Looking Back to See Ahead

"The further Backward you Look, the Further Forward you can See"  Winston Churchill

I really like this quote from Winston Churchill. In a previous post on Learning from History, I was trying to say the same thing. One of the key learnings in looking back at our most transformative period (late nineteenth, early twentieth century), was the Convergence that occurred across multiple domains. I had developed a visual to capture a convergence phenomenon that took place over a one hundred year period – some have called this a Special Century. I updated the visual with new content (click the visual to expand). The color scheme shows the convergence that occurred across the business, science, technology, political, societal and economic domains. The red boxes represent the Catalysts that drove this convergence.

The visual captures a period of great invention that some believe can only happen once – for example, electricity can only be invented once. But what if we are entering another period of great invention? What type of convergence is required to ensure that those inventions enable human flourishing? This time, convergence must span environmental and philosophical domains as well – complicating the work at hand. The catalysts of the past period represent some of the darkest periods in recent history – what are the catalysts of this emerging period? My Blog audience had Their Thoughts.