Mike Lee is long time executive director of the ATMIA (ATM Industry Association) and they publish Future Trends. One of the recurring topics is the prospects and usage of cash. Cash has been declared dead many times but reality seems to always win out over potential technology fascinations.
Commentary: Prospects for cash
- Mike Lee
The following is an excerpt from "ATM Future Trends Report 2012," published by ATMmarketplace.com and ATMIA.
My parents used to comment on the need for an additional pair of eyes in the back of their heads. Does that sound familiar to you? I guess four energetic children were very difficult, if not impossible, to watch and monitor at all times of the day and night. Futurists, like parents, need an extra pair of eyes in the back of their heads. That is because they look backward and forward at the same time.
Futurists certainly need to look forward in time to make forecasts and write scenarios describing plausible and alternative landscapes of the future. Yet they also look backward to understand the trends, underlying patterns and key drivers of change which we can identify in a study of past social development. There is no such thing as foresight in a vacuum. Foresight integrates this hindsight, or knowledge of the past, with insight, which can be gained through scanning the multidimensional environment in which society (and nature) operates. A futurist takes this hindsight and insight and then uses the imagination to project a current understanding of reality into a time period located somewhere in the future, whether five or 500 years hence.
