Ten Survival Skills for a World in Flux

Tom Fletcher

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780008447892
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Prise de décision

To thrive in the twenty-first century, we all need to understand the challenges coming our way. And start adapting, now.

We all know there are major, overlapping, global crises ahead of humanity: climate change, mass migration, new warfare, big tech, further pandemics, authoritarian capitalism. Rather than be daunted, this book charts a way that we can respond. With expertise from his work at the highest levels of international politics, education, activism and business, Tom Fletcher offers a practical manifesto that can help us transform the way we learn, live, and work together.

Amongst its key survival skills, this book offers ideas on how we renew education, restore society and reimagine the future. It helps us chart a course to take back control, to find purpose, and to become better ancestors. It helps us to learn the language of technology - without thinking like computers. It offers 39 steps that each of us can start to take today to boost our survivability.

Vital, practical and accessible, this is a book about how we can anticipate the threats and opportunities of tomorrow and be ready for them - individually and collectively.

PART ONE

Ten Survival Skills

1

How to Take Back Control

On what principle is it that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?

Thomas Macaulay

In the midst of all this change and flux, we could be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed. Whether you agree with them or not, political campaigns such as Brexit and Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ have found ways to play effectively to this sense of dislocation and the desire to find a more stable footing.

Without leaving any more trading blocs or electing any more Trumps, how do we find better ways to feel more in control, or at least less out of control? How can we get better at preparing ourselves more effectively for whatever the future holds? We can do it by getting better at anticipating and understanding what lies ahead; by developing the resilience we will need for crises and setbacks; and by taking back control of our time and our learning, so that we have the survival skills we will need.

Anticipating the future sounds daunting. The good news is that we have a head start. Predicting change and evolving in preparation for it is something we do better than the competition. We can’t outrun a cheetah or out-wrestle a silverback. But Homo sapiens have always been better planners than any other species.

As hunter-gatherers, we learned to predict where and when animals could be caught and trees would give most fruit. By the time of the Romans, those practised in the art of augury were basing key military decisions on their interpretations of the world of birds. Over the course of thousands of years of recorded history, and thanks to brave minds such as that of the mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, human beings became experts at predicting the motions of the stars and planets. Leaps forward such as calculus and modern statistics laid the basis for modern data science, machine learning and predictive analysis, covering everything from where to graze cows to divining weather patterns and credit risks, as well as web searches or sporting line-ups. That market in predictive analysis will reach up to $8.5 billion by 2025.

But knowing the future is not brain science. Philip Tetlock, the co-author of Superforecasting, has sought to demonstrate that people can become better at forecasting and they can teach others how to forecast more effectively. If he is right, why are we not spending as much time and effort on this skill as we do in the gym?

Dubai’s futurist-in-chief, Noah Raford, has been described as the ‘vizier and provocateur’ of the future. Walking through the spectacular Museum of the Future in Dubai, he told me we all have a psychological need to feel we can understand and somehow control the future, but we must understand that the world is stranger than we conceive. It is irresolvably uncertain and complex. For Raford, the most important aspect of his work is not prediction but ‘to use the lens of the future to help us perceive the present more clearly’. A better understanding of what is likely to happen will allow us to make the reforms we need now.

‘Can the rest of us really become forecasters ourselves?’ I asked, feeling overawed by the robot that had just greeted me by name, remembering me from an earlier visit.

Noah grinned as he high-fived ‘Poppy’. ‘Absolutely. This is not about gadgets and tech. Forecasters aren’t trying to predict sports results, but how people will react to the world around them. The key is to proceed with intention.’ Once you take the conscious step to examine and try to anticipate trends, you are already better prepared.

How do we get better at anticipating what lies ahead in order to prepare ourselves for it?

We need to start with humility and caution. For all our successes in planning and programming, humans, including most soothsayers and astrologists, have just as often proved poor at predicting the future. Futurist Ray Kurzweil has been one of the more successful. But while getting it right on the threat to privacy from tech and data, and with health gadgets such as fitness watches, he predicted in 1999 that human life expectancy would rise to ‘over a hundred’ by 2019, and that books would be dead. Whether you are reading this on paper or onscreen, both are evidently not true. Predictably, those who get forecasts right normally get plenty wrong too.

Predictions of global population passing eight billion, flying cars, electronic voting, Chinese democracy, humans on Mars, replacement of fossil fuels, three-day weeks, smart homes, anti-gravity belts and China overtaking America economically are frequently revised. In 1968, the MIT political science professor Ithiel de Sola Pool predicted that better communication, easier translation and greater understanding of human motivations would mean that ‘by the year 2018 nationalism should be a waning force in the world’. If only. The inventor Nikola Tesla, a visionary on so much, predicted that ‘twenty-first-century humans would know better than to pollute their bodies with harmful substances like caffeine and nicotine’. Warren Buffett is right to warn us to always consider the motives of those making the prediction. ‘Don’t ask the barber whether you need a haircut.’

