The Long Now: World Building
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
Now that we’ve built a bridge to leveraging our VUCA world instead of waging war on the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity that defines a cosmo-centric universe, it’s time to imagine the advantages that a long now approach can offer us. Such a world promises to look quite different from the structures and players that we are used to, but also holds the potential for solving long-standing issues around our blindness to transformational novelty, our false separation from nature, and our failure to recognize higher order purpose within the systems we birth and the communities we inhabit. Even Ripley might not believe it!
CONTENT 2: INFOGRAPHIC
Visualize the movement from today’s Wicked Problem – Battling VUCA – toward the transformational Wicked Opportunity – Embracing the Long Now. The map tells a story of the data points we’ve uncovered during this month’s thought leadership, including root causes, trend connections, and point of impact responses. View the full map to see what we discuss in this week’s podcast, the Point of Impact questions, to envision a world impacted by the Long Now!
