Trendrede 2011

This Trendrede 1 , is an initiative of Dutch trend watchers and

futurethinkers; a collective statement about the future of our nation. This
initiative did not appear out of the blue, as new developments never do. It
is the time for it. There is uncertainty about the future and media and
politics are looking at the present and the past –“What happened?” – rather
than looking at the future. Right around the corner from our time, several
significant revolutions lie in wait. The way we live, work, consume and
communicate will radically change. We think the Netherlands has a need
for guidance towards the future, in addition to analysis of the past.

The Troonrede 2 is a product of politics. But the future is in the hands of

governments, citizens and corporations. This Trendrede is an autonomous vision
of Dutch trend watchers. In the Trendrede we will shine our light on the influence
citizens and corporations have on society. With our knowledge and our talent we
wish to contribute to the future of the society we ourselves are a part of. We
want to inspire the Netherlands by illuminating the most promising paths to the
future. We will not illuminate those roads that we see are dead ends. The
Trendrede manifests the undertow of current affairs, but deliberately does not
portray it. We make concrete recommendations and proposals for the future of
the Netherlands. If the Netherlands wishes to ride along on the waves of
tomorrow, we must gauge the current and undercurrent of the waves today.

Chapter 1. Country between hope and despair

“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity;

an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”
Winston Churchill

The Netherlands. Country between hope and despair. Over the years, dark clouds
have accumulated over the nations economy and culture. Seemingly unshakeable
authorities have fallen off their pedestal or have been pushed off. Family doctors,
police, politicians, journalists and judges are no longer the points of reference in
our everyday lives. Anchors have been swept away, groups within society have
been driven apart and society seems adrift. Truth and opinion blend into a social
fog, leaving everyone finding their way by touch.
The result is a widening gap running deep through Holland. A gap between those
feeling displaced and threatened by cultural developments and those grasping
these same developments as an opportunity for breaking through. Half of the
Netherlands is clinging to the emergency brake, while the other half puts their
foot down firmly on the accelerator.
We see people -slumbering at first, but now more and more overtly- regrouping.
Citizens on both sides of the gap are no longer finding their salvation in

1 The document title ‘Trendrede’, or ‘address of trends’, will not be translated

throughout the document.
2 Every September, the Dutch queen addresses the nation in a speech called

‘Troonrede’ or ‘address of the throne’.

traditional parties, established institutions and churches. For this reason, they
organize themselves in alternatives, from residents committees to online
networks. Every community has its own vernacular, truths, standards and
values. From the sideline, fellow citizens are being accused of offensive behavior
and exclusion. Politics are being accused of crime and dichotomy and being
governed by market forces, CEOs of being greedy and of squandering Dutch
interests. To whom new diseases, floods and other environmental disasters can
be attributed is still unclear, but unsettling nonetheless. For those problems that
cannot be solved, the complete removal is advocated. And we expect the years of
clear felling still have not past. There are still more claims to be settled: Think of
pension funds, healthcare issues in politics, areas in which the way of working,
the attitude and the provision of services are no longer accepted. Citizens are
disillusionedly turning away from those traditional organizations that no longer
live up to the heightened expectations. For those lacking the strength to take
matters into their own hands, a collective, blatant ‘no’ allows them to exert
power. The balance of power within society is changing: By mass rejection, the
desperate leave a firm mark on the political and cultural landscape.
Let’s look at the hopeful side. Far away from the ‘angry laggards’, the world of
the young, fast and freely surfing professional is rapidly developing. The
unstoppable energy (built up over the years) of this group will inspire a lot of
societal innovation. They build hope to face the despair. They view reality in a
different way and enrich it by holding it against a new yardstick. New points of
reference mean new starting points and therefore new goals and new results.

Remarkable is that first of all, in many areas, new instruments are devised that
reach further than any purely economical measure does. The state of mind in the
nation is held against a collective production figure: almost an anachronism.
Next to quantity, people want to measure quality, next to prosperity they want to
measure wellbeing. French president Sarkozy assigned Nobel laureates Joseph
Stiglitz and Amartya Sen the task of finding an alternative to the Gross Domestic
Product. The report states that the French expendable income is only two-thirds
of the American one. But when the quality and availability of education and
healthcare, the honorary work in family and community and the amount of
leisure time are taken into account, the income rises up to 87 percent of the
American income. The report implies that someone working many hours in a
society with little communal sense, education or healthcare is only statistically
more prosperous. By measuring economic and cultural progress in a different
way, we refocus our energy. And what we can measure, we can specifically
change.

