This blog post was originally posted on Linkedin 22 of June, 2015. To see the original post click here. Revised.
This topiPaths interested me for years. The recipe is so simple and yet lurking and challenging to grasp. The main reason is that we must look in another direction than we are used to, to find the path. It may even feel counter-intuitive.
Traditionally we have looked at the society, at companies, and on the economical transactions from a micro and macro perspective. Based on that, we have interpolated facts to predict the future. We have assumed that we can base our assumption on what we see, from historical evidence. We have paid all our focus on external events. The tricky part of forecasting the future is to let go of our conceptual thinking of how the world looks today (and how it “always” has been).
We tend to focus on one trajectory at a time and keep all the others stable. Since the pace of change has been historically slow, it worked before. Nowadays, when the change is exponential, it is more of a challenge to predict the future, simply because the complexity and speed have increased.
I highly admire Ray Kurzweil for identifying; The Law of Accelerating Returns. (He is one of my big idols, nowadays he is Director of Engineering at Google.) He states (and proves it) that we have an exponential development (technical, medical, etc). There is plenty written about the law, you can read more about it in this article, that describes it simply.
This interview with Ray Kurzweil is also worth watching:
Ray Kurzweil also stresses the following (from the video above): “What happens in evolution, entities like mammals and humans become more intelligent, more creative, more loving, and moving exponentially to become more God-like; never quite reaching God, but moving in that direction. So evolution is a spiritual process to bring us closer to God, and technological evolution is now running a million times faster than biological evolution and ultimately, we will vastly ultimately trillions-fold expand our creativity and our sense of humor and our ability to love and will become more God-like.”
I do agree with Ray Kurzweil that we are becoming more “God-like” although I would rather phrase it as we are maturing to who we are, (Gods). But I do not agree that it is a direct consequence of technical development. Instead, I would argue that in parallel to the exponential development pace of our technology, we have another, and in a way opposite, exponential development going on. Namely an exponential growth of our awareness (and yes this does affect our biological evolution.)
What we have missed out when projecting the future, is to watch out for internal changes in ourselves. We have, for a long time, taken for granted that humans will always be humans. But nothing, absolutely nothing on our earth is stable. We have just two modes — growth or decline. Although the change may sometimes go slowly.
Partly as a response to an increased amount of external impressions (as a consequence of the exponential technical development), we seek inner stillness and inner guidance. We can see the evidence for this evolution around us.
Have you noticed for instance, how many new yoga places have popped up in your neighborhood? 2013 was the year when several CEO´s outed that they have practiced meditation for years (according to Arianna Huffington, ref. Wisdom 2.0 conference 2014). Meditation is going mainstream. Mindfulness is nowadays a common and accepted activity in companies. The headlines on the cover of Time´s magazine from February 2014 readout The Mindful Revolution.
If you need more to be convinced just ask a book store what kind of books has risen in popularity during the last 10 years. (You will find books about personal development, mindfulness, spirituality, yoga, coaching books, etc.) or ask Google and you will be amazed by how much information you will find nowadays on this subject.
The benefit of mindfulness, yoga practice, meditation, and other spiritual work is, besides inner stillness (and a lot of other benefits) to increase awareness. This is a way to tapping into the unused DNA (science has stated that we only use a fraction of our DNA, about 8,2 %, as far as I know, my statement is not yet scientifically verified).
What happens when we raise our awareness, consciousness? We come to the same conclusion as Ray Kurzweil but from another direction, we get more loving, more caring, more happy, more trustful, more altruistic, just to mention some benefits. And with that the whole world change.
Now stop reading for a while and just imagine the evolving new world, a world with an abundance of creativity and diversity (read services of all kind) combined with people with good and open hearts and altruistic minds. (as always there will be some people that will choose another way of being, but they will be in the minority).
So based on the new “good” world, — how will future business models look like? The simplest way to get a clue is to answer the following questions:
- How would you do business with yourself?
- How would you do business with someone that you really and fully trust? (How many sheets of legal terms would you provide? What terms of conditions would you suggest? What kind of pricing model would you apply? What type of service and support would you provide?)
The clue to the Path to the New Business Model is in the answers.
