|
Implications Wheels
Work continues to develop implications wheels for most of the 30 trends and weak signals identified in the Futures Audit and Weak Signals environmental scan. Implication wheels, also known as futures wheels, were first developed by Joel Barker as a tool to explore possible future impacts of developments, events and decisions under consideration. Implication wheels can be quite simple or complex as shown below. There are even online tools for creating IW's in a virtual environment. The 2nd and 3rd order impacts from these will form the building blocks for IRI2038's future scenarios.
An example is the implications wheel for the augmented workforce shown below. The signal, change or event is at the left, followed by the 1st order impacts:
- Creation of a mental augmentation divide
- Physical augmentation to greatly increase endurance
- Distributed R&D (implants connect all to the cloud)
Each 1st order impact is then extrapolated to two 2nd and 3rd order impacts.
These first-order impacts were chosen from many possibilities, primarily for their diversity and potential to impact different aspects of the future. Other interesting implications of human augmentation the group explored include:
- Using implants to collect direct consumer data
- Tailoring babies for specific jobs and roles
- Ending the gender divide through physical augmentation
- Extending human life expectancy to 300 years-with all the challenges that will bring
An important point is that developing implications wheels is more art than science, involving a lot of judgment. Others may see different potential impacts or choose different ones to pursue, resulting in different scenario systems at the integration phase.
Some other thought provoking implication wheels threads are:
The future of simulation. The ability to simulate large populations of humans ends the need for human testing.
Freelance R&D workforce. The most important person in your organization becomes the one who assembles the cast for your next project.
3-D printing in R&D. The dumbing down of R&D as it becomes easier to just create and test all options.
Crowd sources R&D funding. Significant percentage of R&D projects are crowd sourced, freeing up internal funds for breakthrough innovation.
| 
All IRI2038 project reports to date are available online. These are accessible by all IRI members plus others who participated in the project: