Futurist Keynote Speaker Jim Carroll: Disruptive Trend & Innovation Expert

Futurist Keynote Speaker,  Author, Innovation Expert. 

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Archives for April 2020

Highlight Clip – Week 3 – “Disrupting the Big Disruption: Jim Carroll’s Weekly Review of Leadership and the Big Realignment!”

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Speakers and topic experts should not be boring in this new online world. I’m working hard not to be in my home broadcast studio!

With that in mind, here’s the raw and uncut feed from my weekly ‘show’ this morning. I think I’m getting the hang of delivering the content while managing staging, production, sound and video. When I was on stage in Las Vegas I’d have a team of 20+ doing that – now, it’s just me in my basement!

Some speakers are dumping out crappy head-shot Zoom stuff. I’m trying to take it up a notch. Still lots to learn, but when I’m the host, editor, AV team, production editor and stage manager all in one, and you are going live on Periscope/Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Zoom – some small things fall through the cracks. But week 3, I’m kind of happy with the direction! This is the first 10 minutes. Total show length was 22:03. I’ll post that on my blog. Online. Don’t be BORING!

The focus on my story this week? Kendall Farms and their initiative to quickly build a virtual farmers market. Here’s the whole video clip – I featured just the start in my broadcast today. Other topics? #cobots & #supplychain, #agriculture & automation, hyper-accelerated innovation, # VUCA as the new leadership & more!

 

Daily Inspiration: “At this very moment, someone is busy with an idea, busy inventing a future, that will have you looking back in five years and saying ‘Wow!’”

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“At this very moment, someone is busy with an idea, busy inventing a future, that will have you looking back in five years and saying ‘Wow!’” – Futurist Jim Carroll

We might not yet know what it is, who designed it, what was the basis for their idea – or what it actually might be.

But it’s out there, and it’s happening right now. And the fascinating thing is that there is more than one. Right now, at this very moment, millions of people are choosing not live by the big scary headlines of this very moment – they are busy writing their own future headlines. Should you join them?

Youtube was launched just a bit of time after the great dot.com collapse of 2001. Many people were convinced that the great technology innovation cycle of the 90’s was over – we had an economic collapse. They thought differently.

Walt Disney began his epic voyage during the Great Depression. He didn’t let economic calamity shut down his idea machine. FedEx? It appeared shortly after the 1971 downturn – the era of 21% interest rates and massive future gloom. WhatsApp, Uber, AirBnB and GroupOn were launched after the economic meltdown of 2008 … I guess they didn’t get the memo that the future was over?

Many well known companies began during a downturn. Others relaunched during an era of uncertainty – Apple began its meteoric rise to change the mobile, music, entertainment and computer industries that began during the massive downturn of 2001-02.

Innovators don’t hold back their ideas during eras of great uncertainty. They aren’t blinded by the fear that surrounds them right now, but by the future they see tomorrow.

That’s the attitude that you should take into each and every day at this very moment – because, wouldn’t it be better to join them, albeit in your own way?

Daily Inspiration: “The new rule for the future? We might not know exactly where we are going – but we sure are making great time!

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“The new rule for the future? We might not know exactly where we are going – but we sure are making great time!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

Uncertainty is the new certainty, fuzziness is the new clarity and velocity is now the great equalizer.

Companies are finding that the future is colliding with them at now staggering speed – those that are in survival mode at least. Restaurants have had to shift to take out orders and grocery fulfillment in an effort to survive; retailers have had to master more about e-commerce in the last six weeks than they have had to in the last 20 years; manufacturing organizations with 3d printing technology have had to learn what it means to prototype rapidly as they shift to medical supply production.

What was once unthinkable in terms of fast speed now seems to be the new average velocity. I was thinking about that yesterday when I noticed a stack of my most recent book on a shelf in the home office – “Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast!”

Released back in mid-January, I was pretty excited for the launch of the book – and then this ‘thing’ hit the global economy. It has pretty much disappeared from the radar.

The title is based on the closing instruction I would provide to my audience on the stage, and I could tell by the social media comments and feedback that the idea resonated with a *lot* of people as a structure for moving forward. Think big – we need bold ideas to deal with big challenges. Start small – move fast and break things. Scale fast – learn now to grow it once it’s ready. The idea worked.

Is the idea still valid? Probably more-so than ever before! We’re in a new era in which the speed of some of the trends, demands and requirements upon us have accelerated to an unprecedented degree.

It’s our ability to ingest those trends and turn them into opportunity that will truly define our future!

Daily Inspiration: “We are now firmly placed in the era of ‘aspirational science….'”

