Time, like energy, is becoming a precious resource. Just as no entity has the luxury anymore of frivolously wasting energy, no entity will have the luxury in the future of failing to value time. The dimension of space will govern much of the innovation and application of products and services of the future, and the coupling of time and space will define one of the most important areas of that growth.
We are increasingly seeing endeavors that seek to compress, alter, amplify or eradicate real time in real or virtual space. That space might be the human body, the community, any place we might visit or work from, a warehouse – just about any physical or imagined place. We are learning more about how to manipulate time, and how to apply that to all manner of existence, enterprise or activity.
The increasing focus on time as a value-added proposition will have numerous significant effects on society. Speed and multi-tasking (although its impact on memory is highly contested) will become of paramount importance, and that will alter the human resource talent that many organizations need in order to survive and thrive.
New theories of time will increasingly shape our thinking as we move through the emerging Virtual Economy. As the 21st century progresses, we will be faced with alterations in this dimension that challenge our body rhythms, our business practices, our psyches and our personal behavior and expectations.
How do you see the element of time changing in your workplace, in your homes or in your day-to-day lives?
Here is a link to a blog post about the future of education that our President, Edie Weiner, authored nearly 2 years ago on SyFy’s excellent “Visions For Tomorrow” blog. Like the rest of Weiner, Edrich, Brown’s content, this piece remains (and will continue to remain) highly relevant with the passage of time. The state of education, both in the U.S. and abroad, is an issue that we here at WEB continuously pay careful attention to. A very interesting read…
Is this a truly “effreshent” approach for the future, or unrealistic and ill-conceived? Whatever the response to that question, it’s clear that we always have to maintain an objective lens when assessing the validity of this kind of research. Findings obtained within a controlled research environment may or may not translate into practical application within an organizational context. We will keep you abreast of any updates on this and related topics going forward…
In the context of today’s rapid technological and economic change, organizations around the world are faced with daunting challenges. Traditional thinking is no longer optimizing results, and an entirely new model is emerging – one that we at WEB call “effreshency.” Effreshency refers to the implementation of new and “fresh” strategies that improve upon and revolutionize traditional thinking about six distinct areas of organizational performance that are often viewed separately. Effreshency breaks tradition in all of these six areas simultaneously, and moving forward it will increasingly be the recipe for a sustainable, profitable and competitive organization. The equation for this new model can be expressed as follows:
Job Guarantee…or Tuition Reimbursement: A community college in Michigan has started offering potential applicants money-back guarantees, in an effort to increase enrollment. Beginning in May, people who take six-week courses in certain subjects will be guaranteed a job within a year – or else they will be refunded their tuition. This is certainly an unorthodox idea, particularly for a school in Lansing, Michigan – where unemployment is at 11.7%. The guarantee will apply to the four most in-demand technical jobs in the area: call-center specialists, pharmacy technicians, quality inspectors and computer machinists.
If successful, this approach will conceivably touch upon each of the six variables in the above effreshency equation. Most notably, the school is taking a fresh approach toward accountability — plus it is showing clear adaptability in the face of a challenging enrollment environment.
Is this a truly “effreshent” approach for the future, or unrealistic and ill-conceived? The figures on exponentially increasing tuition costs in the U.S. are staggering. Additionally, the debt burden on the average student, coupled with difficulties in job placement, can be crippling. Is this new model set to catch fire as the wave of the future in higher education, or is it a quirky strategy doomed to fail? It remains difficult to envision top-ranked and prestigious universities ever being forced to implement this sort of strategy, but perhaps community colleges will serve as a beta test. Regardless of the outcome, there’s little argument as to the marketing buzz being generated here.
We have identified green-to-blue space as one of the major growth areas in the Virtual Economy. In the future, green will not just be about doing green, but about being green – designing green into everything from the beginning; taking into consideration the entire life-cycle of a product. Successfully leveraging the value proposition of green and integrating eco-design principles into products and services will become key competitive advantages in the future.
But ultimately…the goal is blue. “Being blue” is about putting back more into the environment than you initially took.
One example of being blue is a new patent-pending technology that could turn cigarette butts into small flower pots. Cigarette butts end up littering our sidewalks, roadways, parks, and even waterways, but Greenbutts has a solution to this. This new “all natural” cigarette, sports filters packed with flower seeds so it can be either composted or planted in soil to grow plants. It hopes to counter the harmful effect cigarettes have on the environment.
The homepage of our website states it clearly: the future will happen with or without you. In other words…change is coming whether you like it or not! But in order to know what the future may bring, we have to be constantly aware of what is going on around us. There is an experiment from several years ago which demonstrates this point very well. In this experiment, subjects were shown a one-minute video and told to focus on how many passes a basketball team made. About halfway through the video, a gorilla emerged and walked across the basketball court. Half the participants in the experiment did not see the gorilla. Why is that? As a psychology major in college, I participated in this experiment, too, and admittedly never saw the gorilla. Psychologists call this inattentional blindness, or in other words, the phenomenon of not being able to perceive things that are in plain sight. How our minds see and process information is at the heart of this. The more you focus on something, the less able you become to see unexpected or unanticipated occurrences. In this case, subjects were concentrating on the ball, and were unable to see the gorilla. Depending on your focus, your entire perspective can change.
No matter who you are, we all carry around a load of mental baggage that we’ve accumulated over time. While this “knowledge” helps to shape our views of the world, it can also cloud our vision and make it near impossible to spot things that are unforeseen and new. For many unknowns, we rely on inferences made from what we do know. But are our extrapolations correct? Are the heuristics we use sufficient? How many times do we do this in our own lives, or in our businesses? Just like you would never drive using only the rear-view mirror, we shouldn’t navigate through the future this way either.
The change process is not just a journey from here to there – it’s a moving motion picture. Though I hardly (actually never) cite early 20th-century French novelists, I do, however, believe Proust’s quote is dead-on: “The true voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Truly meaningful discovery doesn’t come just from learning new things, but from discovering new aspects of things that are already familiar to us.
So, the question I pose is this: How do we shed this metaphorical 800-pound gorilla that we all carry around with us? What are some ways we can see with new eyes? For starters, we need to question the ways we look at the future, and begin seeing it through new lenses.
