The Future Has Revealed Itself...

The future is here and it has finally revealed itself. For far too long we have ignored the signals of change on the periphery of society, often beyond the traditional metrics we hold solemn to explain the state of the world.  The stock market is an interpretative reflection of investor activity, a time series that tracks past behaviors overtime. Yet these and many other methodologies have us look in the rearview mirror to explain the road ahead. The more this seems to work the greater we value methods of past success. 

Naively we have led ourselves to believe we can understand and control a vast and inter-connected global system.  The depth and breadth of this complex system itself is unknowable.  It is not this dynamic system or the virus alone that has created the most recent risk to society and our public health.  It is our thinking.  Our thinking creates individual and collective societal blinders that shadows risk and makes it unseen – until it is. How we see ourselves, the world and ourselves in that world greatly influences our judgment and behavior. Look to where we spend our time, our money and energy to see what is important to us.  

In this time of disruption the only thing that is certain is change itself. This is not a new phenomena, though the pandemic has brought this often ignored reality into focus. Many have had their expectations for routine and predictability shattered creating unease and stress. To be candid, there is no returning to what existed before.  It is gone and we must create a new tomorrow. As a society we must reimagine our expectations about family, community as well as our government, schools, work and life more generally.  

Rather than seek to place blame or fatal attempts to prove causality our efforts benefit more from making ourselves resilient to future unpredictable events.  The Covid-19 pandemic marks the third major event in my life. The first being the collapse of the Soviet Union and the perhaps the beginning of the end for the Westphalian system.  Second were the attacks of 9/11 that some argue emerged from failed pan-Arabism and a return to fundamental Islam.  Now it’s this virus we clinically title Covid-19. 

The famous futurist Alvin Toffler foretold that the “the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn”. It is a time to reflect – to think about our past thinking and actions and chart a new course. We must learn to accept uncertainty and embrace emergence.  Meaning we can’t predict the future. We can however learn to think in possibilities.  We must unlearn rigid, linear thinking methodologies that seek to remove, ignore or discount uncertainty and emergence.  We must relearn that humans and human society are resilient by nature. Relearn that the we can control how we respond to our fellow human and contribute to making a better world.