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“We are now firmly placed in the era of ‘aspirational science.’ People who want science to tell them something they want to hear, not what science is actually telling them!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

I try not to engage in the many battles of social media – there is often no upside, just a race to the bottom of the ugliness of human behaviour. And so I will remind myself that I can should not bother to argue the things that I know are right, the courage to not engage with little hope of rational thinking, and the wisdom to know when to withdraw.

And yet yesterday, someone posted a tweet about a particular arthritis treatment that failed as a treatment that failed in a drug trail. The founder of the company releasing the news (Remeron) made this observation:

“It shows that a lot of times when people think they’re seeing things in desperate situations, when they’re just trying whatever they can, that a lot of times that leads to misleading hypotheses and misleading results.”

That caught my attention!

Moments later, someone posted that misleading video from two California doctors about the lockdown – I’m sure you’ve seen it. In essence, they claim, based upon their ‘study,’ that the lockdown is essentially unnecessary.T

Two doctors! People concluded that they must know what they are talking about!

Both situations took me to write the quote above and send a tweet. I ended up engaging in a bit of spirited online dialog with people who, in my opinion, should know better. Suddenly it seems that everyone knows science better than the scientists; the science of virology is better understood by people who no background in this medical specialty. People who are experts in a narrow field suddenly seem to be experts in everything.

The result? That California video? Their ‘random sample’ upon which they based their observations consisted of the people who actually came into their clinics – a small subset of the population at best. That’s about as random a sample as someone choosing all the green jellybeans from a bowl – and the proclaiming that all jellybeans are green. It was bad science. It got millions of views by people who want to believe what they want to believe, not the reality that exists.

Bad science is bad science. It misleads people, gives them false hope, and accomplishes nothing.

Um, Lysol.

People should know better. Rant over.

Daily Inspiration: “Futurists? Consider it our job to shine a light of hope for what might come next!”

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“Futurists? Consider it our job to shine a light of hope for what might come next!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

There are always opportunities for optimism. It’s the timing that the is the big issue.

I’ve been trying to focus on the things that matter, not the distractions that don’t. With that in mind, my Twitter follow list has evolved somewhat – I’m following more science and medical people than ever before. An emergency room doctor in New York, lots of epidemiologists and virologists, a few cardiologists. These are the folks who are identifying the real trends and issues, not studying the supply of Lysol in the local store.

And doing this gives me a longer term view of what might come next in terms of the science, genomics, technology and insight. We’re all clamouring for understanding what the clear path is out of this thing, and I think we all know there isn’t one.

But it’s also pretty certain that the world we will be living in ten years from now will be quite different from what we expected just a few months ago. Real trends are happening right now, and many of those trends provide for a hopeful path forward.

Rightly or wrongly, I tend to focus on the hope, not the despair; the opportunity, not the complexity; the upside, rather than the downside.

And by following the real science, I certainly see a lot of signs for hope, even if the velocity is not quite what we all hope for!

Daily Inspiration: ““zoomed out” — phrasal verb / adjective / zumed out/”

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“zoomed out” — phrasal verb / adjective / zumed out/ “

The feeling that there are too many business and personal videoconferences each day:
“Another damn online video call? Enough already – I’m just about zoomed out!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

I didn’t coin the phrase – there are a few obscure examples that I can find emerging in the last week.

But it certainly is a phrase that I think we will hear with increasing regularity as people come to feel bombarded by the necessity to show up in a never ending stream of online Zoom calls – with business calls, family check-ins, and then happy hour and evening check-ins with friends! Only to be repeated ad-naseum the next day in a never-ending Groundhog Day of video-matrix images with sometimes inane chat.

The zoomed-out feeling is emerging with such speed that I predicted that it would become a rather common phrase in the next few weeks – during my weekly online Zoom broadcast yesterday!

The irony of my chosen medium for this online observation was not lost on me.

And in fact, I was all set to go wth talking about the issue during my broadcast that the timing was perfect when a good friend, Jessica Leigh Levin, made this comment on social media just an hour or so before the event:

The thing is – Jessica is a meeting and event planner. In the old world, she would arrange for large groups of people to go to Las Vegas to participate in fascinating exchanges of insight, hang out in multiple social gatherings in fascinating settings, and meet new friends. She now hangs out in Zoom. The excitement of how to have a nifty Zoom background probably lost its allure some time ago.

Me? I used to be the guy who went on stage in front of those very people – my running joke was that “my job has me going out and talking to large groups of hungover people.” From a wonderful stage, I inspired them with tales of the future and stories about innovation and disruption…..

We now both find ourselves in an entirely new and different world, and are trying to figure out how to cope.

Such as it is, if you would like to explore this new age attitude in further depth, I’d be pleased to talk about it.

You can easily connect with me.

I’m on Zoom.

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THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THOSE WHO ARE FAST features the best of the insight from Jim Carroll’s blog, in which he
covers issues related to creativity, innovation and future trends.

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