JimCarroll

“Take a look around – you didn’t move fast enough. The future – not your past – has now caught up to you!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

It’s not just that your past has caught up to you. It’s the fact that the future might pass you by!

Years from now, you will look back at what you did during the ‘pandemic years’ to reinvent yourself for the years to come. Were you stuck, clinging to your life in the ‘before times?’ Or did you immediately start taking the steps, pursuing the actions, carving a path, forging a road forward that would take you into a world for what comes next?

It’s not too late to start preparing for a different reality. I’m pretty convinced that in years to come, we will look back at every industry, institution, skill, profession, career, and just about everything else, and our minds will boggle both at the speed and the scope of the change that is underway.

When you are sitting inside a jet, looking down, you can’t really comprehend the speed with which you are moving.

You are now inside that jet.

Are you ready for when you get to the destination?

“Stop trying to get back to where you were ‘before’: invest your time in where you are going to be ‘after!’” Futurist Jim Carroll

It’s a fascinating time to be a futurist – you get to spend a lot of time researching how this once-in-a-lifetime disruption will change everything going forward.

From a corporate perspective, there hasn’t been much of a focus on this, quite obviously. And yet, I’m starting to notice executives within my client base start to move beyond the necessary triage to save and reinvent their companies, to the next phase: “now what?” There has been precious little time for long-term planning when you are performing CPR on the patient – but now that we are in the recovery room, there’s a little bit more time to think about the plan for rehabilitation and reinvention.

The same holds true for individuals – the personal crisis that many millions have been launched into has taken all of their efforts and consumed their entire working day. You can’t have a plan for your future if you won’t have a future to plan for! But as we slowly begin our climb out of the abyss of despair and destruction, people are finding time to take stock of their future circumstances.

If that is you – don’t look back! Fix your gaze forward! Stop thinking about how wonderful it was – put in the effort to create a platform for how wonderful it will be. Don’t dare for a moment to think about your opportunities before – define a unique set of opportunities for who you will be after.

Don’t dare for a moment to think that ‘we are going to back to the way it was’: there’s not a chance of that.

There’s only a chance for something entirely different.

Once you accept that, the rest will start to come to you through what you do next – because you’ll have a better idea of what to do right now!

“Your plan for the future will work, until it won’t. Plan accordingly!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

Some years back, I started using the phrase ‘volatility is the new normal’ quite frequently. As much as I hate the phrase “new normal” in the context of Covid-19, I still often run with the concept when describing the future, and what to do about it.

Way back in 2007, I covered the idea in a list of 10 key trends for the future by specifically framing it around the concept of connectivity risk:

“Volatility is the new normal: increasing connectivity increases the likelihood of cascading failures. Risk management is becoming more important, and more complex. Fewer organizations pay serious attention to the complexity of risk, leading to greater potential for short, sharp economic shocks.

It became a key issue during the 2008-09 recession as organizations had to learn how to align to rapidly changing market and financial circumstances; took on strength again with the 2016 election and the ‘era of insanity‘ which ensued, and obviously once again with the pandemic.

It has certainly become a key and critical leadership issue because, in today’s time of massive uncertainty, future-focused leaders want to make sure they are aligning themselves to fast-paced trends – and insight to navigate this complex new world. Accepting volatility goes to one of my key points about how to align to an uncertain future: when hit by the unknown, you can panic and act irrationally; freeze and do nothing, or respond with a relentless focus on innovation and adaptation.

It’s not natural, though, to accept volatility. Many people are engineered to freeze in the face of uncertainty – the deer in the headlights syndrome! The fact is, business hates uncertainty — and many react by turning off their innovation engines, waiting to see what happens next. But that’s a bad strategy – because opportunities are missed, time is lost, and the future moves on!

History has taught us, over and over again, that those who are aggressive with action, and who align themselves to future trends in times of uncertainty, are those who win in the long run.

Who do you choose to be?