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Alchemy's
Cultural Litmus. We
compile and overlay many economic, demographic and cultural/historical
trends to do our work better. And we look in lots of places since we
were trained that due diligence comes in more flavors than strawberry,
chocolate and vanilla. Leveraging this socio-cultural perspective, many
"shocking" events such as an Obama presidential victory in
2008
were
predictable, down to the language, themes and structure of
the winning strategy. We are not dogmatic about Generational Studies.
We prefer Zeitgeist
("spirit of the times") as a term
describing eras since it is cultural sensibility and affinity, rather
than ages,
that move Overton Windows of status quo. (A
soft attention span
affects, for related
reasons,
both the 55-year old MBA with a Blackberry and Facebook and the 13-year
old
glued to their X-Box or MySpace page.)
To this point, while many are consumed with the
trendily-termed Millennials, in our business and educational work we
have turned our sights to the following
generation we dub Renewals.
Their tasks, and eventual
zeitgeist, as we laid out earlier in the decade,
will be vastly
more
momentous than a similar cohort, Baby
Boomers, also born
amid and into upheaval. Their future will be bright, and different. And
also unfathomable to those who created or fostered the structural
problems that Renewals will be tackling. It's worth noting here that
Paradigms shift not because
the old order embraces new ideas but because the strength and will
necessary to maintain old narratives and mythologies always wanes -
and, reality, marshalled frustration and
recalibrated understanding overpowers them. There is always great noise
and complaint as the transition is effected, mirroring in some ways the
craziness
and hyperbole of Market Bubbles leading up to steep
crashes. But it is possible
to avoid being made obsolete by our ideologies and acculturation. (See:
Lattices & Loops) |
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Compress, created
for a risk-management client, Feb 2006, to prepare an Executive Team
for alternative futures none wished to account for, nor could perceive
using their standard practices. Our uses of planning tools such as OODA loops,
Latticesİ and Litmusİ all work in macro and micro scenarios. Finding
weakness and opportunity in customer service, business model or product
execution (yours or a competitor's) carries similar fundamentals to
large-scale systems analysis. There is no shortage of information in an
information age but complexity is no excuse for missing the ball. In
fact, complexity is often just another word for information
which some organizations are unwilling or ill-equipped to hear.
Large-scale or
small, sometimes it's no fun to be accurate or correct... |
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