MIAMI _ With Florida schools reopening in the fall, youth sports and summer camps getting the OK to resume activity and local governments tip-toeing toward a sense of renewed normalcy, many Floridians ask: What should we expect as we look toward a postpandemic world?
According to noted futurist Amy Webb, we should not only expect more uncertainty, but lean into it.
"We expect today will be similar to tomorrow but amplified," she said during a Miami Herald subscriber-only discussion about the future of Florida after COVID-19. "There's a reluctance to see a world in which all decisions are certain."
Webb is a quantitative futurist and a professor of strategic foresight at the NYU Stern School of Business and Founder of the Future Today Institute. She is also the author of "The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream," which explains how to forecast emerging technology.
The hourlong conversation, moderated by Miami Herald Editorial Page Editor Nancy Ancrum, also featured panelists Elaine Black, president of the Liberty City Trust, Alex Jimenez-Ness, founder and executive chairman of medical device company Welwaze Medical, and Joanne Li, professor of finance at the Florida International University College of Business.
Webb said during these uncertain times, people should lean into the uncertainty instead of shy away from it. By being flexible, she said, people can do a better job of framing new ideas about what a future, postpandemic world will look like.
She used the example of the current administration, noting that strong political views but waffling on policy decisions leaves little room for the flexibility one needs to adapt to changing times.
"Leaning into uncertainty is a little like hydroplaning," she said. "You want to stay fixed on where you want to go but make small fixes until you right yourself."
Webb said the top question she hears from the public is the ask: "What is the new normal and when is it going to get here?"
The answer, she said, is nonexistent and implies that people want less change, not more.
The other panelists agreed.
Li, who has studied similar models to Webb, said the uncharted waters the nation is currently facing makes it hard to say what the "new normal" will be. In her sphere, education, she is advising that people take in incremental change and be adaptable.
Studying new data and sources of information as they are created will help people inform new decisions instead of rely on old ones.
"We have to have the understanding that we will have to accept change," she said.
In conclusion, Webb advised viewers at home to think like a futurist. Instead of speculate about the future, they should think of possible situations in five ways: a baseline future akin to the present, a reversal future in which we revert into past thinking and action (which Webb said America is going through today), a collapse future where there is tremendous failure, a transformational future in which the ideal state becomes a reality and last, the "black swan" future of pure chaos.
"The point of all of this is to aid in decision making," she said. "Planning for that in advance is a way of diffusing some of that anxiety."
