Future Thinking - A Launch Pad for Caribbean Leadership

One of the benefits of leaving the UK, as I did last year to relocate to Barbados, was avoiding the ritual humiliation of the English national football team. Despite an uncharacteristically upbeat showing at the 2018 World Cup, it has generally been a bad 40-years for English football. Those in the know often suggest that the stubborn rigidity of English footballing principles cannot adapt to the more dynamic and ever-changing climate of international football. Once much envied across the world, those rigid English principles, based upon strong defence, fixed team structures and everyone sticking tightly to their role, are not the breeding ground for the creative free-flowing football and fast decision making now required to be successful on the modern world stage.

Look at the top clubs in world football leagues over the last few years –Barcelona and Real Madrid in Spain, Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund in Germany, Manchester City, Manchester United and a resurgent Liverpool in England – they are all teams founded on the principles of creativity and speed, principles of empowerment that enable players with creative talent to think and make instant decisions in a fast-moving environment. And, above all, an ethos to value creativity and prioritise that creativity collectively as a team with shared responsibility and accountability.

Changing from a rigid structure to one which values creativity cannot be done overnight. Indeed, some may say it cannot be done at all, because the principles at the core of each system are diametrically opposed. One founded on stability, safety, repetition of training and prioritizing basics. The other founded on an emphasis of creativity, quick decision making, early identification of talent and prompt exposure of that talent to decision making, thus empowering the talent to learn how to calculate risks. In essence, the very criteria that the former stubborn rigidity is designed to eradicate.

The same can be said of our global academic systems, which were originally built for the Industrial Revolution to provide a largely operational and mechanical workforce with the talent to fuel growth in predominantly domestic, industrial businesses. It was a system where rigidity and learning by rote worked to provide talented students with the basics to succeed in their chosen field (with ‘chosen’ being loosely put, as careers were so often chosen by fathers) and provide manpower (again, carefully chosen, as it was so often men who were the focus).

However, the world we are now hurtling towards is anything but rigid and stable. The last 30-years has seen a surge in global population, technology, environmental risks and rapidly changing social values and behaviours, putting pressure on established industries the world over – an environment that creates space solely for those organisations nimble enough to find the gaps.

In this new world, the skills required from graduates have changed dramatically. Creativity, the ability to think around corners whilst moving at speed, has become the key requirement. That type of thinking is not just a scarce resource that is nice to have, it is absolutely essential to face the global challenges we face over the coming century.

Equally, in the world of professional services, we are not without our challenges when it comes to global trends. Not least of which is the need to constantly innovate and stay ahead of the game as leading thinkers, while we move through new trends and new ways of thinking, with a business model that is heavily reliant upon attracting the best and brightest graduates. Academics and professional services have become codependents on this type of thinking.

What if we could create something new and different that had not been done before in the Caribbean? A programme that could attract students and industry thinkers alike, working collaboratively, to collectively think and challenge established global status quos. And if we can do that in our own region, then suddenly we can move from a position of fast followers of global trends to leaders in certain industries, probably in a shorter timescale than people would usually think.

Some of the benefits of such a programme would then be:

-Attracting the best global students, thus encouraging more global mobility

-Exporting and importing knowledge into the Caribbean through global networks between academics and industry leaders

-Putting students and industry leaders together to learn collaboratively

-Our region is in position to start academic courses in forward-looking subjects that no-one else has

-Create innovators, entrepreneurs and future leaders across the Caribbean

-Create the climate for investment into students and new start-ups in the Caribbean

And suddenly the possibilities are endless….

We are currently working with academic institutions in the Caribbean region to create such a future thinking programme, one that is designed to be a platform on which students can stand for the next 50years of global development, giving them exposure to global trends and leading thinking. This will be a programme that gives students and industry leaders alike the kind of elevation needed to help them see across fast moving global trends to differentiate between short-term speed bumps and long-term transformational shifts.