Lessons from living with the long view

Nobody knows for sure how human life will look 26 years from now, but Ana Carcani Rold has made it her life’s work to help people and institutions plan for whatever that may be. She’s a futurist and CEO of Diplomatic Courier, a magazine and media network for diplomats with its own think tank, called World in 2050. Even so, on a personal level — perhaps surprisingly — she remains deeply committed to the present, which is all that we can control.
Her calling was birthed in a hectic life that required a lot of looking ahead. She is also a board member of Smithsonian Science Education Center, co-founder of Learning Economy Foundation and a member of the National Press Club. She served on the Women’s Democracy Network advisory council and previously taught political science for 15 years at Northeastern University, with a master’s degree in international peace and conflict resolution at American University. She speaks five languages.
“There’s only so much time to do it all well,” Rold says, so she went all in on being organized. The future is her business, but it’s also personal: She wants her kids to thrive in a world that makes that possible. As one enters high school and the other middle school, she knows that their future may not resemble what past generations have faced. Their careers may not yet even exist. “My daughter’s in the Class of 2028,” she says. “By 2030, 60 percent of the jobs we take for granted right now, the industries we know, won’t exist.”
It’s a misunderstood craft. People think being in the strategic forecasting business means you’re foretelling the future, and it couldn’t be further from the truth. Futurists build scenarios so they can be better prepared. They’re strategic planners laying out various versions of what could happen. They look at trends, opinion polling, all sorts of different things. They also are students of history, because sometimes it’s easy to predict what could happen if you find out how people behaved in the past. But the No. 1 skill is being a good planner.
Megatrends are multidecades long. By connecting these, working on them in parallel, we have a better chance of helping the future to arrive well. One example is exponential technology radically reshaping the world. The big public discussion right now is about generative artificial intelligence, but we’ve been playing with small AI for a long time. We don’t realize how much that dictates how we love, care, hate and buy things. The underlying modern economy has been shaped by algorithms for 20 to 30 years. Another is energy transition and disruption due to climate change. It’s tied to conflict in certain parts of the world and you’re going to see massive demographic shifts that will affect geopolitical issues.
And this is the one you hear about the most on the news: societal and governance institutions under pressure. Polling data says we don’t trust institutions. We don’t trust people of authority as much as we used to, we don’t trust the media, we don’t trust our politicians, but we do trust at a community level. We distrust international institutions that used to be so well regarded, like the United Nations, but we trust our mom-and-pop shops or a local newspaper because we know those people and they’re part of our community.
That’s another example, grappling with the next rebalancing of education in the aftermath of the pandemic, the economic crisis and all the geopolitical uncertainty. At the same time, there’s a growing movement to radically transform how we do it. Education systems are no longer able to shape students to be ready for the future. And education is no longer linear. You don’t go in, do your four years, get a degree and spend 30 years in a career. Now people change paths four or five times in their lifetime. It’s more like a zigzag. You go in and out of institutions. You acquire skills in other places, so you’re learning everywhere and it happens all the time.
This is one that I’m passionate about — individual and societal well-being. Can we measure well-being in a way that tells us that society is thriving? If your people are happy, does that matter the same way that GDP matters? We can’t compartmentalize health anymore. We have hard data that shows that when people are flourishing, they have mental, physical, spiritual, intellectual and social health. We are made of all of these neurons, and for humans to flourish, all of them have to work together.
We talk about things that were unheard of before, that the people who will live to 1,000 have already been born. We’ve advanced in abundance, in ways that used to be thought of as science fiction. But it’s a paradox. Our children are suffering more and more from anxiety. Technology kind of owns them; it’s not a tool set for them. It’s robbing them of a real childhood or a way to advance. So there are true issues, anxieties we all feel and we’re trying to figure out what that means. So what, that AI is going to be able to write for me? So what, that AI is going to predict that I care more about this type of food versus another? It doesn’t do anything to advance human flourishing if it only replaces things we should be doing ourselves.
It’s increasingly difficult to retain top talent if you’re a company that doesn’t care about employees as individuals. You see the younger generation who are unabashed to talk about mental health, trauma and demand employers care about them too. Now you see more employers covering mental health. They’re recognizing that it is something they need to address. Data shows that if a person is suffering in any of these areas — add financial health as well — that if they’re worried about where their next meal is coming from, or if they don’t have a good job or don’t have shelter, they are not performing at work, and the company is suffering. It’s to the organization’s benefit to invest in employee well-being because it’s good for their bottom line.
Lots. As we go through this rapid technological advancement, we’re seeing that you need people with different skills. It used to be that you needed to be able to code, but now AI will do the coding for you. What you need is skills that technologies don’t have, what we used to call soft skills. Being a human being that’s flourishing, that has agility and resilience and tenacity and grit, all of those things that were nice to have now are critical skills. You need people who can do teamwork, who are emotionally intelligent, who are agile. When things are highly unpredictable, you need people who are grounded and have emotional stability, the skills to navigate problems with grit and help others to do the same.
I think about this a lot: Would I do things differently if I were to go back into my 20s? It’s a hard way of thinking about things as a futurist, because it brings regret. I would have done this a bit different, and then that mistake wouldn’t have happened, and things would have been easier. But that’s a useless exercise. It’s useless to think about the years before, and it’s useless to think about the years after. It’s very important that you think about the near term, right now, the present, because those are the years you have the most agency to change things. This is the decade where you can actually do something.
This story appears in the October 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.