CSA Celebrity Speakers



Leading experts give their insights into what the world has in store for us in 2013
Magnus Lindkvist


I recently reread The Economist's The World in 2012, i.e. last year's edition of the annual publication. Between spot-on predictions like "London will host the Olympics in July" and vagaries like "Indonesia is at a cross-roads", I failed to find any remarks about this year's biggest cultural phenomenon Gangnam Style by PSY (close to one billion views on YouTube and counting). My prediction for 2013 is that we will yet again fail to predict the most interesting and, in some cases, important trends, fads and ideas. But I didn't write this to make some snide remark about our inability to predict (those kinds of "insights" went out of fashion in 2010). My hope is that by reconsidering where ideas come from, that we can reignite the future in the coming year. Society was for centuries cyclical. Lives and lifestyles did not change. Technology did not bring new opportunities. Ideas were seen as eternal. And so on. For the past century, we have lived in a progressive world where change has been the norm, captained by technology that relentlessly transforms magic (like Telepathy) into something we can use everyday (like Twitter). The concept of Future was invented in this progressive phase and our assumption has for a long time been that whatever The Future will bring, it will be different and hopefully better than today. This assumption has for the past few years been wrong. - The world is less global and interconnected today than it was in 2007, according to the DHL Connectedness Index. - We are travelling slower than we did in the 1970's (due to congestion in cities and the discontinuation of supersonic passenger jets) - Big dreams, like colonising other planets or creating free electricity, have largely died away (save for the odd futurist conference). "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters," to quote The Founders Fund, a venture capital firm. Instead of dreaming big, many are "nightmaring" big with one of the biggest trends in 2012 being Apocaholism – wherein people stock up on gold, canned food and candles to prepare for a coming Armageddon. The Future has in the past decade been transformed from a place of promise to one of punishment. We need to reverse this trend. We need to stop thinking that progress is some kind of divine faucet that entitles us to new ideas en masse and start thinking of progress through the Gangnam Style lens, a small idea in the head of an individual capable of improving lives, or at least a five minute coffee break. I propose we make 2013 about three important ideas to reclaim the future as a place of promise and potential. 1. We need to experiment more! Think of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. He started by blowing things up including, by accident, his baby brother. We just don't do this kind of tinkering anymore. There are too many compliance officers and committees ensuring that individuals don't cause too much harm, which in turn ensures that they can't come up with too many good ideas either. 2. We need to Recycle Failures! Most ideas are a failure first time around. From flat pack furniture (a massive flop when a Swedish department store tried it in 1940) to the dot com bust (should have kept your Amazon stock). We look too much at success as a guide and we don't document failures however so we are losing excellent embryos of good ideas. We need to retreat from being a shame-culture to incorporating failure-recycling in our drive to sustainability. 3. We need to be persistent! In our speed culture, we often fail to appreciate that people need more than a quarter to change. Capitalism – focusing on quarters and even, with the rise of algo-trading on stock markets, milliseconds – is out of sync with human behaviour. Change will come from those who don't have expectations of quarterly or annual dividends to create real progress. I wish you an experimental 2013 and look forward to a new PSY in 2013 but perhaps in the realm of life sciences this time.

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