Learning from the future
Join Us in shaping the future by contributing to our world, rather than using it.
Current Challenges
The challenges we face today are asking for more than just learning from our past experiences and intelligence. It is our habit to expand and renew the content of what we already know to shape the future. However, if we refuse to transform our methods, our intentions and our principles, we obstruct our way into the future.
Learning From The Future
Our habitual approach to the future is to rework, innovate and add knowledge to the past. We are skilled in using plans, methods, ideas, solutions, etc. Our belief is we better ourselves over time and we can only gain knowledge by using our intelligence to try and test our ideas and learn from the results. Intelligent learning provides innovation and progress. If that is needed we can use all our proven approaches and methods and stick with your beliefs.
If we are honest and look at all the challenges facing us today, we should start learning from the future. This approach enables us to get to know the full result, impact and consequences of all we do and will do, as we do it. So for example, in order to changes the impact, we transform our intentions.
At first glance, this sounds easy and something we already do. But in practise is a very hard and demanding exercise to change your plans or intentions, let alone your principles. This is due to how we are trained (educated on the basis of the past) and the myth of learning by mistakes (created by our objectivism).
To connect to the future you will have to let go of all you want, know and believe in. The future communicates what could be, but the less our observation and information processing abilities are “occupied” by our past, the more we perceive. Therefore, learning from the future starts with training our observation and communication to be become “history free”. This is a skill we all have, but our conscious learning ability (as we call it) is not nearly as well developed as our past based intelligent learning ability.
Our Approach
At Act to Be, we work with the root causes of which all the problems, symptoms and challenges are just the messengers. To work with a root-cause you cannot use any existing method, theory or approach, but you will have to design those along the way. In other words you do not know what we are going to do at the start of the transformation.
Therefore the only thing we can offer is our understanding of the principles behind learning from the future.
To create a future we need to work with the people concerned, in real time, real environment, real situation.
And the focus has to be contributing to the other, the situation, the solution, the future. Self-interest or collective self-interest is an obstacle, because it is always based on the past.
4 Intentions from which we work:
Experience of ease, Experience of form, Experience of beauty, Experience of wholeness
2 working principles:
Uniqueness & Wholeness
Any “future design” done without these principles will be problematic in the future because of its inability to foresee impact and consequences.
A gentle warning
We are NOT offering intelligent foresight approaches: Scientific Modelling, Artificial Intelligent future design, innovation techniques, scenario thinking, extrapolations, brainstorm sessions, planning and projecting and so on. These are outstanding and proven methods to create progress and innovation. They also have unwillingly caused most of the problems we are dealing with nowadays.
Our Services
Our first, foremost and free service is having conversations and activities to explore the emerging shape of the future.
Real dialogue and exploring activities are pivotal steps to help us to connect to the future. The design, impact and consequences present themselves, when we are able to deal with the unknown, the unforeseen, the unexpected as signposts.
It is our firm belief that we can help you, assist you, train you, but the people of your organisation, area, team, club, family are the ones that provide the way forward, by learning from the future. That is why the next possible steps are explained below.
Future-Focused Training
Our training programmes are designed to equip individuals with the skills needed to provide future in a rapidly changing world (dominated by the past. We focus on practical, hands-on learning that can be immediately applied.
Collaborative Consulting
We offer consulting services that emphasize collaboration. Our approach ensures that solutions are tailored to your unique future and are grounded in reality.
Future Contributing Programmes
Together we will craft future-proof programmes to address contemporary challenges and opportunities. We provide a range of options that cater to different industries and sectors, all designed to foster a connection to the future.
Skills & Tools
Let's Meet
I am your first contact person in exploring the possibilities of collaboration.
My name is Peter Paul Gerbrands and I have a lifetime of work experience in companies, city districts, governments and local organisations.
The accurate but limited impact of everything we did urged me to explore the leading philosophers from the last century. We developed a new approach to the future, based on their work. I have been assisting people and organisations in those transformations and metamorphoses for the last 20 years.
- I am just the frontman of a diverse and talented group of people that is able to provide learning from the future.
- Among them organisational consultants, professors in future studies, designers, artists, directors (both organisation and stage), cleaners, dancers, illustrators, barista’s, software designers, workers in difficult area’s in cities, aldermen, etc.
- We are all particularly alert to the fact that our past experiences can only be used when called upon by the future and not to create a future.
Get in Touch
We’d love to hear from you! Reach out to learn more about how Act to Be can help you connect to the future through our lectures, training, programmes, and consulting services.