Unleash the possible - Learnings from CPSI 2013

We all have the potential for great results.  It starts somewhere – it just takes one step forward to make the impossible, possible!   This was the clear message from the top creative solving conference in the USA, CPSI 2013.

Here are some more insights that we gained:

Mary O'Hara Devereaux - http://global-foresight.net/ - was a fabulous speaker who reminded us that we used to think of the future by extrapolating from the past.  It no longer works like that.   

We need to develop a much stronger peripheral vision and look beyond narrow viewpoints. If we are trying to facilitate change we need to encourage our team to say yes to possibilities.   

We need courageous creativity so that we can put forward alternatives that are different from what we have today.

Mary also warned that you need to look for who is doing your future now!  There are always weak signals of things to come and someone out there is already doing your future, right now.  Remember that our competitors are no longer just local – they are global.

 Her 4 laws of the future are:

1. Don’t over-estimate the driving forces in the short term and underestimate their long term impacts.  We cannot only respond to the immediate

2. If something is unsustainable, in the long end it will end.  Trends are indicating disruptive shifts in work areas as follows:

Employee to entrepreneur

Career ladder to experience portfolio

Permanent to velcro relationships

Outsourcing to crowd sourcing

Physical to digital infrastructure

Organizations to social networks

Sharing knowledge to creating context for persuasive conversations

3. Her 3^rd law of the future is pay attention to weak signals something in your peripheral vision that is noisy enough - it could be small but if you scan the horizon, think about these weak signals.  Some examples of recent weak signals include –

Most knowledge workers in the world are women

Net speak ‘OMG’ – is this a weak signal of the end of language as we know it?

3D printing – we will soon print out household goods for homes

China files more patents than Japan

Same sex marriage

The rise of the one person household

The second middle age from 60 - 80

4. Mary’s next law of the future - beware of conventional wisdom as it is nearly always wrong.

Take the transformation of medicine as one example.  The sacred cows have been turned out to pasture and we turn them in to hamburgers.

Don't let the short term cancel to the long term.

Mary’s other tips:

1. We are facing the end of work as we know it. We are looking at more robots and more smart machines.  

2. Watch for the growing irrelevance of knowledge.  There is more and more knowledge generated but we have to make sense of the knowledge.  Sense making is now king.  The real challenge is leveraging knowledge in the age of big data.

3. Look out for the rise of the individual and the ME economy.  We want the capability of hyper personalization to live our dream.