Time Passes On a One-Way Street

As a futurist, I spend my time studying the future, looking for signals that hint at what is to come.  I also invest a lot of time looking for patterns and lessons from the past that can inform our future.  The past is behind us and it's too late to change the present, so the future is our canvas - a place where we can create our artistic masterpieces.

Many people that I have interacted with pine for the past.  They wish to return to a mythical past nirvana.  The challenge of course, with that way of thinking, is time only moves one way, and it is away from the past.  It's a one-way street.  The progression of time moves like a train from the past, to the present, and on into the future.  The arrow of time points in one direction only.  In the direction of the universe's expansion.

We cannot see, touch, hear or taste time, but we can measure its passage.  Time can be marked, measured, documented and archived, but never returned to.  

The inevitable passaging of time, innocent of biases or motivations, still seems to evoke strong emotions in many.  People want to stop it.  They resent it's passing.  Many resist, trying to slow it down or even fight it.  The thing is - the future cannot be stopped, only shaped.

No one ever lives in the past.  They can only think about it.  The only place that we as humans have found inhabitable is the present.  We can, however, plan for and prepare to live in our future, which is just around the bend. 

Around the bend, is where the fruits of our labor are fully revealed.  Where the work we have done during our lifetime, can be fully realized in future generations.   It is here where we will finally understand that future people matter.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Presentist vs. Futurist

Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, has published several lists of lessons he has learned over his lifetime.  One of the most interesting lessons was, "Forget trying to predict the future, we are still trying to predict the present."  As a Futurist I understand Kelly's point!  Perhaps it is time to create the role of Presentist.

As we have all experienced with the global COVID-19 pandemic, it is all but impossible to understand or predict something while you are in the midst of it.  It takes distance, it takes hindsight.  Small changes to the COVID-19 virus can result in variants that exhibit different levels of severity and transmissibility.  Scientist don't know the future until both time and data reveal the patterns.

Along this line, Winston Churchill once said, "The further backward you look, the further forward you can see."  Another voice of experience suggesting it takes a different perspective, often involving both time and distance to reveal the patterns that may impact our future.

One of the notable values of machine learning is the ability to find patterns that were once invisible to humans.  For example, intelligence agencies today, utilize what is called "activity based intelligence.  This is the ability to use UAVs (drones) or other sensors in persistent surveillance to monitor the daily activities and movements of an area as big as a small city.  These observations can then be labeled, analyzed by ML, and tracked over a period of time to discover patterns and identify anomalies to the patterns.  

Discovered anomalies can be important.  For example, why did multiple bad guys with no known connection to each other, from several different locations, all converge on one warehouse during the night and leave together in four cargo trucks?  This is an anomaly worthy of further investigation.

This brings us back to Kevin Kelly's lesson.  Forget trying to predict the future, because we can't even predict the present without more time, data and distance.  Learn from the patterns of the past, and use them to recognize today's anomalies that will influence and alter the patterns of the future.  

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Navigating to the Future

The problem with the future lies in its navigation system.  Let me explain.  In my Jeep’s navigation system, I put in my destination and it efficiently proposes routes (preferably over mountains and rivers. The future, however, uses different inputs.  It takes inputs from innovations in science and technology, and mixes them with developments in the societal, geopolitical and economic domains, adds fast changing consumer preferences and behaviors, VC investments, profit motivations, and then sprinkles in some additional earth-shaking catalysts like depressions, wars, pandemics, insurrections, and economic crisis.  Where will that navigation system take us?  Who knows!?  You can see why it’s a fool’s errand to make predictions about the future.

The future’s navigation system is either broken, or we just don’t know how to use it.  It seems to lack a key field – a destination field.  A field where we can specify a place we want to go where humans flourish, develop in healthy ways, in a favorable environment and that is filled with abundance and joy.  If we can find that input field, we should add that destination!

Many of us have given up on navigating to our desired future.  We’ve stopped trying and turned our attention to learning how to best react to whatever comes along on the road to nowhere.  As chaotic and complex as our world is, that still doesn’t seem to be our best option.  As stewards of our civilization and our children’s future, it seems having a desired destination where humans flourish, and choosing the most efficient, equitable and safe routes to get us there would still be in everyone’s best interest.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Optimistic Futurist at TCS

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

The Future of Climate Risk with Expert Stephen Bennett

Each of us are experiencing the effects of extreme weather, so I reached out to Stephen Bennett, the Chief Climate Officer and Co-Founder of The Demex Group to learn how businesses and markets should strategically think about and adapt to them. A fascinating interview!

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Covid-19 and the Role of a Futurist

Early Futurist

Futurist Frank Diana leads Tata Consultancy Services' Future of Business team.  When people ask his predictions about the future he often responds, “We don’t predict, we identify and consider possible scenarios.”  He is also fond of saying that most predictions made after a crisis are wrong.  It’s not picking one future scenario to place a bet on that is the role of a futurist, rather identifying many possible scenarios and then monitoring and tracking which are becoming more likely or not - given new and continuous inputs.

What then is the role of a futurist during a pandemic like Covid-19?  As a Futurist myself working on Frank’s team I can say we focus on how Covid-19 is altering the trajectory of various trends and acting as an accelerate or inhibitor to change.  The value of course is for leaders to use these insights to best position their businesses to succeed.

Human, Digital and Future Cadences on a Time Continuum

Strategy is the art of making use of time and space. I am less concerned about the later than the former. Space we can recover, lost time never. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

Digital transformation involves the process of transforming a business from one state to another.  It is also about time.  An important part of this transformation is speeding up the cadence of business and information movement along the time continuum from human, digital and finally to future-time.  Businesses today must be capable of competing in all three of these cadences on the time continuum simultaneously.

What are the time cadences on the time continuum?

1. Human-time – time cadence governed by our physical, biological and mental limitations as humans and the regulatory environments that we work within.

2. Digital-time – time cadence supported by the digital and mobile technologies used including computers, software applications and network transmission speeds.

3. Future-time – time cadence stretching into the future and only limited by the lack of available data, computing power and the sophistication of algorithms used to analyze, predict, model, project, forecast and recommend.

Ahead of the Curve - Pandemic Responses and Business

“Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be a more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks." ~ Warren Buffet

Ever since the pandemic has taken over and dominated our lives, everyone seems to be talking and writing about “curves.” Not just the shape of the curve, although important in the context of flattening, but also getting ahead of it.  Here are three recent headlines that demonstrate my point, “Was Your State Ahead of the Coronavirus Curve?”, “Getting Ahead of the Curve — in Hopes of Flattening the Curve”, and “How Did Germany Get Ahead of the Curve?”

What does ahead of the curve even mean? I did some research.  It means, “When one is more advanced than others, or ahead of current thinking or practices.”  More research into the origins of the phrase led me to the classic Bell Curve model used to visualize data showing low, average, and above average performances.  If you are “ahead of the curve” you are on the right side of the bell shape and above average in whatever was measured.

Inside the Curve

“Getting inside the Curve”, is another phrase often used by military strategist.  Getting inside the curve refers to a fighter pilot being able to maneuver into an advantageous position by getting inside the turning radius of an opposing aircraft.  A more expansive meaning is used in maneuver strategies and refers to thinking ahead of an opponent and acting in a way that gives you an advantage.