TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to Throw Forwards Thursday. My name is Graeme Codrington and every week we jump into the future and we see what’s going on there. Maybe it’s got something important to teach us. Today is episode 52. Yes, that’s right.
It’s our birthday.
Happy birthday to Throw Forward Thursdays as we reach our 52nd episode.
I hope you don’t mind me being a little bit self indulgent. As I think back over a year of thinking about the future, what I was going to do is look back through the episodes we’ve done and choose my favourite. And as I looked through them, I couldn’t find one.
Some of them are better than others, some of them I put more effort into than others. I think some are positive, some are fairly freaky, but all of them I think are valuable. So instead of choosing my favourite and if you haven’t watched all of them, they are available on YouTube.
They are available in the podcast app that you may be listening to this on. So go back and listen to the archives and remind yourself of them.But what I thought I’d do on this special first anniversary of Throw Forward Thursday is just remind you of three things.
The first is why we do this.We started this a year ago when people were in the middle of another COVID wave. People were very focused on what’s happening tomorrow, what’s going on this week, and people were in a very crisis mindset. What we wanted to do was we wanted to help people not ignore the crisis of covert and the very real realities of their workplace, but to lift their eyes to the horizon again, to be a little bit more strategic, a little bit more long term focused and we thought as a team of tomorrow.
Today we thought that allowing people to jump into the future and to see both positive and maybe some negative things that might happen in the future. We just give them an opportunity. We give you an opportunity to just lift your sites above the crisis driven reality of the world that we’re in. Sadly, a year later, I’m not sure that that’s changed much.
A lot of our clients are still very short term, very crisis orientated. So we’ll keep doing this as long as we can to help you lift your horizon.
The second reason that we put Throw Forward Thursdays together is because we think that on a weekly basis, this is a good habit for you to get into either just you personally or ideally together with your team.
Allocate 15 minutes. Most of my videos are six or seven minutes in length and they spark your imagination to take another six or seven minutes to just ask the question if what Throw Forward Thursday sees in the future is a reality becomes a reality at some stage in the future, how might that impact our world?
If you’re thinking about it from a personal perspective, how might that impact your career, the life that you live? If you’re thinking about it from a business perspective, what might that do to your business? And don’t only think of the threats. In fact, that’s the third thing I want to leave with you. What I’m really hoping I can do is inspire you to think of the opportunities.
Even if some of the things I talk about might be quite negative and scary, I’d like you to think what are the opportunities for you and your business to build the future? It’s a whole lot easier to create the future than it is to predict it also they say. And so what can you do to create a future that you would like to live in? And if you just take 15 minutes a week to think about that and to be inspired by some of the pictures of the future that our team here at Throw forward Thursday shows you, I think that you’ll discover that you build a future focus that you become more future fit or future ready. If our team of tomorrow today can help you make more sense of the future can help you prepare more for whatever the future holds for us.
We love to do that. That is what we do. That’s what gets us out of bed every morning. So please make sure that you contact us you can contact me specifically askaboutthefuture.com. It’s a website, www.askaboutthefuture.com.
You can share your thoughts with me. You can ask me any question you can give me some ideas for future topics on throw forward Thursday or contact us at tomorrow today global contact me or any of our team to talk about how we can help you to prepare for the future.
To think about what might happen in the future and what you need to do about it today.
As always, I’ll see you next week in a new season.
A new year of throw forward Thursday.
I’ll see you then. Bye.
For the past two decades, Graeme has worked with some of the world’s most recognized brands, travelling to over 80 countries in total, and speaking to around 100,000 people every year. He is the author of 5 best-selling books, and on faculty at 5 top global business schools.