Australia 2050: How Can I Inform the Future?
Written by Kasia Jaruleska
This is a guest blog by our consultant, Kasia Jaruleska, who attended the first ‘Australia 2050: How can you inform the future?’ forum.
My idea of planning for the future is knowing what I am doing on a Saturday night, but on this day of rapidly accelerating change, my Saturday comes before I’ve wrapped my head around Monday, so it’s probably a skill that I feel I should develop. Because it’s not just me. The world is changing faster than ever, and the world of business is evolving so quickly that it’s hard to know how to keep up. The leaders of the future will be those who can most reliably predict future trends and future-proof their businesses.
Enter the 'Australia 2050: how can you inform the Future?' Forum was held on Friday, 3 June 2016. A collaboration between You Legal, KPMG, and UniSA’s Science Creativity Education Studio, the forum aimed to concentrate on those exact skill sets and show how to map out possible futures and devise powerful strategic pathways. It sounds like a daunting proposition for a Friday afternoon. Nonetheless, the scene upon arrival at KPMG’s boardroom seems reassuringly familiar: Boardroom – check, People in suits – check, speaker, and microphone - check, snacks – check. Only the glimpses of art supply-covered tables hint that this might be more than your ordinary networking session. When was the last time you got Play-Doh with your too-warm sav blanc?
We start with insights and instructions from Dr. Kristin Alford, a futurist and the director of UniSA’s Science Education and Creativity Studio, and are quickly put to work. We’re split into groups of 3 and set to discuss our ideas for growth, restraint, catastrophe, and transformation. The conversation is instantly raucous and free-flowing. Good ideas are white-boarded for all to see. It provides a fascinating insight into my own mind, the mind of others, and the social dynamic. A most pleasant side effect is how easy this format makes social interaction, awkward pauses disappear, and the desultory “what do you do” of most networking events suddenly become an interesting insight and background to other’s ideas (or an enthusiastic way to avoid doing what we are meant to when ideas run dry!!). Discussions on growth inevitably turn to population and its usual accompaniment, town planning. Switching to restraint proves challenging once the mind is engaged in more fertile endeavors. At the end of that topic, my group has everyone becoming vegan childless communists. Don’t be afraid, this is by no means a mainstream view. Catastrophe is pleasantly macabre, and transformation proves the most insightful. It’s Dr. Alford’s intro to the subject suggesting that in the future, a government cabinet of all women and one man might be the norm that really flips the thought process. It is an incisive and effective attack on your typical thinking.
To finish off, we are finally unleashed on the Play-Doh and instructed to construct an artifact from the future. It is surprisingly challenging. And this perhaps is the most valuable revelation from the event, how rooted our minds are in the past and the present and how hard being a futurist and planning for the future is. In this day and age (but maybe in every?), it seems like everything has already been thought of, already invented. How do we free our minds from the shackles of the present context and the accepted and established formats? Inevitably, almost every idea we come up with is entrenched in current philosophy, a derivative of existing technology, or already exists, showing how out of touch some of us already are. The Forum will be run again in October as part of the Open State Festival on a larger scale, so if you are interested in attending, please do not hesitate to get in touch and learn some skills with us on how to create your own future!