FUTURES THINKING GROUP
FUTURES THINKING GROUP
„The world does not need more successful people. The world desperately needs more peacemakers ,
healers, and lovers of all kind.”
– Dalai Lama
Each year, for many years now, I have been investigating principles that best describe the world in which we live. This year, our world has become chaotic – perhaps best describes as the time of clowns. The US military conveys this as VUCA: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous.
This new concept has been gaining some new relevance to characterize the current geo-political environment and its meaning for tomorrow’s business. VUCA operating environments mean that the complex can quickly become chaotic. That’s why leadership is crucial. The ability of leader to ingrain new paradigms into team behaviours is key for enabling the type of collective decisions making required to achieve optimal outcomes, even in times of chaos. Businesses should expect both the game and the context to change.
A revolution is raging, and revolutions start with language.
The NEW NORMAL is over. Welcome to Age of VUCA. To win it we must deliver magic. The VUCA TIMES play out in a new and unknown Economy, a soft grid where creativity is the entry point, and consumer is the curator. We should change VUCA’s meaning from negative to positive. The VUCA of tomorrow is Vibrant, Unreal, Crazy and Astounding. It’s challenging, but the goal in all things to get into a flow state, where you are discovering rather than working off. This is the “participation economy”. ROI now means Return on Involvement. This is much better than Command and Control. Ideas are today’s currency, not strategy. Technology is only the enabler.
No single person has all the answers, but as a team we can do great things!
If not now, then when?
founding partner 360Inspiration
This Trend Book is not about just another 5 new future trends. Instead, it is more about 5 inspiring directions in a broad perspective. In each direction we have identified its dual meaning. It is like the two sides of the Moon. But it is not about being good or bad, it is more about not having one clear mainstream definition. Each trend could be understood from at least two different angles, which gives us a new, interesting navigation.
You will find each Trend in two polarised understandings:
Trend 
and Trend 
We are pleased to invite you to Futures Thinking Summit in June 2020 in Warsaw - a multidisciplinar business conference for CEOs, menagers, leaders, owners of businesses and R&D departments.
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We live in a time of constant change - social, cultural, economic and technological.
There is a lot of talk nowadays about the uncertainty of our time and the stress of navigating, what Zuzanna Skalska refers to in the newest Trendbook as a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous).
Many well-established businesses are facing challenges stemming from technological evolutions. New companies come to life and offer services that were non-existent before and completely modify the business landscape. Business models that were previously unquestioned suddenly find themselves in survival mode. We know one thing nowadays - if a company does not get involved in creating new solutions, in improving and reinventing the old ones, it will fail in the future, no matter how big its profits are now.
The challenges coming from VUCA - competition from outside the company’s own market and rapid technological change among others - have been around for decades. The business environment also changes all the time and requires the same skills to navigate: paying attention to what customers say and buy, investigating new opportunities from established markets and beyond, improving products and trying out new ones, and recruiting great people who support company in all these activities.
However, during our lifetime the world has changed immensely. We have been using smartphones for ten years only, the internet has been with us for a quarter of a century - to name only a number of the most important innovations. It is really hard to assume what will happen in the next ten or twenty years. We are becoming less certain. We are getting used to the lack of predictability. We expect surprises and issues. We doubt if our organizations are able to get prepared for the unknown.
Therefore, no matter how anxious and uncertain we are, we have to look in a wide perspective and draw inspirations from various sources.
In Blue Media we understand contemporary transformation not as single implementations of new tools or technologies, but as a comprehensive changes in the way the organization operates. The continuous business development we are facing now is more than just ‘it will be different’ statement. It is rather a belief that transforming processes are now as important - or maybe even more important - as their results. And we need to prepare for constant learning.
Human can invent and reinvent things all the time. The need for constant improvement is caused by human insatiability. We are finally living in anthropocene - a geological era, which we shape ourselves with our actions.
We aspire to be a knowledge-based company, although we constantly fight for better understanding of processes we undergo, trying to shape them at the same time. In Blue Media we believe that the catalyst for changes in business should be human (‘human by design’ approach). If the transformation is detached from real human (not consumer’s!) needs, it is not a change, but an imposed vision of high management of the firm.
It is not easy to think in new ways because our thoughts and actions are usually constrained by our present-day conditions. Trendbook enables us to think in far more imaginative way about the future. Instead of narrowing our horizons by forecasting definitive scenarios of the future, Zuzanna Skalska makes us aware of much wider spectrum of options.
Nobody really knows what the job market, city, family, economic systems or even religion will look like in twenty or thirty years. Yet, broadening our horizons can prepare us and our organizations for the future.
Co-founder and CEO Blue Media and Autopay
Co-founder and Board Member Blue Media and Autopay