The Signals Are Talking Quotes

“We’ve made a devil’s pact, swapping convenience and efficiency for an ever-increasing tyranny of information and choice.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“Futurists are skilled at listening to and interpreting the signals talking. It’s a learnable skill, and a process anyone can master. Futurists look for early patterns—pre-trends, if you will—as the scattered points on the fringe converge and begin moving toward the mainstream. They know most patterns will come to nothing, and so they watch and wait and test the patterns to find those few that will evolve into genuine trends. Each trend is a looking glass into the future, a way to see over time’s horizon. The advantage of forecasting the future in this way is obvious. Organizations that can see trends early enough to take action have first-mover influence. But they can also help to inform and shape the broader context, conversing and collaborating with those in other fields to plan ahead.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“Find the Fringe:”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“Success is a lousy teacher,”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it is hitched to everything else in the universe.”70”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“The future is an endless cycle. It neither begins at a finite point nor ends once something has been accomplished. Likewise, the fluidity of time—not chronological time, but how we experience technological change—must stay at the forefront of our thought processes whenever we’re planning for the future.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“Our existing trends inspire new thinking at the fringe, which is why it is essential that you always return back to where you started.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“Patent filings don’t mean that the processes and products described will ever be put into commercial use—but patents are a key component of flaring at the fringe. Indeed, there are never any completely new technologies invented out of whole cloth.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“If we are indeed standing on the precipice of a modern-day Cambrian explosion, within the next one hundred years much of human life could look radically different from today’s world. All of this technological progress—all of these questions, and all of the trends described throughout this book—will cause great disruption and opportunity within organizations. But what does that imply for our future as human beings, living together on planet Earth?”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“Forecasting the future is a matter of listening to, recognizing, and acting on signals. Every step isn’t entirely about logic and data—the process also requires active dreaming and creativity. Rather than prophesying, seeing trends is a matter of looking for emerging changes at the fringe, within organizations, and in our societies. It cannot be relegated to inventive visionaries, nor can it be mapped entirely by left-brain thinkers. Great trends forecasting unites opposing forces, harnessing both wild imagination and pragmatism.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“Here’s how to use these complementary ways of thinking: Flare at the fringe: Keep an open mind as you cast a wide enough net and gather information without judgment. You’re brainstorming, making a fringe map, forcing yourself to think outside the box and consider radically different points of view. Focus to spot patterns: CIPHER helps narrow what you’ve learned and uncovered. Look for contradictions, inflections, practices, hacks, extremes, and rarities. Flare to ask the right questions: In order to get beyond your own belief bias, force yourself to disagree with all of your assertions. Brainstorm to create counterarguments and to poke holes in everything you think you know to be true. Focus to calculate timing: Where is the trend along its trajectory? What is your ETA equation? What are the internal tech developments and the external events worth paying attention to? Flare to create scenarios and strategies: What are the probable, plausible, and possible futures, given what you know to be true today of the trend? What outcomes are likely? What necessary strategies and ways of thinking will govern how your organization will respond to the trend? Focus to pressure-test your action: What outcomes will result in response to the action you take? Is your strategy extensible, and will it continue to address the trend as it evolves? In this final step, you are working to ensure that your desired future is achievable.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“The duality dilemma was responsible for a lack of forward-thinking at BlackBerry, which never had an executable plan to remake the phone’s form factor and operating system. Right-brained staff wanted to make serious changes to the phone, while left-brained staff were fixated on risk and maintaining BlackBerry’s customer base. The future of the company hinged on its ability to bring both forces together to forecast trends and plan for the future. Overcoming the duality dilemma is possible, and it’s a matter of highlighting—rather than discouraging or downplaying—the strengths of both sides. The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University (also known as “the d.school”) teaches a practice that addresses the duality dilemma and illuminates how an organization can harness both strengths in equal measure, alternately broadening (“ flaring”) or narrowing (“ focusing”) its thinking. 2”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“The duality dilemma was responsible for a lack of forward-thinking at BlackBerry, which never had an executable plan to remake the phone’s form factor and operating system. Right-brained staff wanted to make serious changes to the phone, while left-brained staff were fixated on risk and maintaining BlackBerry’s customer base. The future of the company hinged on its ability to bring both forces together to forecast trends and plan for the future.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“organization and its ability to forecast the future. Within every organization are people whose dominant characteristic is either creativity or logic. If you’ve been on a team that includes both groups and didn’t have a great facilitator during your meetings, you probably clashed.