The Future: Slow Down or Go Faster?

By Ron Immink

A perspective on predicting the future - future trends, unpredictability, the mindset and some tools and books to use - brought to you by Bookbuzz and Strategy Crowd.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oak Tree Press
• Release date: Sep 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781781193198

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Introduction: The World in 2022

Future Vision

The faster you go, the further you need to look ahead.

That idea is from Future Vision by Richard Watson, the author of Future Files, Future Minds and Digital vs Human. Future Vision is a very good book to help you plan for the future, with a particular emphasis on scenario planning. But you need good information to develop those scenarios. All his books are worth reading.

Richard Watson is on our list of VUCA gurus; he is a pessimist. Ray Kurzweil, the singularity guy, is one of our other VUCA gurus; he is an optimist.

Stretch to 2040

Let’s stretch it to 2030 / 2040 for the craic. By that time, singularity will have happened. We will have merged with technology and immortality is a real possibility.

Exponential

That seems incredibly far-fetched, but that is because most of us do not understand the impact of exponential. The best book that describes that effect is The Second Machine Age. It’s a fairly dark book on winner-take-all, robotics and AI.

Artificial Intelligence

AI is interesting.

Watson reads 800 million pages per second. Every second. It is also twice as good as a surgeon at making the right diagnosis. If Watson is already better than a top surgeon, what else is it capable of? Is it a threat or an opportunity?

Audi has self-driving cars with different personalities but nobody knows how or why. The ghost is in the machine.

Google has two AI computers talking to each other in an encrypted language and a third one trying to break the encryption. So far without success. So this means there are now two AIs talking to each other, and we have no idea what they are talking about. That is a potential Skynet.

Although The Seventh Sense suggests that AI is clever enough not to let us know that it has taken over.

Future Crimes

If you want to go even darker, add Future Crimes, a book about cyber security, data and privacy. Or a criminal AI (Don Watson?).

Weird Mix

Throw in Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable and What Technology Wants, Steve Kotler’s Tomorrow Land, Michi Kaku’s The Future of the Mind, Brett King’s Augmented and Chris Anderson’s Makers and you get a weird mix of the art of the possible.

Anything in tech: Nano, neuro, bio, genetics, materials, ICT, data, memory, quantum and the list goes on. Best described as a box of Lego blocks that are interchangeable and combinable. Which is why we are now talking brain web, sensor dust, nano paint, spider steel, laser space travel, self-driving cars, etc.

Lies and Statistics

It is unpredictable, hence Future Babble; we have no idea. But we do know some things for sure:

•Demographics

•Internet

•IoT

•Climate – the book to read is Climate Change

•Platforms (Amazon, LinkedIn, Cortana, Google, Facebook, Watson) – the book to read is The Third Wave

•Action = reaction.

The Power of the Mind

Or instead of looking further ahead, slow down and read books like Work Clean, The Code of the Extraordinary Mind, and Buddha’s Brain. Focus on being aware and mindful. I think that is where it lies for the future: meaning and purpose. Because soul is how you beat technology.

When you look into this field, you find lots of interesting books. Books like Exponential Organisations that talk about the importance of transformative purpose, to more hard-core books such Evolved Enterprise and Firms of Endearment. These types of companies beat all metrics hands-down – from 8 to 14 times more profitable. Focus on passion, values, purpose and vision.

Strategic Box

Which brings me to what we call the ‘Strategic Box’. Proud to say it was ahead of its time. Created by myself and Brian O’Kane in 2003 to help SMEs develop a strategy.

I read a book called Funky Business and realised the environment was too unpredictable and that you could only focus on movement and simplification by developing a lens consisting of six statements and weekly targets. The statements are:

•Values

•Passion

•Vision

•Mission

•Positioning

•Resourcing.

Ask the universe

Rather than focusing on what may or may not happen, you should focus on clarity of your own vision, passion and purpose. If you believe in The Tao of Physics and The Secret, the universe or quantum physics will do the rest.

Future Vision

Future scenarios, the faster things move, the further you need to look ahead.

Future vision, scenarios for the world in 2040. Should you plan at all?

How do you plan for a world that is in constant flux? We are getting that question a lot. Should you plan at all? What timeframe do you plan for? And how do you make an organisation fluid enough to respond to constant change and volatility? BIG questions. No easy answers.

Do you have a plan?

A lot of companies have a plan. Sometimes it is a strategic plan. What is scary is that some – and it is particularly endemic in small companies – do not have a plan at all. Which means that the company is rudderless, without any sense of direction. Which in a perverse way, in a world of chaos, makes some sense. You go where the winds blows you.

Based on what?

If it is a strategic plan, it is very likely to be internally-driven (SWOT, growth, market definition