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So I've been futuring,
which is a term I made up --

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(Laughter)

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about three seconds ago.

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I've been futuring for about 20 years,

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and when I first started,
I would sit down with people,

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and say, "Hey,
let's talk 10, 20 years out."

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And they'd say, "Great."

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And I've been seeing that time horizon

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get shorter and shorter

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and shorter,

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so much so that I met
with a CEO two months ago

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and I said -- we started
our initial conversation.

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He goes, "I love what you do.
I want to talk about the next six months."

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(Laughter)

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We have a lot of problems
that we are facing.

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These are civilizational-scale problems.

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The issue though is,

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we can't solve them

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using the mental models
that we use right now

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to try and solve these problems.

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Yes, a lot of great
technical work is being done,

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but there is a problem
that we need to solve a priori, before,

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if we want to really
move the needle on those big problems.

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Short-termism.

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Right? There's no marches.
There's no bracelets.

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There's no petitions that you can sign
to be against short-termism.

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I tried to put one up, and no one signed.

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It was weird.

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(Laughter)

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But it prevents us from doing so much.

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Short-termism, for many reasons,

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has pervaded every
nook and cranny of our reality.

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I just want you to take a second

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and just think about an issue
that you're thinking, working on.

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It could be personal, it could be at work

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or it could be
move-the-needle world stuff,

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and think about
how far out you tend to think

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about the solution set for that.

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Because short-termism prevents the CEO

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from buying really
expensive safety equipment.

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It'll hurt the bottom line.

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So we get the Deepwater Horizon.

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Short-termism prevents teachers

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from spending quality
one-on-one time with their students.

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So right now in America,

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a high school student
drops out every 26 seconds.

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Short-termism prevents Congress --

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sorry if there's anyone
in here from Congress --

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(Laughter)

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or not really that sorry --

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(Laughter)

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from putting money
into a real infrastructure bill.

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So what we get
is the I-35W bridge collapse

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over the Mississippi a few years ago,

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13 killed.

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It wasn't always like this.
We did the Panama Canal.

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We pretty much
have eradicated global polio.

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We did the transcontinental railroad,
the Marshall Plan,

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and it's not just big, physical
infrastructure problems and issues.

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Women's suffrage, the right to vote.

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But in our short-termist time,

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where everything seems to happen right now

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and we can only think out
past the next tweet or timeline post,

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we get hyper-reactionary.

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So what do we do?

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We take people who are fleeing
their war-torn country

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and we go after them.

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We take low-level drug offenders
and we put them away for life,

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and then we build McMansions
without even thinking

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about how we're going
to get between them and their job.

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It's a quick buck.

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Now, the reality is,
for a lot of these problems,

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there are some technical fixes,

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a lot of them.

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I call these technical fixes
sandbag strategies.

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So you know there's a storm coming,

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the levee is broken,
no one's put any money into it,

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you surround your home with sandbags,

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and guess what? It works.

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Storm goes away,
the water level goes down,

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you get rid of the sandbags,

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and you do this storm
after storm after storm.

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And here's the insidious thing.

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A sandbag strategy

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can get you reelected.

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A sandbag strategy

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can help you make your quarterly numbers.

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Now, if we want to move forward

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into a different future
than the one we have right now,

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because I don't think we've hit --

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2016 is not peak civilization.

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(Laughter)

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There's some more we can do,

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but my argument is that unless we shift
our mental models and our mental maps

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on how we think about the short,

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it's not going to happen.

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So what I've developed
is something called longpath,

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and it's a practice,

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and longpath isn't
a kind of one-and-done exercise.

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I'm sure everyone here
at some point has done an off-site

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with a lot of post-it notes
and whiteboards,

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and you do --

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no offense to the consultants
in here who do that --

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and you do a long-term plan,

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and then two weeks later,
everyone forgets about it.

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Right? Or a week later.
If you're lucky, three months.

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It's a practice because
it's not necessarily a thing that you do.

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It's a process where you have
to revisit different ways of thinking

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for every major decision
that you're working on.

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So I want to go through
those three ways of thinking.

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So the first: transgenerational thinking.

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I love the philosophers:

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Plato, Socrates, Habermas, Heidegger.

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I was raised on them.

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But they all did one thing

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that didn't actually seem like a big deal

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until I really started
kind of looking into this.

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And they all took,

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as a unit of measure
for their entire reality

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of what it meant to be virtuous and good,

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the single lifespan,

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from birth to death.

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But here's a problem with these issues:

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they stack up on top of us,

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because the only way we know
how to do something good in the world

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is if we do it between
our birth and our death.

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That's what we're programmed to do.

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If you go to the self-help section
in any bookstore,

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it's all about you.

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Which is great,

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unless you're dealing
with some of these major issues.

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And so with transgenerational thinking,

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which is really kind of
transgenerational ethics,

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you're able to expand
how you think about these problems,

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what is your role
in helping to solve them.

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Now, this isn't something that just has to
be done at the Security Council chamber.

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It's something that you can do
in a very kind of personal way.

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So every once in a while, if I'm lucky,
my wife and I like to go out to dinner,

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and we have three children
under the age of seven.

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So you can imagine
it's a very peaceful, quiet meal.

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(Laughter)

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So we sit down and literally
all I want to do is just eat and chill,

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and my kids have a completely
and totally different idea

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of what we're going to be doing.

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And so my first idea

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is my sandbag strategy, right?

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It's to go into my pocket
and take out the iPhone

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and give them "Frozen"

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or some other bestselling game thing.

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And then I stop

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and I have to kind of put on
this transgenerational thinking cap.

