Futurist Gerd Leonhard - The 6 Future Principles Explained

Greetings. I'm Gerd Leonhard Futurist in Zurich, Switzerland. I've been working on this concept of the future principles for quite some time and it's been a real big topic in my speeches. And so today I just want to outline quickly what they are starting of course, with technology. So the principle of the future is clear. You know, the technology is exponential. It's leaping. Moore's law, Metcalfe's law, Wright's law. We are now at 4, next step is 8, 16. Leaping into the future. That has been discussed a lot. Exponential change. A lot of my speeches, just check it out. Example, my film from six years ago called exponential change Change too. And then industries are converging as a result. So now we have the convergence of transportation mobility with technology. We've had already the transformation of the media business with technology. And now in the future we're going to see the convergence of the pharma and healthcare industry with technology and banking converging with technology with digital currencies, digital wallets and so on. And lastly, it's combinatorial, which means that the biggest effects of change come in when we see all of the stuff happening at the same time. Combining new ideas into new products. For example, the digital twin that's widely used in manufacturing and production allows us to see what's going on on the factory floor virtually in virtual reality and 3D computing and all these things coming together to recreate how we actually do manufacturing. That's just one example. So that's all on the technology part. And we have to understand this because it's basically profound warp drive changes, you know, coming to us, as I say, in the next 10 years, more change in the previous 100 years. On the other side of the equation, we have everything that's going on around sustainability and human centric, or planet centric world, holistic business models, business models that make sense for everybody, not just for the shareholder. The stakeholder economy, that's a tall order. Clearly the circular economy, making sure that we don't just take out, we don't just extract things like energy or human power and human workers, and we actually put it back. So the circular economy idea is very simple. Whatever you take out, you put back. So tourism, energy, sustainability, that is the circular economy. Circular will be the default by 2030. If you're not moved to a circular economy by then, you will be discarded. And I think many companies that are not capable of circular economies, for example the oil and gas industry, that is clearly a very tall order. Or cruise ships they won't be here if they can't make that switch. So this is a very, very big challenge. I think many people foresee, and I on that, that for example, actively investing in oil and gas and coal, of course will be akin to a crime by 2030 in the very near future. We're always going to have oil and gas in some way or the other, but not as a primary energy source. Finally, human benefit, human also means planetary. I'm thinking of it human in a larger sense. Not just people, also animals and environment, of course. So making sure that we have collective benefit, every technology we invent should result in human flourishing or we shouldn't be it. That should be the measurement of how we do all this in the future. So these six principles together form the framework for what I call the good future. And that's of course my main topic now. The six future principles, if you can put those into action in your company and in your life, of course, but also in government, I think that's a very, very good direction. And the other thing that's coming of course at the same time is this concept of going away from this simple obsession of profit and growth to a larger story. People, planet, purpose and prosperity, which of course is also my main mantra of operation. That's the future. The future can't be just profit and growth because that will kill us and we're pretty much on our way. If you're watching what's happening at COP27, if we don't change our course and really fundamentally question how we do things and what the purpose of it all is, yeah, we're going to be in deep trouble. We will not survive global warming of 4, 5, 6 degrees, as has been the discussion now. Well, if we survive it, it will be in special climatized suits for the rich or on other planets. Just ask Elon, I suppose. Right. So the four P's, people, planet, purpose and prosperity, they form the backbone of all these six future principles. And we should look at that together. So any business plan that does not involve the future principles is equally is flawed. And this is why we're seeing right now the drawback on what's happening in the tech industry. This kind of decline of value, like Facebook down 74% at the time of recording, it would probably be 90% very soon. But we're seeing that here. It's the same story. We need to put that back into business and put those future principles to work. That's the ticket to the future. So thanks very much for tuning in and check out my other videos and be sure to subscribe and hit the notify button down there. Thank you.