As a speaker, facilitator, and workshop designer, Jeffrey Rogers brings an interdisciplinary and systems-oriented approach to exploring the question of what it means to live and to lead in an era of accelerating change. He believes the future is too important to be left to the futurists, and his grand professional goal is to empower more people to think/act/live and lead like the future is theirs to create.
Jeffrey is an award-winning educator and conversation catalyst who creates unique learning experiences that build knowledge while also building community. He is principal at the boutique advisory firm be radical and has been a top-rated moderator of immersive executive education programs and international summits for Singularity University since 2017. Jeffrey has also been featured as a guest lecturer and workshop leader at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, and the Empowerment Summit (at ECAL in Lausanne).
Previously, Jeffrey spent a decade building learning and development solutions, consulting on a couple of e-learning startups, and designing and delivering experiential youth leadership programs. He’s a social scientist by training (UC Berkeley, UT Austin) and a future-focused educator--with abiding interests in leadership, human ecology & complexity--by calling.
Introduction to Exponentials, Accelerating Change, Convergence, Philosophy of Technology, Disruption
In this session participants will cut to the core of the mechanisms driving much of the radical change felt across civilization. Thinking exponentially is core to everything we teach at Singularity, and getting into this mindset is a fundamental first step for gaining insight into the future. During this session, participants will come to understand the basic concepts of exponential growth, but will more importantly explore its implications in order to shift away from a linear way of thinking.
Traditional linear thinking often leads us to overestimate growth in the short term and underestimate it in the long term. This is the deceptive aspect of exponential growth. This matters because many technologies (including artificial intelligence, biotechnologies, advanced manufacturing, and more) are driven by exponential improvements in computation and progress in ways that can leave us astonished and unprepared. Exponential growth is democratizing access to these tools, once limited to wealthy labs, enabling small teams and individuals to achieve what was once exclusive to governments and corporations.
This session prepares participants to understand exponential growth patterns, understand their implications, and how to apply them within their industry.
Envisioning the future – of our organizations, ourselves, our world – is fundamentally an act of imagination. But we often lead as though the future were instead a knowable, predictable thing to be realized according to 5-year strategic plans and reliable growth forecasts. The future we plan for is rarely the one we wind up with, and our narrow view of “the future” relies on an illusion of certainty that actually leaves us more vulnerable to the unimagined.
A growing body of research suggests that embracing uncertainty to explore a wider range of possible futures is a highly beneficial, adaptive, and learnable practice for individuals and organizations. Building on that research and a set of practices from strategic foresight and game design, this session will help you break out of the typically unproductive set of responses most leaders have to rising uncertainty (avoidance, paralysis, desire to control, etc.) to adopt a new generative approach. The emphases of the highly interactive workshop will be on storytelling, questioning & play and how these natural human tools can help us tap into increased mental agility and resilience, new creative powers, and a more future-robust model of leadership in complex environments.
Spatial computing technologies like virtual and augmented reality (AR/VR) have seen an impressive pace of development in recent years.
Today, developers are building on virtual world concepts like Second Life by launching a new generation of fully immersive virtual worlds. These are major steps toward the future depicted in stories like Ready Player One.
We’re also witnessing the early stages in the building of one of the most important assets in all of computing: the AR Cloud. Some analysts predict that in the next decade, the AR Cloud will be the most important and valuable piece of computing infrastructure in the world—more valuable than Google’s PageRank index or Facebook’s social graph. Development of the AR Cloud will empower developers, businesses, (and you) -- to layer digital AR content on top of the “real” world.
In this session, you will learn what the AR Cloud is, identify opportunities within social VR, and explore the ways that digital realities, both layered on our real world and captured inside fully immersive ones, will transform our relationship to the use of physical space and reshape how we live, shop, work, and play.