

I’ve created the Thinking Differently folder as a place to hold descriptions of these kinds of exercises.

The first one is called Timejumping. It involves imagining the future at specific timescales by comparing them with similar timescales in the past.

Timejumping can be used very effectively for understanding possible rates of change in near-term (3-10 year) settings. However,  for really getting yourself ‘unstuck’ from today’s dominant paradigms and intellectual fads and fashions it is particularly useful to apply it on long timescales - 100, 300, 500, even 1000 years.

I’ve used this technique for many years, and it remains one of my favorites. I think I first came across something like it in one of the late, great Robert Anton Wilson’s books. However, I believe that the specifics of the approach I’ve described here (using very specific time periods) is original. If you have any reason to believe otherwise, please let me know.  

Enjoy … Ian