Looking back

One of the images most present in our minds during this financial crisis is the depresssion that began with the crash of 1929, almost eighty years ago. We talk about its causes, the institutions that were created to avoid repeating it, and the pictures of employment lines and Grapes of Wrath type migrations.

One comfort during these times is the FDIC --which guarantees that savings won't be wiped out when banks get into trouble. We look to this protection with pride about what our government will do for the good of Americans and congratulate ourselves for successful learning.

What learning or institution will we look back to with pride eighty years from now? What will come out of this crisis, which is arguably more significant given the degree to which our economy is now globalized?

Creating new institutional protections and prohibitions on profligate risk taking is a no brainer. I hope that this will be a turning point of a different sort. I'd like to look back to the crisis of 2008 and remember a cognitive and behavioral shift in our very habits of decision making.

Looking back from 2089, 2008 will be the time when leaders and ordinary citizens alike learned to imagine futures very different from the ones they expect. This will be when we learned to adjust our thinking and judgment to an inherently uncertain environment; when adhering blindly to status quo thinking became archaic, like holding court with kings or relegating women to the home.

Rather than an institution like FDIC, we will have created an institution to focus the nation on building capacity to think the unthinkable, to develop personal resilience, and to know how to survive and thrive at a time of discontinuous change.

Just as we now see information technologies as essential to every aspect of our lives, by 2089 we will have developed social technologies that allow us to exercise and train our minds to think the unthinkable and to have the emotional intelligence to maximize our collective potential.

This is just a snippet of a much longer thought. We need to begin to focus not just on rules, regulations, and protections, but on the cognitive and leadership capacities that will support the new rules. If we don't, they will be empty, like the rituals of a religion we go through by rote. And we'll continue to move from crisis to crisis without much progress.