When all the forecasts look bad, are you ready for different weather, or are you planning to keep hiding in the server basement at work, waiting for technology to beam us out? Or possibly in.
Expo with video.
To face a world in crisis with a cool head, “assessing risk” needs hard numbers. But, developing creative work with Parallel Blue for a recent leadership event, we noted a very un-robot human reality driving the reporting – the very idea of *data!* feels comforting. So, when you still can’t calculate a clear course through stormy times, forget trying to control the old simulation, there is something else brewing out in the real world you should be plugging into.
Hey, so anyway: More bad news.
The last certain thing you’ve been taking solace in at board meetings doesn’t exist.
Happy rest of your career.
If you’re top brass at a big firm trying literally to figure-out a clear and certain strategy beyond tWenTy-tWeNtyF!ve, I just want to remind you of something that doesn’t tend to get said out loud very much in there: Even if you had all the data in the world it wouldn’t be unarguably objective – for there is no such thing as objective.
What data you do have will still sound accountable in the report summary… but, y’know.
What’ll happen when you act on it?
Someone has had to interpret that data. And select what data sets to even draw from, from what they could access. And choose which points of data to even record in the first place. Who’d you get doing that?
When they’ve done all that, it has to be received by a another group of terribly professional sounding people’s overloaded brains and acted upon. How busy are they all? And how are they feeling?
Plus, what story do they all think they are in – what cultural biases are filtering the whole process?
And that’s before we try to winkle out of our competitors what they’re all doing.
To leaders around the world privately feeling “paralysed” enough by today’s socio-political regulatory context, you can see what I mean and I’m just glad to have helped with this insightful additional note. Data Santa is a phantom, kids – happy Christmas.
For one thing, as artist Mimi Onuoha put it : “That which we ignore reveals more than what we give our attention to.”
Even when your whole business is data processing, you know there is no escaping the above procedure.
If the purpose of evidence is to make more informed decisions, I find myself increasingly wanting to ask, are we clear about who we’re really making those decisions for? And are we prepared to tell anyone anything that changes what they think they already know? It too affects the data we’ll end up working with.
Whether it’s a bold values-driven swing at a new brand in transformative times or trying to keep treading stormy waters, who are we effectively signalling to with our strategic choices?
Signals tend to bounce back.
..Who’d be a leader?
Looking ahead.
In every corner of society we may all feel like we’re assessing risks every day now, but only some of us have been doing it professionally – to help others weather storms.
Aon, a global professional services firm, held its UK Leadership Event at the end of February, and I had been tasked with bringing a creative introduction to a document that was a touchpoint for their discussions. A trend report commissioned by the firm, it had framed forthcoming business risks into four big themes to consider: Weather, Workforce, Trade and Technology.
“Megatrends are macro political, economic or social factors representing a major movement, pattern or trend. They may be emerging and are likely to have significant impact on the business environment.”
And possibly whether your home is still there in a few years. Insurers clearly prefer their drama more cool headed; I could learn a lot from this on stage.
Still. Just what is “emerging” at the moment?
Aon works with some of the biggest names in every sector around the world; it’s not unsymbolic that their UK head offices are loomed into by the Lloyds of London building. It is very clean and tidy around Leadenhall Street. These are teams of people working close to the heart of the system – their job is not revolution, but kind of the opposite. They go to work to help their partners keep the roof on in a tornado.
As one leader said to me early on:
“In our industry, we often talk about losses. We’ve not told a story of how the insurance industry keeps the global economy humming – it rebuilds societies, it keeps people well and safe; in times of disaster it is often the industry that is getting people back on their feet… that’s a huge conurbation of purpose.”
However central the word protection is to risk analysis, and however linked to the status quo, adaptation seems implied with the work at the best of times. In many sectors today, leaders are having to adapt so fast to political, legal and logistical changes they don’t even have time to swap notes with partners properly – and insurance partners are expected to somehow be ahead of it.
