Yesterday I was reminded that life and art can provide our best business insights. As sometimes happens, it was a day crammed full of “good stuff”. Hannah’s prom; some useful telephone conversations; Ellie (my eldest) doing her first day’s work at a special school – and loving every moment of it. But the most arresting five minutes of the day were provided courtesy of a tweet from @Rob_Hawley providing a link to TLS’s Poem of the Month Departure Platform by Louis MacNeice with a lovely introduction by Andrew McCulloch
What stopped me in my tracks – if you’ll forgive a pun you’ll have to read the poem to get – was McCulloch’s reminder that “the Greeks thought of the past as stretching out before them while the future waited behind their backs”. It’s a useful thought. We have the past in front of us in terms of what we know (ranging from personal experience; what we can learn; right through to hard, unquestionable data: the intuitive and the empirical) and armed with the sum of this, we experience a future we can’t see until it is the present.
Publishing is full of talk of the future and what it will look like. But fascinating and helpful as it all is, I’m beginning to feel we should spend less time trying to predict it and more time experiencing the journey of getting there, and making a success of getting there: armed with what we already know, and trying to understand more of what we can know, rather than predict what we can’t know. Which takes me right back to the book I am reading and re-reading at the moment, The Intention Economy, because I think it contains some hugely important truths about how the online consumer society is going to function in future, based on the experience of today. It is no co-incidence that after the dedication and before the introduction, Doc Searls quotes Antoine de Saint-Exupery: As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it…
And do read the MacNeice poem. It’s insightful, beautiful and gentle. Well worth five minutes of your day.