Name: 【TEDx】TEDxLondonBusinessSchool 2012 - Lynda Gratton - How to be ready for your future, now
Uploaded: 2013-12-12T06:32:26.000Z
Duration: 12 min 35 s
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Adverbs of frequency

You know, sometimes in our lives something happens to us

Future simple

that changes the way we think, that changes what we're going to do.

And I wanted to start by telling you a story

about something that happened to me almost five years ago

which really set me off into thinking about this question

About four years ago I decided to take my younger son Dominic to Africa.

You know he's like many teenagers in London

spending lots of time hanging around, you know

and I wanted him to really understand what was happening in Africa.

And in particular you know he was just becoming a young

adult, I wanted him to spend time with a Masai warriors.

And so we took a plane - we took a little private plane -

- it took us about two and a half days - we ended up

in a Masai village in the middle of the Masai Mara in Tanzania.

And just as we had hoped there were a couple of

Masai warriors that spent time with us over a couple of days

and so on, wonderful stuff. You know this was great

for a teenager to really understand what it was like to be a warrior.

And one morning he took us to the top of the hill

and what he was doing is he was showing us

his Masai territory and he was talking about how it was

the implications, that they you know, had to live by.

And there he was standing in his whole Masai wonderful red robes

carrying a spear, a spear to kill lions with.

And as we stood there, there was a funny little sound.

Can anyone imagine what that funny little sound was?

It's his mobile phone! So out of his pocket

you know this sort of leopard skin pocket

he has a very excited conversation on his mobile phone.

Well at that moment, I realized that my world had changed

more than I ever imagined it would have done or could do.

But that wasn't the only thing that happened that afternoon because

when he put his phone down, being sort of an inquisitive professor

at the London Business School I said to him,

"What was the conversation about? Who were you talking to?"

And he said "Ah! I was talking to my brother"

Now he as a warrior, his job was to look after the cattle.

But his brother who was younger than my son a 12 year-old

was looking after the goats and in fact his brother

had gone out that morning, at six o'clock in the morning

and had taken the goats out. This was about 12 o'clock by now.

He said, "Well I was talking to my brother."

I said, "Well what was the conversation [about]?"

He said, "My brother had phoned me to tell me

that the goats had just found green grass" .

Now you see that for me is the paradox of the future

because in many ways things changed beyond imagination.

Who would imagine that a Masai warrior four years ago

By the way he had no electricity, he had no car,

he had no refrigerator, but he did have a mobile phone.

But yet at the same time there were things about his life

in terms of his values, his beliefs, and what was important to him.

You know, I think the challenge that we face now

is we are in the midst of the biggest transformation

"The biggest transformation since the industrial revolution" .

I realized it's the biggest transformation ever.

And one of the challenges that we face is to ask ourselves

"What sort of a world do we want to construct?"

And more importantly, what sort of a life do I want to construct?

And there is no question that there are some

pretty tough things happening to us in the future.

If we look into the future what's clear is that

you could walk into the future blindfold.

You know you could walk into a default future

where you don't make choices, you let the future unroll

in front of you or you could be a lot more thoughtful

about the future that you want to create.

You can create in other words a "crafted future".

Now to do that, I think you have to think about

some of the things that are happening in our lives

Both in terms of the bright side and in terms of the side

You know, one of the things that's really clear about the future,

about our lives, about the lives of our children

it could be a life where in fact everything is broken

If you look even now at your life you'll find that even now

you're constantly interrupted by technology.

It's sort of like a bad tempered two year-old.

You know you can't really find the time within your life

So isolation, fragmentation, is a really important part