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Archives for March 2023
Daily Inspiration: “When challenged by the circumstances, change the circumstances!”
“When challenged by the circumstances, change the circumstances!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
Here’s one thing you know for certain – relentless change will always provide for a new and unexpected set of circumstances. It’s your ability to roll with that change that will define you. With that in mind, when confronted by some change, by something uniquely new, and by the challenging circumstances around it, don’t run away from ‘it,’ whatever ‘it’ might be.
Instead, deal with ‘it.’
In other words, when challenged by the circumstances, change the circumstances. How do you do this? Here are a few ideas to get you going – take ‘it’ on rather than shying away from it:
- don’t fight ‘it’
- don’t try to avoid ‘it’
- accept ‘it’
- embrace ‘it’
- understand ‘it’
- experiment with ‘it’
- work with ‘it’
- change with ‘it’
- help to shape ‘it’
- accelerate with ‘it’
How do you do this? Whatever ‘it’ is, here are a few tipis:
- establish the right mindset about ‘it’ – mindset matters!
- prototype your ideas with ‘it’ faster – that gives you a chance to try more solutions with ‘it’
- be iterative in your approach to ‘it’ – keep trying new ideas until you get ‘it’ right
- find partners who understand ‘it’ better than you do – learn from their speed, creativity, and disruptive thinking
- plug into the crowd around ‘it’ – the new hive mind is often defining ‘it’
- fail faster with ‘it’ – experiment, fail fast, and learn how to recover from failure with ‘it’ faster
- structure for speed in your approach to ‘it’ – don’t just try a few fast ideas, be fast!
- don’t just do one big thing with ‘it’ – do many small things with ‘it’
- redefine ‘it’ – make it fit your purpose, rather than the other way around
- be decisive about ‘it’ – don’t let the challenge around ‘it’ fester in your mind
What could ‘it’ be? What might be challenging you?
Maybe it’s a future trend – ‘it’ might be AI, machine learning, IoT technology, cloud robotics, robotic process automation, or digital twin technology. Or maybe it’s innovative ideas, defining disruptive opportunities, or new leadership concepts that you need to adapt. Or perhaps, it’s your own personal goals and ambitions – a new challenge that you are trying to take on.
Whatever the case might be, simply substitute ‘it’ with whatever it might be in the list above – so that you can challenge the circumstances that challenge you!
Daily Inspiration: “If you spend your time waiting to see when something might happen, you probably won’t be ready for it when it actually happens!”
“If you spend your time waiting to see when something might happen, you probably won’t be ready for it when it actually happens!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
The blog post How much time of an average life is spent waiting? features some pretty depressing statistics:
“According to a Timex survey, Americans wait:
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- on average of 20 minutes a day for the bus or train
- 32 minutes whenever they visit a doctor
- 28 minutes in security lines whenever they travel
- 21 minutes for a significant other to get ready to go out
- 13 hours annually waiting on hold for a customer service
- 38 hours each year waiting in traffic
- those living in Big cities wait in traffic for more than 50 hours annually
- about 37 billion hours each year waiting in line somewhere”
In other words, we spent about 6 months of our entire lives waiting for things!
But a lot of that involves uncontrollable, involuntary waiting – it’s not our fault when we are stuck on hold with a customer service representative waiting for some help. (By the way, that’s estimated to take up about 43 days of our life!)
It’s the controllable waiting for which we are at fault: the indecision that drives us, the decisions we defer, the actions we don’t take, the initiative we forgo – all because we are waiting to see what might happen before taking action. The impact of that inaction is that we develop a mindset of not moving forward because we want to wait to see what happens. We start suffering from aggressive indecision. But in a fast-moving world, that usually means we aren’t busy preparing for what might happen – and so we aren’t ready when it happens!
Unnecessary waiting usually doesn’t end well – there are many examples of what happens when companies wait for the future to unfold. I asked Microsoft’s new Bing AI to provide me with a few:
Can you give me actual corporate examples of bad waiting decisions with company names and details?
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- Motorola waited too long to enter the smartphone market, losing its dominant position in the mobile phone industry to competitors like Apple and Samsung
- Excite, an early internet portal, passed on the opportunity to buy Google for under $1 million in 1999, thinking that its own search engine was good enough1.
