Future Here Now: Labor → creativity
Macrotrends
Continuing our series on the Macrotrends driving the disconnect between what we learned and what we need now - and in the future. You can find the previous posts in this series at wiseeconomy.substack.com.
The first part of this statement isn’t going to be a shock to anyone who has read a business publication in the last 10 years: our ability to generate value in the Fusion Era depends on human innovation and creativity, not strong backs and the ability to follow instructions.
The second part, though, is more challenging:
We’re acting like the ability to innovate only belongs to a rare, super special subset of people -- the ones with fancy educations, magic-like skills, the right skin color and upbringing.
We’ve got that all wrong. And getting that wrong means that we are wasting an enormous amount of our potential. We are hamstringing ourselves, choking off our ability to actually address the challenges we are facing.
Because we are leaving much of our best problem-solving potential in the back corner.
More and more, the problems we are facing are the ones that conventional approaches, conventional thinking, have failed to solve. Sometimes because the Heirs Apparent couldn’t see them from their privileged position, sometimes because doing so required new skills that they hadn’t been taught. Mostly, though, we haven’t solved them because the most effective solution doesn’t lie within our conventional experience.
Finding a new solution requires finding a new perspective.
And the time has never been better for that. For the first time in US history, people who are not part of what we have long called the “majority” (white and European-descended), outnumber those who are. And it’s that difference in perspective, divergence in experience, that gives us all a change to see through new eyes, and find new solutions.
Finding new solutions doesn’t require a big name school or a degree or a trust fund. Truly innovative solutions come out of our communities all over the place, from students and grandmothers and the guy who runs the auto body shop.
The problem is, most of the time those solution-creators don’t have the support or the resources -- and no one has ever told them that they can, that Solution-Creator is a purpose that they have the right and the ability to fill.
If we’re all going to do what we need, if we’re going to live into that potential and do what the Fusion Era is demanding of us, we need to unlock all the creativity we can get. It’s not a matter of manager and proletariat, it’s not a question of raw materials and specialized refinement.
It’s a matter of enabling the unexpected innovator to create the next solution. Doing this may be the deepest challenge of our transition from the Industrial to the Fusion era.