Another example. The Netherlands is classified at the top of the world when it
comes to perceived happiness. New generations of youngsters score so well on
self-confidence (Review of General Psychology, September 2010) that the
current measures so not suffice. Researchers argue that Maslow’s pyramid needs
a new layer, because in western society the current top layer of self-actualization
has long been achieved. In the United States this layer is called ‘parenting’
(caring for a new generation), Dutch researchers adopt the broader term ‘giving
meaning’. Het Financiele Dagblad and Academia Aemstel researched the current
perception of work: “Many people in fact do not know what to do, how to grow
and what to experience ‘beyond Maslow’. Even more amazing and longer
vacations, more swimming pools around the house and even more gurus with
their own vision? Is doesn’t inspire any longer. We don’t want to be consumers.
We want to participate in our own world and do not want to have lived without
purpose.” A recent documentary, ‘Alles wat we wilden’ (Everything we wanted),
on the motives of people in their twenties, deepens that image. These people
seemed to strive for a life that is worth remembering.

‘Servant leadership’ is a dominant subject in present day management literature.

A third measure elicits new goals in the economy. What do we expect from our
leaders? That they rise above their own self-interest and are able to link the
individual meaning of employees to the organizational interest at every level in
the organization, and then that organizational interest to societal values. The
servant leader transfers the attention from the quarterly account to the long-
term policy of the organization. In order to grow himself, he knows he must
invest in all elements of the production chain, the whole team working in unison
towards results. From women a more binding, servant leadership is expected.
Despite the presentation of the new government suggesting otherwise, female
leadership is still a debatable item in the media. It is for this reason that, amongst
others, psychologist Susanne Pinker and EU-commissioner Neelie Kroes argue
that the financial crisis would never have escalated with enough women in bank
management: “If Lehman Brothers would have been called Lehman Sisters, it
would never have gotten this far.”

Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility are almost beyond being a

trend. Its surges are already too long and too general. The cradle-to-cradle way
of thinking rapidly evolves into a new gauge: Every end product should
eventually be able to be the starting point of a new chain. This idea has already
found its way to several corporations and government bodies (Desso and the
cities of Almere, Utrecht and Hengelo). Active citizens no longer accept that a
company or an organization backs out of environmental thinking, participates in
‘Greenwashing’ or ignores the work environment in the (international)
production chain. It is the principle of the modern, hopeful citizen: One person
can make a difference. Through a well-expressed public call and a smart choice
of media one individual can gain tremendous support and have significant
impact. One for all becomes all for the cause. This is something we will address in
part two of the Trendrede.

In this first part, we have addressed the widening gap between Holland with
negative expectations and Holland with positive hope. In order to progress, we
must diminish this spacing between individuals. This is not something that can
be achieved by talking about own responsibilities, while the actual subject is an
economizing government. This can be accomplished by offering people the
opportunity to participate in projects that give them a chance of a better future.
The development of new measures like servant leadership and the desire of
living life with a purpose gives us hope that the gap running through the nation
can be bridged in the years to come.
We will conclude this first chapter with a plea for replacing the expansion
of desperation about the past with spreading hope when it comes to the
future. This means hard work, but it will pay off. A hopeful Holland again
appropriates itself a new, socially engineered world; a world in which
giving meaning is the foundation of economical and societal growth. We
continue by illuminating two fundamental paths towards this world.

Chapter 2 – From calculating citizen to connected individual

“I am because we are.”
Translation of the traditional Zulu expression Ubuntu

Like the Young Urban Professional became the icon for budding individualism,
the social networker is the icon for a time that revolves around connections. The
focus on individual liberties has taken us a long way, but eventually we have
thrown ourselves over the edge of a cliff. The unlimited pursuit of self-interest
doesn’t serve this same interest in the end. Or, to put it differently, there is no
such thing as living alone. We are, whether we want it or not, part of a larger
entity: of a network, of an economic chain, of a society. For example, exerting
leadership is only possible as long as there are people willing to be led, just like
we need others ourselves to feel independent. The people around us make us
who we are.

