Benkler also featured on my list for 2009, although it’s one of the two from last year I still haven’t finished either! I’d recommend Cyburbia by James Harkin from my 09 list, and Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting In The Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger and You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier from my pile being assembled for 2010.

I posted last year’s work-related social media reading list here: http://bit.ly/784Phe

Ironically, it’s all part of my social media diet

As to your comment on creative convergence/divergence of various disciplines, I could not agree more – and see this as an ongoing necessity in human/organizational/global transformation. This is why it is so important for practitioners of any/all of these approaches to include “evolutionary” ideas and language in their toolkit, understanding that no one discipline – if closed off in a traditional sense from developing ideas – could possibly remain relevant, especially with the volatility and rapidity of current change across domains.

Yes to “civic intelligence!”

Thanks for your comments Ken!

Several futurists such as Joe Coates have written extensively over the years on futures thinking as “art” rather than “science,” and have been incorporating this aspect into their work. No doubt, Design Thinking comes at this process from a slightly different angle, and that’s good – as we approach problems or aspirations from a transdisciplinary lens, we get much more “bang for our buck.” Nonetheless, Futures Thinking has evolved over time, becoming much more Integral in its approach to creating change processes and developing “a new story beyond any specific hard- (or soft-) coded outcomes and objectives.” This concept is at the foundation of all foresight work that I do – helping individuals and groups to create a new cosmology in order to organically develop their own change through expanded idea/action logics and storyfields. Futures Thinking wouldn’t even be Futures Thinking to me unless it included applied complexity theory, CAS, human development models such as SDi and Integral Theory, organizational and social culture change, social evolution, creativity ideology, etc. Yes, classical foresight work would not look this way (and, of course, strategic planning – which is not strategic thinking, two different animals), but the times are a changing.

BTW, many futurists that I know have begun incorporating Design Thinking into their toolkit, adopting the language and processes when called for by clients – and have found it fairly easy to do so due to the strong similarities in both approaches. A good source here would be my futurist friend Wayne Pethrick who works for Pitney Bowes as Senior Design Strategist in their Concept Studio department. He even recently wrote a piece on the vast similarities b/t DT and Strategic Foresight, and it’s one of the reasons that PB hired him to run their design strategy department. I have even been doing the same, so no need to think I’m really in disagreement here – I’m very glad to include DT in my toolkit as well! It has been even easier for me in that I deal with a ton of graphic designers, media experts, and industrial designers all the time (client-wise).

P.S. One of the downfalls of DT is that there is not enough emphasis on developing a long-term futures thinking internal model/process in the strategic leadership and organizational model, though DT does point its users to a forward looking prospective. As both FT and DT instill organizational transformation (as opposed to Organizational development) through their approaches, they are a great compliment to one another. To me, the emergence and popularity of DT is further proof (among much that I haven’t spoken of here) that the cold winter for FT and Strategic Foresight is over.