This time of pandemic crisis had been responsible for lots of changes in our society and economy. Every time we have a change in our timing roadmap this is the opportunity for thinking about the experiences of the past and present and define in a very positive and open way some reflections about our individual and collective future. We live in VUCA – volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous – times and our citizens and our institutions have the responsability of contributing to the creation and sharing of more value. This is the time of the digital transformation, of the collective intelligence, of the collaborative networks that are the plaftorms for a more positive thinking about the challenges that all of us are facing in the future. This is the best time to reflect on WHY with ideas and thougts.
This is a collective agenda for those that believe that only with a systemic agenda on innovation and creativity is possible to sustain the competitiveness of the economy and the future of society. In these hard times we are living, we must be capable of constructing new frontiers of hope for a new collective answer to the very complex challenges we are in fact facing. The future is already tomorrow and contrary to the past we must integrate our vision for a common purpose that will be the basis of the new social foundation. Things will be different but our capacity to deal with the future must be the same or even stronger.
This new agenda is the evidence that when we are competent and we cooperate we are able to give a sense of reality to the projets we are involved in. To be back to the future is also an experience of the importance of having a good communication with our citizens and our institutions, to build an effective convergence towards a society of trust and intelligence. To be back to the future is above all an individual and collective commitment with our community, a public space where the flow of ideas is the platform for more value and more quality of life. The confirmation that we are prepared to the new challenges of our life.
We live in a time where different problems demand a different set of solutions. Our society is more demanding about the quality and efficiency of the institutions and the citizens expect a very colaborative and participative agenda in their common lives. The digital transformation, the sustainable goals and the social innovation are some examples of continuous mouvements that are improving the way we live and cooperate on a collective basis. But they will not have any positive result if people are not prepared to integrate this new kind of knowledge and practices in their ways of living. We need a new kind of competence that prepares every citizen for a capacity of acting associted to the new values of our society. This is and will be the real basis for a new contract of trust between those we belong to a community focused in the future.
Peter Drucker, one of the most considered experts on management, defends in his thoughts about excellence, that “the best way to antecipate the future is to create it”. This open and proactive attitude towards our future is one of the key messages of the ideas that constitue the context and the concept of this enabling agenda. People must be motivated to a new kind of collective engagement in society and innovation and creativity are the drivers of difference that mobilize citizens and institutions to this challenging agenda. This post pandemic time must be the point of departure of a new effective capacity and the point of arrival of a new sense of modernity and trust of our society. I believe we will win and I am committed to give my individual and collective contribute to this agenda for the future.
This summer is a time of transition for a new period of confidence in a sense of competence ambition. This should be in fact an effective example of solidarity and cooperation in putting in the field innovative proposals to consolidate the capability of finding solutions for the different problems that day by day we have been facing in this context of pandemic crisis. Value creation must be more and more the central purpose of our organizations and it is important that managers and working teams understand the importance of redefining their contexts of cooperation and associated networking strategies. These are very enabling challenges that will have a decisive and critical role in the redefining of this time of confidence we hope to see in the future
Diogo Vasconcelos, who died ten years ago and was a very innovative entrepreneur and social innovator, defended at that time that we must have the ambition of the future and excellence. His message – now that we celebrate his memory with a book about his life and work – is more than ever present and an example for our community as a whole. This is the time of rethinking and renewing the context and concept of the open society, a strategic idea that puts in direct dialogue different civilizations, religions and ideas. This agenda of sharing ideias is the point of departure and the point of arrival of a new way of the citizens and the institutions performing a new contract of trust and value focused on a better future for our communities. Sharing ideas as an act of contributing for a new sense of purpose.
We live in a time in which sustainability must be a strategic brand for the future. The challenge of sustainability – that became more relevant with this pandemic – demands new answers by a society more focused in concrete results for the future. Our society – within this crisis – is determined by degrees of complexity, uncertainty, stronger competition and high standards of quality and innovation demanding. The sustainability agenda is the point of convergence of a more creative matrix of concrete proposals to the challenges that are brought every day to society by people and organizations. For that we need more and more to focus on effective partnerships of challenge that mobilize all of us for the future.
The concept of core competences was celebrated by the global management specialist Gary Hammel and has been used in different social and economic contexts. Cooperation will play a central role in the future of society – a real collaborative and participative space where citizens and institutions share a common strategy towards knowledge and creativity as the key drivers of growth and competitiveness. Core competences will give cooperation a new frontier of capability that helps citizens to answer with more efficiency to the demanding and complex challenges of a new society. This is the right platform for making strategic cooperation as the core competence for a new order in society.
These times of uncertainty and complexity demand new solutions of governance able to embrace the new needs and problems after this pandemic crisis. Governance has always been an exercise of collective intelligence, in which citizens and institutions celebrate a contract of trust focused in the battle of the future. But the success of this contract will depend a lot on the sort of competence and confidence that society as a whole will put in it. Governance must not be defined by law – it must be supported by a smart vision of the plan that our communities must follow in order to guarantee that the value created is shared in the pusuit of the common well being. Governance will be in this sense the key factor for a context of trust in these times of uncertainty.
