Pleiades Technology Futures

Accelerating change, globalization, aging demographics, job migration, nanotechnology, pervasive computing, energy demands, virtual social spaces, global warming, biotechnology and personal portable technology are just a few of the headlines that fight for our attention.  As man's ability to keep up and make sense of this deluge of information is stressed, the natural tendency is to focus on shorter and shorter term horizons and avoid speculation about the ever less predictable tomorrow. 

One result is the desire of consumers to minimize learning times for adopting new processes, technologies and services to more efficiently to get their everyday tasks done.  This is a challenging job for suppliers of goods and services to address the constantly moving disconnect between technology capability and user need.  Only rarely does a product seem to find that "sweet spot", that "just right" end-to-end product solution as typified by the original Sony Walkman, the Palm PDA, and  the Apple iPod portable music solution.

The question of how to emulate these successes is ever present as corporate managers, small business owners and entrepreneurs seek to grow their business and provide a memorable superior customer experience that builds brand loyalty - at a profit.

Pleiades Technology Futures is focused on helping bridge the gaps and surmount the barriers that stand between technology capabilities and real user needs that can be measured by the quality of the customer experience.  This is done through application of cultural anthropology and ethnography for customer insight, technology capability understanding and innovation best practices implementation with all bounded by practical business realities - public or private, for profit or nonprofit.

Principal

Michael L Olson, Ph.D. 

Company

Pleiades Technology Futures is a consultancy designed to assist in planning and taking action towards to manage our way into the future; as individuals, as business organizations, as societies and as a planet.  Such planning begins with defining the context that shapes the reasonably likely futures, developing a vision of what might be possilbe within that set of futures, implementing towards that vision with the tools at hand and adapting as the "real" future unfolds. 

Motivation

Great accomplishments generally start with great visions.  The heavens have often been the catalyst for Man's visions speculating about his environment, his history and the future.  The Pleiades is only one of many constellations that early observers of our earthly skies identified and it, like many of the others, has been the center of stories developed by various cultures to help humans make sense of their world and the nature of Man's circumstance. 

One example mythology is the Greek poet Hesoid's "Work and Days" which admonishes the longing seafarer to instead tend his lands when the Pleiades location in the heavens indicates that the time to mind the crops is here.   Like the heavenly clocks inspired the predictability of the constellations, our grasp of our future is measured by our ability to predict the consequences of Today's observations.  Hence the motivation to select the name of a constellation as a vision metaphor for the company.

An ancilliary feature of the Pleiades is that the number of stars can readily serve as a mnemonic "mind jogger", as hooks for aid recalling useful facts or insights that can be summarized in short lists.  Examples include Steven Covey's "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People"  or Edward de Bono's "Six Thinking Hats".