The notion that the economy is built from domino blocks (if banks collapse, so
does the construction business, the distribution business and the automotive
industry) attracts attention to the many chains in which we are either
consciously or unconsciously a link. We are employees of a business line
connected to other businesses, to suppliers, to banks, to pension funds, to
environmental agencies and governments all over the world. The saleswoman of
a clothing store gets the fact that the dresses she sells are that cheap only
because they are made by children in Asian sweatshops, rubbed in at birthday
parties. Whoever realizes he is part of a complex chain of wobbling economic
domino blocks, also knows that the danger is in the weakest link of the chain.
This means it’s in everyone’s interest to strengthen this particular link. After the
crisis, we notice a small change that will grow in the years to come. Reciprocal
self-interest –I help you knowing you would help me- will become an important
trend. We are not going to relinquish our individual liberties, but there is an
ongoing changeover. The calculating citizen is turning out to be a connected
individual.

The cohesiveness between individuals forms the central idea of a new age.
Everyone has his or her own personal goals in life. However, we start accepting
that in this rapidly changing and globalizing world, we depend on many others to
achieve these goals. The modern individual makes the well-considered choice to
seek this connection. This choice is also what drives many societal
developments.
The development of The New Working, for a start. Fixed contracts, fixed
workplaces and fixed rewards are concepts of the past. People are seeking
connectivity in a new way. Flexible, temporary, goal-oriented –and profound at
the same time- are the concepts of the future. It is these ever-changing contacts
that determine success.
By rapidly switching between his networks, the Independent Professional forms
alliances of opportunity –people complementing his own unique skill-set- to
accomplish complex assignments together. After that –and with that- he goes his
own way. In parallel with the conventional economic reality, a new world has
evolved. Through virtual social networks one can make contact, experience a
sense of community, share knowledge, exchange experiences, test practical
behavior and –important- create value. This creation of value is not always
paired with monetary reward. People employ a constructive code of conduct:
Something is useful when the participants jointly improve. Division is
multiplication. That particular reversal in thought gains us, in addition to new
value, new joy in life. Having access becomes more important than possessing.
This is a new ethic, one remarkably enough lead by old riches like Bill Gates and
Joop van den Ende. It is not the possession that yields power, but the sharing.

Building connections in order to jointly get better from it. This is also the
foundation of using social networks to organize personal life. In several
municipalities energy companies have spawned from the use of social networks,
and subsequently windmills are jointly purchased. Independent Professionals
start procurement and sales co-operations together. Social networks form a well-
functioning breeding ground for new connections. It is of course for this reason
that this first Trendrede is delivered in Seats2Meet. If you look around you see a
beehive of activity, developing almost by the hour. Examples like
Standupinspiration, socialeoverwaarde.nl and the ‘7 days of inspiration’ planned
for February 2011 indicate that there is not only interest, but also a willingness
to make time for activities that are personally meaningful and are of social
significance. One and one then quickly becomes three.
A third, related development is publishing personal goals through social media
as a request for help. A simple hashtag can connect the problem to the solution.
Those who dare to ask will be helped, is the new adage. Taking a vulnerable
position appears to be a successful strategy in accomplishing goals: there is
nearly always someone willing to invest his time and attention in you.

The forth tendency: The new power is built up from the bottom up. ‘Power’ has
found it’s way from the church to the government to the enterprise. Now we can
see that power is making it’s way toward social networks. They form the power
source of the future. Individuals use it to profile and organize themselves with it,
make contact with kindred spirits and are this way able to create a critical mass.
Through online action, Greenpeace forced Nestle to trade in it’s destructive palm
oil plantations for a more environmentally friendly kind and aims it’s latest
action toward energy companies trying to built a coal-plant near the Waddenzee.
We also expect an organization like the British Fairpensions to find it’s way to
Holland. They act on behalf of the individual pension-insured at the annual
meetings of multinationals and point out the necessity of screening their
production chains. The analysis of pension problems will become more of an
issue as well. There will come a moment that a HEMA employee will no longer
accept that the money she hands over to the pension-fund is invested in a hedge-
fund that uses it to buy that same HEMA, sucking the profit out of it and forcing
the company to emaciate it’s pension plan. No one likes to bite his own tail.

What is the vision for the future outlined in this second part of the
Trendrede? We are growing towards an Interdependent Economy.
Everything is connected to everything. We can no longer limit ourselves to
adjusting only a single element to solve a problem or accomplish a goal.
And that has far-reaching consequences for the way the market, society
and politics are arranged. There will be emphasis on other values. The path
to the highest profit –an inalienable target for businesses- changes
character. Customer value en societal value surpass shareholder value.
Experience over product. Healthy growth over exploiting and continuous
profit-optimization over one time profit maximization.

