Back to the Future – 2020 Year In Review #19 [Countdown #2]

Back to the Future

Welcome to the penultimate post of this Year in Review series. In the last three posts, we have begun the final countdown to 2021. I have compared the events of 2020 with the ‘opening thoughts’ i.e. the 20 thoughts about 2020 that I had written at the beginning of the year. In the previous three countdown posts, we discussed the journey and milestones, the Digital Tsunami and Top 10 things about AI. In this post, let us go Back to the Future. Let us speak about children, their perception and reality and the implications on the workforce and on humanity.

Back to 2020 – Back to the Future

As we have been doing in the previous posts, we will be picking up 4 thoughts from the ‘opening note’ (#9,10,11 and 17). We can then contrast them with the related events during 2020 and see how reality stacked against expectations. In the ‘opening post’, I shared a few thoughts that dealt with children and mindsets, belief systems and perception. Let us go back to January 2020 and see if the opening thoughts lead us Back to the Future!

International Travel – Exposure and the Pandemic

In thought #10 in the ‘opening note’, I wrote about my daughter’s exposure to international travel and multiple foreign languages, even before she became a teenager. Thankfully, she completed the residential program in Spain in 2019 itself, well before the outbreak of the pandemic. I had also written about kids benefiting from the exposure on account of international travel.

Well, the pandemic and the year 2020 changed our attitude towards international travel. We realized that it gives you the unwanted sort of ‘exposure’ too. Interestingly, Nassim Taleb, the author of the bestseller Black Swan, had warned of this scenario many years ago. He predicted that the unintended consequence of increasing international travel will be the outbreak of a strange virus traveling throughout the globe. He mentioned this in his book, Black Swan, in 1997 itself.

You can read about how risks played their part during 2020 in the first post of this series – Black or White Swan. A short video clip explaining some of these aspects is embedded below and you can also see the full keynote address on Governance and Risk on YouTube.

A Model for International Exposure

The linkage between the damage caused by the pandemic and international travel is well established. However, this brings us to the next question. What happened in 2020 to the children’s international exposure (of the good kind)?

Every dark cloud has a silver lining and there is an opportunity in every adversity. With specific reference to my daughter’s journey, a couple of factors played a crucial role. Firstly, events and inter-school competitions became digital. Secondly, many of these events were organized outside of school hours. Unlike in the past, children no longer had to travel during school hours to attend physical events. These two factors also meant that the cost and hassles of organizing and attending digital events reduced significantly.

A combination of these factors led to a snowball effect. The access to digital events increased exponentially. My daughter has already participated in more than 25 competitions in the first nine months of the pandemic. Moreover, the children are playing a far greater role in organizing these events. Consequently, they are building real world skills such as digital marketing and virtual event management!

Model United Nations (MUN)

Apart from the various inter-school competitions, I specifically want to highlight the spate of MUN (Model United Nations) conventions that she attended. This experience more than made up for the lack of international travel. The MUNs require the participants to represent a country in an extensive series of deliberations around a given social issue. I was intrigued by the discussions I overheard in one of the MUNs. It was fascinating to see teenagers talk about issues such as the refugee crisis across countries as diverse as Sweden and Uganda. Since each child represented one country, they gained in depth knowledge about that country. Not just that, they also gained an unimaginable appreciation of global affairs.

As adults, we have also gained significantly due to increased access to global events. We have also attended virtual conferences and webinars from the comfort of our homes. However, let us not steal the children’s thunder. I am sure that most adults would not be able to rival the kids who regularly participate in these MUNs! Read this detailed account written by another teenager, Devishi Aggarwal, of her MUN journey.

A Matter of Perception

I had written about perception, mindsets and belief systems in my ‘opening note’ (#9 and #11). However, I was surprised when my 13 year old wrote an insightful article about Perception and Reality last month. The article was very well received and is the most commented article on this platform, by a long shot!

A lot of people wondered how such a young girl could express herself so lucidly about the complex subject of perception. I traveled down the memory lane to my past, just as a reference point for comparison. I was first introduced to the subject of Perception during my MBA at IIM Bangalore. By then, I was already a qualified professional (Chartered Accountant) and had been working full time for 4 years. In fact, I was then almost twice the current age of my daughter!

But, is this comparison fair or valid? Can I compare compare my childhood with that of my daughter? Or, even my adult self from more than 20 years ago with a child today? We all suffer from this fallacy of comparison. The kind of exposure to information that GenZ has cannot be compared with that of GenX. The next generation, Alpha, will once again recalibrate the scale of comparison in the times to come.

