How The Future Is Being Discussed And Why It Matters

TRANSCRIPT:

People who are business leaders, who are celebrated thinkers, celebrities, politicians, they often talk about the future.

You can learn a lot about the future from them, but you can also learn a lot about why people talk about the future. The future as a rhetorical device. The future to sound deep and persuasive. The future to offer inspiration. The future has a way of making a heady platitude sound like a plan.

Then, there are all of you. You who I would call the foot soldiers of the future. Here's my little gift of a foot soldier.

What I mean by that is that for you the future is not some imaginary time out there. It's not a rhetorical device. It doesn't exist to prettify your pros, or carry favor, or win an argument. The future is where you're expected to be informed by and you use that information and take it back to your co‑workers and inform other people.

The decisions that you make, the ideas you have about the future are the things that are going to shape how all of us interact with the spaces, and the places, and the goods that we care about. How our values are getting mobilized in the world.

Filmed at PSFK’s CXI 2018 conference: psfk.com

Devon Powers: devonpowers.com