- Netflix announced a plan to split itself into two separate businesses in 2011, one for streaming and one for DVD rentals, but faced a huge backlash from customers and investors and quickly reversed its decision2.
- Kodak failed to embrace digital photography until it was too late, despite inventing the first digital camera in 1975. It filed for bankruptcy in 2012
(By the way, send me feedback – I’m waiting to see if using an AI for some of the research and preparation of my Daily Inspiration post is a good idea or bad idea. I’ll wait.)
Those all seem rather tech-oriented, so I probed a bit further. Bing gave me a few more answers.
What is the most significant example of ‘bad waiting’ in corporate history?
There is no definitive answer to this question, as different sources may have different criteria and opinions on what constitutes a bad waiting decision in corporate history. However, based on some of the web search results12, here are some possible candidates:
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- Blockbuster waited too long to embrace online streaming and rental services, rejecting a partnership offer from Netflix in 2000, and eventually filing for bankruptcy in 2011
- Nokia waited too long to adopt Android as its operating system for smartphones, sticking with its own Symbian platform until 2011, when it was already losing market share to Apple and Samsung.
- Kodak waited too long to embrace digital photography until it was too late, despite inventing the first digital camera in 1975. It filed for bankruptcy in 2012.
- Nike waited too long to upgrade its supply chain software system in 2000, resulting in bugs and integration issues that caused inventory shortages and excesses. Nike had to slash prices to get rid of the additional inventory, putting pressure on margins and profits.
(Also, another question. How should I cite A.I. answers and content in my posts? Does anyone have any definitive guidance? I’ll wait to find out what you have to say!)
Here’s the problem with waiting – you can’t just ‘wait and see’ your way into the future. Think about what we might do day to day if we let a culture of ‘active indecision‘ seep into our culture:
- we wait for clarity on strategy but might not get any
- we wait for clarity on a trend but might never get it in time
- we wait for someone to make a decision but they might be suffering from aggressive indecision
- we wait for some certainty in our decision that might take away risk but we might never get it
- we wait for someone to tell us what to do, but they don’t know what to do in the first place
- we wait for a trend to get to critical mass, but by the time it does, we’ve lost the opportunity
We wait.
No doubt sometimes waiting makes sense – we might need to get more information to assess the real risks and benefits of moving forward. Once again, I asked Bing for a few examples:
“Here are some actual corporate examples of good waiting decisions with company names and details:
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- Apple waited until 2007 to launch its first iPhone, after years of research and development, testing different designs and features, and creating a strong brand loyalty
- Netflix waited until 2013 to start producing its own original content, after building a large customer base, collecting data on viewing preferences, and securing licensing deals with studios
- Amazon waited until 2014 to enter the smartphone market with its Fire Phone, after dominating the e-commerce and cloud computing sectors, expanding into new product categories, and acquiring patents and technologies². However, the Fire Phone was not a success due to poor design and marketing choices.
Ok, so sometimes there is ‘good waiting!‘
But that’s not always the case – I’ve seen many innovation and leadership failures as a result of waiting, particularly with the events I did with Motorola. Waiting can lead to costly mistakes because we miss out on significant opportunities. Not only that, it means that we aren’t investing in gaining the necessary experience – what I call experiential capital – so that we are ready when the trend actually begins to crystallize and become significant.
The art of waiting always involved a tradeoff, a pause between acting and not acting. But we need to be aware of an overreliance on waiting. We can’t wait around to take on this potential leadership miscalculation.
I couldn’t wait to ask Bing about the art of waiting.
Oh.
Ok, stop waiting.
Daily Inspiration: “Dismissive skepticism is at the root of many a missed opportunity!”
“Dismissive skepticism is at the root of many a missed opportunity!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
To be a futurist is to be one who is often accused of getting the significance of various trends wrong. That’s OK – we have to deal with the skeptics – it comes with the territory!
I’ve had some interesting reactions to a few of my trends pieces as of late. A few folks have dismissed my Vertical Farming post, part of my BIG Future series, suggesting that it will never amount to much, most of all because it won’t ‘scale’ to meet the needs of millions of people. Last week, in an event with a number of CEOs, one fellow seemed to be rather dismissive of a move to electric vehicles, pointing out the recent challenge in California. Just days after a law was passed requiring that by 2035 that all new vehicles be electric vehicles, electrical utilities were asking people to NOT charge their cars because of excessive demand on the grid as the result of all the storms this winter.
