October’s interesting reads

Here we are again with a few of the things that have sparked my interest from around the internet (and a little beyond).

I’m currently reading Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise, about prediction and forecasting. It’s well-written and informative, and also a nice complement to working in foresight (which isn’t about prediction).

There’s a close crossover between a foresight mindset and an innovation mindset, so I was interested in this piece about dealing with fear as we try to innovate. Many big organisations suffer from this – the worst thing you can do is be wrong. Amy Edmonson recently spoke at the RSA on her work on the importance of (a certain type of) failure.

In spite of the clickbait title, this article gives a great tip for smartphone users about the AI-driven swipe to type keyboard. I’ve been using this since I read the article and it is fantastic – many fewer typos and auto-correct nightmares.

If you’ll forgive a little self-promotion (though only tangentially, as I wasn’t involved in either project), a couple of interesting pieces of work came out of the EU Policy Lab in October. The first, explained by a blog post here, is the culmination of a year-long foresight exercise with the European Innovation Council, looking at emerging technologies. The second is a set of reference scenarios to help European decision-makers move along a path of thinking about the future as they go about their work.