The Long Now: Trend Analysis
The issue we’re examining in January is the prevailing Battle Against VUCA. Despite our greatest efforts to wage war on the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous landscape, the world continues to shift in unpredictable ways. The result is a constant exercise in futility that only leads to frustration, equivocation and breakdown. Surely we must continue to fight against forces that seek to disrupt the status quo – or should we?
We don’t think so. That’s why we reframed this issue into Embracing the Long Now; the idea that we have been misguidedly “shrinking the future” and must instead make long-term thinking more common, stretch out what people consider as “now,” and flow with the possibilities that exist within a VUCA universe. Join us as we seek to flip our collective brain on its head!
CONTENT 1: WICKED OPPORTUNITY PODCAST
Moving from a mindset of battling a VUCA environment to one of embracing a long now perspective is certainly no easy task. However, it’s a shift that we must engage in if our hopes for humanity extend beyond a struggle for survival or a surrender to certain obsolescence. The bridge to a mysterious future may be covered by the fog of legacy systems, but our collective fear of such a future – one that beckons us to reframe the way we define organizations, governments and society – can be cleared by understanding the generative world that awaits us on the other side. Yes, we see the troubled water. That’s why we’re building a bridge. 😉
CONTENT 2: SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION TREND CARD GAME
Want to build your own bridge between today’s headlines and a more transformative Wicked Opportunity future? During this week’s podcast, we demonstrated how “positive reappraisal” of our VUCA environment can enable us to embrace a long now mindset using trends identified in our environmental scanning. Access the trend cards we used and practice connecting today to tomorrow with our Six Degrees of Separation game.
Explore the connections between this month’s Trend Cards. Download here.
