Daily Inspiration: “Confront your reality – your biggest potential always comes from solving your most complex problems!”

“Confront your reality – your biggest potential always comes from solving your most complex problems!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

How do you fit your big ideas into a small space? By understanding that YOU own the space and can take it where you need to.

One of the most interesting things about my business over the last 25 years is that I ended up getting a ridiculous number of bookings at the most senior levels of major global organizations – the World Bank, NASA, Disney, Pfizer. I’d find myself contacted by one of their most senior executives, seeking if I might be able to come in for a talk on the future and disruptive innovation – they believed that their team needed a cold, hard look at the reality of their future, and that an outsider, a futurist, an oddball thinker – might be best delivered to build that insight.

And so I found myself within a business model that had me flying all over the world for short, brief bursts of performance, before moving on to the next moment of short, sharp shocks of insight.

The key thing is that literally ALL of these situations involved some very unique, very precise disruptive leadership issue that the senior executive – often a CEO – needed to have their team understand. The concept of transformation leadership. The importance of ‘upside down innovation.’ The acceleration of additive manufacturing methodologies. The impact of global collaborative science on R&D. The impact of a change in the balance of the consumer relationship.

All of these issues were hugely disruptive, and it was critical that the organization was firmly aligned to them. My job was to bring clarity to the issue with a detailed overview based concise research with razor focused delivery.

Then, the pandemic hit, and everyone hit the pause button.

The interesting thing is that the need to understand and manage these complex issues has not gone away, so my challenge became one of – “How do I deliver this insight but through a distinctly unfriendly format.” People were ‘zoomed out’ within a month of the start of the pandemic.

The solution? Creating my own unique space, a variety of methodologies, multiple different formats, and innovative delivery!

That’s why for the next while, I’ll be devoting a good part of my creative energy from my virtual broadcast studio by focusing on the leadership lessons I’ve learned along the way. I’m getting a hint that my global client base is beginning to awaken from their pandemic slumber, ready to move beyond a continued focus on emergency action, and are aligning themselves to our disruptive future once again.

And with that in mind, there’s a lot to learn about how to confront a complex future through our lessons from the past. Stay tuned!