An early casualty in difficult times is often the future. As uncertainty grows, we focus on doing more of what worked in the past, but try to do more of it – faster. Like unfit people, we breathe more shallowly. We lower targets. Our time horizons collapse, becoming significantly shorter. And you know where this is going.
In The Future Quotient, a report by Volans and global ad agency JWT, we conclude that it is time for transformational (not incremental) change – and that the way forward involves scanning wider, diving deeper into emergent realities, aiming higher, and thinking and acting over significantly extended time-scales.
It struck us that we should be trying to develop new tools which could measure how we engage time, and the future in particular.
Coming up with the idea was one thing, but developing a workable method was quite another. Then, on a new social network, I stumbled across an interesting tool developed by a Californian firm MindTime Technologies. I contacted its chief executive, John Furey, and our teams set to work to develop a hybrid process, testing the time orientation of an individual, team or organisation, and then linking it to their take on sustainability issues.
The beta version of that test is now live at http://mindtimemaps.com/fq. It's quick, free and provides nearly instantaneous feedback. We plan to build an open-source database
of the results – as a way of bringing sustainability's inter-generational timescales back into the spotlight.
As several chief executives told us during the course of the project, recessionary pressures and wider uncertainties in the system have encouraged short-termism to proliferate, with even pension funds becoming increasingly myopic in their investing.
True leaders encourage and persuade us to go wider, deeper, higher and longer. Take the test, perhaps asking your wider team – or even your entire organisation – to give it a try, too. Help us all get a better sense of how to help our species make this the best century yet.
