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By training and inclination, Ruben is a big picture strategic thinker. A Canadian pioneer of serious futures thinking, Nelson has spent his life exploring and seeking to understand the forces that are now re-shaping our lives, our world and our future. Today, he is Canada’s leading practitioner and teacher of strategic foresight. The question at the core of his life is this: “What would we do, if we truly knew what we were doing?”
His research into long-term cultural change has led him to believe that the 21st Century is a rare hinge of history. Its novel conditions will require every existing culture to embrace the need for and reality of a fundamental transformation. For over forty years, Nelson has offered strategic advice to Cabinet Ministers and senior executives in every sector of Canadian society. He has advised a Canadian Prime Minister on the future of social policy and undertaken the only formal Canadian research into our long evolution and transformation from a late modern Industrial society and economy into a truly post-Industrial culture.
Nelson also directed the Foresight Canada team that undertook a fresh assessment for The National Research Council of Canada of the complex and swampy strategic issues Canada and the world will face to 2020. For many years, Ruben has lived as a freelance intellectual contributing to such diverse areas as social policy, technology assessment, futures research, strategic foresight and the emerging knowledge-based economy/society. Today he is recognized as Canada’s most widely-experienced professional futures researcher. One of his current preoccupations is the creation, in cooperation with many professional colleagues, of a permanent Canadian network for strategic foresight.
Ruben is president of Square One Management Ltd, executive director of the Capitalizing on Change Project and fellow of the World Business Academy, the World Academy of Art and Science, and the Meridian Institute for Leadership, Governance and Change.
Ruben is a keynote speaker at the symposium.
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