Daily Inspiration: “Navigating 2022 – What to expect when you are always expecting the unexpected!”

“Navigating 2022 – What to expect when you are always expecting the unexpected!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

Maybe I should have put together another book! After all, look at where we find ourselves today! If I were to write one right now, it would be how to navigate through uncertainty, complexity, and relentless volatility. But perhaps by the time I wrote it, we might find no need for it! There’s always hope!

Barely 3 months in, 2022 has certainly been defined by volatility and the unexpected. War in Ukraine, accelerating inflation, an uncertain economic horizon, continued supply chain challenges, high oil, and gasoline prices. I tried to capture the idea of future volatility last year when I started putting together some blog posts about the year to come with a number of related ‘thinking-teasers” – short clips that give people something to think about. Here are two of them. Notice a theme?

And while I force myself to be an optimist, I also had one moment in which I compiled a list of the worst things yet to come, and wrote them into a really depressing blog post, The Dark Underside of a Usually Optimistic Future: How Bad Could Things Get? Pretty Bad!‘ In a particularly sour mood, I captured all of my negative predictions into one spot. How bad could it get? Pretty bad. I dare you to read it, and disagree with some of my predictions. You can read it here: https://badthings.jimcarroll.com.

The Dark Underside of a Usually Optimistic Future: How Bad Could Things Get? Pretty Bad!

To go with it, I “filmed a thing.” It’s pretty dark, LOL. I even found some wonderfully dark music to go with it. Depressing!

What was one of the things on the list of my ‘bad things’ post? War with China – and so while I did not anticipate Ukraine, I did expect unexpected volatility!

Here’s the point of this post – I’ve long thought that we would enter a new era of accelerating volatility, and here we find ourselves today. And so, being forward-oriented, one of the keynote themes I pulled together last year that is now attracting attention is how to lead through volatility. It plays into the types of talks I did through our last era of big volatility from 2008 to 2011 or so. I kept pretty busy! Check out the description – and take a look at the image at the end. That’s from a keynote from early 2009.

So keep this in mind – where we find ourselves today, accelerating into the unexpected is the natural result of what happens when we find ourselves in a world in which volatility is the new normal!

Keynote: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity – Leadership Strategies and Insight for the Post Pandemic World