I’m a Trekkie. Always have been. Kirk was okay, but from Picard on I was all in. My mother and I spent whole days in front of the TV with Janeway, Sisko and the rest of the crew. I’ve seen almost everything there is, and to this day the Star Trek series are my reason for having Prime and Netflix. And I still believe it’s worth dreaming up a utopia, for your own team and company too.
Utopias and Dystopias
Two things fascinated me.
- The recurring philosophical debate about questions like: What is “right”? What do values mean? The ethical weighing of life, freedom, self-determination and influence. The answer was rarely simple. It usually took a new perspective on the problem.
- I loved the distant future the shows painted. A union of cultures that had largely left money behind and drew motivation and meaning from developing themselves, humanity and others, backed by technology in abundance. Of course, not everything in these stories was great either: hierarchies, a push for sameness and, despite all the “strange new worlds and new civilizations,” little individuality or diversity. But the utopia Gene Roddenberry created gave my thoughts wings and made me curious. Far more than dystopias ever did, whether zombie apocalypses, pandemics 😬 or alien invasions.
Why Humanity Lags Behind Technology
On the way into the future, technology is moving at breakneck speed. Tablets are as normal in our lives as they are for Jean-Luc Picard, we can (more or less) talk to computers, and we can reach the whole world at the push of a button. A lot has happened under the hood, too: big advances in battery technology thanks to the electric car boom, and quantum computers with immense potential. With Vantablack we now have the blackest black there is, absorbing 99.965% of incoming light. The California Life Company (Calico, a sister company of Google) is researching how we can live longer. With models like Atlas and Spot, Boston Dynamics shows the astonishingly organic motor coordination robots are capable of today. iPhones and iPads now come with a lidar system for scanning the 3D environment on top of their high-end cameras. Autonomous driving keeps getting more reliable and safer … You might be tempted to say: “We’ve got this.”
Technological development left us humans behind on speed a long time ago. We’re just not that fast. Evolution has its own laws of development and time. We’re still looking for food, shelter, belonging and, more recently, meaning. We need either a crisis or time to change … there’s room for improvement. But one look at how we live together (in families, companies, communities or Facebook comment sections) shows that these days we have very different concerns than “developing ourselves and humanity and exploring new worlds.”
And the pressure is high! We’re constantly being scolded, or scolding ourselves: “Get out of your comfort zone! Change! Keep up with the times! Be more agile! Do this! Do that!” All of that takes time, and we don’t give ourselves that time. A guilty conscience is guaranteed.
A Breath of Federation Air in the Daily Grind
Of course, we don’t have to do anything at all. Not be agile. Not go vegan. Not think about it. Let’s leave things as they are. Keep the system running. But in all the everyday hustle, we rarely look beyond our own plate anymore. Instead, we zero in on the hair in our pea soup and complain that it needs more salt … or less.
Lifting your gaze and dreaming up a utopia for the future does more than prevent a stiff neck and a stiff mind. Turning your focus to the final frontier changes your thinking and the moment.
A Utopia for Your Team and Company
We should think much more often about how we actually want to live. What utopia do we want for ourselves? It doesn’t have to be a United Federation of Planets. Let’s start by tidying up on a small scale. With ourselves, in our own context and in our companies. What should the future look like? How do we want to work? What should relationships in the team be like? How do we handle our products and services? And be concrete about it. Just scrape the yellowed company vision off the lobby wall and: dream. Expand your mind.
And before you know it … you’ve already taken the first step toward the future.
