What’s next? Disruption. An opportunity to fascinate.

This past week I joined 1,000 other professional speakers at the National Speakers Association Convention. One my favorite sessions was with a futurist who nearly made my head explode. Some folks on Twitter and Facebook thought I was insulting him when I posted about my head exploding. Quite the contrary – very few speakers light my brain on fire to the level of head explosion. Fellow Certified Speaking Professional Dr. Graeme Codrington, from the U.K., did just that.  He started with the perspective that there have few times when changing forces come together to create the type of revolution we’ve just started and pointed to the industrial revolution as the last time we saw such massive change.

He outlined five forces that will drive disruptive change in our world  over the next decade, while noting his examples were not forecasts but reality. I’m sharing because these forces will also dramatically impact farming and food choices – and we need collective brainpower.

1. Technology: Computer technology is at the point where it’s only limited by our imagination. Google glasses recognize any object and will go search for a public profile, projecting the findings on the glasses so the wearer can have immediate background info. They’re working on contacts that would project such information onto the user’s retina. The first flying car was approved by the FAA last February. You can now get in driver-less car at the Las Vegas airport and be taken to your hotel directed by GoogleMaps. Smart foods were held up as an example, as was medical robotics and 3D printing. Wal-Mart collects and analyzes 1.8 billion pieces of data each month. Technology is so much more than the device at your fingertips; it’s going to continue infiltrating every part of your life. Case in point from his workshop, this one year-old who seems to think a magazine is a broken iPad. [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXV-yaFmQNk[/youtube]
2. Institutional Change: Organizations and companies are shifting rapidly, but the greatest driver seems to come from those outside. For example, Google didn’t come from the Yellow Pages – but those colored pages have been replaced by “that search tool on the internet.”  Digital music wasn’t introduced by record companies. It makes me ponder what will drive the institutional change around food and farming.
3. Demography:  90 million more people are added to the middle class globally each year.  There’s a greater diversity of world views and generations. The U.S. was one example of dramatic shift – three weeks ago was a first with more than half the babies born in the U.S. not being Caucasian. Retirement has become “retreadment” with Boomers being far more active and living longer than any other generation. Half of the world’s population growth in the next 10 years will be in China, India, Brazil, Pakistan, Niger, Congo, Ethiopia, Mexico and the U.S.
4. Environment: Water. Pollution. Global warming (where he made a joke that the U.S. seems to be the only country in world who didn’t accept this as reality). Access to food. Business commitment to going green.
5. Shifting societal values: There is now no normal work day, normal career or teams. I thought Graeme’s slide on the new [ab]normal best summed it up. It doesn’t pay to wish for yesterday.

As a sidenote, the last time I went to a futurist session at NSA was when I learned about social media. Five years ago.  So you can see I have a tendency to listen to the futurists, test out the concepts and then adapt  them to agriculture. I took time to ask Graeme at the end of the session about his expectations of societal acceptance of science as it relates to farming, nutrition and agriculture. His advice was to hit people in the heart and convey the impact in their pocketbook. I couldn’t agree more – agriculture has to learn to be more fascinating by connecting in more meaningful ways.

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence. It is to act with yesterday’s logic” was a Peter Drucker quote shared that day. Futurists are fine, but it’s the application that really matters. So how can agriculture adapt and act with tomorrow’s logic?