There are some phrases which we find incredibly irritating. We class “blue skies thinking” and “thinking out of the box” among them. They are the sort of jargon used in management-speak, to encourage people to try ideas which they might not like. On the other hand, how do we get people to think laterally or radically, to use imagination, to free themselves of assumptions and to consider all possibilities?
When we are thinking about the way we bring up children or when we devise new systems of care or education, we certainly need to think radically. It has become a commonplace that the only constant is change, and in many ways – global warming, for example – we now recognise that change is going to proceed throughout the lives of our children and grandchildren.
So maybe we need to do some blue skies thinking about what life will be like for them as adults, and about the skills, knowledge and experience they will require to cope and to succeed. Otherwise they will risk being unprepared for the changes to come, and they will be pushed around by external influences, rather than shape events themselves.
- We can see some of the factors which will loom large in the future emerging now :-
- the percentage of children who are overweight, with implications for their health as adults,
- the new ways of communicating and their implications for social relationships,
- the numbers who isolate themselves in their rooms with their computers, and
- the consequent lack of activities (such as meals) which are shared by families,
- the volume of migration, resulting in millions of children being brought up in countries which are new to them,
- the impact on second generation immigrants,
- the world-wide nature of child exploitation, the sex industry and child labour,
- the need to conserve resources, some of which may run out or be in short supply in coming decades,
- the reaction against transporting goods around the world and the need to curtail travel, to reduce carbon footprints,
- the growth of the Chinese, Indian and other economies, shifting the balance of world economic power,
- the development of medical treatments based on knowledge of people’s genes,
- the dangers posed by dissident groups, who feel the need to react against other cultures, countries or systems …..
The list is virtually endless. If looking ahead is to be of value, though, we will need to do more than list the factors. We will need to understand their inter-relationship, and to create a holistic picture out of all these factors.
Can we guess at the likely life-style of twenty, fifty or a hundred years from now? Guesses in the past have often seemed retrospectively laughable. Yet it is one of the strengths of the human species that it is capable of thinking ahead, of supposing, of considering alternatives, of planning. It is why we have become the dominant species on earth, but, as Valerie Jackson points out in her column this month, it means that we need to be responsible and consider ourselves accountable for the welfare of the world.
Time to do some blue skies thinking.