A thought from today (and yesterday and tomorrow)

Recently I travelled in ancient Rome, I was there just days before Vesuvius erupted and destroyed Pompei and no one around me knew it was going to happen. I heard a man faced with a difficult decision – that would affect many others – ask himself “what [is] leadership… but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretence that the decision was based on reason?”

Those words still apply to many of our institutions today, where we reward certainty, decisive action and the weight of experience.

But perhaps we should spend more time observing the volcanoes – those boiling, churning pressures fighting to change the world, shape the world, destroy the world – that surround us and less making blindly confident decisions.

I had time travelled in a story. A possible version of events built on fragmented evidence and contradictory accounts spun into a compelling tale that took me to one possible version of the past. We can use the same tricks to travel into the future. And we have much more chance of making an impact there than we do in ancient history.