What's our take on:
War
What's our take on:
The Global Economy
What's our take on:
Oil
About Kenos Circle
The Kenos Circle is a society of professional academics, business theorists, and commercial consultants sharing a common interest in the concepts, tools, and methods of modern complexity science and management for understanding "the future". The name of the society is taken from the mythological South American god Kenos, creator of the world. The Kenos Circle aims to create many possible worlds of the future, and explore the relative likelihood of each of them coming to pass.
The society's goal is to provide information, insights, and methods to foresee and assess future events on all time scales, ranging from relatively short-term (months to a few years) shifts in cultural trends in popular fashion, music, and film to intermediate-term (several years) movements in political and economic activities, such as elections and demographic shifts, to long-term (decades) events such as the outbreak of wars and long-range economic and financial trends.
The Kenos Circle will explore future trends by organizing targeted seminars for members of the Circle, as well as planners and managers from the business and governmental decision-making communities. The content of these seminars will consist of core material focused on new tools from complex system theory for understanding and anticipating future trends, augmented by specific examples of how to employ these tools in particular settings appropriate to the seminar audience. Seminars will initially be aimed at leaders from industries such as financial services, advertising, insurance, pharmaceuticals, government policy makers, retailing, and manufacturing.
Each seminar will be conducted by world-class experts from The Kenos Circle group of Fellows and Associates, as well as special guest scholars, selected for their ability to translate the concepts of complexity science into workable tools for creating visions of the future. These concepts include:
- Socionomics: The study of social causation, the how and why social mood creates events ranging from the emergence of fashion to the outbreak of war. Seminars will give a complete account of how to use these ideas for projecting current moods into future actions and events.
- Computer-based simulation models: The creation of "silicon surrogates" of real-world systems ranging from an entire industry like the catastrophe insurance industry to the detailed flow of customers through a supermarket. In all cases the purpose of the simulation is to answer the question: "What is likely to happen if I ..."? These simulations constitute a "laboratory" for doing controlled, repeatable experiments on social and behavioral processes to understand their counterintuitive nature.
- Cycles research: The study of how social processes like financial markets, demographic systems, and political transition take place—and when.
- Data distillation: The extraction of information from masses of data is a crucial aspect of modern management. Complexity science has developed tools for both processing data and graphically displaying what the data is trying to say, in order for decision-makers to understand the tradeoffs involved in different courses of action.
- Instabilities and "Surprises": Modern chaos theory and fractal analysis allow us to see when "small" changes at the beginning of an ongoing process such as introduction of a new product or change of political stance can lead to dramatic, "big" changes in the end result of such decision. Of special interest to those concerned with the future are when current trends will "turn". Tools like the Hurst exponent give us insight into this most valuable of all questions.
An important part of each seminar will be "hands-on" exercises for the seminar attendees to test their understanding of how to actually employ these ideas and tools to address questions in their own area of interest.