Are you going with the flow?
I listened to a podcast recently about an extreme whitewater kayaker and his adventures. Not long after I watched a webinar of Seth Godin his new book This is Strategy.
One of Godin’s points was how we often ignore systems and our environment, yet how influential they can be in determining outcomes. Many successes are due to the business harnessing the forces at play (eg, YouTube and the internet coming of age, Zoom and lockdowns, Ozempic and Instagram). I connected the podcast and webinar with the analogy of finding the fast water to speed your passage.
From my (limited) experience in paddling down braided rivers in races, the best paddlers are not necessarily the strongest, they are the ones that can read the river best. This is one of the reasons Steve Gurney won so many Coast to Coast races. He would out-think rather than out-muscle his competition. He found the fastest water.
This made me consider where the fast currents in the world around us are. We live in an era of rapid change in terms of trends, needs, demographics, climate, geopolitics, technologies etc. The internet coupled with AI makes the speed of adoption of new stuff exponentially faster than ever before. This confluence will throw up many opportunities in all types of categories.
The cool thing about this is that imagination becomes more of a valuable skill. Connecting disparate things, emerging needs, and deploying new technologies in novel ways. Godin believes it will not be long before we see the first one-person business hitting $1b through clever application of tools and tech.
It strikes me that mastery of imagination will be a big determination of individual success going forward. AI cannot imagine the undocumented - that is the domain of humans. This is where the new ground will be cut - with AI being a lever to accelerate.
I can envisage a new C-suite role, CIO - Chief Imagination Officer. Who wouldn’t want that job?
Curiosity and imagination are happy bedfellows. Get curious. Imagine new possibilities. Run away from the status quo (aka a comfortable rut) and discover.
