Erica Orange

Erica is Executive Vice President & Chief Operating Officer of The Future Hunters, one of the world’s leading futurist consulting firms. She analyzes emerging sociocultural, technological, economic, geopolitical and environmental trends – and identifies the strategic implications (the “So what?”) of those trends for several of the most influential Fortune 500 companies, trade associations and public sector clients. Erica’s ability to spot patterns, think critically, and translate that into actionable strategies is what has made her an asset to clients for over 15 years.

Erica speaks to a wide range of global audiences about the macro trends that are shaping and impacting today’s landscape. She has spoken at TEDx and keynoted over 200 conferences around the world, including across Europe, Latin America and Asia. She has authored numerous industry white papers, and has been featured in news outlets including Forbes, NPR, Time, Inc, Wired, Bloomberg, and CBS This Morning. In 2020, she was named by Forbes as one of the world’s 50 Top Female Futurists.

Erica’s presentations:

• Challenge core thinking, and get people to see the world (and their industries) in completely new ways;
• Identify trends that have a direct impact on your organization; and
• Put change in context so that you can better deal with it – and create new future-proofed opportunities.

SPEAKING TOPICS: 2023
Below is a sampling of speaking topics/themes — none of which are mutually exclusive. All fit together to help provide a thought-provoking and holistic look at where the future is moving. This is also not a complete topic list.

FOUNDATION TO UNDERSTANDING THE FUTURE

Templosion + The Transformation of the Global Economy:

Since 2008, what we’ve experienced was (and still is) a fundamental global economic transformation. Economic transformations are brought about by the convergences of new technologies that create efficiencies in existing businesses, create whole new ones, replace work and workers and open entirely new vistas. This has lead to a world of templosion — the idea that the biggest of things/events are happening in shorter periods of time. Everything is becoming more abbreviated and compressed.

The Accelerator + Magnifier Effect:
The circumstances of the last 3 years accelerated many previously developing trends at an exponential pace (e.g., distributed + hybridized work; increased use of AI, etc.) It also magnified existing issues (e.g., the limits of short-term thinking; changes in trade, technology, finance – including the risks inherent in supply chains, etc.) What this underscores is the critical importance of long-term thinking and strategic foresight.

EXAMPLES OF TREND-SPECIFIC SPEAKING CONTENT

The Future of Work & The Workplace
Artificial intelligence (AI), smart systems, robotics, and the rise of deep learning and the neural net will be responsible for disintermediating an increasing number of global human workers in the future. But it will not always signal technology’s complete displacement of humans from the equation. More likely, at least in the near-term, is that automated labor will work alongside human labor and the two will reinforce one another to make the combination more productive. It is not just about automation, but augmentation. And not just about replacement, but enhancement.

Generational Compression: Redefining Gen Z
Generations have long been grouped in birth year cohorts of 15-20 years. But generations are now seemingly refreshing every 2-3 years. Technology is changing so rapidly that kids only a few years apart struggle to have the same cultural and technological frames of reference. Today’s youth are not just digital natives, they are “Cybrids” – cyber hybrids – who have a symbiotic relationship with the digital world from an early age. Understanding what makes this generation tick is critical for understanding retention & recruitment, talent management, advertising/marketing, and education/learning.

Influence as a Currency:
An economy built around capturing and maintaining consumer attention has long been building. Attention has been assigned monetary value, as has time. But what is beginning to shift is the way in which we assign financial value to people, and more specifically, to consumers. Going beyond attention, consumer influence is now being bought, traded, and sold much like stocks in the stock market. The growth of a Human Stock Exchange (HSE) is collapsing human traits, creations and personalities into a currency, exposing what we are willing to pay for, invest in and monetize.

The Metaverse, Enterprise Metaverse + Rise of Digital Twins
The metaverse is slowly becoming mainstream. For entrants in this new “wild west,” the metaverse is not about creating virtual interpretations of real-life products or services. Rather it’s about uncoupling these things from their physical environments and entirely reimagining the experience. It’s also important to note that the metaverse is cleaving in two. One is the consumer-centric version. Another focuses on organizational replication and is known as the “enterprise metaverse” – essentially, a digital copy of the physical economy. Unlike the metaverse, which is populated mostly by human avatars, the corporate version is largely a collection of objects. Digital twins – virtual 3D representation synchronized with physical things or processes – are driving much of this growth.

EXAMPLES OF PROPRIETARY FUTURE-FOCUSED VISUAL FRAMEWORKS

The Competency Tree:
Future competitiveness will rely on the creation of an entirely new skills and competencies framework. To ensure that we have the thinking required to solve the big issues that will arise in the future, we need to start viewing and training for these skills and competencies as interconnected. Our proprietary Competency Tree is meant to serve as a modeling outline to help visualize how might we future-proof the human workforce to make them more innovative than ever. It can also be used as a tool to help reconfigure retention and recruitment strategies.

The Workspace Culture CHAIN:
As leaders navigate an evolving new work landscape, the one critical piece ripe for redefinition is culture. How can forward-thinking organizations design and execute the conditions for truly effective culture in a hybridized environment? How can it be reimagined in a more human-centric way? Organizations that treat their people with greater fairness, empathy and consideration, while removing the obstacles that prevent them from doing their best work will emerge among the winners.

The Three Ts: Time, Trust + Truth:
Time has become our greatest asset; it is the new currency. Leveraging it in innovative ways is, and will continue to be, a distinct competitive advantage. But beyond time, two other critical luxuries are emerging: trust + truth.

Trust: There is a growing vacuum of trust. And that vacuum is giving new urgency not just to transparency but ho Honesty in everything from ESG principles to employment practices to corporate values and ethics. But trust is getting harder to define because trust is fluid. Building stakeholder trust will be an ongoing process. It must be something that becomes fully engrained into the ethos of the company. Consumers will pay a premium for things they can trust, and there will be new value in trusted human-to-human relationships.

Truth: The distortion of the truth is being exacerbated by a climate of rampant distrust and mis-, dis- and mal-information. We are operating in a world in which different versions of reality battle to see which gains our momentary attention. That reality might be based on established truths – or it might be based on falsities…and perhaps it doesn’t even matter because increasingly we are living in a world without proof. Fairness, integrity and authenticity will rise in importance.

The Metaspace Economy: Emerging Trends

Templosion

SPEAKING & MEDIA CLIPS