Jump Shifts in Perspectives,
Practices and Circumstances

What is a jump shift? It is a fundamental and disruptive change in our way of doing business. It involves leaping to a higher plane of vision and performance. Jump shifts occur during periods of disruptive technological innovation, such as the e-knowledge disruption we’re experiencing today. Today’s emerging Knowledge Economy is very different from yesterday’s Information Economy. Tomorrow’s Knowledge Economy will be different from today’s in ways that affect every aspect of learning, knowledge management, and performance for individuals and organizations. The power of this vision is not only that it helps enterprises plan for the future, but that it energizes enterprises to act decisively now, to participate in the jump shifts rather than be left behind.

Jump shifts can take different forms. Jump shifts in vision and perspective enable one to consider a different plane of performance with different practices and values. But jump shifts can also occur in circumstances. For example, it is very likely that within the next few years, the traditional model for scholarly publishing will make a jump shift to an even more unbundled form based on digital repositories and horizontal marketplaces. Our visioning for the future must consider potentials posed by such dramatic changes in circumstances.

Planning from the Future Backward

The essence of foresight-based planning is “planning from the future backward” (Slaughter 2002). Rather than merely extrapolating present knowledge concepts and practices forward into the future, foresight-based planning develops plausible scenarios of the future that capture the potential of current and anticipated trends. Then those scenarios can be pulled back to the present to identify actions and changes in perspective that are necessary to “get there from here.” That’s planning from the future backward.

Future scenarios can include a range of e-knowledge impacts. Pragmatic changes in e-knowledge can improve the efficiency of existing business and knowledge processes. Progressive changes in e-knowledge can facilitate the reinvention of business and knowledge processes and the underlying knowledge ecology of organizations. At the revolutionary level, e-knowledge can stimulate rethinking of the basic foundations of our enterprises and institutions — colleges and universities, associations, corporations, government agencies, and other enterprises. e-Knowledge scenarios can include permutations and combinations of these impacts.