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“If you were to zoom way out and look at the six steps of my forecasting method, you would see this duality in play. It’s not a happy accident. Scientific and technological advances depend on both ingenuity and rigorous evaluation. The future of our culture—how we communicate, work, shop, play games, and take care of ourselves—necessarily intersects with the future of science and technology. Daydreaming alone won’t bring new ideas to market; ideas require process engineering and budgeting before they can become tangible. However, too much emphasis on logic and linear thinking will kill moonshots while they’re still on the whiteboard. That is why it’s important to afford equal treatment to each hemisphere, alternating between broad creative thinking and more pragmatic, analytical assessment. When executed completely, the forces are balanced, allowing for innovation while ensuring a check-and-balance system for the future.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“A futurist is always listening for signals, and she is always considering the implications of scenarios and strategies, even when the F.U.T.U.R.E. Test is passed. She asks “Why?” as often as “Why not?” How does it address the trend identified, and does it solve for our basic human needs? What good will this technology bring to humanity? How will it improve our lives? What consequences may it bring, and are we prepared for what may come as a result of our actions? For that, she looks again and again to the fringe in order to understand how adjacent trends collide and how new layers of ideas, experiments, tools, businesses, and socioeconomic structures are built.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“But in order to make our machines think, we humans need to help them learn. That’s what those playing jokes were doing initially when they made fun of Tay, and when they tricked her into saying that Hitler was “swagger since before internet was even a thing.” Tay did what she was programmed to do, which is the same thing that we ourselves are all wired to do: she learned from her environment”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“A neural network is the place where information is sent and received, and a program is the set of meticulous, step-by-step instructions that tell a system precisely what to do so that it will accomplish a specific task. How you want the computer to get from start to finish—essentially, a set of rules—is the “algorithm.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“THE FINAL STEP of our forecasting process is to pressure-test any strategy created to address a technology trend. Scenarios, as we’ve seen, help inform strategy; they fill in the necessary details in order to tell a complete story. However, in our zeal to pursue what’s new and what’s next, critical questions and details can be overlooked.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“Listening to the signals talking isn’t enough—we need to understand what they’re actually saying. We must identify the likely impact and determine what the trend could mean to our businesses, our communities, and our individual daily lives. The “if this, then that” formula creates that necessary narrative to help our brains recognize what would otherwise be disparate data points and place them into cohesive scenarios for our probable, plausible, and probable futures. Scoring those scenarios by our degree of certainty and the level of importance to an organization, industry, or society informs how and when action should be taken.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“The final step in writing scenarios is to develop subjective but informed probabilities.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“But the purpose of writing scenarios isn’t to create a set of provocative stories for weekend reading. Instead, taken together, they form a powerful tool to assist those in charge of making decisions. Inevitably, they will ask: Which one of these scenarios do you really think will happen? How confident are you in that scenario? How much confidence do you have in the information you’re presenting me with?”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“Once we unhinge ourselves from the laws of nature as we understand them today (as well as the rules by which society operates), we can dream up possible future scenarios”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“Since people make decisions about the future of technology, we need a framing of human emotion: what we want to happen, what we feel strongly can’t or won’t happen, and what we fear might actually come to fruition.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“The details that underline the case you want to make may be complex, but if you want attention paid to your story, it must be easy to follow.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“Charming) at the end.12 The details that underline the case you want to make may be complex, but if you want attention paid to your story, it must be easy to follow.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“The logical next step after determining where a trend is on its trajectory is to follow with an “if this, then that” statement. Step five of our forecasting method is to use Kahn’s technique of storytelling and put the facts into a narrative context to develop possible scenarios for the future. Our goal isn’t to predict something that will definitely happen. Instead, we must envision all of the possible outcomes and use them to help us make an informed decision about strategy to employ in the present.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“People are instinctive storytellers. Our ancestors, according to evolutionary psychologists, preferred descriptive storytelling over facts.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“The future-fallacy trap happens in every organization, and quite often within those that are pushing the boundaries of innovation. When a decision is made to act on an important trend, details must be considered before putting a trend into action.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“It’s the future-fallacy trap: when your inflexibility on details causes mistakes in your planning for the future.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream