Gerd Leonhard Virtual Keynote for SHI Digital Workplace Summit Dec 14, 2020

Hi, I'm futurist Gerd Leonhard in Zurich, Switzerland. It's my pleasure to give the keynote at SHI's Digital Workplace Summit, and I will talk to you about the future and how I believe the future will work. I will share some 10 foresights with you. Let's start with the first one. We are not going back to normal. We're not going back, even if there is a vaccine, when it does happen, how it happens worldwide, we don't know yet, but sometime next year, we're not going back to what was before. We have changed the way that we look at things. We have changed the way that we look at work. We have changed the way that we look at politics. We have different expectations from companies that we work with and that we work for. We have discovered amazing technologies. We have discovered that we actually want to meet in person. We have discovered that we can work from home just as well, though at the same time, we are going to a new normal, a bunch of new normals. It's kind of a little bit like what it was in World War II. On similar large-scale disruptions like this, for example, in World War II, women went to work finally because all the men were at the battlefront. And after World War II, that was the normal. And now we're here in a kind of tough situation, quite similar in many ways, where our paradigms are being disrupted and we're starting to think that this is normal, that we can actually do this. Work from home, we can use technology, we can go virtual. I mean, that's the first point. Let's not say that we're going to go back to the pre-pandemic circumstances. We're not. We're going to a new world, and that world is also vastly different. This decade is shaping up to be a wild ride of things that are different, having to do with so many global factors that were there before, but amplified in the COVID crisis. For example, climate change. For example, technology. For example, political considerations, for example, supply chain changes and China, and the story goes on. Let me get into more detail on this. One thing that we see, of course, now we are all kind of digitally, we're working in the cloud, right? We have finally gotten to the place to where we say, well, I know it's possible, and we can say very much whatever was nascent before, what was already there, kind of incubating, has become the new normal now, and it's very likely to prevail. Here's a whole bunch of lists of things, and Bill Gates gave a great talk about this the other day at an interview on YouTube. Basically, remote everything, yeah, everything is going