New age, new institutions. Part of the material wealth will inevitably shift to the
countries experiencing enormous economic growth. The Netherlands has a
history of commercial spirit and international contacts. Sociologists consider its
culture very ‘feminine’ with an firm emphasis on meeting and consultation.
Problems like ‘water management’, ‘aging’ and ‘health’ are global problems that
can only be solved by international commitment. In his last speech for the UN,
former Prime Minister Balkenende used firm words to describe the inertia of the
UN. The expectation is that next to, above and below the UN, the World Bank and
the IMF – no longer the guiding organizations they once were- new organizations
will emerge that will apply the commitment principle to solve worldwide
problems. The Netherlands can and must have the ambition to play an important
role in this new world.
Chapter 3. Reappraisal: Please give us your attention

“No army can stop an idea whose time has come.”

Victor Hugo

How do we keep standing upright in a flowing world? In our country, monitoring

systems and accountability reports have taken the place of traditional moral
anchors. Uncertainty and distrust leave us in a situation where we want to keep
an increasing number of issues in society and our personal life under close
control. The effect is that large parts of daily life have become subject to
complicated systems. Whether this is in healthcare or our food chain, with the
police, economic life or politics, people complain about the load of administrative
work that needs to be done to comply with ‘the system’. Monitoring systems are
always created after the fact. But there are certain things you cannot prevent.
When Iceland produces an ash cloud, entire distribution networks are paralyzed
and millions of people and as many commodities are stuck in the wrong place
until the computer says ‘go’. The earth appears uncontrollable, just like the
economy and the behavior of individual people. We keep being faced with this
paradox of our need to control. Control is supposed to provide security, but
more control also gives rise to the feeling of powerlessness and
uncertainty.

He, who locks the steer of his bicycle in place, will fall within 20 meters.
There is a message that we hear with increasing volume: You cannot change the
world through old rules and new laws or by rebuilding an existing control
system. The system may never control us. The daily reality is too wayward to
lock human behavior in place. We are increasingly unwilling to accept that
cutbacks are made there where citizens and patients directly suffer the
consequences and that healthcare professionals are forced to neglect their
primary task because they are forced to fill out forms supposedly measuring
their effectiveness.
This has caused a fierce debate about delegating responsibility. Quotes like
“giving the class back to the teacher” and “handing the instruments to the
policeman” speak volumes. The wish is to return to the basis. Human hands and
human actions inspire new support.

An improvement in quality must originate from the people themselves. Only they
themselves have the right attention for the little daily variances in their
environment.
We can see that a search has been started for new forms of ‘grasp’. Control has
two sides: It limits courses of action and forces people to direct their attention to
within these courses. In the years to come we will switch from controlling
the process to observing the process. Achieving grasp by means of limitation
can be deadly to the personal initiative as well as to the ongoing awareness of
personal work. We can see the control shifting from top-down to bottom-up.
Directed attention sparks new life. Instead of forcing people to operate within a
constraining system, we will again be asking them to pay attention to the
challenges they face in their personal working environment.
Attention offers support as well as freedom. This support can be directed at
tradition as easy as at renewal, thus being anchor and sail at the same time. It is
for this reason many trends for the years to come will revolve around the
meaning of attention.
Attention is something that we see as anchor in the large groups of people
discovering an unambiguous belief or a cultural persuasion. Attention for a
written doctrine inspires inner peace, confidence and illuminates the personal
life path. Old-fashioned words like catharsis and purification are reborn aside
meditation and spirituality.
Support is also found in the traditions of the Zuiderzee, Calvinism, Jan Smit,
Verkade cookies or Unox soup. By keeping them in the spotlight they remain
reference points in our culture. Our own backyard is a safe point of focus in a
very, very wide world.

Attention for our own backyard is also becoming an economical factor. Attention
leads to creation of value: the own small world appears to be more advantageous
than previously thought. Not everything can be imported from cheap-production
areas, simply because the cost of controlling and overseeing all the links in the
production and supply chains would be too high. Confidence in ‘the local’ rises.
More and more supermarkets choose to draw their fresh products from the local
vicinity. The control is more direct, the involvement is greater and it benefits the
environment.
Attention for the surrounding leads to new values. Eggs from the own
neighborhood inspire curiosity about the chicken that laid them. A visit to the
breeder leads to the discovery that there are more than twenty types of
strawberries, while we only encountered one of these in the supermarket up to
now.

