The horizon of the future belongs to the brave (and the smart)

The horizon of the future belongs to the brave and the smart. It belongs to kids, the students, the factory workers, the professionals and the elderly that are willing to learn and to keep on learning. The future belongs to those who can master the new unfolding high ground of the STEAM domains and the 5C’s skill set. It belongs to those who can also bring a sense authenticity, humility, and true humanity into this new brave world.

STEAM - The New High Ground

Fifty years ago, the wisdom was: “first get your law degree, and then the world will be yours. This thinking has changed and is more like: first get your STEAM degree and, or skill set, then you can become anything you want to be. The future will belong to the kids with a combination of science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics skills. STEAM is the new strategic high road, and it will serve those on its path well.

The 5C’s Skill Set

To be successful in the world of STEAM, in the new world of work, you have to make sure that the following skills become second nature to you. You have to think about them, practice them and let them become part of your muscle memory.

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking will become the number one skill that will distinguish you from the million other qualified people and ten million robots that would like to tender for your work. Critical Thinking is the ability, to stand back from the problem, to reimagine, to ask the right questions and to become smarter in the way we think. Einstein understood part of this challenge when he wrote: “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Communication

The ability to communicate effectively, to listen, to share, to exchange information, news, and ideas effectively and, to participate discourse, is and will become an even more powerful skill, in a world where everyone wants to talk at the same time.

Collaboration

Talk is cheap, but it is the ability to work and deliver results as a team, and a team of teams, that will become the gold standard against which everyone will be measured. As the world becomes more interconnected, you will more and more, find yourself working with people that you have never met before. It will be teams and professionals that live and work in other parts of the world, other cultures and other time zones.

Creativity

Creativity is the stuff dreams are made off. It is the ability to use logical thinking, intuition, imagination, mix it up and step into the world of miracles. It is creativity that led us, to discover fire, explain relativity and understand the helix structure of DNA.

Creative people can think, “inside the box,” “outside the box,” and “where there is no box.” They have the cunning ability to create their own perspective of stubborn problems, bring into play old and new wisdom and connecting the dots of different worlds.

Coding

Coding or writing computer code is the skill and ability to translate English to a language machines, and computers can understand. It is a set of instructions, a task list at a specific level of the overall computer architecture that tells the computer to do these tasks. In the end, it is the ability to take a very complex information task and break it down into a set of logical steps and procedures that the computer will execute to solve a specific problem.

The ability to instruct computers to do things and solve problems, takes place at different levels, from a simple Excel formula to writing machine language. The ability to find your own field of dreams and to excel in it will be critically important going forward.

One Last Thing

We are creating a new world. It will be below us, above us and all around us. This world will wake you up in the morning, tell you what to wear for the day, switch on your coffee maker, tell you that you need to take your car for a service, edit your emails, link you with friends and colleagues, and find a cure for the cancer that is lurking in your body. It will not be a perfect world, but it will be of our creation and, of our collective image. If that is the case, make sure that you put the very best of yourself into it.

If we are going to live and work shoulder to shoulder with machines, computers, and a new resident intelligence, we should make sure that it reflects the best of human excellence.

Pour into it, your own authenticity, a sense humility, and true humanity; Pour into it your own unique giftedness, all your love, and inspiration and let it become an artifact and platform that foster and support meaningful relationships and meaningful work.

About Nav Pienaar

Nav Pienaar is a solutions architect, a navigator, and a writer. He is a South African born design engineer, specializing in the field of Design, Data Visualization and Business Intelligence.

He is a design engineer with an advanced business degree and an MBA. He has a deep understanding of the integrated, complex and dynamic nature of modern business. He also has the knowledge, ability, and experience, to design and build very powerful business navigation systems for high-performance businesses and teams.

He has done extensive work, building advanced Business Intelligence platforms in almost all functional business areas and for a wide variety of industries. 

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