“Being a good person” will become a profession. “A good person is not a profession. A good person will become a profession.”

But then, you ask, what about a skill that gives a person the opportunity to earn money? Take, for example, the old taxi drivers who kept a map of the city in their heads, knew the best routes, etc. It turns out that now the same task can be performed by a person who has just arrived in the city, using a navigator. That is, the idea that there is a competence that is guaranteed to feed a person throughout life is ending. The same thing can happen with almost any profession. This means: 1) a person must constantly update his type of activity; 2) in this complex, uncertain world, the winners are those who are able, huddled together in a group, to create a comfortable space within for mutual support. This group will invest some collective competence in the external environment. One will be in the field who is not a warrior. All other things being equal, what will benefit is not individual professionals, but the community, which becomes a space for joint development, renewal, doing something that people like, fits their lifestyle, etc. And they will obviously benefit from corporations, because corporations give power collective action, but does not provide meaningfulness and correspondence to the way of life. These new “communities of practice” will benefit both from the corporation and from the individual professional, be it a surgeon, a dentist, or an artist. Accordingly, idea number two in this world is that in addition to the fact that you must constantly be ready for personal changes, you must also be able to collaborate, find common meaning, create an environment, a community.

New family

On what principles can a “community of practice” be built? On the most different ones.

The next generation will be both more introverted and more interaction-oriented. Someone will completely go into the digital world: with the advent of augmented reality and other simulators, they will be able to lie in capsules, like in a matrix, and not get out anywhere, and someone, on the contrary, will say that the real world is the most interesting thing, because that it is more complex than what a computer can simulate.

There are already a huge number of communities, and there will be even more. The word “community” seems to me not entirely suitable for one simple reason: community is a form that has existed for a very long time, and we call this form some new quality, which partly looks like a traditional community, and partly like a new one. It's like families.

There is an assumption that many existing families, under the powerful influence of technological and social transformations, will fall apart, and are already falling apart. On the one hand, people are becoming more and more atomized, saying: “It’s easier for me to do it myself.” On the other hand, they discover that there are like-minded people, people similar to them, with whom they feel good. A reorganization occurs: from this community a new family or a new tribe begins to emerge on new grounds. We don’t even fully understand what it is, we just record what is happening.

"Gardener" - leader of a new era

For example, it is clear that in a situation “one man in the field is not a warrior,” people who have the competencies of cooperation, dialogue, including peacemaking, that is, the ability to work in non-conflict productive situations, win over those who do not have this ability. They will have a strategic advantage. They used to say, “a good person is not a profession.” Now a “good person” becomes a profession if he is the engine of this very community and creates the right emotional atmosphere in it. The tribe will be ready to share various resources with him - money, power, anything - so that he maintains the viability of the community. And those who know how to create such cells around themselves create a new world.

And these are not leaders in the usual sense. The leader of a feudal society is a knight with a sword, capable of cutting off the heads of all enemies and forcing his subjects to do his will. The leader of the new reality is a person who, perhaps, stands in the background, does not come forward. But he organizes the space in such a way that everyone around him enters the most productive mode of life. They enjoy it, they are interested, they do what they love and receive a decent energy resource for it. They feel that in their interaction a process of creativity, living energy, etc. is born. Someone must launch and create this kind of life-giving community. They are a kind of gardeners.

“The leader of the new reality organizes the space in such a way that everyone around him enters the most productive mode of life”

In the new reality of a complex society, it is not by chance that we use the term “gardener”. The transition to a complex society brings the human world much closer to biological systems. When you go into the forest, you see: here a tree grows, here a bunny runs, here a bird flies, here a squirrel jumps, here some beetles crawl. They are all very complex creatures, much more complex than the robots, programs, buildings that we build. At the same time, they are all somehow synchronized, a balance has been built between them. The forest grows as a whole and exists for thousands of years. This is an extremely complex system in which a huge number of information flows take place. This system does not need to be managed in order for it to develop, but it can be helped. And so foresters, gardeners are those who organize the right space so that living processes flow in the right direction.

Some people gradually begin to take on the role of this kind of manager. It is different, but strategically stable. A knight with a sword is not able to create a forest, he can only kill enemies and flog vassals with a whip. He is not able to create a space in which the vassals feel good, in which no one obeys him, but everyone is busy with what they need. This is the quality of a new leader. It is similar to what Lao Tzu once wrote about: the ideal ruler is the one whom no one sees or hears, but he guides everyone. This is where we are going - from cooperation to the ability to organize environments. Habitat, living environment, ecosystem. And gardeners environments have new leaders.

