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Flash Foresight (Burrus, 2011)

How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible

Daniel Burrus

JLJ - Guru Daniel Burrus is a circus showman selling you concepts you can use to successfully enter the future that will be here before you know it. He peddles pocket wisdom for breaking the barriers that threaten to undermine you and or your company as it struggles to keep afloat in a complex, changing world.

Read, and indeed you too might learn to pull ideas from nowhere to succeed in a modern world. It might be as simple as starting with what you know - but it is kind of hard to start with what you do not know. In fact, many of the trends cited in this work might be easy to see with hindsight, but like the stock market and comedy, timing is everything.

p.9 Having a clear grasp of cyclic change is an important element of flash foresight, but it's not the core of the matter. Developing a keen sense of flash foresight depends more on the certainty that comes from understanding another pattern of change, one chat is quite different from cyclic change. This second pattern is acyclic and progressive - that is, it does not cycle back on itself but progresses forward in one direction only. In other words, within this second type of change, what goes up does not necessarily come down. I call this linear change.

p.17 The executives were thunderstruck. An important piece of information had just become visible. Why hadn't they seen this coming? Because they hadn't looked. They had not developed the habit of starting with what they knew.

p.38 looking into the visible future is no longer a luxury. In an era of rapid, epic change, it has become a survival necessity.