In both cases, the basis for their skepticism is well founded and warranted – but misses the point that often, ‘the future happens slowly, and then, all at once.’ I think that will be the case with electric vehicles. In addition, I’ve long gone to the issue of the ‘timing of the trend‘ to point out how the future might unfold. We can’t expect that when a trend appears it suddenly matures: the most difficult thing about the future is not necessarily the trend but the timing. That’s why I’ve got at scale’ as part of the title of the vertical farming trend. The idea has existed for a time, but I believe the numbers are so compelling that at some point, it will only make sense that it will scale.
In addition, many trends ‘co-exist’: any trend does not necessarily replace something else. Some of the comments have indicated that some folks seem to believe that I am suggesting that vertical farming might replace most existing farming, but that’s not the case. It’s a trend that will co-exist with traditional agriculture forever – but the point is, we are at an inflection point with the idea and the technology behind it.
What’s the basis for skepticism? It’s certainly been the case that when we talk about the future and a trend, it has long been the reality of those behind the trend to ‘over-promise but underdeliver; skepticism is warranted of any trend, considering history. particularly more so today in the era of ‘TechnoSkepticism.’ Many people feel burned by the future as the result of past-failed predictions: as the saying often goes, “I was promised flying cars, but instead, I got (something else.)’
The danger with all this is that too much skepticism can cause you to lose sight of the eventual mainstreaming of any paricular trend. Take the idea of the smart home and home automation; back in 1999 or so, the article ‘Is This Guy Crazy or just way ahead of his time’ ran in a magazine, taking a look at my ‘smart home’ setup. (I was much in the news back then; as the author of 34 books about the Internet, I did over 3,000 interviews on radio, TV, and print. (I kept track).)
If you want to read the article, the full PDF is here.
If you read the article, it all seems rather pedestrian now – in-home music via various devices, working at home, and wireless Ethernet. And yet, at the time, the article title deemed that I might be ‘crazy’ for doing such things. Yesterday crazy is now mainstream. Today? One of my sons has a crazy-smart ‘smart home’ – here’s the screen for the iPad-based controller he has in place, by which he can control lights, switches, fans, and even the heated floor in a bathroom.
How about e-commerce and online shopping? Back in 1998 or so, my co-author and I released our book Selling Online: How to Become a Successful E-Commerce Merchant. Long since out of the print, the book sold in the US and Canada; a German edition was published, as was one for Russia. VISA liked the book so much that they did a bulk purchase of 50,000 copies, distributing it to various merchants at the time.
It was a fun project, but wow – did we ever run into skeptics?
We were admonished in the media for daring to suggest that vast numbers of people might actually buy things online; that most efforts were doomed to fail; that it was a fool’s venture. This wasn’t helped by the dot.com collapse of 2000, in which much of the blame can be laid at the feet of overhyped e-commerce: we had far too many companies busy establishing lofty goals with huge promises as to the extent of sales.
When those were proven wrong, stock markets lost faith. Oops.
But this had more to do with the timing of the trend rather than the trend itself – and as we all know, the acceleration of e-commerce and its adaptation rocketed as a result of Covid. Retailers who were busy getting involved with the trend before Covid had a far more successful transition to our world of lockdown than those who did not.
Online knowledge sharing and collaboration? In 1986, I suggested a project I called “Linkage” within the global professional services firm for whom I worked. I wrote the story of what happened in my book, Surviving the Information Age:
The intent was to unite professionals in various disciplines throughout the company through an electronic mail network so that they could share their own specialized knowledge. Many others had already begun their own informal networks; computer specialists across the country, for example, had been trading tips and ideas online for years. We found that tax professionals across the country were already plugging into each other, electronically exchanging their thoughts and reactions to the latest federal budget or new tax regulation.
My belief was that the “linkage” concept would provide the impetus for massive information sharing throughout the company, with the result that the business could better respond to clients, deal with competitive pressures and survive in an increasingly complicated world. I still passionately believe in the “linkage” concept today and see many thousands of organizations worldwide implement such projects.
