Following is an excerpt of an interview of Scott Smith of Changeist that appears in the second issue of Manifest, a new publication of ideas and opinions from Mediacodex. The full text of the interview is available at the publication's site in Manifest No 2 (pdf).

Manifest: You are in the "future" business: What does this mean?

SS: More accurately, I am in the foresight business, which means I help companies identify, track and explore areas of emerging change that may not seem important to them at the moment, or for which they don't have a way to frame understanding or gain context. The purpose of my work is to help organizations see the world differently, and act on what they see in an informed and structured fashion.

"Structure" is the key word here: companies, and the many bright people that often work inside them, often have a peripheral awareness of important trends and driving forces they intuit will change their business, for good or ill, but they lack a systematic way of organizing what they are aware of, identifying what they may not be aware of but which might complete the picture, and then working with that knowledge in a way that allows them to plug this structured foresight into their decision process. They tend to let go of these critical insights, weak signals of change and patterns they may see emerging because they have nowhere to put them and no way to process them. Also the short-term thinking of many organizations prevents people within these systems from feeling free enough to explore the emerging patterns and find useful insights in them.

The end game for Changeist and the organizations we work with is to proactively move into the future, taking advantage of short-term opportunities and avoiding approaching obstacles while setting a course for a more positive, responsible long-term strategy.

Now, to your question, I specifically spend a lot of time exploring what you might call the "future" in a more whole fashion, developing scenarios, modeling new dynamics and possible long-term evolution of society, commerce, technology, politics, etc. Where I might pull just a slice of this "future" out for a client to see, for that slice to be useful, it has to have context. Thinking about that context puts my head in the "future" a lot of the time!

Manifest: What is the most interesting thing you have come across?

SS: This is a tough question to answer. I come across a lot of interesting things in the course of my work--threads of other people's thinking that intrigue me, strange and novel concepts, new technologies, etc. I don't tend to fetishize certain pet concepts or technologies. I think I tend to like most the unexpected twist of thinking, the counter trend, the left turn or remix of conventional wisdom. Every week or so I find an article or something that reveals a hidden part of the world that, knowing about it, adds another interesting dimension to my worldview.

In the last few years I have become very interested in cities as a laboratory of the future, because they mix together and ferment an amazing number of social, technological, economic, environmental and political trends and issues, and because they are rapidly becoming the living environment for most of the planet.

Manifest: What trends should we pay attention in mid-2008?

SS: I think we can't escape looking at resources (not only energy, but attention and cognitive capacity, time, living space, etc) and what constraints on these resources mean for how we will live. The world isn't an infinite source of raw material, and we are now seeing the impact of that. A lot of systems we live in and rely on are reaching their limits of complexity or stability, and we have to recognize that and start thinking about different ways to deal with this. Some of the solutions are simple and even personal, but have to be scaled up. Others mean finding different, new or even old and discarded ways of living.

We need to get away from the idea that we can purely innovate and consume our way out of constraint, and be willing to accept that life might be different than the model we've embraced for the last century. This is an where an approach to foresight that takes into account our wants, needs and capabilities as humans can be useful. It gets us away from thinking about adding more layers of "new" to the world, and looks more directly at what we are capable of, what our capacities are, and how we want to live.

In February, Scott Smith was interviewed by blogger Sandrine Szabo for profession-web.ch on how companies are applying new tools to sense and detect change and how human foresight can help companies adjust to major shifts in global business such as a more socially focused capitalism discussed by global leaders this year at Davos. The interview took place prior to LIFT08 on the campus of the Université de Genève.

Culturepod.ch @ Lift08 with Scott Smith from Thierry on Vimeo.