Take a moment to think about your ideal version of a foreseeable future. Picture a vision of a world that would make you feel proud to be a part of, that would inspire you on a regular basis or simply get you excited to be living in it. What would it be?
The question is extremely broad, yet a majority of people would give an answer referring to what I call the big five: Conflicts, World Hunger, Pollution, Wealth Inequalities, Public Health. The most intriguing part is that these issues are not recent, in fact if we were to go back in time seventy years ago and ask the same question we would get similar responses. The reality is that for the last seven decades we — humanity as a whole — have made no significant progress on any of these fronts. Even worse, in some cases, the time passing by only exacerbated the situation. Seventy years. That’s a lot, almost two full adult work lives or three Generation Time (the average Generation Time being about twenty-five years). What has really been accomplished over that time frame?
Since the end of World War II, the main focus of the world leaders has been to set up the building blocks and lay down the foundations to allow the beginning of a new era made of Globalization and a Digital Technology. This could seem superficial and insignificant relative to all the colossal issues existing on Earth but let’s take a step back for a moment and dive into what are, in my opinion, the main benefits of Globalization; they may surprise you more than you think.
We have now entered a worldwide and ever-growing flow of goods and people transiting from one place to another at a pace never seen before; with that, we have enabled the entire planet to be connected and reachable within seconds. For the first time ever in history, over fifty percent of the population (yes, over 4 billion people) have immediate access to information and knowledge. Free trade allows a good portion of them to also have access to primary resources (such as labor, raw material, foodstuffs, etc.) all over the globe. It is easier than ever to grasp information, learn about a subject, discover an opportunity, unify people around it, aggregate resources and create something that will drive more people to it. I believe that the combination of having information, cognizance and resources available within its reach will empower a new generation of entrepreneurs a lot bigger and far more influential than any other before it. In fact, there’s no doubt in my mind that some of them will have the expediency to rise as world leaders and have a strong influence on hundreds of millions of lives. To a certain extent, we could say it has already started. The best example is this success story about a man born and raised in South Africa who then went to university in Canada which, a couple of years later, ended up building his vision at the head of 2 multi-billion dollars companies (aerospace and sustainable energy/transportation).
Today’s system is far from being perfect but we have to give credit where credit is due; the fundamentals are strong and they will act as catalyst for a drastic shift in global influence. Knowledge and awareness are the starting point of an idea, the spark at the origin of a fire, having the means to grow and expend this idea is the fuel that will transform it into a real blaze. However, I think there is still one major barrier before we could see plenty of new leaders remodeling the world in different directions: Innovative thinking.
What’s fascinating is that for most of us, thinking from the outside in is the only thing we know. Analyze the surroundings, identify what could be enhanced, look and build solutions to these around it. Our brains have been formatted to be analytical, sometimes even creating problems that do not exists just to be able to deliver solutions. Nonetheless no one was born this way. As kids, we all have the same reasoning process, the only thing we know is… that we don’t know anything. At this age, our reasoning is based exclusively uncertainty and questioning. “Why?”, “and why?”, “but why” and it doesn’t even stop there. All small children have that fascination for curiosity, this unbelievable thirst for knowledge and discovery. At this age, creativity is at its peak driven by the taste for exploration, experimentation and the absence of boundaries.
Once we grow up our entire thought process changes and becomes formatted to think about problems first. Most of the modern educational systems are teaching thinking styles made to create builders not architects: analytic, deterministic, analogical reasoning. That’s how we learn Math, Physic, Biology, History and pretty much everything else. These thought process come naturally and with good reasons: it is the main methodologies which allowed the human race to evolve, from the ancient Greece all the way up to today’s modern society. Humanity did a big leap forward when it stopped trying to reinvent the wheel and instead started to build on top of what had just been discovered. Keep the same principle, fast forward tens of centuries later, and here we are. For years and years and years we’ve been told to not question the world surrounding us too much but more to consider it as an ecosystem we should get familiar with and try to improve. The Pythagorean theorem, the Ideal Gas Laws, the Mitosis have all been demonstrated, forget about how they got discovered but understand them and use this knowledge to discover or create something new. Improving the society we live in is just a matter of building on top of the foundations that have been (somewhat) solidly demonstrated by the previous generations. Modern schools are not encouraging differences, especially when it comes to cogitation. The mindset they promote is to not question why or how the existing world works because in a way it’s a waste of time. If everyone was re-thinking problems that have been solved for decades it would push the human race into a period of stagnation or worse a real regression phase.
To some extent, that’s true. We can’t all be leaders and we need builders to do the actual work. But today more than ever this distribution seems unbalanced. In a world where we all have so much tools at our disposal to give to the future a different shape, creativity has now become the bottleneck. This obsession to look for constraints and problems even before thinking often impedes to see all the possibilities. In the same way, having an understanding of the causality between different things has lead a majority of people to put boundaries to their imagination. The world’s leader of tomorrow will be ones who will be able to combine different thought process, driven by a vision that they will build using all the resources put at their disposal by the current system; and it would probably be people like you and me.