But even back then the concept of “linkage” was not well understood by many in management. I was involved in many international projects and could see the benefit of global information sharing. But when my boss and I flew to New York to make a pitch to senior management, asking them to sponsor the project, which would encourage such information sharing on a global scale, our pitch was met with blank stares. They simply could not comprehend the concept that would capture the imagination of much of the rest of the corporate world through the next decade, even though they understood the competition was already moving rapidly to put in place such technologies.
Returning home from New York, dejected and flabbergasted, the trip turned out to be a first step in my decision years later to walk away from my 12-year career with the company. I simply could not live with what I believed to be blind stupidity.
Today, of course, corporate knowledge — the combined experience, wisdom, and awareness held by employees — has come to be recognized as an increasingly important resource and asset. Every leading-edge company, including, finally, my previous employer, has put in place sophisticated knowledge-sharing tools.
I seemed to christen my project with a name eerily similar to LinkedIn, which became a global collaborative knowledge network. Companies? Today, they continue to invest heavily in ‘internal knowledge networking.’
The key point to all of this?
You can dismiss a trend – you can’t deny it though.
You should never let your skepticism get in the way of the potential reality of a trend.
The BIG Future: The Longevity Divide
Since 1900, global life expectancy has doubled. But now, accelerating medical science, combined with a focus on lifestyle, is leading us to the era of the ‘super-seniors’ – a growing percentage of the population that will live a rewarding and fulfilling life to 100 and perhaps, beyond.
At the same, time, however, many will die an early death. Increasing life expectancy is not widespread – at the same time we see longevity, we see an acceleration of a decrease in lifespan for those who are subsumed by the ‘reality crisis‘ and the ‘expectation gap!’
It is undisputed that worldwide, we have seen a significant increase in life expectancy in the last century.
The Fact of Longevity
First, the good news: in the industrialized world, a good proportion of the global population is going to live longer:
- “German-based demographer James Vaupel estimates that the average baby girl born now in Western societies will live to be 100. Many of today’s baby boys, he says, will also live to be 100.” Sydney Morning Herald, January 8, 2011
A series of maps from Our World In Data makes clear the reality of longer life expectancy:
But you know that already!
The implications are an obvious increase in the number of people living to the age 100. A few years ago, I took a quick call for an interview with The Sun UK newspaper on longer life expectancy, taking on this topic.
![UKBaby](/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/UKBaby.png)
The Sun sits behind a paywall, and the article isn’t available online, but I managed to dig out a copy. Click here for the Pdf!
100 not out; HOW YOUR BABY WILL REACH ITS CENTURY
by Dulcie Pearce,14 December 2013Around a third of children born today will reach the ripe old age of 100.
The Office for National Statistics has revealed that 39 percent of girls born in 2013 will celebrate their centenary — and the boys are not far behind at 30 percent. So if all goes well, they should be receiving their telegram from our future King George in 2113.
There are now 14,000 people in the UK who are 100 or over, compared with just 600 in 1961.
Deputy Sun Woman Editor Dulcie Pearce – with the help of futurist and trends expert Jim Carroll – looks at what our newborns face in their long lifetime.
HEALTH AND LIFESTYLE
11 – by this age our newborns are likely to have smoked
THE average life expectancy for a boy born today is 80 and 83 for a girl. They are very likely to try a cigarette by the age of 11 and have a one-in-six chance of becoming a smoker. The most common birth weight is 7lb 8oz for a boy and 7lb 2oz for a girl.
Only 34 per cent of boys and 39 per cent of girls born in 2013 will be a healthy size in adult life.
The most common male cancer will be prostate, which now has a one-in-eight chance of developing. One in eight girls born today will be at risk of breast cancer.
Boys will have a one-in-four chance of breaking a bone from osteoporosis when they reach 50, and a girl will have a one-in-two chance. By the time they are between 40 and 70, more than half of the boys will have erectile dysfunction.
Jim says: “In the future, we will be able to work with DNA-based medicine, which does exist today. It will have a huge impact on the healthcare of the next generation. They will be able to look at the DNA of a baby born today and deal with the medical condition they have even before it is even making them ill.”
LOVE AND MARRIAGE
31 – when they are likely to have their first child
ON average, the babies of 2013 will have their first child at 31. That is two years later than their parents and five years later than their grandparents. They are most likely to get married at 33 – and the 2046 wedding will set them back an eye-watering £39,000.
