Future Here Now: The answer is yes and

Roundup

In this issue:

• Surprise! Your intuition might actually help you see the future

• Training Tech Workers

• Too much free speech might prevent you from hearing important stuff

• Resilience = measuring and monitoring

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My favorite place in Las Vegas, other than wherever my friends are, is Area 15, a massive experience from Meow Wolf that… well, it defies description. Whatever pictures or video you find online, they’re just a sliver. If you go anywhere near Las Vegas, go to Area 15. You won’t regret it.

This is one tiny little bit of that experience: at one point, you walk through what looks like a corporate office hallway. Wood paneling, portraits of company leaders past and present in elaborate frames along the wall, interspersed with doors. Lots of doors. With no indication of what lay behind them.

If you thought you were trying to get to A Destination – maybe something you saw in one of those online clips – you might be tempted to pass by them. But if you do, you might miss some amazing installations – a surreal wall of mirrors, a room with walls covered in an indecipherable script that you’ve seen snuck into other parts of the experience, a full lab with glowing specimens reaching out of their flasks, and most delightfully, and inexplicably, a dark room lit only by narrow light beams and resonating with deep notes when you try to touch them.

What do you miss when you assume there’s only one door worth going through? What other ways of experiencing, knowing, learning, do we close ourselves off from?

We’ve hit the limits of the purely rational approach to life, experience, even problem-solving. The Industrial Era solidified the idea that we could answer all of our questions if we just thought hard enough, logic-ed hard enough. That the intellect was the motive force, the place where Answers lived, and our job was to get good enough at thinking to dig down to those Answers.

But having largely gotten there, we find that the rational is tangled up in the non-rational so tightly that neither one actually does what it was intended. Our fears and our desires are so knotted up in our supposed rationality that we don’t even see how the former dictates the shape of much of the latter .

Not only do we need to understand the role of emotion, imagination, vision, fear, but we need to accept that these can give us insights, insights that help us find better solutions. If we ignore those, we can’t address the ways they shape our supposedly rational thought. And we miss out entirely on what they might be able to tell us.

How do the ways that we work and live change if we assume that there are other, legitimate ways of knowing, thinking, deciding, than the ones we’ve been taught? What changes when we discover that the hallway we’re in has options that we never imagined were behind those doors?

Production Note: the links to the original articles are in the headlines of each article.

Surprise! Your intuition might actually help you see the future

A key part of our Industrial Era baggage: