Around the world in 80—er, more like 8!—days

Fly me into the future

In the coming weeks, with the work I have booked, I will be flying to Qatar, India, Singapore, San Francisco, Austin, and then back to New York, making the first time in all my travels I'll ever have literally gone all the way around the world in one sequence of trips.

Among the highlights of this trip: a week from today (give or take a few time zones), I will be delivering a keynote on “The Tech Humanist Future” at the Gartner IT Symposium in Kochi, India. It's going to be an exciting trip, a wonderful opportunity to meet business and tech leaders from the region, and, well, a great part of this journey circumnavigating the globe.

A few days later, I'll be in Texas, delivering the keynote at a conference for facilities coordinators in higher education about the future of education, the future of place, and how tech might fit into it all.

The future of this, the future of that. With COP27 happening this week (a client and I were discussing my being there this week, too, as I was for COP25), there are reminders everywhere of how interconnected all of these future concepts are. The climate is surely the biggest theme, but we are falling short of all of the Sustainable Development Goals — such as SDG 4, Quality Education, for example — and they all interconnect.

(Mind you, I know better than many people might from my own A Future So Bright research and writing that the climate costs of air travel are high, and I cannot help but wrestle with the ethics of this dilemma while addressing an increasingly global audience, but for the moment knowing that cost commits me to make the Tech Humanist / A Future So Bright message that much more urgent and clear for the leaders who are poised to move it forward. I also use services like Wren and Goodwings to invest in credible offset programs. This is the answer for now; that answer may very well change in the years ahead.)

Given that, here in the U.S., we just ended Daylight Saving Time (and are supposedly on the cusp of never? always? having it? I haven’t kept up with all the hot DST-or-not goss; I’ve been too focused on the Twitter drama), it’s an interesting moment to ponder the nature of, y’know, time and space. In other words, that flying east-to-west is flying into the past, and flying west-to-east is flying into the future.

Which means, on my particular around-the-world trip, I will be flying into the future the entire way. Kind of appropriate, n'est-ce pas?

In the meantime, I'm excited to share the stage in Kochi with several of Gartner's top analysts as well as the former Prime Minister of Bhutan, Dasho Tshering Tobgay, who helped advocate the Gross National Happiness principles.

By the time I land back in New York at the exhausted end of next week, I hope to have gained new insight, shared some new ways of thinking and leading, and become a better advocate for humanity.

I’ll be sure to report back what I learn from the future.