We are in the Driver's Seat - A Magic Carpet Ride

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Humanity facing the challenge of shaping a transformation process for sustainable development. Decarbonization and the circularity of production processes are key concerns for project management. To manage these challenges a paradigm shift is necessary. Project managers should see themselves as designers of the future. To this end, the separation between strategic and operational management must be closed. The current first story of take-make-waste, supplemented by a second story for a green wonderland, continues to be based on an ideology of controllability and will not be able to solve the issues. What is needed is a global understanding of responsibility for strategic and operational management. A practical methodological approach to reach this objective has been presented and discussed over the past three years. Further studies and experiences are now available. These have led to the further development of the methodological approach and describe the cooperation between strategic decisions and the operational implementation of projects. Aim is to enable transformation process for the decarbonization of production processes and circular economy. The prerequisite is an expansion of the area of responsibility for strategic and operational management. This requires a third story far from the controllability ideologies, referred as Next7G Management and derived from the UN Brundlandt Commission of 1987, which proposed the principle of anticipating all actions to the extent that they are considered up to the seventh generation after them. This approach was further developed for strategic planning and the resulting implementation by operational management and applied to the next seven product generations. This will radically expand and change project managers' understanding of their role and competencies. They will become the designers of the future sitting in the driver’s seat, who will have to think beyond the mere delivery of their project results in closed structures and thus be involved in strategic decisions in a creative way. Only in this way can the paradigm shift for sustainable global development be realized.