Jim says: “Only one in four now live in heterosexual, two-parent families. As we know, the ‘conventional’ family no longer exists.” A baby born today is more likely to live with ” a partner for much longer in a relationship.”
£39,000.- cost of their wedding at age 33
DEBT
52 – age today’s tots will clear their student loans
THIS generation will be paying their student loan until they are 52 and their mortgage until 61.
Jim says: “A baby born today faces life in a world riddled with debt. But this will be an entrepreneurial generation. They are coming into a world where their parents are internet savvy. So they will be seeing job opportunities and work through fresh eyes. They will acclimatise to the debt and – sad as it might be – they will see it as part of life.”
61 – when the mortgage is finally paid off
JOB
70 – when their first pension payment is received
THESE babies will not pick up their first pension payment until the age of 70 – and go on to enjoy 30 years of retirement. Jim says: “They will almost definitely work in a job that we have never heard of or has yet to be created. I predict that 65 per cent of children born today will work in a job that does not even exist yet.”
“It is not far-fetched to say that they could be flying a plane from inside their house. We are living in an incredibly fast world and it will be an even faster one with the technology becoming even more advanced. ”
They are most likely to be self-employed. “Permanent jobs for companies are quickly becoming a thing of the past and they will soon become extinct. These children born today will either be working for themselves or working on short-term employment contracts.”
65 per cent – will be working in job that does not yet exist
Payback of longer lives
SUN Doctor Carol Cooper says: “Around half of today’s babies could live to 100 and beyond if the trend carries on.” Longer lives may mean more opportunities, but there are more challenges. Obesity and type 2 diabetes rates are skyrocketing.
“Over 65, around one in 20 will have dementia, but numbers may treble. There has been a sea change in cancer treatments and there’ll be many advances. More people live alone … life might not only be long, but lonely too.”
Wow! I’m gonna get a telegram from King George!
What leads to longer life expectancy? 80% of our future health depends on how we live, and not on our DNA!
The study analyzed 34 years of data on more than 100,000 adults to see if there is a correlation between healthy habits and the three chronic conditions. Researchers found women who maintained at least four of the five healthy habits by the age of 50 lived an average of 34.4 more years free of chronic conditions, while women who did not adopt the healthy habits lived an average of only 23.7 additional years – a difference of more than a decade.
The findings were similar in men. Men who adopted at least four of the five healthy habits by 50 lived an average of 31.1 more years without chronic conditions while men who did not live an average of only 23.5 years.
There’s nothing new here – you are already well acquainted with these facts.
What is alarming is the increasing number of people refusing to believe this reality.
Reversing Longevity
The sad fact is, many won’t enjoy this increase in life expectancy as a result of lifestyle disease, with a coinciding massive ramp-up in healthcare demand — driven by aging and lifestyle-based disease. The culprit? Obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and another avoidable disease. According to the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, “1.6 billion adults are overweight or obese worldwide and over 50 percent of adults in the US and Europe fit into this category.” This type of thing directly reduces longevity.
I began speaking about the reversal of life expectancy at conferences well over two decades ago. Going back to a presentation years ago, the insight is pretty stark. Consider the trends, using diabetes as an example:
- “The number of adults with diabetes worldwide has more than doubled since 1980 to 347 million, a far larger number than previously thought and one that suggests costs of treating the disease will also balloon.” Global diabetes epidemic balloons to 350 million, Reuters Health E-Line, June 27, 2011
(It’s interesting to note though, that the challenge with lifestyle disease isn’t restricted to the Western world; the statin (cholesterol) drug market in China, India other “BRIC” countries is set to grow at rates of up to 25% compounded per year. In other words, developing nations are soon to see the same lifestyle diseases which are currently sweeping through North America and Europe.)
Some basic maps put things in perspective, offered without commentary:
![](/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/map_county_obese_diabetes_2.jpg)
Back to Our World in Data, with a few charts that lay bare this reality:
Bottom line? Society was already dealing with a decrease in longevity, driven by lifestyle disease, before a big curve ball was thrown its way.
I’ve often covered this on stage in terms of what I call ‘the expectation gap’; here are a few slides that cover the issue. First, the nature of the gap:
What’s the result? A decrease in longevity for a portion of the population, with ’60 becoming the new 70.’