The discouraging point about these examples is that it is impossible to get it right all the time. The encouraging point is that there is no reason why we can’t give it a shot ourselves.

To get better at doing so, we can get better at understanding and monitoring the megatrends I described in the introduction. Like the physicist John Dalton, born in 1766, who relaxed by using homemade equipment to record and predict the weather. His fifty-seven years of records were the earliest such dataset in the UK, forming part of his studies of humidity, temperature, atmospheric pressure and wind. From his data, the science of meteorology was founded. But we will also sometimes need, in journalist Nik Gowing’s words, to let ourselves ‘think the unthinkable’. Like theoretical physicist Peter Higgs and his team who in 1964 predicted the existence of the Higgs boson elementary particle through the Higgs mechanism. Yet it wasn’t until 2012 that the particle was confirmed to exist and Higgs won the Nobel Prize. We can help ourselves to think the unthinkable by seeking out ideas we disagree with and consciously challenging our existing assumptions about the world.

We can also get better at making connections between the past and the future. Futurist Anne Lise Kjaer says that, like archaeologists, futurists ‘use artefacts from the present and try to connect the dots into interesting narratives in the future. When it comes to the future, you have two choices. You can sit back and think, It’s not happening to me, and build a great big wall to keep out all the bad news. Or you can build windmills and harness the winds of change. It’s a huge opportunity to educate the parents of the next generation, not just the children.’

A key part of taking control, then, is also to anticipate and prepare for setbacks and crises. Our freshly polished antennae will tell us to assume one thing: surprises and uncertainty are inevitable. And that no plan survives contact with the enemy.

Traditionally it was believed that the ability to come through adversity could only be observed or acquired in times of stress. To develop the capacity to bounce back, you needed something to bounce back from, whether a violent threat, trauma or difficult childhood or home life. But recent work by psychologists such as Norman Garmezy and Emmy Werner has shown that resilience can also be learned. Sometimes that happens because of the good fortune of contact with a supportive teacher or mentor. Yet often it is about how we perceive our sense of agency, whether we think that we rather than our circumstances affect our way of being in the world. People who can meet the world on their own terms are able to become more autonomous and independent. Like in the Tennyson poem, more resilient people think of themselves as masters of their own fate.

George Bonanno, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University, has been studying resilience for twenty-five years, trying to figure out why some people are better able to handle stress. He told the New Yorker that a key factor is whether an individual is able to understand an event as traumatic or as an opportunity to learn and grow. Every frightening event can be traumatic or not to the person experiencing it. What matters is how we explain it to ourselves.

Can we train ourselves to be better prepared for shocks, and to process more effectively those we have already experienced? Yes. The first step is to recognise our ability to regulate our emotions more successfully. The next, University of Pennsylvania positive psychologist Martin Seligman told me, is to reframe the way we describe negative events to ourselves. Bad events aren’t our fault or indicative of some wider failure in us. We have agency to change our situation. If we view adversity as a challenge to learn from, we are more likely to come through it. Resilience is our ability to bounce back from stress, to adapt to challenging circumstances, to thrive in adversity. It requires self-awareness and awareness of others. People who are more resilient will tend to see setbacks as temporary, specific to a moment or situation, and not all about them. They are less likely to see setbacks as permanent, more general, or very much about them. They will feel more in control. There is an ongoing competition between factors that increase our grit and those that increase our stress. So we have to keep working at our preparedness. From my experience, for example as ambassador in Beirut and Syria and working as an adviser to the G20 after the 2008 financial crash, there are ways we can train ourselves to do this.

First, practise thinking carefully under pressure. This was the mantra of England’s World Cup-winning rugby union coach Clive Woodward. It sounds simple, but we know how quickly that clarity goes when a crisis hits. People act very differently under pressure. Our adrenalin picks up, we take hasty decisions, we panic. As with a rugby team, it is possible to practise thinking carefully under pressure, in the way that Woodward’s 2003 team did in the decisive closing moments of the final. To prepare for the big crises, we can get better at not ruminating over the small ones, recognising what is beyond our control, and focusing on the areas where we do actually have agency and influence, including in managing our emotions. If we want to take back control, that’s a good place to start.

Second, during a crisis you need more than ever to know where the scaffolding is. Who are the people or what are the habits that you will most rely on when it gets tough? We can prepare ourselves by investing more heavily in those load-bearing relationships and practices in advance. Look after the basics.

Third, communication is even more important during times of stress. We need to make even more of an effort to listen. ‘How do we fix this together?’ is a good crisis question. Make people part of the solution. Don’t assume that because you’ve said it once, everyone has heard and understood it. Ask the right questions, of yourself and those around you. Who here disagrees with this approach? If no one, that’s a problem.

The next step to taking back control is to regain more control of our time.

