By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

The future is not a Singularity [i.e., an absolute unitary end point all sentient beings and intelligent things are accelerating toward]. The future is not a place [i.e., like Cleveland]. The future is a State of Mind.

The consensus among strategic thinkers is that future success requires high performance executives manage at least three separate and distinct “time zones”:

Now…[0-36 months –sometimes referred to as Horizon 1]
Next/Meso…[37-60 months – Horizon 2]
Later …[60+ months – Horizon 3]

In workshops around the world executives in every discipline and vertical market agree that the defining element common to all of our futures will be change. The question is how will YOUR behavior change in the face of such change?

Individuals and institutions demonstrating a capacity to thrive in times of change and uncertainty share several traits and capabilities. Among those is aggressive management of mental models. Reflective analysis of in-use thinking patterns is a powerful antidote to the modern obsession with the present tense.

Mental Models
As things change so do must we change how we think. How frequently do you and your executive team pause and ask “what have we learned so far this year?” How frequently do you ask, “given our changing circumstances, what long-held beliefs, practices and tool sets are no longer relevant?” Hillary Mantel, won the Booker Prize in 2009 for “putting the camera behind Cromwell’s eyes.” What we are talking about here is interrogating how Cromwell evaluated what he saw with those eyes.

Many Things Have a “Sell-By” Date
Telephone operators, human computers, milk men, elevator operators, gas station attendants, bowling pin setters, lectors who entertain factory workers, lamp lighters, Rolodexes and cursive handwriting have diminished relevance in our digitizing world.

There is More to Know
Another defining element common to all of our futures is that there is more to know. In 2003 - since the start of time humanity had created ~5 exabytes of data [i.e., 50,000 Libraries of Congress’ worth of information]. In Q4 2015 we will create that amount of information EVERY 120 seconds!

Here is another way of looking at the exponential expansion of knowledge. The For Dummies series began in 1991 with DOS for Dummies, which helped computer neophytes navigate the user-unfriendly program that predated Windows. The series has swelled to more than 1,000 titles and sold more than 150 million copies. John Wiley & Sons, which bought the Dummies brand in 2001, cranks out 200 new Dummies titles a year. At that rate, there may soon be more Dummies books out there than dummies to read them.

Ignorance is no longer a state of nature. It is a choice!

As you look to your future, do you have a strategy for keeping up with an exponentially increasing knowledge set? Do you have a strategy for exfoliating no longer relevant mental models and methodologies? Are you getting full value from the knowledge you have?

High performance organizations consistently engage in the Front-End of the Knowledge Supply Chain. They find a thousand to one price differential between creating knowledge in-house in the early stages of a technology development [e.g., social, mobile, cloud and analytics] than waiting for uncertainty to be eliminated and obtaining knowledge via consultancies and/or acquisitions.