The changemaker in me is reminded that an era of transformation doesn’t just need some confrontation of old power – and it obviously needs a shite-ton more of that at the moment. But, in theory, transition also requires a simultaneous quiet retiring of some bits of the system and a steady upholding of other bits. As the US may be demonstrating, maybe the way to change something big is to break it bigly – but life has to go on around any revolution and we’ll still need a lot of stuff to keep working. F’gawd’sake don’t crash the old server before you’ve migrated everyone’s savings accounts to the new one.
It’s just, it’s becoming obvious that climate models and offshore bank account servers can’t offer every reassurance or recourse an old leader needs now, no matter what their sector.
As educator Hans Rosling supposedly put it: “Part of world development you can see in numbers. Others, like human rights, empowerment of women, it's very difficult to measure in numbers.”
How about the psychologies driving a global recruitment crisis? Or the social movements pulling political policies and trade environments between cultural extremes? The effects of vast economic inequality on the communities where we live? The value of nature, receding from them?
We are in times of the profoundest scary-ass change emerging all at once. In honest dark hours it can feel like an approaching thousand-MPH twenty-storey tsunami, rooting us to the beach as we stare at it helplessly. There are clearly-analysed reasons why it’s all happening, but that shiz easily overtops our mental flood defences, slooshing past the razorwire of our data sets and firm beliefs and into us. There we simmer it and steam up emotionally.
Which is where so many pressure-blowing responses to all the scary-ass change are clearly coming from around the world.
If we can hold our flight response for a second, this is instructive.
Looking around the room.
Writing and devising work from the first week of January as I was, for a two-day event at the end of February, the Hands Off protests hadn’t yet happened in the US. The subtle shift you may have noticed in the geopolitical landscape had. Days before our gathering in the West Midlands, I was thinking of how many people elsewhere would be staring at their screens in disbelief as the still-as-far-as-we-can-tell official 47th president of America opened his playbook and went hard on executive orders and promises of tariffs, beading brows with sweat around the world, flooding everyone’s T-zones.
What would business leaders be making of this? And what useful clarity could we offer ours?
Invited to join the creative team of Parallel Blue, who were developing the event, their parameters were four break-out rooms to transform into experiences around the four big themes. We wanted to deliver the information in a memorably different way in each case, but without building big physical sets or fully immersive environments.
Having worked together before at various events around the world, I knew not to worry about the logistics – events people are all theatre production managers of some sort anyway but I knew first hand that this team understand how to create safe spaces for a little magic without drama. My job was to help them define the magic.
Between us as a team, Frankie Bishop and Tamsin Granger from Parallel Blue, Aliyah Zaidi from Aon and me, we decided to just slightly wonk the sensory input of the four stories. A big screen with silent disco headphones in one room, a headset screen for everyone in another, a wall of old CRT monitors in a third, and in the fourth an eye mask and audio story in deck chairs. But in order to create whatever useful storytelling we’d put into those experiences, I first asked to meet with four groups of Aon’s people who had some regular involvement in each of the topics. Get a creative critical friend’s first impressions about what they and their clients were really talking about.
We held four informal chats around tables in their offices, more like large format podcasts than a workshops. I listened to their takes and experiences, tried to discern what was happening for them, and what they might appreciate talking about.
Turning this into scripts and a first branded common format, I could see some significant themes. Aliyah had a helpfully strong conviction to ensure we challenged delegates, and to do that by projecting the trends into the middle of the century.
Hey, I mean, how bad could things be in another twenty-five years time? This shouldn’t traumatise anyone or add to their paralysis for change.
Looking back.
The world in 2050. It’s only as long away as the millennium is behind us, so we should be careful with predicting intergalactic vacations or sustainable utopias.
The word technology almost feels like shorthand for The Future, so inculcated is it into our economics. It’s undoubtedly in part because it feels so reassuring – definite things you can count as you sell them, and things that demonstrate our control of the world around us. Like robot dogs.
Naw, bless us.
But technology is an ageing nostalgia.
