MORE ON FUTURING

6 Supertrends Shaping the Future

A brief review from the June 12, 2006 Blog:
An excellent book for teaching is, Futuring: The Exploration of the Future by Edward Cornish. As Cornish writes: “Most of us know better than to drive down a highway at eighty miles an hour without looking at the road ahead. But when it comes to steering our careers and businesses, we hardly ever consider what’s coming toward us. We often wind up in a nasty ‘crash’ that we could have avoided if we had better anticipated possible developments. This is where futuring can help.” Cornish is the president of the World Future Society and the editor of its magazine, The Futurist. As you will learn as you read the book, futuring is not “fortune-telling.” It is the science of looking at trends, studying demographics and researching attitudes and behaviors that will ultimately affect societies.
Today will be a brief review of what Cornish labels, “The 6 Supertrends Shaping the Future”:
1. Technological Progress
Technology is lowering the number of workers needed in manufacturing, technology and the service industry (web sites provide sales and service for example). In China, over half of this year’s college graduates will not find work. Technology can build better cars, appliances or heavy equipment better than a human counterpart. This increases a company’s profitability and pushes workers into lower paying jobs, if the jobs exist. The only jobs being imported to the US are in healthcare, specifically, nurses. Higher unemployment will be a way of life in the future.
2. Economic Growth
The sheer volume of people insures that economic growth will continue. It may not yield double-digit growth, but commodities will be consumed and more products will be required. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has stated that the pace at which America consumes will require 4 Earths to keep up supplies over the next 100 years. Economic growth is a self-sustaining process.
3. Improving Health
There’s a major difference between longevity and quality of life. Medical advances can keep people alive for many years in a state of total dependence. That is not quality of life; people would say that if they can’t do the things they enjoy, then life is not worth living. Unfortunately, the US has no euthanasia option. Hence, people live on.
Longevity is changing our view on living. Older people who require more interventions are absorbing an unequal share of the resources. It has been estimated that 90 percent of all Medicare payouts occur in the last 10 percent of life. This “never quit attitude” has changed people’s expectations about death.
4. Increasing Mobility
Barney Frank, Congressman from Massachusetts, said that you cannot easily address gas consumption in the US because we have spent decades telling people to move from the cities and towns and commute to work. The decision to build interstate highway systems instead of mass transit was made over 50 years ago. The automobile is the US’s means of travel.
This kind of individual/family mobility also means that communities no longer have the kind of familiarity that existed when several generations of families would live in the same town. People no longer have a commitment to community beyond what serves their family.
5. Environmental Decline
Oil and other fossil fuels may be the current news headlines but it will be water that ultimately determines the strength of a country. Clean water is essential for survival; just look at how hard it is for people in the arid areas of Africa to live from day to day. Progress hardly matters when starvation is hours away.
Also, if you have seen Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, you should be concerned about global warming. Many scientists in that film feel that the Earth could be inhabitable north of Equator in just 5 years (around 2011-2012).
6. Loss of Traditional Culture
Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has written two books and hundreds of opinion articles about the “flat world.” This notion that people will morph into one community is the essence of unrest and the “holy war” being fought to preserve radical religious views. But, don’t limit your vision of terrorists to those from the Middle East. White Supremists also have a agenda of “purity” and much of the uproar about immigration quotas and even gay marriage are examples of people fighting to preserve their view of life.

GROWTH <> LEADERSHIP <> EXCELLENCE
© 2006 3 Minute Learning LLC