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Silos, groupthink and knowledge ghettos

Early in 2015, I had a conversation with a lovely man who leads the futurist department for one of the largest tech companies in the world. His team would imagine the future with the company’s pipeline technologies and build out offices and homes in the vision of these technologies. He showed me a short film about how they were imagining the future, and it felt exciting in terms of the technology capabilities, but a bit soulless. I asked if he had anyone from the arts and humanities on his team. He said “No, just engineers.” I asked, “How are you imagining the future without people from the arts and humanities?” He genuinely looked flummoxed and said, “Wow, that’s a blind spot.”

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