Deep Dives

Future Heads: How VW Is Using Swarm Intelligence To Deal With Uncertainty

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Article Summary:

The 2020 pandemic wreaked havoc with the economy, the global supply chain and the way companies operate, taking just about everyone by surprise.  So how can corporates possibly plan as far ahead as 2040?

Germany’s Volkswagen Group is trying to do just that, by using swarm intelligence to craft an ethics policy that will cover societal, technological, economical, ecological and political changes over the next 20 years. The evolution of its ethics policy was developed by an internal program called Future Heads, a group of 320 experts, strategists, managers and thought leaders from a wide range of disciplines and brands that form a network to collectively think about how the world will change and how the group should confront those changes.

About the author

Jennifer L. Schenker

Jennifer L. Schenker, an award-winning journalist, has been covering the global tech industry from Europe since 1985, working full-time, at various points in her career for the Wall Street Journal Europe, Time Magazine, International Herald Tribune, Red Herring and BusinessWeek. She is currently the editor-in-chief of The Innovator, an English-language global publication about the digital transformation of business. Jennifer was voted one of the 50 most inspiring women in technology in Europe in 2015 and 2016 and was named by Forbes Magazine in 2018 as one of the 30 women leaders disrupting tech in France. She has been a World Economic Forum Tech Pioneers judge for 20 years. She lives in Paris and has dual U.S. and French citizenship.