Related Publications - Tuning into our times

A discussion on how social, economic, technological and geographical changes are coming together – on Fast Forward!

The future’s here, as William Gibson put it, it’s just not evenly distributed. Although sometimes the future actually feels more like “back to the future” because there’s lots of paradoxes or contradictions in the trends. For example;

• We want simplicity and sophistication; privacy but self-exposure; novelty but constancy; to take risks but for the government to fix things.
• We’re increasingly a ‘Me, Me, Me society, but we want to “belong”, to have a sense of connection and community: But often we care more about the wider world than we do about our immediate community.

We’re living in times of unprecedented change. Nothing new, you might say. To us, the differences this time are the ways in which the social, economic, technological and geographic are converging. How the Internet, broadband and mobile multi-media devices provide new ways of operating, personally and commercially, with less distinction between the two spheres. And we feel the force of China and India.

This has created a mass market of individual consumers and a mass movement of everyday people, who are increasingly putting themselves first, as consumers, citizens and workers.

• Attitudes, values, life patterns, demographics are changing significantly.
• How business is done, what a business is, where it takes place, who runs them, and how profits are made and distributed, are changing.
• Connectivity, not just the Internet and broadband, but the development of social and economic networks, and networks of networks, is strengthening.
• Innovation is increasingly from ‘everyone and everywhere’
• High level social and emotional skills are needed to work effectively.
• People are valuing their time and energy more than money

In the Department of Labour, we focus on understanding better how this affects the labour market - the supply of and the demand for talent and skills. Whatever your area of focus, few of us know enough to assess what’s happening within society and the economy, and be better future prepared.

To improve our collective future preparedness, we invite you to read Tuning into our Times, and discuss five assumptions, things that we might be in danger of taking for granted.

We’d welcome your thoughts and any links to resources that would contribute to developing the ideas in Tuning Into Our Times

There are two versions of Tuning Into our Times. The first version was prepared between August 2005 and July 2006. The second version was prepared for the Future Practitioners forum, an inter-departmental forum hosted by the State Services Commission in May 2007. It has more discussion about the impact of what is called Web 2.0, the interactive web, where users create and share content.