Forever Skills

APPENDIX ALooking back to look forward

Given we have termed the capabilities in this book ‘Forever Skills’, it seems likely that these skills informed our success and viability as a species throughout our history.

With that in mind, this appendix will detail some of what we found in terms of which skills have always been with us and how they might inform what matters today as well as what will matter tomorrow.

We divided human history into three not-so-neatly defined categories:

1. The Ancient World
2. Recent(ish) History
3. The Modern World (the world we occupy in the early twenty-first century).

The goal of this exercise, as with all of the research we’ve conducted, was to identify patterns and trends, and to isolate those skills that have proven to be evergreen and a consistent asset to those who wield them.

One of our key finds has been that often the words different cultures and industries use to describe certain skills or traits have varied. In fact, the variation in definitions of skills and the breadth of these definitions appears to be incredibly important. In this appendix, we’ve chosen to use the words selected by historians, archaeologists and sociologists to describe the daily lives and work skills of the cultures and times they have explored.

In the interest of ‘utility over completeness’ in our research, we focused on cultures that were either significantly successful or at least powerfully influential in their own time. We also considered that of those whose impact ...