Reshaping business in uncertainty with Futurist Tanja Schindler
Opening Future Summit 2020, futurist Tanja Schindler shares with us some of her views on the future of business, education and human to robot interactions in the next years. Tanja is a co-founder of Futures Space and an international and award-winning Futurist for more than seven years with international experience in foresight, innovation, and strategy.
She holds a double MBA/Master of Strategic Foresight with distinction from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia and through Futures Space explores the next decades with more than 400 members from 50 countries, creating together with futurists, thought leaders and companies from all over the world, future maps to identify future challenges and to actively and jointly shape the future.
Tell us a little about how you see the future of business in the next 5 years. What do you think will be the main actions that a business should consider in order not to give up its values, but at the same time to empower its employees to be creative and motivated?
I imagine the future of business and work will be defined by a few key values: sustainability, collaboration, flexibility, resilience and purpose-centricity. If a company is not able to act through its core set of values and a mission to serve a clear cause or tackling a substantial problem in our world, they will not succeed. I see that the future employee does not work for one organisation but rather focuses on project-based collaboration across industries. Hence, organisations need to attract talent via their mission. Hiring a flexible team will ensure a higher innovation rate as systems thinking and overall insights are transferred across industries. Consequently, companies need to redefine themselves as a network organisation that have a core mission and build agile projects around it. By that, they become resilient and adapt to current changes.
Then, to become future-oriented, organisations need to define their core competencies and pick a futures challenge that needs to be solved; only then they stay relevant in the future. However, many try to keep their current core business alive and attract more customers. Instead, they should ask themselves, what could kill their current business, and then act to transform their business accordingly. As a next step, then they should ask which better future they can help to build with their competencies, rather than their current products or services. The future is about reinventing yourself and your business over and over again to serve a better outcome, and this outcome needs to be sustainable, long-term and serving nature, including humanity.
From an economic point of view, are we sufficiently prepared as knowledge to overcome this impasse in the next 2 years? Do you think that less developed countries will find the resources needed to improve their quality of life?
I think it is important to understand that developing countries should not eager to become like industrial countries. We have done many mistakes over the past decades and harm our environments and overused our resources. I think those other countries have a great possibility to do much better than we did and over-jumping mistakes we made. For example, the are way more flexible in creating decentralised structures as they do not have a sophisticated centralised system yet. However, many current problems are caused by this centralisation of energy, food distribution or mobility. So by imagining and using new resources in a better way, I am sure they can do much better. Also, developed countries should support this development as we can learn and adapt once we see decentralised systems successful running. Consequently, less developed countries should use their creativity and ask for funding to show the industrial countries how to do it better.
Learning has gone completely online. What challenges should we expect? How well do you think online education can become?
Firstly, we need to understand that learning will be our companion for the rest of our lives, our current structure of getting an education that serves until we retire is outdated. Hence, online education can be a great opportunity to imbed this long-life learning in our daily routines. Another opportunity is that online education is much more inclusive, and we can interact with people around the globe. A huge problem when trying to imagine the future or find innovations are our current assumption and biases how our world runs. By interacting with other cultures and people speaking various languages, new structures and ideas can evolve. We need to unlearn how we've learned before accepting there are new, better ways of learning. Once social interaction becomes possible again, I am sure there will be local and offline hubs where the learned content can be discussed. Hence, traditional spaces such as universities and schools will become a location for interacting, discussing and challenges what we’ve learned rather than consuming the content - this I imagine will move into the online space.
What do you think will be the first jobs that will require collaboration between humans, algorithms and robots and what skills does someone need to be able to have such a job?
I hope that many jobs will require interaction with humans and robots, as I see many chances for such an undertaking. For example, imagine healthcare staff would not have to do any heavy lifting of patients anymore or distributing meals but rather has more time for caring conversations and having lunch or dinner with the patients. There will be a difference, however, who will interact with the robots or AI machines in the front-end, so the user and the once who program those in the backend. Important is we understand that we define the ethics of inviting robots in our lives, so we need to make the tough decisions and set some rules. Why do we always imaging that robots have to replace a certain workforce, maybe they are owned by the workforce and humans can begin to use their creativity and social skills to solve more complex problems in this world. Another good decision will be that everyone who learns how to program also learns about ethics and philosophy as those human will give the robots their soul or decide which data is collected and stored.
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Tanja opens Future Summit 2020, a large event focusing on future trends and scenarios, gathering over 60 international speakers in a 5 day online marathon. Some of the key topics of the 2020 Summit: What are the transformations that the pandemic brings in business and society? How are AI, VR and automation transforming industries and business models? What are the Green Deal opportunities and the new realities of social impact investment? What does the future of work and education look like and what are the latest trends in digital health, leadership and mobility services? What are the implications of the climate crisis and the solutions to it? How is the world changing after the US presidential election and what are the economic transformations for Romania and Europe in 2021?