ABSTRACT
Sustainably competent professionals have to look toward the future to prepare or innovate accordingly. This chapter introduces the concept of thinking on different time scales when solving current and future problems. An assistant city manager dealing with the impacts of sea level rise on a coastal community serves as an example of a professional who uses operational, tactical, and strategic approaches to tackle symptoms and eradicate causes. Non-linear relations of various processes and doubling myths are examined, and a traffic expert discusses the unexpected effects of speed limits on accidents and congestion. The final case study of this chapter showcases a crowdsourcing organization that anticipates and fulfills community needs in an innovative way. At the end of the chapter, the authors discuss function analysis as a method for discovering underlying and changing needs at the individual and societal level.
