Daily Inspiration: “If you keep listening to the same old people, you’ll end up doing the same old things!”

“If you keep listening to the same old people, you’ll end up doing the same old things!” – Futurist  Jim Carroll

People get stuck in a mono-culture, a sameness of being, a routine of predictability.

They end up doing today what they did yesterday, and will do it tomorrow, and will wake up one day and say, “WTF? Why didn’t I do anything great with my life?”

Don’t do that. It’s not a lot of fun.

One of the quickest pathways to failure is getting stuck in a rut. Break out of it.

It happens with companies and organizations too – they seek the same old insight, the same old advice, from the same old people, and end up doing the same old things.

Last week, I was contacted by a senior executive with a global company. “We need to shake things up!” went his message. “We really need your insight to get our team to think differently!”

Then yesterday, he came back with a phrase that is all too common in this industry. “We decided to go with the same industry person we had speak to us last year.” Then he confided that management decided they didn’t want to worry anyone too much about the pace of change.

LOL. In other words, they are going to hear the same old things, the same old ideas, and will end up doing the same old thing.

This organization is in the energy industry – which is being energized, if you pardon the pun, by change.

Trends? Accelerating changes to the grid, distributed energy concepts, faster renewable science, changing consumer behavior, the impact of hyperconnectivity -massive business model disruption – tomorrow, his company won’t look anything like it does today.

Yet, it probably will for these foolks, because they’ve got a culture of sameness, an inability to reach for vision, incapacitated by lemming-like thought. Eventually, they’ll begin to witness the wreckage of their mono-thinking.

This happens all too often. The simple act of seeking my insight would not have changed the world, but it would have indicated their ability to reach beyond themselves to understand what comes next.

You deal with this all the time, don’t you? You are in an organization that is dying from a monoculture of groupthink – no one dares to think big, everyone is thinking small, being marginal in thought is the only goal!

Do this today – find someone weird, unique, different, odd. Find someone you don’t like, who might have a message that is going to shake you to your core. Someone who scares you.

Spend some time with them, and listen to what they have to say.

Because deep down in your soul, you know they are right, and you need to be shaken out of your complacency.

You’ll come away with a different perception of the world, and better insight into your future!