In case you were wondering, no, Peter Senge does not now speak in a strange collection of undecipherable symbols. That was me trying to post from my mobile phone while I was at a conference hearing Senge speak. Something obviously went screwy with Typepad’s mobile blogging software. Hope it was a one time thing.

I was trying to give you a pithy quote from Peter Senge’s keynote at the conference (it was the annual meeting of the Chesapeake Bay Organization Development Network). He said a LOT of great things at this conference, and I plan on several blog posts about them, although I do need to stew on them a bit. But one of the first things he said was the quote I was sharing:

The only thing that is clear about the future is that it isn’t going to be like the past

We tend to view the future as a relatively simple extrapolation of what’s going on now (the future will be like today, but cell phones will be faster…). Systems thinking shows that not to be true.