James, Jennifer, Thinking In The Future Tense: Leadership skills for a new age, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, 254 pages, ISBN 0-684-81098-0.

American society (and the healthcare world many of us work in) is changing at an unprecedented pace. The changes taking place now normally take two or three generations to be assimilated; but, we are trying to make the stretch in a decade! The only thing constant is constant pressure to learn faster, think smarter, and free oneself from confining assumptions and old mindsets.
How does one separate old cultural beliefs from new realities? Survival will require perspective (identifying the important changes), energy (doing more with less), and a “menagerie” mind (the ability to create new patterns). If one’s perceptions and policies are clouded by nostalgia, the resulting hiring, firing, evaluation, and conflict resolution errors will cost precious time, money, and goodwill. The ability to think on the edge of one’s culture is crucial.

Ms. James is an urban cultural anthropologist with a special interest in adaptive strategies--how people survive in times of change. Does the following quote seem like déjà vu?

When I talk with workers about how things are going in their companies, they tell me their managers often don’t know what they are doing and won’t listen to what the workforce has to say. When I talk with the managers, they admit to confusion but tell me they must follow ambivalent orders from executives. When I talk to the executives, they will sometimes admit to anxiety, not knowing what to do with conflicting goals...When I ask teachers, “What are you doing to help our children develop the skills to handle this shift and cross safely into the next century?” they tell me, “We’re waiting for the administrators to die!”...They do not believe that people with vested interests in the systems of the past will be able to make the necessary gut-level and mind-level decisions fast enough to accommodate change...

The new economic reality is that work will become 80% cerebral and 20% manual--the opposite at the beginning of this century! Humankind has gone from hunter-gatherer (10 million years) to agriculture (eight thousand years) to urban industry (two hundred years) to...a global service world speeding toward a bioeconomy that combines gene manipulation with electronics (“brains, technology, and services”). If not careful, much of society will end up “burnt out,” disenfranchised, and rife with depression, exhaustion, and paranoia.

One needs the ability to “think in the future tense.” This will involve eight skills: 1) Perspective; 2) Pattern recognition; 3) Cultural knowledge (Myths and symbols); 4) Flexibility; 5) Vision; 6) Energy; 7) Intelligence; and 8) Global values. A chapter is devoted to each of these and the skills needed to succeed at them are summarized.

For example, most of us are in the “perspective” phase, and she summarizes the skills needed as follows: The ability to relax; A sense of humor; Insight and intuition; Knowledge of your personal history; Knowledge of your culture’s history; Resilience; Multiple sources of information; Attention to the repressed; High tolerance for chaos; The ability to insulate your hot buttons; The ability to empathize; and Time to visualize.

The book is written quite conversationally in a low key, intellectually humorous style. It is a deceptively easy read that will cause many unpredictable “aftershocks.” Highly recommended.

I have heard Ms. James speak and was on the edge of his seat for 90 minutes. There is no better book for getting anyone...repeat, anyone “outside the box” to face the realities of relentless change. She also has three videos available on this material.