Now that the 2019 NWA Tech Summit has ended, I find myself asking the question, “Did we think enough about what’s next after next?”
Well there are many opinions on that and after some of those discussions, I started to wonder if people really knew how to think in terms of the future. We had a great number of speakers that were “out there” in a futurist kind of spirit and I found the most successful ones had 3 things in common:
- Their point of view was that of a wide-eyed kid in a toy store. You know the look, the one that says, “holy cow, anything is possible here.”
- When they were talking about timelines, they used terminology around 3, 5- and 10-year horizons and they were only vaguely specific, on purpose, about what that future meant.
- They seemed to be continually re-assessing their vision, purpose and goals.
I’ll be touching on these points in more detail in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, I think it’s important for us to try to look beyond our own generation and the next one and look to the one beyond our view.
In our instant gratification society, many of us behave like we don’t have control over the future, that it will just happen. That isn’t true. All of us do have a level of control, but it requires that we think about what’s next after next. It requires that we act like “kids” and imagine the many possible futures and think beyond our own comfort zone. We should all try to push past our own visible horizon — it will make us do things that we never thought were possible.
Tom Douglass is the founder and CEO of Catapult Consulting – LLC of Arkansas, an emerging tech, innovation and management consultancy.