05/14/08 - Effective Strategies for 2020 Vision: Is your crystal ball cloudy, too?
This year’s NUTN conference theme asks presenters to maintain a “futurist” focus by “looking at the panorama of 2020.” This implies that presenters will be capable of discussing the future with some degree of clarity, if not exactly with 20/20 vision. But how can presenters forecast the future if, as one recent best-selling book argues, such forecasting is impossible?
Frankly, my crystal ball tends to be rather cloudy, which makes attempting to forecast the future unsatisfying and a bit anxiety-provoking. Reading the best-selling book The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb only increased this anxiety at first. If you’ve read the book, you see the dilemma. The central argument is that predicting what will change the world or how it will change is essentially impossible, since major changes are unpredictable -- the result of the interaction of unfathomably complex factors, which we experience as serendipity -- accidents and luck.
If this argument is true, why bother trying to forecast what technology-enabled higher education will look like 12 years from now when the task is essentially impossible?
It turns out that trying to forecast the future with 2020 vision is a great thing to do if you don’t worry much about whether the forecasts will be accurate. It’s an opportunity to imagine and express what you’d like the future to look like; to talk about new ideas you’re trying, or hear about new ideas you might like to try; or to expand one’s thinking about what’s possible and what’s worth exploring. I’ll be talking more about each of these strategies in upcoming editions of this newsletter. Or, you can visit the SLS blog [search on “Black Swan”] to see how my thinking has evolved on this so far.
John Sener
Sener Learning Services
NUTN Board Member
