Visit the FTF: Conference 2015 page for information on more of this year’s speakers and to purchase tickets to the event.

In the world of tech, there are very few ideas hatched in the mid-90’s that, left unchanged, are still just as relevant today as they were then. Hyper Island, however, is an exception.

The school, which opened its doors in 1996 in a former military prison on a small island off the southeastern coast of Sweden, was founded on a straightforward principle that hasn’t diminished in importance in the decades since: how can individuals and companies stay ahead of the curve when the traditional way of learning is dated and mismatched with the pace and needs of the real world?

Hyper Island became a place to answer that question, a new institution of professional learning based on flexibility in anticipating and dealing with change.

Practically speaking, the school has two main functions: educational programs for young talent and industry professionals seeking to immerse themselves in intensive learning experiences – like digital strategy, e-commerce and art direction; and business innovation consulting to boost understanding of how the digital world changes societies and consumer behavior, designed to support organizations looking to remain competitive in an increasingly digitized world.

Mathias Jakobsen came to Hyper Island after a working on several digital startups. Today, he’s the school’s Learning Designer, and will be leading a workshop at this year’s FTF: Conference on June 11.

We spoke with Mathias about predicting the future, how technology will shape the fashion industry and how leaders need to adapt in order to survive.

FTF: First of all, in your own words, what is Hyper Island and what lead you to become a Learning Designer there?

Mathias: Hyper Island started in Sweden in 1996 as a new kind of higher education school that would teach people how to work with the technology of the future. Today, we have schools and offices all over the world and help some of the worlds biggest companies adapt to change and transform how they do business. I came to Hyper Island by an almost inevitable coincidence: I founded my first company at the age of 15, in the early days of the Internet, and I worked with companies to help them capture the new opportunities. Later, my personal interest in fashion lead me to build two digitally powered fashion media projects, before I got fed up with all the online stuff. Then I went offline, moved to NYC and became a life coach for startup CEOs, which was incredible, but also extremely isolating. That’s when Hyper Island came into my life, and I got reconnected with my Internet-past and decided to open up again, look to the future and take the skills and experiences I had gathered as an entrepreneur and put them to use in a more structured way. Hyper Island has been the perfect platform for me to do that.

FTF: At Hyper Island you talk a lot about tomorrow and “the future” — how do you go about predicting what’s next? 

Mathias: I think the truth is that you probably can’t. Futurists have predicted flying cars and colonies on the moon and in 1928 economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2028 automation would mean that we would work no more than three hours a day and that this would be more than enough. However, the fact that we have often been wrong, and probably will be wrong many more times, is not an excuse to not engage in the practice of looking at trends. From a business perspective what’s interesting in not to precisely predict how the long term future will look: think about Apple. When they launched the Newton device in 1993, they were pretty accurate in their vision of what our future personal devices would look and feel, but in a way the device was too far ahead. The Internet had not become mainstream yet, and the device was eventually discontinued. The way you make money in business is seeing the big trends and then identifying the tipping points when one or more trends converge and it opens up new possibilities. Ten years after the Newton was discontinued, Apple tried again with a similar device: the iPhone. In 2007 the Internet was mainstream and the iPhone was a wholly Internet-enabled device. Not everyone was convinced at the time, but it proved to be the tipping point for cell phones to become smart phones.

The point is that we need to engage future prediction not as an exact science that is left to experts and science fiction writers, but rather an active, ongoing collaborative and collective practice where we look ahead and imagine possible long term future scenarios and then work backwards and try to find the short term, low risk opportunities that could help us seize the opportunity.

At Hyper Island, we host an annual Global Industry Forum where we invite guests from all kinds of industries to do this with us. We collect the insights and compile it into our own trend report, which we both use internally and share with our network.

FTF: As someone who studies the impact of new technology, what are the main challenges you see for companies who want to be future-ready? 

Mathias: Sooner or later, every single industry and every single business in it will be disrupted, and their product and business model will be radically transformed. However, most companies have a hard time imagining a future where their current business and product simply doesn’t exist anymore. And it’s not just old industries. Ask a Google employee to imagine a world where there is no more paid advertising and you will most likely see a face of utter fear and outright rejection.

What we know for certain is that we can’t be ready for these scenarios if we can’t even imagine it.

The other big challenge is to understand what their user’s actual needs are. We all have ideas about this, but we need to really listen to the people who are actually using our products and pay attention to what they say. There can be many different reasons. Each of these reasons can potentially be served in a radically different way. These are the opportunities that we need to pay attention to as business leaders.

FTF: To that end, how do you see the role of leadership changing? What does a leader need in order to succeed tomorrow? 

Mathias: First of all, any leader needs a high level of situational and personal awareness. Being a leader has nothing to do with which role you are in: you can lead from anywhere, but only if you have the situational awareness to understand and see the opportunities. Whether you have any formal, organizational authority or not, I think every leader must learn to lead as if she has no such formal authority. In fact, I think the formal authority that comes with a leadership role is probably one of the biggest liabilities and inhibitors for effective leadership; if you have the power to hire and fire people, then no matter how nice and warm you are, your subordinates will not be thrilled to come and share with you some bad news about a big mistake they made which cost the company a lot of money. However, it is in your best interest to know this. In many cases your best option might be to abdicate certain powers and explicitly ensure that the people you depend on for information cannot be threatened by you in any way.

I also think that every leader must get out there and be in real direct contact with the end users. Craig Newman of Craigslist works one day a week as chairman of the company board. The other four days he works as a basic customer service rep, answering the phone and angry e-mails. That way he really knows what is going on and there is no risk of bad news getting filtered out through middle management. The good news is that the Internet allows you to really do this in an amazing way, if you are willing to do it.

FTF: What do you see as the biggest opportunities for fashion companies in the Internet age? 

Mathias: As I see it, fashion is fundamentally a social phenomenon that just happens to involve a lot of clothes at this point in time. But as our lives, identities and social interactions become more and more mediated through digital, I think there is a huge opportunity for the ones who find ways to interact in that space. What’s the digital equivalent of Louboutins? How can you wear your Chanel 2.55 on Facebook? Right now I only see fashion companies engaging online to sell their physical products.

Design of fashion products has historically been a highly exclusive and excluding process, but the use of fashion has always been participatory. What the designer shows on the runway is just a vision. Only when people buy it and wear it, and other designers emulate it and tweak it, only then does it become real fashion. Who will create the Wikipedia equivalent of the fashion world? Not an encyclopedia of fashion, but the social digital platform that truly takes fashion beyond clothes and physical goods?