I recently spoke with a CEO about the future of her company. She found the topic interesting, but said that at the moment, there was neither the time nor the money for it. She noted that the economic situation was difficult and that there were simply more urgent things to do.
I could understand that. Nevertheless, the conversation stayed with me. After all, when is the right time to focus on the future?
I noticed that we often behave in much the same way in our private lives. We have ideas about how we want to live someday, or what we still want to experience or change. But first, this or that needs to be taken care of. And eventually, we realize that our ideas never came to anything.
What I find strange about this is that we don't just put off unpleasant decisions. We even postpone engaging with a future that we could actually be looking forward to.
I observe something similar in companies. We discuss the skills shortage, AI, costs, and competitiveness. We think about how to solve our current problems and how to carry our existing business into the future as effectively as possible.
But how often do we actually ask ourselves what kind of company we want to be in ten years?
Perhaps our customers will need completely different things then. Perhaps we can use our current skills to solve problems we haven't even thought of yet. Perhaps we will discover opportunities that we cannot see as long as we base everything solely on our current business.
That is why I am increasingly focusing on flipping the perspective. First, consider how people might live and work in the future, what their needs will be, and what role we want to play in that. And then, look at what that means for the decisions we make today.
Of course, this doesn't solve acute economic problems. But it could prevent us from spending all our energy on maintaining something whose future we haven't even questioned yet.
After all, we shape our future every single day with every decision we make—even when we don't take the time to think about it.
Perhaps we should ask ourselves less about when we will finally have time for the future, and more about what opportunities we are missing out on as long as we don't make that time.