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I don't do this in the restaurant,
because it would be bizarre,

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but I have to --

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I did it once, and that's how
I learned it was bizarre.

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(Laughter)

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And you have to kind of think,
"OK, I can do this."

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But what is this teaching them?

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So what does it mean
if I actually bring some paper

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or engage with them in conversation?

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It's hard. It's not easy,
and I'm making this very personal.

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It's actually more traumatic

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than some of the big issues
that I work on in the world --

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entertaining my kids at dinner.

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But what it does is it connects them
here in the present with me,

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but it also --

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and this is the crux
of transgenerational thinking ethics --

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it sets them up to how they're
going to interact with their kids

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and their kids and their kids.

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Second, futures thinking.

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When we think about the future,

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10, 15 years out,

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give me a vision of what the future is.

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You don't have to give it to me,
but think in your head.

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And what you're probably going to see

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is the dominant cultural lens

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that dominates our thinking
about the future right now:

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technology.

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So when we think about the problems,

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we always put it through
a technological lens,

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a tech-centric, a techno-utopia,
and there's nothing wrong with that,

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but it's something that we have to
really think deeply about

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if we're going to move
on these major issues,

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because it wasn't always like this. Right?

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The ancients had their way of thinking

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about what the future was.

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The Church definitely had their idea
of what the future could be,

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and you could actually pay your way
into that future. Right?

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And luckily for humanity,

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we got the scientific revolution.

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From there, we got the technology,

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but what has happened --

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And by the way, this is not a critique.

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I love technology.

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Everything in my house talks back to me,

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from my children
to my speakers to everything.

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(Laughter)

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But we've abdicated the future
from the high priests in Rome

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to the high priests of Silicon Valley.

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So when we think, well,
how are we going to deal with climate

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or with poverty or homelessness,

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our first reaction is to think about it
through a technology lens.

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And look, I'm not advocating
that we go to this guy.

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I love Joel, don't get me wrong,

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but I'm not saying we go to Joel.

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What I'm saying is we need to rethink

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our base assumption about
only looking at the future in one way,

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only looking at it
through the dominant lens,

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because our problems
are so big and so vast

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that we need to open ourselves up.

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So that's why I do everything in my power
not to talk about the future.

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I talk about futures.

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It opens the conversation again.

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So when you're sitting and thinking

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about how do we move forward
on this major issue --

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it could be at home,

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it could be at work,

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it could be again on the global stage --

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don't cut yourself off from thinking
about something beyond technology as a fix

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because we're more concerned
about technological evolution right now

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than we are about moral evolution.

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And unless we fix for that,

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we're not going to be able
to get out of short-termism

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and get to where we want to be.

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The final, telos thinking.
This comes from the Greek root.

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Ultimate aim and ultimate purpose.

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And it's really asking one question:

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to what end?

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When was the last time
you asked yourself: to what end?

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And when you asked yourself that,
how far out did you go?

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Because long isn't long enough anymore.

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Three, five years doesn't cut it.

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It's 30, 40, 50, a hundred years.

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In Homer's epic, "The Odyssey,"

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Odysseus had the answer to his "what end."

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It was Ithaca.

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It was this bold vision
of what he wanted --

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to return to Penelope.

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And I can tell you,
because of the work that I'm doing,

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but also you know it intuitively --
we have lost our Ithaca.

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We have lost our "to what end,"
so we stay on this hamster wheel.

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And yes, we're trying
to solve these problems,

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but what comes after we solve the problem?

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And unless you define what comes after,
people aren't going to move.

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The businesses --
this isn't just about business --

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but the businesses that do consistently
who break out of short-termism

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not surprisingly
are family-run businesses.

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They're transgenerational. They're telos.
They think about the futures.

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And this is an ad for Patek Philippe.
They're 175 years old,

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and what's amazing
is that they literally embody

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this kind of longpathian sense
in their brand,

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because, by the way,
you never actually own a Patek Philippe,

252
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and I definitely won't --

253
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(Laughter)

254
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unless somebody wants to just
throw 25,000 dollars on the stage.

255
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You merely look after it
for the next generation.

256
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So it's important that we remember,

257
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the future, we treat it like a noun.

258
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It's not. It's a verb.

259
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It requires action.

260
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It requires us to push into it.

261
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It's not this thing that washes over us.

262
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It's something that we
actually have total control over,

263
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but in a short-term society,
we end up feeling like we don't.

264
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We feel like we're trapped.

265
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We can push through that.

266
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Now I'm getting more comfortable

267
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in the fact that at some point

268
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in the inevitable future,

269
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I will die,

270
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but because of these new ways
of thinking and doing,

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both in the outside world
and also with my family at home,

272
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and what I'm leaving my kids,
I get more comfortable in that fact.

273
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And it's something that a lot of us
are really uncomfortable with,

274
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but I'm telling you,

275
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think it through.

276
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Apply this type of thinking
and you can push yourself past

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what's inevitably
very, very uncomfortable.

278
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And it all begins really
with yourself asking this question:

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what is your longpath?

280
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But I ask you, when you ask yourself that

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now or tonight or behind a steering wheel

282
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or in the boardroom or the situation room:

283
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push past the longpath,

284
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quick, oh, what's my longpath
the next three years or five years?

285
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Try and push past your own life if you can

286
00:13:03,480 --> 00:13:05,856
because it makes you do things
a little bit bigger

287
00:13:05,880 --> 00:13:07,560
than you thought were possible.

288
00:13:08,800 --> 00:13:11,800
Yes, we have huge,
huge problems out there.

289
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With this process, with this thinking,

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I think we can make a difference.

291
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I think you can make a difference

292
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and I believe in you guys.

293
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Thank you.

294
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(Applause)