Time is a powerful currency. We all know that the time we have is finite. As we get older, we feel the sand falling through the glass. A good back-of-the-envelope exercise is to think about what you would really love to be doing today, or this week. How much time would you set aside, in an ideal world, for doing the things and spending time with the people that bring you joy? And then write in the column alongside it a breakdown of what you are really doing today, or this week.

The difference between the two can be stark and discouraging. But it can at least help us to see where we can make changes.

Sometimes, it may just be that we need to slow down. My successor as the prime minister’s foreign policy adviser in 10 Downing Street was my friend John Casson. He is the smartest foreign policy thinker I’ve met. After a brilliant stint there he went to Cairo as ambassador. During a tough political period he did an extraordinary job, amassing over a million Twitter followers along the way.

And then he stepped back, devoting his time to what he describes as stillness, attention, self-awareness, rest and letting go. John told me that he had learned in this time that ‘we become what we pay attention to. Ruthlessly eliminate hurry. Pursue stillness. Pay deep attention.’ He introduced me to the blessing of John O’Donohue:

This is the time to be slow

Lie low to the wall

Until the bitter weather passes

Try, as best you can, not to let

The wire brush of doubt

Scrape from your heart

All sense of yourself

And your hesitant light.

If you remain generous,

Time will come good;

And you will find your feet

Again on fresh pastures of promise,

Where the air will be kind

And blushed with beginning.

Taking back control of more of our time might also mean reducing the time we choose to sell to our employer. How can we increase our financial independence and buy ourselves more time? What do we really need to live on each year? What are the savings we can make now to get there? There are shelves of books with the answers to those challenges. They boil down to two unexciting but decent ideas: reduce your debt and own less.

‘Every time you borrow money, you’re robbing your future self,’ counsels personal finance expert Nathan W. Morris. This involves tough choices. We have been told relentlessly that the key to happiness is to spend. Yet we know it isn’t. ‘Too many people spend money they haven’t earned to buy things they don’t want to impress people they don’t like,’ as Will Rogers put it. Shopping itself stimulates our primal hunter-gatherer urges, making us worse judges of what we actually need: look around your home or the next boot fair for all those unwanted impulse buys.

The science suggests that, if you know what to do with it, a certain amount of money helps, in that it can reduce unhappiness. But we can’t purchase real happiness, because we’re never satisfied. We overestimate the pleasure having more brings, a condition that economists call the ‘hedonic treadmill’.

Sometimes the extra money brings new stress: a longer commute or a new set of richer neighbours to envy. Humans compete: this is a survival skill that has helped us through much of history. But once we have met our basic needs, it may hold us back. In Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert says, ‘Once you have your human needs met, a lot more money doesn’t make for a lot more happiness.’ When we think of life in terms of time rather than cash, we might find that what we most value is a weekly walk in nature, a decent internet connection, a regular lunch with friends and the occasional break exploring somewhere new. ‘Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants,’ counselled the Greek Stoic philosopher and former slave Epictetus.

How we perceive our relative wealth has more impact on our happiness than the wealth itself. We can at least stop comparing ourselves to the Clooneys, Jeff Bezos or the latest winner of the lottery, and start comparing ourselves to what the Dartmouth College economist Erzo Luttmer has called ‘similar others’ – the people we work or grew up with, old friends and classmates. Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California, argues that happy people aren’t bothered by the successes of others. When she asked less happy people who they compared themselves with, ‘they went on and on’. But ‘the happy people didn’t know what we were talking about’. They dared not to compare.

We can buy more time by focusing on what we need rather than what we want. People overestimate the pleasure they’ll get from things, and underestimate the pleasure they’ll get from experiences. The science suggests that sometimes it can often be the things that don’t last that create the most lasting happiness. Students rated experiences (a night out or holiday) more highly than possessions. One reason may be that experiences tend to get better, not diminish, as you recall them. People who are happiest are often those who are able to think of everything as an experience, including spending.

The most Googled financial questions are how to save, invest and retire. The answer to those searches may be simpler than we think, and combines all three. Peter Adeney, a Canadian blogger and software engineer, is better known as Mr. Money Mustache, having retired at the age of thirty by minimising his spending and focusing relentlessly on the goal of financial independence. Describing the typical middle-class lifestyle as ‘an exploding volcano of wastefulness’, he has argued that by spending less money and owning fewer physical possessions we can give ourselves a better shot at happiness.

At the heart of his approach is the idea that you calculate what you really need to live on, and reduce your spending to that. His followers are ruthless in eliminating debt, tracking their finances and setting aside an emergency fund to free them from anxiety about the what-ifs of life. The goal of retirement is not to retire from doing things. Quite the opposite. It frees them to do the work they love, to find purpose. ‘You can only become truly accomplished at something you love,’ said Maya Angelou. ‘Don’t make money your goal. Instead, pursue the things you love doing, and then do them so well that people can’t take their eyes off you.’

She is right. If we think of time rather than money as the key to the life w...