Third, the reality disconnect. Consider this survey, which lies bare a simple reality: people think they can live an unhealthy lifestyle and somehow the healthcare system will simply scale to take care of them.
Want to know how bad it might get? Consider the explosion in childhood obesity
The result of all this is that for the very first time in a long time, we are seeing a real decline in life expectancy:
What’s the cause? Largely avoidable lifestyle disease. (I’m ignoring the socio-economic implications of that here.) This chart simply puts in perspective that those who don’t have those high-risk factors that reduce life expectancy live longer!)
The Healthcare Reality Crisis
Enter Covid – what we have witnessed is an acceleration in a decrease in longevity as a result of denialism!
Back in 2017, I wrote a post about what I called ‘The Emerging Healthcare Reality Crisis,” taking on the issue of lifestyle disease and longevity, but also the increasing denialism when it comes to healthcare.
Here’s what I wrote:
Much of my work as a futurist is based on science, facts, research, and stuff that really isn’t up for debate.
So it was really quite sad yesterday to read the New York Times article yesterday, How the Anti-Vaxxers are Winning.
Clearly, there are vast sections of the population today who do not believe in science. They don’t believe in facts. They don’t believe in much other than what they want to believe in.
Their belief system will increasingly drive their attitude and understanding of their healthcare circumstances.
Going forward, this new reality will prove to be a tremendous challenge for the healthcare system.
Essentially, lots of people are going to succumb to lifestyle diseases — diabetes, heart disease, and obesity-related illness. They will refuse to accept the science-based fact that what they eat, how they live, and what they do (or don’t do) are directly responsible for their condition.
They will be fed information that will lead them to believe that it is not their fault. They will choose to read the information that absolves them of blame. The healthcare system will not have the funding, resources or money to deal with them.
Many will die an early death.
I try to be an optimistic futurist all the time, but on this issue, I am not, and I think the healthcare system needs to do some thinking on this issue.
In essence, in my blog post “The Emerging Healthcare Reality Crisis.” I predicted that an increasing number of people were turning their backs on established healthcare dogma, preferring to believe that a steady diet of obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, and lifestyle would never have a negative impact on them. (Hint: um, it will!)
The global pandemic has led to a reality in which the situation has only become worse. I’ve tried my best to avoid posts about politics over the years when it comes to the future and innovation, but it has become over the last several months. What is unfolding right now with denial will have long-lasting implications – from a longevity as well as an economic perspective. Society is split, and it’s pretty clear that in the long run, there will be winners and losers. Try and guess which states are the latter! (Hint: it’s not difficult.)
Here’s a simple scientific fact: with Covid, people who get vaxxed don’t die; and it’s unvaccinated who are ending up in hospitals, and who are dying or who end up with complex long-term health complications. That is not a conspiratorial plot – it’s reality.
What does this mean?
We were already seeing a decrease in longevity pre-Covid. Now, with healthcare denialism driven faster by the pandemic, we will see the trend accelerate.
The Economic Implications of Decreasing Longevity
This has BIG implications.
From a global perspective, there has been a shift underway in thinking as to how we deal with the significant challenges which are coming: worldwide, we are seeing a major new emphasis by health care providers, organizations, government, medical groups, and others to a philosophy that is shifting to a “preventative” approach as opposed to a reactive model when it comes to managing healthcare spending. That’s because the potential impact of the problem is massive in scope.
- “If policies do not change, six European countries— Belgium, France, Greece, Luxembourg, Slovenia, and Ukraine—will be devoting more than 30% of GDP to age-related spending by 2050.” “Old age tension,” Economist Magazine, Oct 2010
What makes the challenge difficult is that there is an ever-decreasing workforce that will be there to fund the increased healthcare spending:
- the ratio of workers to retirees in the Western world is about 5.2 to 1 now
- in some countries, this will drop to 2.6 to 1 within a decade
- the immigration outflow in some countries (i.e. Ireland) exacerbates the problem
There is a similar challenge in scope with age-related diseases such as Alzheimer’s and dementia:
- the number of patients with dementia / Alzheimer’s is set to double to 66 million by 2030 – and to 115 million by 2050!
- that will require an estimated $604 billion a year in treatment — it’s set to triple by 2050!