On a similar note, the pandemic and the year 2020 has changed everything. But, most of all, it has changed our mindset. I, for one, will not perceive perception in the same manner that I did before 2020. The above mentioned experiences have brought me Back to the Future!

GenZ and the Future Workforce

The current GenZ has started joining the workforce and needless to mention, this is significantly changing the workplace dynamics. In my thoughts for 2020 (#11), I wondered what would happen when today’s children joined the workforce. I also remarked that our perception has diverged from the reality of the children.

In this respect, 2020 has been a watershed year. The new generation is increasingly comfortable with digital and in fact, does not even have an older reference point. However, the thinking of the older generations is rooted in a very different era. Consequently, the divergence between their perception and GenZ’s reality has increased drastically.

This is especially true for those who refuse to accept the sweeping changes. The refusal could be on account of the generation gap or on account of the pandemic induced changes. However, with the onslaught of the digital tsunami, the new generation will be on more familiar turf in the remote workplace as compared to the older generations.

This also implies that the pandemic serves as the perfect excuse to re-align our mental models and world views. If we ever needed a nudge to do this, the events in 2020 have given us a giant push!

In addition, the discussions around the ‘gig economy’ have been gaining ground over the last few years. This workforce model envisages a world without permanent employment. Such models and concepts are already in force in various segments of work, especially for some creative professionals.

These revised working models brought about by the accelerated digitalization during 2020 will continue beyond the pandemic. The New Normal has probably already kicked in. However, it is important that we do not lose momentum in adapting to the new environment in the near future. Because, momentum is the most important thing in our change journey. In case you are curious, you can read the detailed post on Momentum in this Year In Review series.

Back to the Future – Being Human

In my opening note (#17), I made a passing remark about nice guys finishing first. I did not imagine at the beginning of the year that empathy, compassion and just being human would become the key qualities in focus in 2020. Haven’t we all become more empathetic as a result of the global suffering during this year?

However, this trend is also not isolated and can be correlated to other developments. In the previous post, we spoke in detail about AI. One of the most common mainstream debates around AI is around it’s impact on jobs. It is often remarked that jobs requiring empathy such as care givers will never be replaced by AI. Similarly, creative jobs are also considered the forte of humans. Skills that require exploring or imagining future scenarios that don’t have past precedents are valuable.

If we look at the pandemic, it has forced us to become more compassionate and empathetic as a race. It has also forced us to search for creative solutions and adapt to changes quickly. While mechanically running the race of our lives, we have been forced into a pitstop.

We now need to revisit our approach during this pitstop in the race of our lives.

Outlook for 2021 and Beyond

Once again, this leads us to the core theme for this post – Back to the Future. We keep making ‘progress’ and ‘developments’ during our lifetime. As generations come and go, we tend to diverge from our core and from who we are as human beings. Each time this divergence goes beyond the threshold limits, Mother Nature has its own ways of restoring the balance.

This phenomenon is undeniable, whether one explains it using philosophy or science or religious scriptures or using any other field. Each time we run ahead of ourselves as a race, we will be humbly reminded of our roots. We will need to revert to our original compassionate, empathetic and humane state. And, we will be forced to travel back to the future.

These thoughts not only apply to humanity as a race, but also at an individual level. We were born with just the right attributes required to survive in this world. Children are the perfect manifestations of curious and creative creatures on this planet. The man made systems (of education and much more) have taken us too far away from our original selves. In order to move ahead in the New Normal, we need to travel back to the future.

The good news is that the turn of the year is the best time to begin a new journey. In 2021, let us take a step Back to the Future!

Year In Review 2020

Check out the master article for the Year in Review 2020 that contains links to all posts in this series. Also, bookmark the master article on the browser to read all the 20 thoughts from 2020 and lessons for 2021.

About The Author

Rajiv Maheshwari is a business and start-up advisor, and the co-founder of From The Experts Mouth. He is a management professional with over 25 years of experience, and worked as CEO for a decade, and in leadership roles with NYSE listed companies such as Accenture and WNS.

He is a Chartered Accountant and MBA (Director’s Merit List from IIM Bangalore) and an autodidact, who is on the path of self-directed life long learning and sharing. He is a thought leader, author and keynote speaker and has developed several frameworks to bridge the gap between academia and industry.