The Tällberg Forum is a gathering like no other. For over 30 years, leaders have come at the invitation of the Tällberg Foundation, to talk about what is going on in the world. Everyone brings her/his own experience to the talks. In one sense, we can view this as one single, continuous conversation. Participants have varied. The themes have evolved and the times have moved on. But some things remain constant: the culture of the village that hosts us has not altered much. The landscape and the lake are the same, even though the local biosphere is shifting perceptibly now, (mainly due to climate change). But the underlying Tällberg approach has not changed.  Conversations at Tällberg have been, and continue to be, based on systems thinking, humanistic values and on an unrelenting curiosity and desire to have one’s reasoning, assumptions and world views shaken.

For decades, the conversation at Tällberg gatherings has woven a few key components together: one central theme is the continued process of globalization and the resulting increased systems’ interdependence. Another is the quest to under-stand the globally interdependent financial, technological, economic, social and earth systems crises and to explore the practical meaning of sustainability through this integrated picture.

Seeking to understand the context for global governance and the lack of problem-solving mechanisms to cope with global systems problems is a third imperative. Social innovation and disruptive entrepreneurship have also been featured. And we have looked at many of these components from the perspective of the leader (business strategists or corporate executives or politicians at global, national or local levels). We all need to understand these forces of change in order to make better decisions and manage increasing complexity.

In 2012, we are highlighting the decisive role of technology and its evolution. We believe that technology shapes the present and the future more profoundly than say, economic policy. It is not possible to design longer term political and economic agendas if we do not understand the dynamics of science and the evolution of technologies.

It was not political theory that created the industrial revolution. Socialism and liberalism emerged as a response to it. It was not politics that created new physics, penicillin, the transistor, the computer or the Internet, the IPhone or social media. But these technologies and foundational knowledge for new technologies all changed the power of nations, lifestyles, mindsets and the futures of peoples.

Human knowledge and imagination is applied to resolve the large and small challenges of everyday life through technology. These solutions create an ever-new present, with new challenges – many directly related to the technologies of the time. The accumulation of tools and technologies has gone on since the dawn of civilizations and the number of tools, approaches and solutions (both hard and soft) will continue to grow as more actors enter this field. Still, the processes through which technologies evolve (often in particular locations) are not understood, and neither is the evolutionary nature of technology. The debate tends too easily to fall into an ideological dialectic where technology is either inherently good or inherently bad. The intent behind each use of technology is a measure and reflection of us, humankind. It is the interplay between new technologies and the political, social and economic context that creates the present and the future.

This is the direction for our exploration during the coming days in Tällberg. The challenge we are setting ourselves is to go “Beyond our imagination” through our conversations here. We have gathered hundreds of leading thinkers and doers, and provided a structure to the conversation, in the form of a program (large sessions in the tent and smaller sessions around the village). We then add the key components without which there would be no Tällberg meeting, and probably no new insights and novel ideas: the inspiration of music, culture, poetry and nature. The rest is brought by each participant – their ideas, feelings, knowledge and experience. The result will not be a consensus, a statement or a collective recommendation, but a community of individuals who have shared their concerns and found new ideas and viable paths for action that they can take back home.