On this day, in 2018.
And if you think about it, the future was pretty slow back then. In the olden days, pre-Covid, before the world accelerated, and the Acceleration Gap became your biggest challenge going forward!
“Maybe the very first thing you should understand about the future is that it will probably happen sooner than you think!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
On this day in 2018, I spoke to a few thousand dentists about their future.
I have pictures. Lots of them! And video! I might as well use it, and so in the months to come, you’ll find my Daily Inspiration will make use of stories from my past, providing some context on looking forward by looking back!
The quote is a critical one I would often use on stage as I set up my talk – by referencing the time that NASA invited me in to talk about ‘the future of space.’ It was a wonderful scene – I had a room full of astronauts, launch directors, rocket engineers, mission controllers, and others. It had to be the highlight (so far!) of my speaking career. (My launch was successful; they invited me back in for a second voyage….)
The context was typical of many of my talks through the years. NASA at the time was in the midst of an agonizing and complex future – do they do it on their own, or might the path to space be found in new forms of disruptive, collaborative thinking? I set the stage for my mission by outlining the reality of the era of acceleration – and the fact that what we think is far away is actually closer than we think.
We need to time travel when it comes to the future.
From this point on, that storyline became a critical part of how I would open many of my keynotes around the world – to understand the future, our very first step is to appreciate it is going to be here faster than we think.
After all, look at NASA today – in the context of SpaceX.
What was the context of the storyline within my keynote for these dentists on this day 3 years ago? The acceleration of healthcare, faster medical science, the arrival of bio-engineered body parts, and much, much more. Here’s a highlight clip.
And check this shorter clip – it’s all about the attitude that you carry towards what comes next. Food for thought!
Before I hit the stage, I gave a bit of a brief overview of my context for the talk that would happen soon. I usually did this during ‘stage check’.
And so when it comes to the future, sometimes – we can look forward by looking back!
So – someone asked me if I delivered canned insight.
LOL.
I’ll just give you this playlist to start.
And then, let me share what I really do.
I decided to start listing a few clients with a short overview of the unique keynote titles or topic spin that formed the basis for my keynote or talk for their CEO group or leadership team. Each and every one unique, customized and hitting on some key, core issue.
Consider this: these are my clients, and what I covered – and every single one of these talks has resulted in some unique innovation, disruption, transformation, or trends guidance.
I’m thinking there’s a new book here!
It’s quite the list. And that’s only some of the unique topics I’ve covered!
“You’ll finally discover your true creative energy when you find your fifth Beatle, your very own Bernie Taupin!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
Every creative person has their fifth Beatle, their very own Bernie Taupin – working behind the scenes, making the magic really happen!
And quite often, working silently with little credit, totally unacknowledged and unrecognized for the magic they do.
In my case, that would be my wife and business partner, Christa.
On Friday, I handed over to her the manuscript, such as it is, for my 39th book, going with the working title, “Now What: Reinvention and the Role of Optimism in our Post-Pandemic Era.” There comes a point when your creative energy is spent, your efforts hitting that wall of diminishing artistic returns.
I hit that point – and so it was time to hand it over to her, where she will do her magic. And it will be ….. magical!
I truly would not be able to accomplish what I do without her efforts. And she’s been doing this for a long, long time. I’ve often asked her if she would like her name on the book as a co-author – and the answer has always been “NO.” She should be listed as such.
39 books! Many of these were written in the ’90s, in the long-lost early days of the Internet. Some had to do with the role and future of healthcare online, money management in the connected era, how to maximize your small business potential through online resources. My co-author Rick Broadhead and I were often referred to as the “Lennon & McCartney of the Canadian Internet scene”, pumping out our works at a furious pace. We also got our books into print in the US, Germany, Russia – and even found an unauthorized copy of one selling in India!
Other books we pulled together were simple directories of online resources. Our little Canadian Internet Handbook became a national bestseller, rocketing both myself and Rick into news shows, press interviews, a whirlwind of publicity insanity that went on for 6 solid years until we had enough.
One of our best efforts was known by the title “From Light Bulbs to Yottabits: How to Profit By Understanding the Internet of the Future.” Released with uncanny timing right as the dot.com world was imploding, it sank like a stone, unnoticed and pretty much a failure when it came to sales. Released in 2000, it predicted with absolutely stunning accuracy where we find ourselves in the world of technology today.
On every single one of these books, Rick and I would take them as far as we could – at which point we would hand them over to Christa. She would take on her role of editing and polish with a flourish. She knew what she was doing – she would stand her ground, battel for her perspective, reorganize the words of these two iconoclastic geeks into words that the average human could understand.
All she ever got was a tiny mention in the credits.
I also did a ‘solo’ album during this time, writing Surviving the Information Age, which took a look at the early days of the, well, information age. Christa and I hit the library together as part of the research process, spending countless hours looking back at the news media during the ’50s, ’60s, 70s. This was a book in which she fully and completely played the role of a creative partner, helping throughout with the writing process. It remains my proudest work.
She never got credit as a co-author – she should have. I did ask – she said no!
And then, in the 2000s, she worked with me as I pivoted to writing titles around the topics of trends and innovation – What I Learned from Frogs in Texas, Ready, Set Done, The Future Belongs to Those Who are Fast, and most recently, Think Big, Start Small., Scale Fast. In each case, I took things as far as I could until I had no more, became absolutely bored with the project, or knew that it needed her unique insight to drag it towards the finish line.
And in each case, she worked her magic. She never got proper acknowledgment, other than a small mention in the book credits.
I did ask – she said no.
(All of these are found on my Books page.)
She’s now doing it again on this latest project. This is a unique book, unlike anything I’ve ever written before.
