This article is an exploration of knowledge cultures. A knowledge culture is what determines a company’s ability to “see” and “know” the world outside their front door. It is what holds the company together, determines the way people share and develop knowledge, and how they share work. It is especially important to see a knowledge culture as what determines the value of work within the organization. Many company’s with weak knowledge cultures cannot effectively share the benefits of insights and research. Some go as far as to make a hard distinction between strategy and research, and lose their ability to connect what the company does to the realities of their customers.

It can be argued that self-knowledge is an often-overlooked skill that is vital for the future and can be honed, developed, strengthened, and ultimately utilized. For organizations, knowing themselves is just as crucial—and beneficial. A deep understanding of an organization's role in the world, and what it aims to become, can enable more strategic and clear decision-making as some options will immediately be swept off the table because they don't fit into the organization’s framing of its identity. Organizational self-knowledge further helps the organization to respond to conditions of uncertainty as it is able to relate possible future decisions and actions back to ‘who it is’ and use its self-knowledge as a steadfast beacon that gives direction on how it might behave and adapt. We explore how self-knowledge for individuals and organizations applies to possible real-life situations.

How could you innovate by making use of history? This article discusses the specific use case of harnessing a company's history as "cultural data" to proprietorially train a generative AI system for innovation purposes. We argue that this would enable a company to create novel designs that are coherent with a brand's identity and tradition. It would allow for storytelling beyond the established canon. We could analyze organizational culture at scale. And, potentially, such a system could be used to build organization-specific scenarios and anticipate the future.

We are always theorizing! We have a theory for most of the things we encounter or are aware of in life. We use these theories to help us make sense of the world, to inform our decision making and importantly help us to predict future outcomes, attitudes and behaviours when a similar set of circumstances arises. Since we are conscious of our theories, we believe we shape the theories we carry, that we control them. But are we in control of our theories and the processes that develop these theories? Is there hidden theory we are not aware of, driving thoughts, actions and decision making? If we are not in control of our theorizing, this means that our sense making of the world, decision making and future predictions are inaccurate.

We tend to think that the future is far out and that we need digital simulations and VR glasses to transport us into expected realities in order to experience them proactively. 

In reality, versions of the future are already happening at the edges and you just need to be able to draw parallels between what is taking place in other contexts and translate that to your own. 

This article investigates how generational market research has slowly turned into a scam since the original inception of the “teenage consumer”. In the last decades, so-called experts have made it a lucrative business to proclaim generational differences, heralding the emergence of new birth cohorts-specific generations at faster and faster intervals. This business has conjured up an artificial generational warfare that mostly takes place in the click-hungry world of digital media.

You can’t waste time with just any old foresight because something that impacts company-wide strategy is extremely important, and potentially dangerous. You need good foresight to help you prepare for the next few years of your entire organization’s development. So, what is good foresight a how do you recognize it?

Virtual ethnography is a scam and anything but human-centric. In fact, it is only a second-class substitute that manages to barely fill a knowledge gap during the state of exception this pandemic poses. As I argue in this article, virtual ethnography with its remote methods is incapable of fulfilling several methodological key qualities that allow qualitative researchers to gain a deep understanding of human behavior, everyday life, and how people experience the world.

Humankind is used to consuming photography around the clock. However, photography as an often-overlooked tool in commercial, human-centric research. Currently treated as a nice-to-have afterthought, it is, in fact, a fantastic tool for providing deep ethnographic insights into the lives of people. Ethnographic photography, we argue, therefore requires a higher degree of professionalization.

At the Human Futures Studio, we believe it is time to take the next step and move beyond the status quo. In order to become a growing and sustainable business, we argue that a car sharing provider needs to embrace an entirely different perspective in the service development process.

For a car sharing service to become truly desirable and establish a sustainable business, people need to see value which goes beyond just gaining access to another commuter mobility option. The current modus operandi, the commute, may in fact be preventing a more innovative approach coming into being.

Radical Human-Centricity is an attempt to change the way most commercial and applied behaviour studies are conducted. Through it we are trying to fulfil the promise of human-centricity, which we believe has not lived up to its hype.

Human futures is a critical perspective and methodology that is a way of examining phenomena through multiple lenses--a way of taking a holistic view of the past, present, and possible futures.