“The key to growth is the introduction of higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness.” – Lao Tzu
It is not clear when exactly people began pledging to themselves that in the coming year they would lose weight, start going to the gym or drop any one of a number of ‘bad’ habits.
However, the recorded history of the world shows that the concept of making such New Year’s resolutions has existed at least since 1600s. One common theme in all such resolutions is the expectation of a change which will make the life of the individual or the group, who makes the resolution, better in the new year, compared to the old.
Leaders of countries are also known to have expressed such resolutions for their countries, sometimes indirectly through their budgets for the New Year.
One other common characteristic of most of these New Year’s resolutions, irrespective of whether it is an individual or a country, is that they are broken in just a few days into the New Year.
People find it much easier to fall back to their comfort zones and live the life the way they used to do in the previous year.
Leader
If the broken resolution was about the future of a country, then the leader who presented the resolution would be labeled as a ‘true politician’ who is expected to make false promises anyway. When citizens of a country get accustomed to such deceptions year after year, they tend to accept it as the norm and to not see anything wrong with it either. Therefore, the citizens will not see ‘making false promises’ as a reason to disqualify the particular politician at the next election and the cycle therefore, repeats.
Whether it is an individual or a country, if one expects to grow, develop, and improve, in any aspect, be it economic, physical/mental health, intellectual, or physical or spiritual wealth, one has to be prepared to embrace change. Because ‘to grow’ is ‘to change’.Whether it is an individual, an organisation, or a country, a key ingredient in accepting change is being able to think differently.
That makes ‘the way of thinking’ the most important factor in a growth process. In order to change one’s way of thinking one will have to invest time and effort in changing the mind-set of the stakeholders. When one changes the way of looking at things, the things looked at will be seen differently.
One has to have a suitable environment to accommodate such a change and that means one should be aware of the environment one is operating in.
Village
Since each one of us is living in today’s global village, when we think about such an environment, we certainly will have to take the effects of relevant global parametres and their influence over specific sub-environments narrowing it down all the way to the inner most environment one is living in.
Though it took over one-hundred years for the world to embrace the transition from agricultural to industrial societies, it only took a couple of decades to change from industrial to information societies.
The world has come to a point where the ‘anticipation of the future’ is essential to experience growth, because the changes in information societies are occurring so fast that there is no time to react. Even though there is a certain type of industrialisation taking place within the information societies, the industry involved in that is the production and distributionor buying and selling of information.
If we try to introduce changes without acknowledging the larger trends and shifts that are restructuring our societies then, the changes we try to introduce would be out of date right at the introduction itself.
Difficult
One who is not aware of the present is doomed to fail in the unfolding future. Anyone who finds it difficult to understand that can just look at the way Covid-19 impacted the world and the way the world reacted to protect its citizens.
Together with Artificial Intelligence and all other new technologies, biology in the 21st century will be what physics and chemistry were to the 20th century. Bio-Medical engineering will be using fermentation technology together with information technology to produce more effective drugs with minimal side-effects, new methods of producing enzymes which are called ‘living-catalysts’ and all available technologies in splitting genes so that the root cause of ailments can be identified taking the ambiguities of statistics out of the treatment methods.
Not only business organisations and Governments but also people will become aware of ‘Digital Transformation’ which is a paradigm shift in role, responsibility, attitude, and the intentions of maintaining connectivity with the rest of the world. That is perhaps why the digital anthropologist Brian Solis said: “Digital transformation is more about humans than digital.”
One of the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic will certainly be the infusion of data-driven services into more and more aspects of industry and everyone’s life in general. One’s ability to adapt to a digital future depends on developing the next generation of skills and closing the gap between talent supply and demand. People will have to “future proof” their potential. While every job requires “on the job learning” to a certain extent, most of the employees would try to hold on to it with the minimum amount of learning.
Employees
Though experienced employees can perform their jobs well in the autopilot mode, if they let go of this opportunity to learn the applications of new technologies, they might lose the chance of discovering their true potential.
Education systems will have to study this evolutionary process carefully and adjust their curricula and methodologies to facilitate the younger generation as well as reskilling and upskilling the existing labor force.
It might be helpful if the systems study the transformations the world has experienced through major technological revolutions such as printing, radio, photography, television and video recording and automation.Technological development recognises no barrier before it.
Though technology will be in constant progress, different human societies will be at different levels of intellectual and spiritual development and therefore the impact of technology on those societies will be different from one another.
Education systems catering to different societies should recognise those conditions before they introduce “one size fits all” curriculum or teaching/learning methodologies in the name of “using new technology in education”, just because the other countries and societies use them and market their products to support their industries.
Whatever the change an individual, an organisation or a country is contemplating about, it must address future trends such as cultural nationalism within global lifestyles, privatisation of the welfare state, gender equality (especially in leadership positions), ethical dilemmas of invasion of the human body and mind by all new information and bio-medical innovations and the transformation from representative democracies to participatory democracies.
That is why, as Lao-Tzu has said, we should all try to introduce higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness.
The writer has served in the higher education sector as an academic over twenty years in the USA and fourteen years in Sri Lanka and he can be contacted at [email protected]