A NEW YEAR, A NEW DECADE, WHAT WILL IT BRING?

As we begin a new year and a new decade what will we humans do in order to make a positive contribution for the future?

On the final ABC TV 7:30 Report for 2010 on New Years Eve the futurist Richard Slaughter was the final person to be interviewed for 2010 and the presenter, Tracy Bowden, asked him “So if you had to give your top three things that we need to be proactive about, to make the world a better place, what would they be?”

The summary of Richard Slaughter’s reply:

1                     A more dignified advertising industry that was not trying to convince us to buy and consume more with our identities being tied up with what we have and who we are.

2                     We need to shift off the growth path by understanding that we have reached the point now where we have to rein that growth in to make it less destructive.

3                     A shift in worldview to a global world view, an Earth-centered world view and with that shift comes the ability to seeing everything we do on a daily basis - driving our car, earning a living, fixing the roof, deciding what appliances to buy, where to go, how to travel - into that global context.

Slaughter concluded, “Because the global context is in fact the actual environment that we live in and now we've got the tools, the methods, we've got tremendous ability to analyse complex data and come up with clear conclusions and with all that in our hand I reckon that we can do a much better job of steering away from the dystopia and over-shoot and collapsed futures towards futures that are sustainable and also humanly more desirable.”

This is a good example of why futures thinking matters, and why it is a leadership requirement and challenge - it is the thinking we need to do before we even think about any strategy or actions we may take.  It is the rigour needed to create the relevance. We need this to happen more often to solve many of today’s problems, as solutions often do exist, but the courage and will to engage in these solutions is what is often missing.