PIC No. 35:
• Title: The Future Normal: How We Will Live, Work and Thrive in the Next Decade
• Authors: Rohit Bhargava and Henry Coutinho-Mason
• Publisher: Ideapress Publishing (March 7, 2023, 336 pages)
• Management Bucket #3 of 20: The Strategy Bucket
Welcome to Issue No. 35 of PAILS IN COMPARISON, the value-added sidekick of John Pearson’s Buckets Blog. This blog features my “PICs”—shorter reviews of helpful books—with comparisons to other books in my 20 management buckets (core competencies) filing system.
Artificial Intelligence Wrote 6 Verses in 3 Seconds!
First, let me be clear. I did not ask AI to write this review. I was tempted, however, because my limited forays into artificial intelligence have been quite impressive. (Prompt: “Create a nonprofit organization committee charter template.”) Anyway…I wrote this review the old-fashioned way.
But speaking of AI, let’s jump over to Chapter 11, “Augmented Creativity,” where co-authors Rohit Bhargava and Henry Coutinho-Mason ask, “What if artificial intelligence could make humans more creative?” They asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT artificial content creation tool a single prompt, “Rewrite the song ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ to be about AI.”
AI wrote six verses, including this opening:
“In the midst of the digital age,
AI rose to the stage,
A new kind of star was born,
And the old ways were gone.”
They note, “The lyrics above came back in three seconds. No human, not even the world’s best songwriters, could produce something this quickly. And most people would agree that the lyrics are distinctly passable.”
The Future Normal also mentions IBM. (And speaking of IBM, see my review of Good Power, by Ginni Rometty, former Chairman and CEO of IBM from 2012 to 2020). “Several years ago, IBM’s Watson helped create a ‘cognitive movie trailer’ for Morgan, a suspense-filled horror movie about an artificially enhanced human.” The result: “This combination of human and AI-powered machine reduced the time required to produce a movie trailer from the typical two to three weeks to around 24 hours.”
But…I should back up (like AI would have done) and give you a proper introduction to The Future Normal: How We Will Live, Work and Thrive in the Next Decade. Co-author Rohit Bhargava is also the author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller, Non-Obvious Megatrends: How to See What Others Miss and Predict the Future (read my review). So, I could hardly wait to read his latest thinking.
To write this book, the authors approach the future as contrarians—as “now-ists”—and that’s intriguing. They write, “We both felt that we took a different approach than many futurists. Instead of asking what could change the future, we routinely found ourselves asking, ‘What already has?’ and ‘Do we want this change to be a part of humanity’s future?’”
They note, “Indeed, neither of us spends much time looking at futurist scenarios at all. Our energy is focused on the present. As now-ists rather than futurists, we stay on top of business innovations because they so often spark insights into what our future normal will look like. Any new business innovation—whether an entirely new brand or startup, or a new product, service, or initiative from an existing brand—is a bet on the future.
These two very creative “now-ists” clearly love their work! “We have engaged in rich dialogue with uncanny holograms, donned full bodysuits to ‘feel’ virtual wind, and suffered the pitying stares of passersby while wearing Google Glasses in public. We have anxiously strapped ourselves in as passengers of prototype self-driving cars and watched artificial intelligence ‘write’ a full-length article years before it was widely available.”
And this: “For every world-changing innovation we celebrated, another would fail to reach the mainstream or hit an unexpected impasse. The truth is that the future is abandoned, defunded, ignored, or ridiculed just as often as it is realized. So the real challenge isn’t predicting the future but rather predicting what will become normal.”
PLAYLISTS! I love the book’s format and the permission from the authors to jump around the 30 chapters in any order. They add, “At the end of the book in appendix A, we’ve also provided a selection of curated ‘playlists’ to help you zero in on the chapters that will have the greatest impact on your life and your career, no matter what industry you work in.”
For example, the “Government, NGOs & Nonprofits” playlist recommends you focus on 10 of the 30 short chapters, including: Certified Media, Ending Loneliness, Work Constructed, Impact Hubs, New Collectivism, Good Governing, The 15-Minute City, Reflective Cultures, Stealth Learning, and Millions of Microgrids.
The “Future Normal” content is categorized into three major sections (10 chapters per section):
• Part 1: How We Will Connect, Get Healthy, and Thrive
• Part 2: How We Will Live, Work, and Consume
• Part 3: How Humanity Will Survive
The three introductory pages for each of the three major sections include 10 chapter icons and 10 one-line summaries. The authors reveal that the “chapter on augmented creativity also inspired the design of this book. We used AI tools to suggest the various icons you see on the opening page of each chapter. To learn more about how we leveraged AI for this design task, visit our online resources at thefuturenormal.com.”
In Chapter 3, “Certified Media,” the authors ask, “What if all media outlets were required to have images and videos validated before publishing, and how might this affect freedom of speech?” And note that in 2018, “MIT researchers famously reported that misinformation spreads up to 100 times further and six times faster than truth, and political falsehoods spread three times faster than other misinformation.”
Every chapter features numerous stories and at least one “instigator.” In Chapter 22, “Good Governing,” the authors ask, “What if government policies were recognized for actually making citizens’ lives better?” The Instigator: The World Government Summit, “an annual gathering of more than 20,000 government leaders and experts.” Imagine this: “The 2022 annual event featured nearly 1,000 sessions, more than 600 speakers, and over 40 participating organizations. In past years, the event has showcased programs such as Indonesia’s innovative experiment to allow bus riders in the country’s second-largest city of Surabaya to pay for their ride by collecting and submitting five plastic bottles instead of paying with cash.”
In the conclusion, “The Future Will Be Normal,” the authors predict: “The secret to seizing emerging opportunities has always been in bridging these two dimensions—embracing the new, while grounding it in what will not change.” They quote Amazon founder Jeff Bezos who once observed: “I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ … I almost never get the question—‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’—And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two.”
BONUS! Click here to view a 22-minute dialogue with the coauthors.
PAILS IN COMPARISON: Reading this book reminded me of several other must-read books in the Strategy Bucket, plus other buckets/core competencies.
[ ] Non-Obvious Megatrends: How to See What Others Miss and Predict the Future, by Rohit Bhargava (Read my review.)
[ ] The Attacker’s Advantage: Turning Uncertainty Into Breakthrough Opportunities, by Ram Charan (Read my review.)
[ ] Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen, by Dan Heath (Read my review.)
[ ] Barna Trends 2018: What's New and What's Next at the Intersection of Faith and Culture (Read my review.) – Note! As you read this, now five years later, ask “How prophetic was the Barna organization?”
To order from Amazon, click on the title for Future Normal: How We Will Live, Work and Thrive in the Next Decade, by Rohit Bhargava and Henry Coutinho-Mason. For more book reviews, visit John Pearson’s Buckets Blog and subscribe to Your Weekly Staff Meeting. And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.
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