WNGC

“What’s not going to change?”

It’s my go-to lead question when parsing and making sense of the future.

Jeff Bezos famously asked this question in 1997 amidst growing doubts about Amazon and online retail’s long-term potential. The answer was that customers would continue to want things faster and cheaper. So he built a company around that.

WNGC has been a simple, helpful starting point for me when thinking about everything from the world our kids will live in to core skills that I should double-down on to investing and career decisions to forecasting markets, technologies, and product adoption to what we could do differently for our clients.

Thinking about the medium-to-long-term future can seem overwhelming. It can make you anxcious. It can make you feel like you're being pulled in all directions from feeds, updates, advice, and the real technological change we're experiencing. It can have you scratching your head on where to even start.

WGNC has helped me stay clear and grounded.

It's helped me prioritize what’s important.

Let’s try out WNGC on a question, a big one for fellow parents.

What are the skills and behaviors that will be important for our kids to develop in the next 20 years to help them live fulfilling, economically secure lives?

Note: one day our kids will be able to spin up books, articles, movies, podcasts, research, products, events, and entire companies – things that could once take decades – in less than an afternoon by just speaking the right words into something that may or may not be a phone.

That’s a lot of change.

But, WNGC? The importance of:

• Human connection – people will still want to be seen, heard, and valued and they’ll want to collaborate and experience the world together
• Communication – people and agents will be goal-directed and self-improving and our kids will be defining which problems to focus on and communicating purpose, risks, boundary conditions, and trade-offs
• Asking revealing questions in order to surface those goals, risks, boundaries, and trade-offs
• Taste – our kids will be the ones evaluating the world, the work of others, and the actions of agents.

With this WNGC scaffolding, it’s easier to take the next step of unpacking the skills, behaviors, and experiences our kids can focus on cultivating, even though the tools and means they use to achieve them will change.

Have you used WNGC on big or small questions?

How has it helped you in clarifying markets, technology adoption, investments, and your life?