-
So in the winter of 2012,
-
I went to visit my grandmother's house
-
in South India,
-
a place, by the way,
-
where the mosquitos have a special taste
for the blood of the American-born.
-
(Laughter)
-
No joke.
-
When I was there,
I got an unexpected gift.
-
It was this antique instrument
-
made more than a century ago,
-
hand-carved from a rare wood,
-
inlaid with pearls
-
and with dozens of metal strings.
-
It's a family heirloom,
-
a link between my past,
-
the country where my parents were born,
-
and the future,
-
the unknown places I'll take it.
-
I didn't actually realize it
at the time I got it,
-
but it would later become
a powerful metaphor for my work.
-
We all know the saying,
-
"There's no time like the present."
-
But nowadays, it can feel
like there's no time but the present.
-
What's immediate and ephemeral
seems to dominate our lives,
-
our economy and our politics.
-
If you think about it,
our species evolved to think ahead,
-
to chart the stars,
-
dream of the afterlife,
-
sow seeds for later harvest.
-
Some scientists call this superpower
that we have "mental time travel,"
-
and it's responsible for pretty much
everything we call human civilization,
-
from farming to the Magna Carta
-
to the internet,
-
all first conjured in the minds of humans.
-
But let's get real:
-
if we look around us today,
-
we don't exactly seem to be
using this superpower quite enough,
-
and that begs the question, why not?
-
What's wrong is how our communities,
businesses and institutions are designed.
-
They're designed in a way
that's impairing our foresight.
-
I want to talk to you
about the three key mistakes
-
that I think we're making.
-
The first mistake is what we measure.
-
When we look at the quarterly
profits of a company
-
or its near-term stock price,
-
that's often not a great measure
-
of whether that company
is going to grow its market share
-
or be inventive in the long run.
-
When we glue ourselves to the test scores
that kids bring back from school,
-
that's not necessarily
what's great for those kids' learning
-
and curiosity in the long run.
-
We're not measuring
what really matters in the future.
-
The second mistake we're making
that impairs our foresight
-
is what we reward.
-
When we celebrate a political leader
or a business leader
-
for the disaster she just cleaned up
-
or the announcement she just made,
-
we're not motivating that leader
-
to invest in preventing
those disasters in the first place,
-
or to put down payments on the future
by protecting communities from floods
-
or fighting inequality
-
or investing in research and education.
-
The third mistake
that impairs our foresight
-
is what we fail to imagine.
-
Now, when we do think about the future,
-
we tend to focus
on predicting exactly what's next,
-
whether we're using horoscopes
or algorithms to do that.
-
But we spend a lot less time imagining
all the possibilities the future holds.
-
When the Ebola outbreak
emerged in 2014 in West Africa,
-
public health officials around the world
had early warning signs
-
and predictive tools
-
that showed how
that outbreak might spread,
-
but they failed to fathom that it would,
-
and they failed to act
in time to intervene,
-
and the epidemic grew
to kill more than 11,000 people.
-
When people with lots of resources
and good forecasts
-
don't prepare for deadly hurricanes,
-
they're often failing to imagine
how dangerous they can be.
-
Now, none of these mistakes
that I've described,
-
as dismal as they might sound,
-
are inevitable.
-
In fact, they're all avoidable.
-
What we need to make
better decisions about the future
-
are tools that can aid our foresight,
-
tools that can help us think ahead.
-
Think of these as something
like the telescopes
-
that ship captains of yore used
when they scanned the horizon.
-
Only instead of for looking
across distance and the ocean,
-
these tools are for looking
across time to the future.
-
I want to share with you a
few of the tools
-
that I've found in my research
-
that I think can help us with foresight.
-
The first tool I want to share with you
-
I think of as making
the long game pay now.
-
This is Wes Jackson, a farmer
I spent some time with in Kansas.
-
And Jackson knows
-
that the way that most crops
are grown around the world today
-
is stripping the Earth
of the fertile topsoil
-
we need to feed future generations.
-
He got together
with a group of scientists,
-
and they bred perennial grain crops
which have deep roots
-
that anchor the fertile topsoil of a farm,
-
preventing erosion
and protecting future harvests.
-
But they also knew
-
that in order to get farmers
to grow these crops in the short run,
-
they needed to boost
the annual yields of the crops
-
and find companies willing
to make cereal and beer using the grains
-
so that farmers could reap profits today
by doing what's good for tomorrow.
-
And this is a tried-and-true strategy.
