The Future of Humanitarian Skills: New Report with Humanitarian Leadership Academy
Jeremy Kirshbaum
In Business, Design, High Delta Markets Posted October 19, 2019
In the world of 2030, the humanitarian sector will be a tangled web of distributed networks, newly powerful nations, altruistic individuals and opportunistic profiteers. They will continuously shape and reshape, forming quickly around an issue and dissolving as quickly as they appeared.
We just released a report with the Humanitarian Leadership Academy about the future of skills in the humanitarian sector. It’s based on field work in Jordan and the Philippines, and interviews with experts across the world. Download and read the full report here:
In this report, we look forward to the future of humanitarian skills in 2030, to help humanitarian workers prepare for the decade ahead. The world of the next decade will be faced with crises at never-before-seen scale and magnitude. Old forms of crises like famine and armed conflict will take on new shapes as technology and society advance, and emerging forms of crises like “computational crises” will become part of everyday life. Humanitarian workers will need new skills to face this future, to reduce human suffering with all the advantages of cutting edge organizing methods and technologies. No one can predict the future, but we can prepare for it.
By using the methods of strategic foresight, this report forecasts the future and brings it to life through analysis, scenarios, and archetypes. Anyone working in the humanitarian sector, or anyone aligned with its purpose, can use this report to better inform what skills to start learning today, to create the future that we wish to see, and prepare for the unforeseeable disruptions ahead.
We are also preparing to release a virtual reality experience on the Oculus store to bring parts of this future to life, so stay tuned!
Thanks to everyone that worked on this project over the last few months, including Atish Gonsalves for his co-authorship, Lenny Kirshbaum, Joseph Andrews, and Anum Ahmed for their writing contributions, Isabella Schreiber for her design leadership, Noah Miska for his illustrations and editing, Anne Garcon for her help getting the details right, and Lisa Kirshbaum for her final push across the finish line.
As always, if you get a chance to read through it and something sparks an idea, reach out at jjkirshbaum@gmail.com and let’s chat about it!
