Spanish philosopher George Santayana once said: Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it. While it is important to remember the lessons of history, it turns out that the most successful cultures might be those with the strongest national sense and application of foresight. Foresight is the ability to accurately plan and predict for future outcomes. According to a recent piece published by Nordic think tank Demos Helsinki, it may be a pivotal factor in a nation’s success.
Finland’s success story is a perfect example of how leveraging foresight can help any nation change its course for the better. Despite its troubled past as a disadvantaged country on the northern outskirts of Europe, it has flourished into a progressive and educated society that boasts a high quality of life. Some would say that the Fins are “obsessed” with the future, but that would be too reductive a statement. The Fins are consummate planners who have a parliamentary committee dedicated to future matters and even require the government to produce a future report on topics like climate change and the aging population. They are also the first country in the world whose universities offer a master’s degree in “Future Studies”.
Now, Demos Helsinki is hoping that Finland can share this future-thinking mindset with governments, businesses, and communities around the world. In a new project, they have teamed up with some of the best minds in Tanzania to transform the primarily agricultural nation into a knowledge based economy, by unleashing the brainpower of their young and growing population. Despite their distinct cultures, Tanzania has a lot in common with Finland: they both want to be known for science, technology and other knowledge-based contributions.
The main characteristic of future-oriented societies is a strong willingness to delay present gratification to ensure future success or comfort. This implies that a society has the ability to imagine all of the intermediate steps it takes to achieve a favorable outcome, and willingly plans to execute them accordingly. A May 2014 article in Forbes describes how “future orienteers” outperform those who solely look to the past in almost every category. These master of the future have “better grades, [are] more educated, more optimistic, [have] more financial success, and more consistent results.”
There’s a TED talk from Keith Chen that has shown how our language, and whether there is a robust way of expressing the future tense, impacts our ability to save money for the future. If you speak German, you likely think about the future often because there is a strong concept and form for creating sentences that indicate a future event, which requires more thought about what happens in the future. If your native tongue is, for example, Chinese, which does not have a specific verb conjugation to express the future tense, the world is spoken about largely in the present tense, using context to indicate when something is happening.
In your opinion, how does future orientation work to make both cultures and business ventures successful? What can we learn from the Finnish culture, who pride themselves on delaying present gratification and instead diligently plan for the future?
