At the end of the 80“s, there were barely 10 years left for the change of millennium. I was a little girl and lived oblivious to calendars, days, let alone millennia, until one day my older brother brought a Miguel Rios album. It was called ”Rock and Rios". Wow, I loved his music! Then a song started playing:
“[...] it is the time of change....
chroniclers, sorcerers and saints are born...
hallucinate about what's to come...
they say that the end of the millennium...
if we do not remedy today...
we will have hunger, stick and pollution [...]”.
But his refrain made my hair stand up even more and ended my desire to dance:
“Year two thousand, the year two thousand arrives and the millennium will bring,
a brave new world,
a place of terror,
there will simply be NO LIFE ON THE PLANET...”
Uff, what a night I spent! I was scared, really...what a mystery...but..., What was going to happen? Was it going to be the end of the world? And how should we prepare?
The next day I made a plan: I got a backpack and filled it with food, toys, a blanket, water and my favorite Alice in Wonderland story. I hid it under the bed and thought, “Now I'm ready”.
2020 is approaching, and according to the experts, in that year great and important changes are foreseen. I remember the day I heard that song, (although today it has nothing to do ... the generations have changed and we are already on the Z, those destined to dominate the world, which undoubtedly play with a lot of advantage unlike those who were born in Generation X, that although in the alphabet separates us only one letter, many changes have rained since then, especially access to information. I think about it and I imagine that day, if I had Google I probably would have been able to sleep more peacefully... or not. But let's go back to the beginning, I'm starting to disperse and at the end I write an article within a parenthesis ;).
In 2020 the transformation will be much greater than what we have seen in the last decade: genomics, nanotechnology, robotics, augmented reality, virtual reality, industrial revolution, the whole world will be connected and we will find everything on search engines.. Even the consulting firm Gartner, in a recent study it has presented, predicts that in the year of the double 20 we will converse more with robots than with our partner. Excuse me? And you are not afraid?... Personally, this makes me technophobic.
But do we feel ready, what is our level of digital maturity, do we have our backpack ready to meet the needs and survive 2020?
So that it doesn't happen to you as it did to me, and you can sleep tonight after reading this article, I have prepared a plan, a list of tips for us to digitally transform ourselves and survive that year, The event, already marked as transcendental for the world.
- Tip No. 1Open your mind: Open yourself to new perspectives, approaches, to what is different, to what may bother you, to your fears ... we need to have a 360º vision. Dare to leave your comfort zone, you will have the opportunity to have a new vision of reality, but this time full of opportunities and motivations.
- Council No. 2 . Adaptability, I'm here now. The ability to adapt quickly to new trends and opportunities is fundamental and indispensable for survival.
- Tip No. 3. Digital communication. We must be able to communicate, relate and collaborate with each other efficiently with digital tools and in digital environments.
- Council No. 4 . My new social state: State of continuous growth: I believe we need to be in a state of constant revolution. We cannot make a change and then just sit back and wait for it to happen. We need to build new impulses and rhythms to see ourselves reflected in the new reality.
- Tip No. 5 Capacity for renewal. Although it sounds like a cliché, it is true: renew or die. It is a good idea to study new technologies because the labor market is also changing.
- Council No. 6 Allowing for failure: what we often forget is that allowing failures is a necessary precondition for innovation. Innovation is about trying new things and taking risks. If you want to be innovative, you must allow yourself to try, take some risk and sometimes fail.
- Council No. 7 Agile. Agile methodology is, or implies, basically four things: 1) continuously generate value, 2) Adaptation, 3) Collaboration, 4) Continuous improvement. Focus your own transformation to this methodology.
All of these changes are gradual and small steps are necessary to bring them about, but humans are wonderfully adaptable and I am confident that we will ride the crest of the technology wave and make it through 2020, which, as of today, is as full of uncertainty as 2000 was for me.