Session 10!

Creating your own future. Are you pregnant with the future?

Interesting Observations and Ideas:

We have to differentiate between working back from the future and forward from the present. Mind messing? Not quite after I understood what was the difference!

Working back from the future= postulating the future and formulating ways to work towards that goal.

Working forward from the present= working with what you have into the future.

I think the winning formula that is present for people who work back from the future is that they are more open to new ideas and concepts and that they are not bound by their old ideas or mindsets.

For example, people who did not see that Apple would succeed were bound by their old mindsets of what laptops should be like or what mp3s should be like. Whereas, Apple could see what people wanted in the future and work towards that.

So a question to pose to all of us, are you ready for the future yet? Are you creating your own future yet?

Key take-away points:

In order to plan ahead for the future, we have to be aware of the mega trends.

What are mega trends: major changes or shifts in our lives.

For example: growing world population, evolving technology, urbanization, globalization and need for green technology

I loved the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWXG-TsDAqc because it brought many great insights. The video showed that we need a sense of where things are going to be able to respond to the needs of the future. This is because in the present, we all have the same amount of information. Hence, what sets us apart is how we perceive and create the future we want to be in.

Though the video was rather brain washing (suddenly felt Siemens was such a wonderful company haha) I think it showed to us that technology has a role to play in the future. No matter how human the problem was (like mobility and healthcare), there seemed to be a form of technology that shapes how people operate in those various aspects.

However, it does not stop at thinking about the future but planning for it. If people can be split into thinkers and doers, I feel that the people who will success in the future would be those who are both thinkers and doers. That is, formulating the future they want to see and working towards it. In my opinion, I think that working towards the future is the most difficult because there are tricky wild cards in the future as mentioned in class that may jeopardize all plans made before. However, if a person believes strongly in carrying out his plans regardless how absurd it sounds today (as mentioned in session 9), the plans will eventually gel into reality in the future.

Issues for further discussion:

Enjoyed Siewlin’s sharing on the 5 ways people view the future; extrapolators, pattern analysts, goal analysts, counter punchers and intuitors. Probably we could have talked more about which we should aim to be in the future, on top of what we have discussed (which would be better in a specific company Apple in that industry). That’d have been interesting (:

Personal Ratings for Session: 9.5/10