Future FIT vs Future Proof - Future on the Agenda

Let's look at the second one. Can we not make this difficult? Is it possible to do this easier? And there's lots of tools. So I'm going to show you one small shift that you can make right now that will change immediately how you think about the future. And that one is this word future-proof, this phrase. A lot of my colleagues use it, and I don't want to diss them at all, but I think future-proof is the wrong word. Because, like the little chap with his waterproof rain jacket and his umbrella, to proof yourself from something is to separate, to protect yourself from something, to repel it, to keep it away from you. And that doesn't work with futures thinking. You can't protect yourself from the future, and you cannot ever, no matter what, gather enough resource and insight and intelligence to actually be able to cope with everything. You can't, you can't prepare yourself entirely for the future because it is so vast. To pretend that you can is to exhaust yourself because you won't be able to keep up. So you want to, you want to find a new way of expressing it. So instead of future-proofing ourselves, we need to become— any minute now, we will become— Future-proofing ourselves. Future fit. There we go. So future fit is engaging with, like these young guys playing in the rain, playing in the mud. You need to be agile. You're having fun. You're experiencing the future. You're not protecting yourself from it. You're not creating a barrier. You're not pretending that you can create protection because that's not possible. But now you've got the energy and the agility to engage with the future, and that's going to be a lot more exciting and ultimately more beneficial. Now I know a lot of people get annoyed when you play with the word and say not this word but rather that word and, you know, people don't like political correctness. I think there really is a place for it but that small shift of just one word from future-proof to future-fit does this. Imagine flying home one day and you get into a plane and you take off and you know that a plane never goes in a straight direct line. There's reasons that they've got to move around things. And so the pilot is constantly course correcting the whole time to get closer and closer to the destination and to deal with whatever comes along their way. If the pilot is not paying attention, if they take off and they're just in 1 degree in the wrong direction and they don't correct, then ultimately they end up somewhere else entirely. They end up in the wrong place, because in 9 hours' time it's going to be a lot more expensive in terms of fuel, and a lot more annoying for all of the passengers. To suddenly, you know, take a left turn and then fly to your actual destination. You want to change as early as possible. You want to make a small shift now so that it becomes easier and easier and easier to get to the place that you really want to get to. That's what being future fit is about, as opposed to being future-proof.