A brief post with a humorous undertow.
In June I published the Second Revised Edition of my book “Engineering Education in a Rapidly Changing World“. On page 22 I included the disclaimer “What we do know is that tomorrow’s world will be an intense VUCA world… great advances are unpredictable, future scenarios thus full of uncertainty. We might miss a next revolution…..”
I had not expected that in less than seven months after its publication I already had missed the first revolution. And that our view on the world would shift so much and so fast after the Brexit and Trump’s victory. Fortunately we Dutch have a good sense of humour to handle these rapid changes, and highly appreciate freedom of speech. On January 23 the programme “VPRO Zondag met Lubach” on Dutch television blew our minds with the funny comedy sketch “America first, the Netherlands second” (25,900,000 views in 2017). We may be a small country, but sometimes have great visions… Probably most Trump supporters do not understand the jokes and will refer to Helmut Schmidt’s quote instead:
„Wer Visionen hat, sollte zum Arzt gehen.“
I am happy that the changes in our world in the past couple of months confirm, that skills such as critical thinking, strategic thinking, empathy, a global mindset, imagination, creativity, initiative, handling failure, correlating chaos, and intercultural communication are all skills that remain important or are gaining prominence. For engineers as well as other professionals and anybody else. And thus I don’t see the need for a Third Revised Edition of my report on the future of engineering education, because it is all contained already in the second edition. Thank God. But nobody will deny that change is going really fast, and is accelerating!