- that means spending here will go from 1% of global GDP today, to 3% of global GDP by 2050
The World Economic Forum posits that the global economic impact of the five leading chronic diseases — cancer, diabetes, mental illness, heart disease, and respiratory disease — could reach $47 trillion over the next 20 years. Clearly, the world needs some big bold initiatives. The result is active programs to increase longevity through better lifestyle management, focused, for example, on wellness and lifestyle; behavior-oriented payment policies; and aggressive public/private efforts for lifestyle modification.
What is also happening is a recognition that earlier screening for lifestyle and age-related diseases can have a massive impact on the overall cost of dealing with the scope challenge:
- “Identifying dementia early can cut the cost of care by nearly 30 percent … routine screening that identified patients with early signs of dementia helped cut average healthcare costs by nearly $2,000 per patient in the first year, often by eliminating money spent on unnecessary tests and treatments.” Early diagnosis can cut Alzheimer’s costs, Reuters Health E-Line, July 2010
The key issue as we go forward: where there is a crisis, there is an opportunity for innovative thinking. We are in a period of time that involves tremendous challenges; and yet, when we step back 10 or 20 years from now, we will see a number of organizations that stepped up to the challenge and pursued some pretty bold concepts and ideas, all of which led to a continued increase in longevity – for those who choose to participate.
Regions Opting Out
Certain regions will be hurt, significantly, by the longevity divide and the healthcare reality crisis.
Simply put, as some people live longer, the demand for the healthcare system grows. At the same time, as other people live shorter lives, their lifestyle-driven disease will place significant and onerous demands on the same healthcare system. The longevity divide leads to, ironically, an overall massive increase in healthcare spending.
Here’s a pop quiz – what does the economic future look like for regions like Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, and Arkansas, where denialism is prevalent? For quite some time, I’ve been taking on the trend of what happens to those regions. What happens when a region turns its back on the future? Economic decline happens slowly and then, all at once. We aren’t seeing any real negativity yet, because we are in the halcyon days of anti-science political populism. Hey Florida! Fun times! Long term? LOL!
With that in mind, here’s what I think will happen, and what will become more apparent in 2023, just from a healthcare perspective.
- over time, these regions see a significant increase in healthcare, education, and other societal costs. Quite simply, it will become difficult to staff up regions that are anti-future.
- healthcare workers, teachers, and science and research professionals themselves will be hesitant to include such regions on their list of potential recruitment locations – what doctor wants to go to work in a region in which a majority of people think that healthcare science is a fake thing, or where they might be arrested for living up to the Hippocratic oath? How many teachers want to build a carer in a region in which politicians attack them for simply doing their job?
- other professional workers will drop such regions from their list of future locations to establish a living. Who wants to raise a young family in an area that has a built-in, systemic failure at work?
- since these regions were already suffering excessive healthcare costs as a result of lifestyle diseases, this comes on top of an already strained healthcare system. It makes it worse going forward.
- conferences, trade shows, meetings, and events will be hit, as associations, trade groups and large-scale conference organizers drop these regions from their list for the future.
- future economic opportunity will likely be scaled back – regions with raging political volatility and irrational attacks on entire professions will be less attractive to companies seeking to locate new facilities, whether it be head office locations, manufacturing facilities, logistics operations, or other investments
- the brand image of such a region as a place for business investment going forward takes a major hit – “We’re full of crazy people, build your business here!” is not much of a draw
- accelerated business volatility – uncertainty from so many different perspectives, as political agendas come to twist and turn and challenge and deviate any sense of economic reliability going forward
- reduced government revenue as a result of these economic drawbacks, which makes less money available for healthcare, education, infrastructure, and other critical investment, which causes an ongoing vicious circle
It’s pretty clear that the trend we will see in the future is that future denialism carries a price.
Are leadership teams starting to notice the risk? Definitely! I spoke about this issue in this recent manufacturing podcast – and it was interesting, that this particular issue REALLY drew the attention of the two fellows interviewing me, senior executives in the manufacturing space.
Daily Inspiration: “The future of work? It’s the skills you don’t know about that you need to be planning for!”
“The future of work? It’s the skills you don’t know about that you need to be planning for!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
What can the legal cannabis industry teach us about the future? Quite a bit about the future of the workforce and skills. As I will often joke on stage, most major food companies will have to hire cannabis experts in the near future to help them deal with their development and production of gummy bears! Here’s a clip to get you thinking!
