Be Less Zombie

9What Does the Future Actually Mean?

How to make sense of what's coming and its likely impact on your future prosperity.

Anyone can gather data from the future. It's just a choice to mobilise good fact finding.

Turning that data into valuable, actionable insights is where the magic begins.

There are three important approaches to interpreting this data that your future will thank you for taking seriously. Few companies do them all well, so a pigeon-step in this direction is a leap of potential competitive advantage.

Data Analytics

This is big data. It's crunching numbers, spotting patterns and suggesting potential scenarios. ‘Data scientist’ is one of the fastest-growing jobs for good reason – these people can help you predict the future, to some degree.

Those crunched numbers need to come from somewhere and part of the skill here is designing a strategy that aligns the right mix of inputs, analysis and outputs. The Internet of Things is a driving force in Big Data, as Professor Alan Brown of Exeter University explains.

‘Imagine you make coffee cups. What happens if you embed a sensor inside them? Now they can tell you where they are, what's inside them, the temperature of the liquid, the speed of consumption, the way they are held and tilted, how long they get put down between sips, the heart rate of the holders, their distance from one another, and so on. Suddenly your coffee cups become thousands of instant feedback loops giving you data that can become the lifeblood of ...