Lao Tzu Photo: wikimedia.org

We are now releasing a report on the topic of 21st century skills, where one of the theses is: in logic industrial society the main model is a car. A machine consists of parts, hence the idea of ​​human modularity. He's a cog in the machine. Not a simple screw made of one monoblock and alloy, but a complex prefabricated structure. He himself is seen as a machine into which we can put different competencies. And he should also be able to read, and we’ll also teach him how to hammer nails, and let’s add a little math to him. We assemble a person, like a machine from various parts, and say: “Go work as a cog in the social machine.”

In a complex world where the key metaphor is the forest, Live nature, we cannot say to a bunny: “Bunny, we sewed such an ear on you, go sit in this place, don’t move.” No, the bunny was born, grew up, runs around on its own, we can only create conditions for the bunny to feel good. A complex person is not assembled, he is grown, formed in complex environments, and he has some qualities that form the basis of his personality, capable of interacting with a complex world. In this sense, 21st century competencies such as the ability to cope with stress or the ability to learn and relearn are manifestations of the core of personality. The key concept is not career self-realization, not “I am like a professional,” but my interesting, high-quality, rich life.

At the same time, “rich inner world" means, oddly enough, the presence of internal paradoxes. There is in a person different types motivation, he doesn’t want just one thing, but different things. “He will plow the arable land, write poetry,” and get involved in politics. And this is all for fun, and it all complements him. And then it’s not even individual competencies that are important, but what is called an existential strategy. What lies at the core of this person’s existence, in his life path.

Without cattle and elites

I argue that this will happen if we discard the snobbery that is characteristic of the modern management system, which divides people into cattle and the elite. In fact, every person is quite complex.

Based on the trends we see, I think it's the prerogative to live difficult life will cease to be something that is only available to the elite. In the future, this opportunity will open up for everyone. It's a bit like walking into a big, well-designed online gaming world where we can create a character and start exploring the space, encountering all the different creatures that inhabit it...

“One of the main things that will be “reassembled” during the 21st century is the political structure of countries”

The transition from simple to complex is due to the fact that in simple situations one leader can, with his mind, consciousness or body, find the right way to act alone. In complex systems, one person’s competencies are not enough to feel them, pass them through and find the right solution. 70 years ago, cyberneticist William Ross Ashby described this as the law of requisite diversity. The systems that are managed and the systems that manage must match each other in complexity. This general principle, according to which all control systems work in all areas, be it the control of the brain, the body, or the control of the anthill, which the queen carries out with the help of pheromones, or how the forest self-coordinates.

Polycentric leadership is an inevitable consequence in a world of communities. Leaders will not be able to govern on the same basis; they must form a kind of tribal councils, agree on common meanings. In theory, this is precisely why the Internet was invented, and not to post cats or watch porn. In the 50-60s of the twentieth century, people came up with it as an environment in which they generate collective knowledge, distributing their cognitive abilities as efficiently as possible.

Leaders of countries at the G20 summit

Regulatory systems like politics and finance will undergo major overhauls over the coming decades. The elites may not want this. And this is the saddest thing, because, for example, the end feudal era in Europe, as is known, the 30 Years' War was the most destructive war of that period. But it cleared space for a new society. There is a risk that global elites will perceive the new situation as a threat to themselves. They won’t want to change, period: “We have resources, we are satisfied with the current structures of the economy, we are satisfied with the way society works.” The consequence could be a major war in which either society will reboot or humanity will be destroyed, which is a possible scenario for the 21st century.

But there is hope that modern elites will still be smarter than their predecessors. After all, for some reason we accumulated knowledge. They can say: “Guys, listen, if we don’t start changing, then we will simply be swept away by the wave of transformation.” This is a good script.

That is why we in the “Global Future of Education” define for ourselves the main task - the creation of supranational civil ways of cooperation between people. We are beginning to build parallel systems of the nervous tissue of global society that will help overcome the crisis peacefully. This is too powerful a civilizational movement; it does not depend on the election of specific leaders. We can only control the flow of the river; we cannot force it to stop. Or we can, but with catastrophic consequences. Our task is to prevent the river from demolishing everything that already exists.

Thank you for reading to the end!

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In recent decades, education has confidently become main value modern world, displacing what people used to value in earlier times - for example, money, origin, youth and beauty. It is not so important who you were born, what you have and whether you look good, how important it is what you have learned.

Moreover, these days students are sold not so much knowledge and a diploma as a way to work with information. Learn to think correctly, deftly handle the bottomless sources of data accumulated by humanity, notice and analyze signals coming from everywhere - and you will succeed, no matter what you undertake. It’s useless to hammer into your head the contents of the world’s libraries and everything that Google remembers, but if you know where to look, if you can see additional factors influencing the situation, and not confuse cause with effect, you’re cool.

But the restless consciousness loves to look for duality and pitfalls anywhere. For the Russian ear, the word “education” breaks down into contradictory concepts: on the one hand, something formative - creating and structuring, something that, in fact, molds you into a personality; on the other hand, it is an image, something external, façade, temporary and inauthentic. And it seems like this is an outdated conflict that rural writers adored - “hey, you graduated from universities, surpassed all kinds of sciences, but never became a man” - but it’s impossible to completely get rid of it.