The slide I used? Right here! In article on the future of cannabis in the drinks industry, it was suggested that “students in food science and food processing need to be trained in cannabis now, so that they’re ready to help develop new products in five years’ time” is from Drinks Magazine, published in 2018.
The point? Organizations always need to be thinking RIGHT now about the skills they might need in the future. Borrowing on one of my favourite phrases, our reality is that we need to prepare for jobs that do not yet exist, for careers not yet invented, for knowledge not yet in existence, and for industries yet to be defined. That is the future of work!
Watch the video clip – when I put this slide about cannabis up in front of a bunch of senior executives for major food companies, they all quickly came to agree in a follow-up discussion that this was one of the biggest issues they are faced with. The context of your future? It’s to be found in another one of my previous Daily Inspiration posts. “You are going to need to recruit people for jobs not yet in existence based on skills not yet developed and you need to do this yesterday!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
It’s the jobs that do not yet exist that you really need to prepare for! And the trend is very real.
There was a lot of different content to each keynote, but I opened both events with a key bedrock quote that I’ve used for almost every keynote for close to 25 years – that 65% of kids in preschool today will work in jobs or careers that do not yet exist. Here’s that opening in context:
I originally came across the prediction way back in 1997 in an Australian study; the original source material has long since disappeared.
Since then, this statistic has become a bit of a meme in the education, skills, HR, and knowledge industries; it was even often quoted throughout the Bush and Obama administrations. The fun part is that over the years, a few groups have tried to track down the source of the quote, and have made their way back to me; my original citation source has long since disappeared. Some take umbrage with the observation, demanding proof and scholastic attribution, which seems kind of quaint in the world of today in which it seems anybody can make up anything they like.
That key statistic has been one of three observations that I’ve often used to set the tone for my keynotes and the idea of accelerating change – the other two being that 1/2 of the knowledge for a typical college degree is obsolete or revised by the time of graduation and that most products are now obsolete within just a few years of release. Here’s another highlight clip of my first few minutes on stage at a manufacturing event in Chicago, setting the tone early on:
In New Orleans, I kicked things up a notch – check out this bold assertion as to what we really need to do to align to a faster future.
New jobs? New careers? I have no problem suggesting a few; there are dozens. Here are five to start your day thinking about:
- knowledge farmers: exponential knowledge growth, in part driven by social networking, is leading to information overload everywhere. KF’s are the uber-editors who immerse themselves in global data feeds, extracting relevant knowledge and insight from data torrents. They’re the new editors, and it’s their ability to apply their insight to knowledge-rivers that will place them in high demand.
- location intelligence professionals: see my earlier post on this. I’ve been talking about this for years. These are the folks who are linking GoogleMap-type data to existing business processes and services, and who are building entire new global infrastructures on spatial information.
- mash managers: as innovation moves from the core to the masses, creative insight is emerging from those who learn how to take multiple new ideas, and input them into the innovation process. These people synthesize ideas from multiple sources, study markets, interpret insight, and decide how to re-evolve a product, service, brand, marketing campaign, or just about anything else. Their focus in “constant innovation,” and it’s their idea-immersive environment that drives them forward.
- tactical controllers: in this wildly information-chaotic world, some people are busy searching for the next big thing. A new and very real profession emerges with those who step beyond the “minutiae-of-the-moment” and instead focus on providing tactical, strategic guidance on what-to-do-in-the-next-moments … they are the PR expert who knows how to steer the company through a global viral idea meltdown; the brand expert who knows how to re-energize a brand next week; the individual who studies what the global knowledge farmers are revealing, and who understands what to do next as a result.
- analytical architects: the world’s big problems are being solved by those who are learning to throw sophisticated solutions at complex problems. These are the folks who will architect the smart-highway infrastructure; load-balanced two-way energy grids; just-next-week manufacturing processes for the era of the customization of one. They’ve combined education in combinatory theory with big server farms to generate the new smart infrastructure that is set to envelop us.
Reality? My son works as a drone pilot – a location intelligence professional. A.I.? Check out the number of articles for ‘prompt engineers,’ another new fast-emerging skill requirement.
The future? It’s big, it’s bold, and it’s happening all around you!
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