Futurist Edie Weiner on New Transformations, Part 5

We recently spoke with prominent futurist Edie Weiner, president of Weiner, Edrich, Brown. She laid out for us some of her fascinating insights about the five most important social shifts she predicts will take place over the coming years. We are posting them as a series each day this week. We shared her thoughts on the first shift having to do with the economy. The second shift she discussed with us involves 10 new value propositions that Edie says will become increasingly important--click here and here to read about them. The third and fourth shifts relate to brain imaging. Today, we're sharing the final shift.

Point number five has to do with the legacy we leave for future generations. There are certain words that we attach values to that we think are wonderful, like leadership, innovation, imagination. And the point that I want to make is that these are neutral words. In terms of leadership, there are Mother Theresas and there are Adolph Hitlers. In terms of innovation, there is Scotch tape and there are financial instruments that bring down the entire financial, global network. And the same is true of imagination. There are the Walt Disneys of the world and the Gene Roddenberrys, but there are also the guys who walk into the a movie theater and shoots a lot of people because he imagines himself to be a supervillian.

What we have to understand is that, on the negative side of the ledger, negative leadership, negative innovation, negative imagination have no barriers at all. It doesn’t have to obey politics, laws, regulations, budgets, time constraints, bureaucracy, it just is. On the positive side of the ledger, positive leadership, innovation and imagination has to obey all of this. So I really believe in the end that if we have a legacy to leave, all of us, it’s to create 10 times more positive imagination than there is negative because without that, we’re going to leave the future with the belief that the future is very bleak and very dark, that between climate change and cyber terrorism and water shortages and wars and refugees and famine, that it’s all so bleak. So we have a responsibility to feed positive imagination, that’s how we create our future, it comes from our imagination.