Prof. Dr. Thomas Druyen – the “5 Premium Speakers Questions”
Prof. Dr. Thomas Druyen is the founder and director of the IZZ Institute for Future Psychology and Future Management at the Sigmund Freud Private University in Vienna and the inventor of the Future Compass. He works as a scientist, author, speaker, manager and publicist. He is also president of the opta data Future Foundation in Essen, which focuses on healthcare and the healthcare professions.
In his research, he focuses on the mental possibilities of how people and organizations learn to deal with accelerated futures, artificial intelligence and mental overload in a forward-looking way.
Thomas Druyen in an interview:
1. What are the core subjects of your keynote speeches?
My core topic is change in difficult times.
How do we, me, my company, my group, but also my family, my network, my generation, all of us, manage to adapt to the new and exponential challenges of the future and to cope with them successfully. At the moment we are experiencing the greatest change in human history, yet companies, politics, administrations, business and culture behave as if all we have to do is become more efficient and better in order to solve the problems. This is wrong. We need a new mindset, because there are factors such as artificial intelligence that are now making our old and also successful ways of thinking obsolete. This mental transformation with its neuronal, psychological and entrepreneurial requirements is my core topic.
2. Which audiance or which branch do you reach with your speech?
With my topics of change, future psychology, future navigation, I reach every audience and every sector and also every generation. We all have to get involved in new living and working conditions in exponential and technology-dominated times.
3. Are you a PREMIUM SPEAKER? Where do you get your insights from?
For 30 years I have been standing on stages and giving lectures to small and large audiences, in universities, corporations, family businesses, administrations, in libraries, in workshops or large halls. I take the knowledge from my scientific work and from my studies in the field of demographic change, generational research, sociology, psychology and new research areas that I myself have established over many years such as asset wealth research, wealth psychology, future psychology, future navigation and future management. My academic origins are the Westphalian Wilhelm’s University in Münster, the Sigmund Freud Private University in Vienna or the Witten Institute for Family Business at the University of Witten Herdecke.
4. What will be in the future? Does «time» play an important role in your work?
This is precisely the fundamental question of our scientific and future psychology work. Since 2015, we have conducted more than 9000 interviews with people from all generations. We conduct the interviews using our Future Compass, a new method to capture the wishes, hopes, fantasies and imagination of the interviewees. Our interviews all begin mentally in 10 or 15 years’ time. In this way, we and the interviewees from all walks of life are able to associate their own futures and thus also gain access to their unconscious. Against this background, we actually gain many new insights into emotional and psychological expectations of the future. In this respect, we actually come very close to the future. But the crucial thing is to shape it ourselves. That is our greatest chance.
5. Tell us your life motto? What do you want to give your listeners to take with them?
As a 19-year-old, I found a sentence by George Bernard Shaw:
“You always blame circumstances for what you are. I don’t believe in circumstances. Those who get on in the world go and find the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, they create them themselves.”
That has been my unconditional motto ever since and my life teaching has also emerged from it: concrethics.