To future-proof is a verb. It's an action term.

To take action to make your firm, our communities, this business, and our world fit for tomorrow, here's a unique and compelling opportunity: Hive 2019.

Wikipedia, a place where wisdom-of-crowds definitions, meanings, and what matters to people intersect, says this about "future-proofing."

[It's] the process of anticipating the future and developing methods of minimizing the effects of shocks and stresses of future events. Future-proofing is used in industries such as electronics, medical industry, industrial design, and more recently, in design for climate change. The principles of future-proofing are extracted from other industries and codified as a system for approaching an intervention in an historic building.

We've been obsessing here about "shocks and stresses of future events." Once upon a time, up until about 15 years or so ago, four of them might have been thought about roughly like this.

  • Home sites will cost too much, and are laden with excessive regulatory burden, adding 30% to 40% to asking prices.
  • Skilled construction workers will be too scarce, and disappearing by the day; and together with productivity losses due to inefficient, technologically-outdated processes, add another 20% to 25% to asking prices.
  • Loans to both home building firms and to potential mortgage borrowers, while low in cost, will be too hard to qualify for, given new baseline requirements and scorecards for access to the credit box.
  • Buildings will generate upwards of 40% of annual global greenhouse gas emissions.

As our reference notes, "future-proof refers to the ability of something to continue to be of value into the distant future--that the item does not become obsolete."

Now, if you embrace a theory that we're apt to overestimate extents of change in the near term, and underestimate the magnitude of change in the more distant future, you may be nodding your head right now. These four "shocks and stresses" were once the future, and now they're big-time sources of friction in the path of those who want to experience the future.

Today's set of shocks and stresses of future events--amplified, accelerated, and augmented by technology and data--pose existential risks:

  • Loss of relevance
  • Obsolescence
  • Loss of trust
  • Insolvency
  • Disruption
  • Extinction
  • Worse

Challenges of a future that now matters more than all of the stored knowledge and sage experience of the past create shocks and stresses to our tools, to our devices, to our careers, to our homes, to our business models, to our industries, to our neighborhoods, and to our ecosystem of communities that relate and inter-depend.

This is why we've focused Hive 2019, December 4th and 5th in Austin, on conversation and engagement that will empower participants to act, to future-proof, to become more resilient, more capable of continuing to be of value, more fit to flourish despite shocks and stresses of future events. Check out the Hive event summary and register here.