This week's Future Here Now digs into one of the key skills that everyone will need in the Fusion Era. In period of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity, where intedependencies are more complex than ever and information transparency extends past anything we have known before, no boss, manager, leader or elected official is going to have All The Answers.
And given how much our economic viability -- and our ability to solve vexing problems -- is going to depend on new levels of human creativity, every person has to be entrepreneurial, no matter whether they work for themselves or not. Career decisions, discerning a satisfying personal path, anything that involves making sense of and acting on the information and choices available to us is going to mean that we can't just do what someone else tells us, which is what many of us have relied on throughout the Industrial Era (and before).
This presents really serious challenges for a lot of people who have come up in the Industrial Era. We were taught to sit in the rows, do the worksheets, punch the clock, follow the directives, live according to the expectations. But those guiding forces have failed many of us, economically, personally and collectively. And even though we can see that, at least in glimpses, this challenge scares even the most free-spirited of us.
But perhaps the bigger challenge this transition creates are for the organizations that shape our work and our communities. Organizations can get just as set in their ways as individdual people - often moreso, because changing an organizaition's fundamentals requires changing lots of people, in sync.
Try It On
Choose an organization that you’re connected to - your company, your school, the nonprofit you volunteer at, etc.
Think of an element of that organization's work - maybe one that you find a little frustrating or that you think isn't as valuable as it should be.
If you had absolute power, what would you do differently?
How would that challenge or confuse or upset the people who are involved with that today?
What do you think would eventually happen?