We are looking for a small-scale, cost-efficient alternative for the ‘mega-thinking’.

Not that we are going to smash any machines in the process. ‘Do it yourself’
stands, more than ever, for ‘do it with attention’. The small and home business,
the fastest growing business organization of the years to come, is perhaps the
best example of how ‘do it yourself’ grew into ‘do it with attention’. Richard
Sennett’s book ‘the craftsman’ gets increasing endorsement and imitation. The
interest in crafts rises each year among students all over the world. They gladly
retake control of the production process and embrace the ancient techniques
that are still very relevant. They work with what their direct surrounding
produces as starting material. Wool from the sheep in the Rhine and Veen area
may not yield enough profit to start shaving them, but when making ecologic
tweed out of it, it is the basis for a proud local product of high quality, drawing
attention from creative designers. The Dutch cooperation programs that
historical crafting icons like Royal Tichelaar Makkum, Royal Delft and Royal
Leerdam engage in with present-day leading designers are noticed
internationally. That the general public is now interested, is shown by the visitor
figures for the Zuiderzeemuseum, for instance. The attention goes out to what
we can grasp, follow and comprehend.
Giving more attention to small things gives us the astonishment and
begeisterung that we are looking for. The revolution of the nineties was found in
thinking big, with the worldwide Internet and the expanding financial systems.
Now, thinking small will lead the revolution. Nanotechnology and
neurosciences are the power sources of the future. Making measuring
instruments more precise, the decomposition of processes and the reduction of
materials will create great cultural and economic value. Precision data will
become the lubrication of economic traffic. We master our own learning
processes on an increasingly precise level and are able to change or improve
physical circumstances. A growing number of food supplements, bordering on
narcotics, allow us to stimulate very specific parts of our brain. The trend is to
use this new power to gain extra focus and with that, this development amplifies
itself. Doing less with more attention. Buying less but more attention for
consuming. Less of a career but more attention for life.

Attention will become one of the important currencies. Its scarcity will lead to
moments of choice. We deal with our attention efficiently by delegating as much
of the daily hassles as possible. New services offer the consumer pre-selection
and save him the stress of going through the entire supply himself. Filtering will
be the new standard, surprise an option. What we will see is that young people
with fewer social skills take this selection to an even more extreme level. Some of
them will choose to live an online life. They reduce the attention they have for
the unpredictable reality to a minimum: Their body will become a necessary
maintenance vehicle for the brain, which in turn aims for a fantasy life in virtual
realities. The virtividual works, plays, communicates and enjoys online. The
movie Avatar illustrates how a limited body in reality can be exchanged for a
more appealing form in virtuality. And eventually, who can stop a youngster that
decides to give his full attention to World of Warcraft, in an attempt to become
the number one in it? After all, we also allow fourteen year old girls to sail
around the world, just because it appears to be their life focus.

We keep getting better at filtering an selecting in order to direct our

attention. Attention provides support and the things we give our attention
to, grow. The final conclusion of this third important development: We
relinquish unnecessary control to gain space for attention. What we give
our attention to can prosper and grow. Let’s make 2011 the year of
attention. For our resources, each other, the connections we live by and the
future.

In this first Dutch Trendrede we have drawn several lines that can guide the
discussion and the decision-making on future developments. It is a refined
message, which itself is a trend. It is not a bold, optimistic statement, but one
with a sound of hope. It is important to give the three developments
• The gap between hope and despair
• The connected individual
• The reappraisal of attention
a place in the discussion of Holland’s future. We needn’t improve the past, that is
what it is. Let’s let the past go again. Let’s turn away from resentment. Let us
make a turn towards the future. In this Trendrede we have addressed the
reference points giving people confidence and opportunities, the points that
enable us to embrace the future, without the ballast of the past.

This first reasoning about the future gives several activities, aimed toward the
professionalization and further foundation of futurethinking, the green light. We
want to let go of the traditional and reluctant way of thinking about the world of
tomorrow. Whether we are policymakers, journalists or futurethinkers, the
future affects us all so we should actively engage it. This first Trendrede should
inspire the essential discussion about the future of the Netherlands. It is a good
thing you are willing to take note of that.

English translation:
Niels Buit, Netscore (December 2010)