Miguel Jimenez: Culture and Strategic Foresight
Miguel Jimenez: Culture and Strategic Foresight
Season 1 Number 8
Future & culture
we think about the future every minute and every day, thinking about sell it! Have you ever thought about buying time, air or water? It’s in our DNA
In the beginning, the real motive behind working in future foresight or strategic foresight is that when you start to see what a technology is able to do to humanity, how technology is pushing the boundaries forward.
How can technology affect humans? And what it will have in the next five to ten years?
Mostly people who work in technology, they use it for short term projects, but you should expand and read more books on how to do the long-term projects. We must think about the long term because the short term is broken, you must link everything together to reach your ambition .
And if you ask people about this, you will find that most leaders in companies, regardless of their size, think in the short term, and if you use a certain language when you talk to the board of directors, you will find that they did not understand what you are saying because in fact they do not think about the future.
The future is the only legacy we will leave to those after us. So, we conclude that few people around the world think about the future, but there are not many tangible, actionable things that people can use in their lives. Also, future studies and strategic foresight are related to humanity and making the future.
Are there any pre-condition for someone to be a futurist?
In fact, any job needs a formal education learner, also needs practice and training to move from beginner to senior. E.g., When you choose a degree, you want to study, it is a long-term decision that will affect your life. Every human on this planet predicts and the prediction is what is usually before the future, which means, we anticipate the likely consequences of the decision we have made. So, you must prepare yourself well for the results, e.g., during the summer we keep more food
because we expect something to happen. So, the expectation we do in our daily life is a biological thing.
Anyone can predict, but it needs more practicing and training, you should be open-minded, because the future is more diverse, open and is not limited to a specific experience like your experience in the legal field only.
What is our view of the world?
All the decisions we made in the past were logical decisions, it seemed like they were taken at the right time to make us what we are now, but sometimes we have to give up some of those decisions, e.g., you might be a vegetarian and suddenly you decide to eat meat, here you challenged the decision you made in the past, and you must be open in order to continue to develop.
In fact, man thinks about the future every minute and every day, thinking and worrying about the future is in our DNA. But sometimes it’s psychological aspects because there is a perception on an individual level that being a Nigerian and having an open approach and challenging your assumptions, needs to overcome the fear.
there is a fine line that takes us from the present to the future, we cannot predict the future but we can guess where we are heading in it. But there are many questions that people have, like: Where do we start and How? Why don’t I put myself in other people’s shoes and start like them?
We by nature tend to work with a group, but at the same time we think of ourselves, because we have a kind of selfishness, we may now do something together in the short term but in the future, we change that opinion. E.g., Suppose that what you are today doesn’t exist, and you don’t have a position of power, and this is difficult because most people think that this assumption reduces what others are, so we need everyone, because everyone is part of the future we are building.
When we talk about the future, what are we trying to sell to people?
We’re trying to sell them a picture and a story about a place that’s going to get better, so you’re putting your resources into that place and making a
story, but that story might change the way we think about the future. We don’t invest in days; we need to create the future in the coming months. So, what we have to do is set things up and define a longer country, for example: we have a pioneering company in the new sector, what this company needs are to launch the new product, not money. So, investing in the tangible gives us a more flexible company. Cause The main issue is the return on investment and the persuasion of others.
How can we stay the same company that we are used to?
✓ first begin to see the challenges of how to sell something as popular as water.
✓ Then, use that to run a proper scan, look for signals and what other people are doing, and link to various work you’ve thought of before.
✓ Then, continue the process to understand the different steps.
e.g., If you thought about selling the air or the sun, would you pay for them? This is where the challenge and thinking begin.
How can we identify cultural differences and benefit from them in foreseeing the future?
“Time is an asset, so you shouldn’t waste it”.
The countries of the world use time in a different way, and consider that time is not important, because what is important is the connections that we will have in that period. E.g. In Spain, people are famous for being late because it isn’t time for the person we meet, so if we say we will come at 9 we will come 10. Unlike southern Europe, time is very accurate, most of these societies use time as an asset, and this asset can be sold for trade.
Here we need to understand that investing in a certain period of time will produce a certain amount of things. This is one of the most exciting things because here we are taking advantage of time and its output. So don’t expect the future to be fixed until you can plan for the future.
Is there a difference between working with the private and the public sector within the same culture?
Of course, the private sector is completely different from the public sector. The private is driven by the return on investment and shareholders, but the public sector is driven by politics. Although they are two different approaches, they need each other. E.g., In Spain, the political incentive to create better future art is in the short term, because every year you have to elect a new artist, and this is for the public sector, but for the private, deputies tend to be re-elected within 4 years.
In addition, most people think that the private sector is more interested in investing and changing the future to be more sustainable and more profitable. It’s hard for everyone to have a long-term view even though they have it, because it’s easier for the public sector to influence long-term outcomes, that we can create policies that transform things. E.g., the public sector has been able to put in place policies to prevent the transmission of the virus around the world, so it has the power to influence things in the long run.
What advice can you give someone who wants to think ahead and have strategic foresight?
1. Challenge your assumptions and change yourself.
2. Find people with different points of view.
3. There are many books that talk about how we can predict the future, including: Miller’s real book, which says that insight is one thing, and what we do in the future is building proactive systems.
4. Understanding the different ways of predicting things enables us to discover the right place. Foreseeing the future is a very specific thing but predicting it is a kind of future.
5. At first you should think of a process, a scenario before getting hammers to build a house, you should think about why people need shelter and then apply different work methodologies.
What is the most important capacity a public or private sector organization must have in order to have an effective strategic vision within the project?
The most important ability is to accept that the future is intangible. We are trying to measure something intangible using very precise and tangible KPIs. E.g., Most people are able to walk, how many people have been trained to run? less than 90% of people trained to run. So just training people to do something doesn’t make you good, it just makes you someone who knows a little more than before, so you also need to practice.
The most important aspect of having a culture is mentality. As it’s the first and most important task of any thinking in the future is to try to work on the culture and change the mindset and make sure that we speak the same language.
Finally, the global future is completely different from the local and cultural future, but we often turn towards the global future in order for this vision to be technical for everything, what should we do? Just set things up.