The Importance of Maps: Plotting the Future with Juan Enríquez

When was the last time you looked at a map to work out where you were going?

Recently, probably. When was the last time you looked at a non-digital map, a non-Google or Tom Tom map, a map made out of paper? If you’re a walker or a hiker, it may also be not long ago. But when was the last time you looked at an old map, a map that has, on its basic function of navigation, been compromised by time?

Juan Enríquez collects them. Enríquez was the founding director of the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business School and a fellow at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. But even that’s a limp introduction for a man who has helped negotiate the Chiapas Peace Accords, sequence the human genome, map biomass in the world’s oceans and published a handful of books that are seriously spooky in their predictions of economic and political trends. Here’s some more on the maps, from Wired magazine:

”At his home, a map from the 1480s depicts Jersusalem as the centre of the world. Another shows Europe in the shape of a queen. There’s Captain Cook’s logbook, an early map of the Amazon, and a Franco-German map from the late 1700s that depicts love as a war between men and women, watched over by General Cupid.”

And here’s why…

“The maps teach me how people saw the world, what the edge of the known world was, what they were discovering, what they knew – and where they went wrong. Part of what I try to do is map where things are going and then build something around it. So it helps me to understand where things have been, what trends are and what I’m building next.”

If you only read one book in the next five years, make it Enríquez’s As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth.