If... (A Compass For the Unknown Territory Ahead)

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

Charles Darwin

Two things prompt this...

A weariness with all the prophets of certainty. I do so envy their ability to look ten years into the future and predict precisely what kind of world we’ll be living in.

And Iain Tait’s recent caution against assuming we’re in a ‘post-digital’ era. It continues to truly haunt me. It gave me the wonderful, jolting realization that we ain’t seen nothing yet.

We’re now in uncharted waters. And they’re going to get a lot stranger. As Henry Wallace once opined, “the only certainty in this life is change.” So how on earth are we going to stay adaptable to the torrent of change?

My two cents’ worth...

If you love solving problems

If you are a student of the fundamentals of human nature

If you work to be an architect of behavioral change

If you are fluent in both fast and slow culture

If you have a knowledge of how brands grow

If you are genuinely interested in clients’ business issues

If you are lover of storytelling in all its disparate forms

If you have a fascination for how we are becoming technological creatures

If you like to look under the hood to see how technology actually works

If you don’t give in to rhetoric

If you don’t succumb to fashion

If you realize you don’t know it all

If you admit that none of us actually knows where we are headed

If you remember there are no rules

If you remember there are new rules

If you maintain a good-natured disdain for our business

If you’re focused on making stuff today that works

If you play well with others

Then the chances are you will stay adaptive

Have a future

And have fun

Or something.