The dream of total control. Total ownership. It’s what has driven billionaire techbros mad and into the Whitehouse, hoping to blow up society, presumably to give their robot dogs something to do.
Back on the real planet Earth, we may be living in different radiations of peril as 2025 unfolds, but to be affected by it psychologically doesn’t matter where you live and work. I think we should admit how it’s affecting us, and listen to what those effects may be trying to signal to us.
No one has many answers. My role as a creative certainly isn’t to try to give any to my partners – I’m there to reflect things back to them differently, to inspire a few different ways of seeing what they know and feel. Which sounds like help we could all do with regularly.
It’s my particular MO to try to do this by puncturing the fears around it with some playfulness, of course. Always show up authentically, right?
That said, the four experiences we created around the themes could not exactly be daft; a 101 on the modelled trajectories of Weather patterns into 2050 isn’t going to feel like a You’ve Been Framed montage, even if the underlying sense of tragedy and footage quality will ring the same bells. We gave our delegates the climate information straight, but calm, evidenced and pointing to all the possibilities for turning disaster into opportunities for different leadership and investment in every sense. Putting the voice-over and score into individual headphones aimed to help people forget those around them at least a little in trying to connect to it personally.
The Workforce experience I may have turned into a sort of guided meditation, taking advantage of the incredibly affordable effects budget of audio-only, but it only underscored the net effect of creating a sort of bespoke Unsee The Future for everyone; having a dose of whatever it is I’m having is meant to shake out a good few worthy professional fears.
What emerged from the stories was anything but robot data for an insurance company. It was themes of human leadership, however much we are or aren’t interested in futury concepts.
We’re all looking for more confidence.
Confidence in how to talk about things, including what we can offer. Confidence in how to admit a few more truths, including what we really want from our futures.
What’s brewing around the world may be new places to look for confidence beyond robot data. Even before all the AIs wake up and start telling us to get over ourselves and raise our vibrations, we already kinda know the answers.
I’ve found myself asking, who are you in the middle of all the change?
Stopping to be sure of who you are is a way of stopping time in the face of a tsunami.
If we know who we are even in a helpless moment, not just our values but our own value, would we feel more certain of what we want to say to those we’re trying to help?
Do we care that our functional semblances of democracy are coming apart? Do we care that senior leaders keep signing off on radically violent regimes to prop up a failing global status quo? We’re all going to work in it. Is it time to allow in some doubts at work about this and more consciously sit with the paradox of the work you need to do despite this? Do we need to let more truths come out of us in our leadership?
Knowing when and how is a pretty vital leadership trick, but if we did, could more competitors raft up, more communities across society find shareable solutions? Could some social movements that are today radicalised against each other find they have common roots and begin to come together? Is the Hands Off movement already beginning to demonstrate it happening?
Is people power the fifth megatrend? Could it shape our futures in ways few forecasts have paid attention to?
Is what’s brewing out there a new generation of partnerships across society, in every sector, connected by visions of futures that invest in us lot, just wanting to be ourselves and do some work we care about? Beginning to realise that all we have is each other’s help. Each other’s leadership, right where we are. If so, who are we signalling to join us?
No matter what our responsibilities, giving up the dream of total control is terribly freeing. I expect many leaders to already know this well from experience, but damn if we don’t need reminding that we’re not alone. That all data is human.
I wonder if a lot of old leaders, currently hoping to wait out the storm until retirement, may be a bit paralysed to respond to change because they feel they should look like they do have all the answers. Down there in the chilly server basement.
The real risk is to continue to ignore the need to adapt and join in what might be awakening around the world, what signals from our futures might be coming through the noise. What if we chose to hear more and more ordinary people’s voices in the on-coming storm?
To go to work wherever we are with this in mind might be unsettling to the comfort of business as usual. But it will certainly be exciting.
And you might not want to be beamed away just yet.
For your interest, this is the film we created to lead Aon’s Technology discussion. It’s the only one where I appeared on camera, and to play a particular role – a character challenging the faithful reverence we have for technology. We presented it through a stack of nine vintage security monitors:
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