It’s been a struggle, to be honest! It’s become a book that explores the simple voyage through optimism and reinvention of seven everyday individuals – what they’ve done to reinvent their life, and what we might learn from them. It’s become the closest thing to a self-help book that I’ve ever written, and I got to the point where I wasn’t even sure there was a book there!
She read through what I had, has seen the potential, and will come back with something wonderful. And I had the most wonderful moment as she finished the rough manuscript, and quietly said from over on her said of the office that, yes, there is a book there. I truly wasn’t sure!
Every creative person needs their fifth Beatle, their Bernie Taupin.
Christa is mine.
Look, I am not professing to be someone who has the creative brilliance of the Beatles, or the musical mastery of Elton John – but they had George Martin, the producer, and the Rocket Man had Bernie Taupin, the songwriter.
Both working, mostly silent, behind the scenes, who do the truly magical things to make creativity magical!
And I have my Christa.
Thank you, my love!
The global pandemic has changed the axis of our universe. What was disruptive before is now massively transformative.
Do you have a strategy to keep up?
Pre-pandemic, CEOs and organizations were dealing with a world of business model disruption, the acceleration of technology, the faster evolution of key skills, and other critical issues. Now, in the harsh light of our emerging post-pandemic world, one thing is clear – the future is even more complex than it was before. And a simple fact has emerged – there is a massive and growing gap between the speed of change and the ability of organizations to keep up. Bridging this gap is critical to future success – and the significance of your inability to bridge the gap is even bigger than it was before.
Pre-pandemic, CEOs and organizations were dealing with a world of business model disruption, the acceleration of technology, the faster evolution of key skills, and other critical issues. Now, in the harsh light of our emerging post-pandemic world, one thing is clear – the future is even more complex than it was before. And a simple fact has emerged – there is a massive and growing gap between the speed of change and the ability of organizations to keep up. Bridging this gap is critical to future success – and the significance of your inability to bridge the gap is even bigger than it was before.
The challenges exist in stark terms. Medical knowledge is now doubling every 78 days, compared to 8 years a decade ago, rendering irrelevant previous healthcare industry strategies. We’ve gone from a world of just-in-time to just-in-case supply chain concepts because of a world of broken globalization. 68% percent of organizations have said that global pandemic has forced them to adapt and change their business models – what was disruptive before is even more so today.
The gap is growing, and the challenge is that society and organizations are not prepared to deal with the massive disconnect this presents – they are structured for slow in an era of fast! That’s the ‘ACCELERATION GAP’ – it’s real, and it’s’ growing. And it’s going to hurt you going forward unless you work to minimize it. Because otherwise, leadership strategies that worked yesterday are exposed as being irrelevant tomorrow even while they are actively considered today.
What worked yesterday will not work tomorrow, and you are on a guaranteed path to failure if you don’t align with our new reality- by mastering the disconnect between speed and structure. The pandemic has changed everything, and future-oriented leadership is more important than ever before. History tells us that every global crisis shifts the axis of the future of our universe and every crisis offers an opportunity to improve.
In this keynote, Futurist Jim Carroll provides you detailed, customized insight on the trends that matter as we go forward into a world driven by uncertainty, impacted by potential relentless volatility, and unrelenting waves of massive opportunity – and a stagey for mastering the acceleration disconnect. For over 25 years, Jim Carroll has provided senior-level leadership insight on how to become a future-ready organization. With clients such as NASA, Disney, Pfizer, Microsoft, Chrysler, the World Government Summit, Godiva, and Nestle, he has a proven track record of aligning organizations to a fast-moving future.
“It’s pretty obvious that the ability to return to where we were is being held back by those who refuse to accept what it will take to get there!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
It’s fascinating how quickly our world changes – we’ve gone from “we need a vaccine” to “when will the vaccine be distributed?” to “I won’t take a vaccine, are you kidding?” in but a matter of months.
If there is one trend that is clear, it’s that the ability of a society to implode because of the sorry state of its maturity has accelerated. Watching the anti-vaxxers and the issue of vaccine-hesitancy is like watching a car wreck in slow motion – you know how it is going to end up; you want to turn away, but you can’t but help to take a look.
Since my job is to talk about trends, let’s talk about a significant one: it’s becoming pretty clear that the US won’t be able to soon have the nice things that it wants – and as it strives to get them, it’s going to be incomprehensibly ugly. The government has achieved something remarkable in getting 200 million people vaccinated in very short order but knows that it is going to be a tall order to reach many of the rest.
The result is that the science of herd immunity means that it will be out of reach.
Compare that to Britain and Israel, where the same type of demagogue-leader-driven hysteria and mental illness does not exist – they’ll be able to have nice things because the anti-vax mental illness does not exist in the same scope! And in my home country of Canada – although we are in the midst of a slow rollout driven by supply issues, and we are in the dark depths of a major wave – the uptake will be pretty significant. We’ll be able to have nice things!
And so the US at this moment and well into the future will be a land of fascinating but damaging contradictions. American Airlines is hiring back all of its pilots, expecting an explosion in travel demand. Major conferences are being scheduled in a wave of expectation for the fall. People are talking about a return to the ‘good old days.’
But here’s one thing to think about – future, reliable economic growth will come to those nations who have the maturity to deal with reality. If I were a CEO, consider a future investment, Britain, Israel – and hey, Canada – would be top of mind. You can’t make things great again when a pandemic becomes endemic, washing waves of illness over a country in a regular series of outbreaks that will further drive apart the existing split in society.
This has become one of my biggest trends that outline our future – the big gap between the desire to return to where we were and the ability to get there.
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