A Quick Primer On Futurist-Level Foresight

Anyone raising a child with the benefits of the digital world doesn't have to look past those tiny fingertips tapping their own apps to realize how quickly we're transitioning.

Theoretical physicist and futurist Dr. Michio Kaku argues that humankind is at a turning point in history. He claims that in this century, we are going to make a shift from the "Age of Discovery" to the "Age of Mastery," a period in which we will move from being passive observers of life and nature to its active choreographers. According to Kaku, robots with human-level intelligence may finally become a reality, and in the ultimate stage of mastery, we'll even be able to merge our minds with machine intelligence. It's how we harness this mastery that will matter.

The science fiction is becoming fact. During a recent visit to Google headquarters, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation to allow autonomous vehicles to operate on the state's roads. Brown touted the signing of the bill as turning today's science fiction into tomorrow's reality. California is the third U.S. state to legalize self-driving cars, following Nevada and Florida, where similar laws earlier were passed this year.

This is just the beginning. We need to be ready for the next set of intelligent innovation, in any field. Hospitals are embracing robotic surgery, and patients are choosing it more and more for many procedures. Robotic-assisted laparoscopic radical prostatectomy, is minimally-invasive, laparoscopic surgery, and has become the standard of care for prostate cancer patients. It offers lower morbidity, less pain, less blood loss and increased precision.

Education too needs to evolve to prepare people for an integrated world, where science converges with every area of practice and development. People training in or committed to a single discipline in a traditional manner won't succeed in tomorrow's marketplace. For more than 30 years, the Fisher Program in Management and Technology has combined two of Penn's greatest assets into one educational experience: Penn Engineering and The Wharton School. Schools that fail to offer true cross-disciplinary study are going to fall behind to create future leaders of a converged world. And leaders who fail to create cross-functional, cross-industry workforce will lose to their competition.

It is the leader's responsibility to prepare his or her organization for what lies ahead--and that will mean changes in what we are doing now to break down the silos and create multi-disciplinary teams--in order to prepare for the unknown.

The underlying, critical element of achieving and maintaining convergence in the modern organization is nothing less than individual leadership. It takes leaders with perseverance and courage to build and implement the cross-functional management culture with the tenets of converged disciplines.

It is a continual evolution and revolution of concepts and opportunities that reflect contemporary and future business operations and objectives.

An essential part of this transition requires both left-brained (analytical) and right-brained (creative) talent and culture. Leaders of the future will approach this collaboration challenge by defining cross-functional teams as personas'. These are roles that one assumes or displays in society or the workplace. Their skills and behaviors influence their interactions with other people. Some personas are analytical, some are creative, and others are a combination. A few personas are as follows:

However, to sustain product and business innovation, leaders must build a flexible culture that can attract and empower a wide variety of talent. It is all too easy for organizations to fall into the analysis trap and focus on left-brain skills like process, measurement, and execution.

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A Quick Primer On Futurist-Level Foresight