What will "The Enterprise of The Future" be facing in thirty years from now?
- Consultation EBBF style, relaxed and visionary
The setting and the weather clearly played an influential role in our weekend where we imagined what key trends will arise in the world, thirty years from now. Deciding to hold the weekend in the quite beautiful setting of Acuto immersed in the nature of Italy, enjoying our workshops and consultation on the open terrazza under a warm sun pampered by wonderful Italian cappuccinos and food certainly helped the conversations reach a new level.
The weekend began with the presentations of a team of experts whom EBBF invited to introduce participants from over 15 nations to expert views of the future in areas such as:
- Transparency and Anti-Corruption efforts
- Sustainability and Climate Change
- Technology issues
- Gender issues and the result of equal opportunities to women and men
In the ARTICLES area of MEMBERS-SECTION of the EBBF website you can view their presentations which started with an introduction to scenario planning from Ruediger Fox and a "Vision of the Future" from Arthur Dahl.
All the participants then took over and we all set our minds thirty years from now offering our views on what the world will look like then, below we highlight just a couple of the future trends that we created.
A More Democratic Communication System
- Online Democracy
The influence of the media and of communicating key messages is so strong that large marketing efforts are currently made. Very large investments in communication campaigns often trying to either confuse or send contradictory messages aimed at covering non necessarily ethical or sustainable behaviours of companies.
Television will gradually lose its influence and media will increasingly move online. This will be one of the factors that will make the rich and powerful lose the grip on information flows. The ease and zero cost of new online communication technology will allow us all to create and have access to true and untampered information. No stone will be left unturned and scandal hidden in the communication era of the future due to the extremely wide net of communicators. It will be easier for individuals with no budget but also no hidden agendas to communicate true facts.
The Wiki already has shown another interesting phenomena: the general force towards good of the "general public" contrasting the force towards "materialism and competition" of the current holders of media capital. In the case of the Wiki Encyclopedia the vast majority of users and contributors have highlighted and excluded from involvement the few individuals who were abusing the system. It showed a very effective self-regulated democracy system that will become even stronger in the future.
The entire Web 2.0 phenomena will be a thing of the past in 30 years from now, having evolved to three dimensional communication systems that will allow us to connect exactly with who we want to, making is easier to find relevant experts and information, easing the access to sources of finance and cooperation in business.
Also companies will enjoy the benefits of reduced travel expenses and as a consequence reduced environmental costs and personal stress of business travel thanks to new virtual three dimensional communication systems that will have individuals appearing and discussing in one same virtual room in a way that Second Life has introduced now.
Materialism and Consumer Culture versus Conscious Consumers - Search for Meaning
The increase of stress and productivity will reach such a peak that in thirty years from now the swing will come back towards a search for more meaningful and balanced life styles and economic systems. We see more people deciding to work less hours and more people having not a number of five year careers but a new work system where people will actually have more than one job and spend a few hours of each day on each job.
More and more people will be working from home in a more meaningful environment, women and men will be able to better balance their working and family life and this will also affect business decisions: the levels of aggressiveness and competition will be lower if decisions and conversations are held not in an office after a frustrating hour of traffic jams but in the tranquillity and family atmosphere of our homes.
The increased interconnectedness that will be a direct cause of communication and technology advances will increase the number of business decisions that will take into account not only local but global issues.
Scarcity of Current Energy Resources
- Alternative Energy in Transport
In thirty years from now, if not earlier, the Energy Resources that we currently take for granted will be so expensive and scarce that lower levels of consumption will not be auspicable but inevitable. There simply will not be enough energy for all the world's demand. We envisaged that this could go in two directions: survival of the fittest with only the most energy efficient and energy independent companies surviving which may even go to the extreme that only the richest companies will be able to buy the energy for production. The higher cost of production will mean that less people will be able to afford many goods and as a result only necessary goods will be purchased. This would lead to less consumerism and wiser purchases.
The alternative that we see as more likely is that companies will pool their resources more effectively with a system of exchange of energy that would allow one company to use energy when another company is not using it. An important surge in sustainable production materials and processes will be the determining success factor for the companies that will survive.
Housing will include mandatory solar panels and sun assisted water heating materials and new construction methods closer to the current close to zero energy requirements of the most northerly Finnish houses.
Transport, and all other industries will see their use of alternative energies increase dramatically and we envisage that many new local alternative energy production sites will be built: down to a house or a small company setting up wind and sun energy harnessing systems in their own yard.
Increased Rich Poor Divide Pushing New Economic Systems
The increased divide between Wealthy and Poor due to the current economic system will force new ways of finance and trade. The displacement of millions of poor people who will suffer the most from the floodings caused by global warming will see them moving closer to areas currently inhabited by the wealthy. Living side by side will exhacerbate the effects of the divide (violence, sense of injustice, terrorism) and will force financial institutions, investors, businesses to think of new models that will include as opposed to exclude lower income populations.
We also envisage positive effects of online access that in thirty years from now will cover the entire earth. Anyone in every single corner of the earth will have the ability to access knowledge and information that will in turn create a great deal more opportunities for them to enter the economic and trading system.
Companies of the future
From the visions of the future we then consulted over the implications for us and our companies of these future trends and ended the weekend with the creation of no less than five enterprises of the future. Each company adapted to the economic and social environment that we will face in thirty years from now.
The weekend ended with the wish that we could actually be making some of those companies a reality taking our conversations to a practical level: the most common comment was "if only we could be working together in the same company, what an ideal group of people to work with and create the responsible, sustainable, meaningful enterprise of the future".
