A Map Metaphor for thinking about the future and where we are in time

Map analogy part 3. At the top right-hand side of the map, you see quite a scary part of the world. There is a desert, there is a ship that has crashed onto the shoreline, there is danger, there's terra incognita, and the old warning phrase, here be dragons. Now, where does the here be dragons come from? The old mapmakers from many centuries ago didn't always have a really good understanding of what was in unexplored parts of the world. So those unexplored territories where the mapmakers had never gone, when no explorer from their city, their country had ever gone to, it was unknown. But it was also at a time in terms of artistic expression that people really didn't like to have a minimalistic view to their artwork. So when they drew out their maps and there was this large unformed part of the map where there was no data, no information to put, it indicated 2 things. One is that they didn't know and they wanted to sort of hide that, and secondly, that it was going to really clash with the sensibilities of how people like to see their artistic expression, including maps. It was an expression called horror vacui, a horror of open vacant space. spaces. And so in terms of art expression, they filled it with lots of really intricate drawings, and in terms of maps, they had to put something there. So there were normally 2 things that they would do. They would drop a whole mountain range there in the middle of this open space, or they would put a warning, here be dragons. And we can just read here be dragons as in, we don't know what's here, it's probably scary, you probably shouldn't go. And that is how we see the future very often. We don't know what is coming next. There are so many variables, so much complexity, so many interacting elements that we don't know what is coming. It is scary, and we feel like we're going to be threatened, as in by a dragon. And we must remember that dragons are how they saw danger in the past, not how we see cute dragons in our movies these days. So what do we do about these dangerous parts of the world? First of all, as we're preparing to move into the future, we need to put a good team together that can help us. We need to be prepared for what we don't know in terms of mindset and attitude, and we need to do some good research. We can't tell exactly what is coming, but we can prepare ourselves to be agile and flexible and able to respond to any of the challenges that are facing us in the future.