The Long Now (1.4)

The Long Now: Unconscious Futures Modeling

The issue we’re examining in January is the prevailing Battle Against VUCA. Despite our greatest efforts to wage war on the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous landscape, the world continues to shift in unpredictable ways. The result is a constant exercise in futility that only leads to frustration, equivocation and breakdown. Surely we must continue to fight against forces that seek to disrupt the status quo – or should we?

We don’t think so. That’s why we reframed this issue into Embracing the Long Now; the idea that we have been misguidedly “shrinking the future” and must instead make long-term thinking more common, stretch out what people consider as “now,” and flow with the possibilities that exist within a VUCA universe. Join us as we seek to flip our collective brain on its head!

CONTENT 1: WICKED OPPORTUNITY PODCAST

Welcome to the first episode of 2021! Throughout 2020 there were a plethora of voices reinforcing that we live in an increasingly VUCA world – volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous – and for very obvious reasons. Facts being ridiculed, stable governance under assault, and a pandemic that completely altered life around the world – all manifestations of a VUCA environment that has unraveled business as usual. In reality, we’ve always lived in a VUCA world, and the real lesson of the previous year is that we need to shift our mindsets to align with the movements of the cosmos. This is VUCA liked you’ve never heard it before!

CONTENT 2: SELF DISCOVERY QUIZ

This month’s quiz dove into our personal reactions around reframing the Wicked Problem of the Battling Against VUCA into the Wicked Opportunity Embracing the Long Now. Here are the survey results for this month.