Future Here Now: Future Ready Brains at work
Signals
Be sure to join me today at noon Eastern time for Future Ready Live. This week we’re talking about how to build that Future Ready Mind, and I’ll be giving you my three best strategies for making that happen! Find the live at my profile on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
Just a reminder that new Future Here Now subscribers can take 25% off the cost of a full subscription or a group subscription in January. A full subscription gets you more useful content, invitations and opportunitie for new resources, and an hour consultation or workshop with your team, organization or community leaders!
Yesterday I shared with you a few of the fundamental characteristics of the future that’s unfolding right now — I call these the Ground Conditions, because they for the basis of the new skills and strategies that we’re going to need. In keeping with the three that we talked about yesterday, here are a few Signals — indicators of where the deep trends seem to be going.
Entrepreneurial Thinking 4 Lyfe, not just for startups
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ive-coached-many-successful-entrepreneurs-here-7-lessons-gcy8e/
This article lays out “seven strategies and principles [the author] uncovered that universally fuel success.”
Take a close look at his list, though. The “strategies and principles” he’s talking about might look surprisingly like good insights for anyone, whether they work for themselves or a Fortune 500.
That’s a crucial Signal that you just got from your own interpretation of a piece of information.
We know that our life and career paths are less clearly defined than they were in the Industrial Era, and that we’re made responsible for our progression in a way that many of our great grandparents couldn’t have imagined. Writing out goals? Developing broader networks? That might be entrepreneur behavior, but aren’t these things that we all have to do to thrive in today’s marketplace?
True, but you know plenty of people who struggle to do exactly that. Either they’ve never been exposed to that thinking, or their skills sets aren’t strong in these areas. And yet, from middle school to retirement and beyond, we’re expected to manage our own trajectory, make the right choices, build the right kinds of savings, and basically manage our lives proactively. But visit a high school, or a prison, or workers in dead-end jobs, and you will find thousands who never developed those skills.
Developing an entrepreneurial mindset might come second nature to a few of us, but for large segments of our population, it’s a crucial asset that’s been completely overlooked. Which, very directly, costs us all.
Clear as mud: what you lose when you take a binary approach
https://www.elrha.org/project-blog/binary-failure/
This is a particularly concrete example of how binaries (in this case, Works/Doesn’t Work) badly gum up the works for the kinds of complex problem-solving that we have to undertake when Industrial Era, Big Public Works type investments have not been able to make a difference on an essential service.
Note how the very act of assigning a simple categorization actually made it harder for the researchers to find the best solutions for each given situation. The yes/no distinction might have seemed simple, but in reality it made solving the problem much harder.
You want more innovation? You need a culture that builds bravery
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/fear-factor-overcoming-human-barriers-to-innovation
I used this collection a couple of months ago, but I think it sheds a crucial light on what I mean when I say that we have to learn to be brave. For a lot of us, social acceptance or rejection can feel like a physical threat — we actually react, in our bodies, with many of the same changes in heart rate, respiration, etc., when the threat is social as when it is physical. In most work environments, “Bravery” does not mean fighting a dragon. It means risking social status or belonging, which shouldn’t be that big of a deal, but our prehistoric brains like to tell us otherwise.
As a result, “bravery” (or not being stopped by fear), depends more on a social context that offers psychological safety than it does on skills or status or credentials. In an era that demands near-constant innovation, and that asks us to do that in a VUCA environment where nowhere near as many things as we’d like can be taken for granted, psychological safety becomes one of the most crucial conditions for business or community resilience.