More and more often I meet excellent, sought-after specialists, with a good professional reputation, who are not confined to work - they travel, enjoy exploring the world, and feel at home in European cultural salons and in American scientific circles. And at the same time, in private statements they are capable of completely savage discourse, broadcasting something dense, xenophobic, misogynistic or something else.

A nice girl from St. Petersburg, incredibly easy to collaborate with, suddenly mentions gays who need to be treated, and not recognized as normal. So, should you cancel all joint projects from now on?

A wonderfully educated - that is, by all accounts “well-made” - Israeli of Soviet origin makes a phrase about “mudbloods,” Jews of insufficient quality who have no place in his country. And you become confused, because in Russia you basically didn’t get close to people who could say “let the Jews go to their Israel,” and now you have a guy with the same construction in your friends.

A wonderful man of Caucasian nationality, a Muscovite, who graduated from a decent university, is helpful and infinitely polite, relaxes and accidentally discovers an abyss: he drops just a couple of words, from which it is obvious that representatives of other nations are not entirely human for him, unsuitable for friendship, creating a family, no matter what. there was no deep relationship. And the point is not even in preserving blood, but in the fact that the “others” are not pure enough.

A highly paid programmer, who will be welcome in any country in the world, says about a girl (calmly, as if it were obvious), that there are no women with such an exterior or age, this is unsuitable biological material. And he, of course, is ready to talk with “this” and even work, but respect - excuse me.

And now I won’t even mention politics, about whom various worthy professionals propose to put in place, expel, kill, dehumanize.

And you seem to understand that your personal tolerance allows for other people’s opinions, traditions, tastes and beliefs - in a word, any otherness that these people do not allow others, but you are not like that. And they do not harm the mentioned categories of the population, they simply convey a personal attitude, just They say about this - and you are for freedom of speech, by the way. And you come into contact with them at points where these views do not decide anything; your cooperation takes place on other planes - not about sex, gender, religion or origin. And even, from their point of view, you are one of the “full-fledged” ones; no one personally sends you to the furnace. But how do you cope with the feeling that you are negotiating with a group of dressed-up savages and one of them has the shin bone of the previous negotiator hidden in their house?

True, these days the idea of ​​reputation is returning, which completely disappeared in the last century.

When people used to live in gated communities, an individual's reputation was everything. The world was quite transparent, and people saw who was what in private life. Few people wanted to deal with a bad guy, no matter what kind of a master he was - they used his services only involuntarily, all other things being equal, choosing a “good person”. The criteria for “goodness” could be different, but on average one had to comply with the accepted norms and not commit evil acts in everyday life.

Subsequently, communities opened up, but private life, on the contrary, became closed, and we began to navigate by facades. Professionals were increasingly chosen based on the quality of their work and depth of knowledge, while personal qualities faded into the background. Moreover, a slightly wild specialist was considered a pretty exotic - the image of a strange type with golden hands (head) gained attractiveness. What he was doing there during non-working hours seemed unimportant, and whether he beat his wife or tyrannized the cats, no one really knew.

And suddenly we had social networks, and everyone’s stupidity became visible. And the media began to quickly spread any statements made by public figures. But the main thing, of course, is that people began to write on the Internet with their own fingers. Now it is very difficult to hide from the knowledge that the employee you need is in free time goes to some radical marches, watches “House 2” and, yes, tyranns the cats. You naturally choose people not only by their professional reputation, but also by their manner of commenting on social networks and by their belief systems - because, as noted, you don’t want to find yourself in a circle of cannibals disguised as clerks.

And the endlessly respected education suddenly began to lose value, not being supported by culture, tolerance and good character. A good person, fortunately, is still not a profession, but a fairly full-fledged criterion. Therefore, if you lack empathy, you are radical and peremptory, irritable and a little obscurantist, it makes sense to stop being proud of this and pay a little attention to your public statements - no matter what university you graduated from.

From the editor

Even a large number of formations does not guarantee avoidance of those very notorious rake that each of us stumbles upon, dreaming that this would be the last time. The book by Andre Kukla will tell you how to not let your brain deceive you. “Mental traps. Stupid things that reasonable people do to ruin their lives.": .

The words “success”, “self-realization” and “destination” are often equated. Of course, somewhere in ideal world you purposefully and consistently achieve financial and social success, realizing your purpose. But in real world Self-realization and purpose do not always go hand in hand. How are they different? Look for the answer in an article by a psychologist Yaroslav Voznyuk: .

Becoming the best version of yourself, constantly improving with the help of popular psychological books, is already a thing of the past, says Danish psychologist Sven Brinkman. We read his book “The end of the era of self-help. How to stop improving yourself" and wrote down the main thoughts: .