Would you like to see into the future?  I know you would.  Do you all realize that you have that ability?  It’s not easy and it’s not quick but with a little hard work, some research and an imagination you can in fact pretty accurately do this.
As a little boy I used to love to play guns with my cousins.  These were the days before political correctness took conflict and toy weapons away from children so we had an impressive arsenal of plastic pistols, rifles, and even hand grenades.  We yielded these toys with devastating Rambo like results; at least that’s how we imagined it.  Using your imagination is as simple as taking some components of reality and exaggerating others to visualize something new.  We would create noises as we shot, pretend we were hit when shot at and hit the deck to avoid those pesky grenades.

Predicting the future isn’t that different.  Our components of reality are historical record and our exaggerations are predictions that extend out trends that we have identified which can be tied together and allow us to visualize the future.

Let’s try one, It all starts with a question:  What will our typical education look like in one hundred years?  Historically we have seen the cost of education move from private to public, for a long time only the rich could afford formal education, as enrolment grew prices dropped and eventually the government took over.  This cycle started with primary education and was socialized by 1900 in the US, followed by secondary education.  The next logical step would predictably be some form of post secondary education or college becoming mandatory for all students.

As humanity develops more and more knowledge the time required to learn all the basics and then expand upon them will continue to lengthen.  A few hundred years ago simply being literate so you could read the bible was a fine European education, eventually agricultural skills and some basic mathematics were introduced.  This trend continued with the additions of arts and sciences.  Today we have hundreds of curricula and because of this we need 6 hours per day X 180 days per year X 13 years before we consider the mandatory baseline of acceptable knowledge achieved.  If we take that trend and extend it out for the next 100 years it’s easy to see an 8 hour day X year round (about 220 days) X 19 year (masters level) program just to cover the basics.

We have over the years also seen a growing amount of flexibility in our system to pick a specialty to focus on.  Only religious and other ancient texts were used around much of the world if you go back far enough.  Eventually specialty books were introduced and over the past century we have seen choice at the high school level and the introduction of AP classes along with special education for those with learning disabilities.  Over the next hundred years it’s going to be necessary to customize our system more and more to cater to the unique needs of students to help them get the most out of the system and acquire marketable skills.

Put these all together and you have mandatory tax payer funded formal education for all people run much like a business with bankers hours that lasts until we are 24 years old and grants us Masters level knowledge in any field of our choice.  Does that sound crazy to you?  To think that we would have anything less than that sounds crazy to me.

The typical role of a 24 year old may include several externships weaved into her already busy schedule of cybernetics and bionics classes taught by three-dimensional virtual professors from all over the world.  Her parents could be paying a UN educational world tax out of their checks each month.  Project partners could be from any number of countries around the globe.  Teachers could belong to international unions dedicated to equal opportunities for students everywhere.

This is the logical direction that we are heading.  I’m not advocating for nor against this scenario, I am merely using historical trends and projecting them out at their current rate using a little research and a little imagination.

As children we use our imagination a lot but that practice is hammered out of our head as we approach our teenage years.  In the past this was necessary to ground people and focus on physical labor however we are now a knowledge based society where mental work is far more valuable.  Value in our society is now largely derived from ideas and vision not from how hard you work.  Imagination is an important tool that plays a key role in a knowledge workforce.

Try this exercise in your work, ask yourself, where is my team or department heading?  Ask yourself, what is the next logical step for our product?  I think you will find with a little historical data and some imagination you can rough in some of those answers and drive yourself and your team into the future.