What if…?

The Institute for the Future has a talent for producing these rather fetching visualisations of their futures work.

This one maps out the driving forces (as they see them) underpinning sustainability over the coming decade.

I quite like the idea of a ‘planatery markup language: PNL‘.

Its available in pdf to download.

Many thanks to the Rufus Team in Sunderland for their time this morning and showing me their 1962 Vespa which has pride of place in the corner of their office.

Nice touch!.

Back in January 08 I was asked to take part in a debate as part of the BURA annual conference.

Now I was given the unenviable task of assessing the impact of the ‘credit crunch’ on the regeneration industry.

I tried to make my presentation as upbeat as possible, but even at this stage some of the figures and numbers were pretty gloomy.

The key areas I predicted might be impacted were; commercial property, private housebuilding and its supply chain, retail and cultural led development. Now I could devote a whole blog to pointing out examples that prove my point, but equally there are bound to be some cases that prove the opposite. A point I made in my speech.

However, over the subsequent lunchbreak I was surprised by the number of ‘regeneration and property development professionals’ who said I was part of a group of gloom mongers who were talking Britain into a recession.! Likewise, the number of people who (despite their relative senior status in the industry) had not looked at some of the basic facts and were not that aware of the wider forces impacting their industry and asked me where I got them from was worrying.
For the record, I am still not convinced that the UK will go into recession but the likelihood has significantly increased. These latest figures from the ONS do nothing to change this view and the post-script to this article in The Observer spells out the gloomy scenario.
One of the most interesting things for me about this whole experience is how, if a situation is potentially bad, so many people adopt an ostrich like stance and refuse to think ahead or accept that a situation may be bad.?

Does anyone know of psychological studies that examine this phenomenon?

Here we go then back into the blogging fray.

For the past 6 months or so I’ve been so busy that thought of keeping a daily blog was just a step too far.

That’s not to say that I haven’t seen a lot that I would have liked to blog about. So, now that things are a little more balanced its time to rejuvenate the What If blog again.

Watch out for improvements and changes over the coming days.!

Cheers

Stuart