Opening the Door to A Very Human Future


Exponential change is our new reality. The pace, scale, reach, and the potential impacts of the underlying drivers of change are extraordinary and represent both challenge and opportunity to individuals, public sector organisations, not-for-profit, and commercial enterprises alike. The primary exponential change focus of many organisations is increasingly on the development and potential impact of new automation technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics to create increasingly efficient processes and enable greater customer personalisation.

But in life, society, and business we need to be alert to all the signals, predictions, and scenarios of how the emerging future could change the nature of our world. In response, we need to be thinking about how we will design future business products, services, and processes. In government, we need to be thinking about how we will design and deliver future public services. Collectively we must try to imagine the impact of new ideas, technologies, and approaches in existing sectors and how they help us create new sectors that will power the future economy.

Context for Change

Our world is becoming increasingly complex, globalisation is evolving and increasing uncertainty is a new reality. The increasing desire of people around the world to shape their own futures is driving change at the political, economic, and social levels. New technologies and a growing middle class – especially in Asia - are typically critical drivers. The broadening of sustainability is becoming a license to operate. Sustainability is no longer just the domain of concerns about the environment, climate change, and bio-diversity; it’s also about economics, equality, infrastructure renewal, and social improvement. New consumers are emerging; not just millennials and Gen-Z but also boomers who are increasingly adopting new perspectives on what and how they engage with brands, products, and services. Technology offers business and society more broadly amazing benefits including the ability to change our traditional scarcity mind-set to an abundance mind-set by embracing “Trekonomics” – Star Trek’s economic utopia. We are experiencing two worlds colliding; the analogue, physical world where we focus on created physical products and services, with the digital world where data and information are the valuable currency and where data is opening up a new world of possibility.

Opening a Door to a Very Human Future

Taken altogether, these drivers of future change represent both challenge and opportunity and the key question becomes, are we ready to open a door to a very human future?

The answers do not lie in technology – enabling though it could prove to be – but they lie in our mind-set, our leadership behaviours, and the actions we take as individuals, as enterprises, and as governments.

Image Credit: Arek Socha via https://pixabay.com/photos/doors-choices-choose-open-decision-1587329