-
In fact, it was used
by George Washington Carver
-
in the South of the United States
after the Civil War
-
in the early 20th century.
-
A lot of people have probably heard
of Carver's 300 uses for the peanut,
-
the products in recipes
that he came up with
-
that made the peanut so popular.
-
But not everyone knows
why Carver did that.
-
He was trying to help
poor Alabama sharecroppers
-
whose cotton yields were declining,
-
and he knew that planting
peanuts in their fields
-
would replenish those soils
-
so that their cotton yields
would be better a few years later.
-
But he also knew it needed
to be lucrative for them in the short run.
-
Alright, so let's talk
about another tool for foresight.
-
This one I like to think of
as keeping the memory of the past alive
-
to help us imagine the future.
-
So I went to Fukushima, Japan
-
on the sixth anniversary
of the nuclear reactor disaster there
-
that followed the Tohoku earthquake
and tsunami of 2011.
-
When I was there, I learned
about the Onagawa Nuclear Power Station,
-
which was even closer
to the epicenter of that earthquake
-
than the infamous Fukushima Daiichi
that we all know about.
-
In Onagawa, people in the city
actually fled to the nuclear power plant
-
as a place of refuge.
-
It was that safe.
-
It was spared by the tsunamis.
-
It was the foresight of just one engineer,
-
Yanosuke Hirai,
-
that made that happen.
-
In the 1960s, he fought
to build that power plant
-
farther back from the coast
-
at higher elevation
and with a higher sea wall.
-
He knew the story of his hometown shrine,
-
which had flooded
in the year 869 after a tsunami.
-
It was his knowledge of history
that allowed him to imagine
-
what others could not.
-
OK, one more tool of foresight.
-
This one I think of
as creating shared heirlooms.
-
These are lobster fishermen
on the Pacific coast of Mexico,
-
and they're the ones who taught me this.
-
They have protected
their lobster harvest there
-
for nearly a century,
-
and they've done that
by treating it as a shared resource
-
that they're passing on to their collected
children and grandchildren.
-
They carefully measure what they catch
-
so that they're not taking
the breeding lobster out of the ocean.
-
Across North America,
there are more than 30 fisheries
-
that are doing something
vaguely similar to this.
-
They're creating long-term stakes
in the fisheries known as catch shares
-
which get fishermen to be motivated
-
not just in taking whatever they can
from the ocean today
-
but in its long-term survival.
-
Now, there are many,
many more tools of foresight
-
I would love to share with you,
-
and they come from all kinds of places:
-
investment firms that look
beyond near-term stock prices,
-
states that have freed their elections
-
from the immediate interests
of campaign financiers.
-
And we're going to need to marshal
as many of these tools as we can
-
if we want to rethink what we measure,
-
change what we reward
-
and be brave enough
to imagine what lies ahead.
-
Not all this is going to be easy,
as you can imagine.
-
Some of these tools
we can pick up in our own lives,
-
some we're going to need to do
in businesses or in communities,
-
and some we need to do as a society.
-
The future is worth this effort.
-
My own inspiration to keep up this effort
is the instrument I shared with you.
-
It's called a dilruba,
-
and it was custom-made
for my great-grandfather.
-
He was a well-known
music and art critic in India
-
in the early 20th century.
-
My great-grandfather had the foresight
to protect this instrument
-
at a time when my great-grandmother
was pawning off all their belongings,
-
but that's another story.
-
He protected it by giving it
to the next generation,
-
by giving it to my grandmother,
-
and she gave it to me.
-
When I first heard
the sound of this instrument,
-
it haunted me.
-
It felt like hearing a wanderer
in the Himalayan fog.
-
It felt like hearing
a voice from the past.
-
(Music)
-
(Music ends)
-
That's my friend Simran Singh
playing the dilruba.
-
When I play it, it sounds
like a cat's dying somewhere,
-
so you're welcome.
-
(Laughter)
-
This instrument is in my home today,
-
but it doesn't actually belong to me.
-
It's my role to shepherd it in time,
-
and that feels more meaningful to me
than just owning it for today.
-
This instrument positions me
as both a descendant and an ancestor.
-
It makes me feel part of a story
bigger than my own.
-
And this, I believe,
-
is the single most powerful way
we can reclaim foresight:
-
by seeing ourselves
as the good ancestors we long to be,
-
ancestors not just to our own children
-
but to all humanity.
-
Whatever your heirloom is,
-
however big or small,
-
protect it
-
and know that its music
can resonate for generations.
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)