Forever Skills

PART 3CONTROL SKILLS

‘NO MAN IS FIT TO COMMAND ANOTHER, THAT CANNOT COMMAND HIMSELF.’

William Penn

The last of our Forever Skills clusters is Control.

In some ways, this might be considered the most problematic of the three clusters of Forever Skills, as the very concept of control has rather a lot of baggage associated with it. You may even be feeling a little uncomfortable right now and less than excited to read on.

Depending on your political or philosophical views, the word ‘control’ might conjure up authoritarian or militaristic imagery, planned economic systems and government overreach and bureaucracy. Alternatively, one might consider control to be contrary to natural law or an unfair impingement on our spirituality.

The truth is, we often think of control as being the antithesis of freedom of any kind. This is possibly because our initial experience of control is that of being a child with very little, surrounded by adults who seem to have more than we would like. Commands such as ‘Go to bed’, ‘Eat your broccoli’, and ‘Share your toys’, are hardly likely to leave us appreciating control, given that it appears to only be directed towards us.

However, despite this discomfort with the word ‘control’, what emerged from our research is that an ability to understand it, use it, apply it and negotiate with it is a critical consideration in terms of the skills that the future will demand.

Perhaps it is useful at this stage to broaden our definition of ‘control’ from one ...