As a management consultant, entrepreneur, speaker, and author, John has spent over 40 years in Silicon Valley. He is driven by a desire to help individuals and institutions around the world to increase their impact in a rapidly changing world. He recently retired as a leader of the Center for the Edge at Deloitte, and has worked with McKinsey & Co. and Boston Consulting Group. He also served as senior vice president of strategy at Atari, Inc., and is the founder of two Silicon Valley startups. He currently occupies leadership roles at the World Economic Forum and the Santa Fe Institute, and he serves on the faculty of Singularity University. He just finished his 8th book, The Journey Beyond Fear, which will be published by McGraw Hill in May and, among his previous books are The Power of Pull, Net Gain, Net Worth, Out of the Box, and The Only Sustainable Edge.
How and why is fear the defining problem of this period? And, how can we navigate through this period of fear?
When I started writing my book three years ago, I was struck by the degree to which the dominant emotion that I was encountering everywhere was fear, from the highest levels of organizations down to the front lines and out in the communities. I think that there are many different dimensions to the forces that are driving our fear. One element is the mounting performance pressure on all of us. Intensified competition and the accelerating pace of change are now resulting in the disappearance of things we thought we could rely on. We’re experiencing intensifying competition both at a corporate level, but more importantly, at the individual level. We can no longer be certain that we’ve got a job next week or next month. A second element is the connectivity we’ve created on a global scale, where small events far away can quickly cascade into extremely disruptive events.
The paradox is that while we’re in a world of mounting performance pressure, we’re also in a world of exponentially expanding opportunity. We can create much more value with far fewer resources and much more rapidly than would have been imaginable a couple of decades ago. So, key to navigating through this challenging time will be to recognize this opportunity and to cultivate the emotions that will help us to address those opportunities. The need now is to recognize, first of all, that we have fear. Most of us live in cultures where fear is viewed as a sign of weakness, and hence, are unwilling to even acknowledge to ourselves, much less to anyone else, that we’re feeling fear. The next step is recognizing that we need to find ways to cultivate emotions that will help us move beyond fear – the emotions we aspire to have. We want to have hope and excitement. We want to have more and more impact in ways that matter to us and to the people who matter to us. We have these other emotions, and they’re waiting to be drawn out and unleashed.
How can we accelerate our learning to create new knowledge in a rapidly changing world?
Everybody today is talking about lifelong learning and learning faster, but very few people, if any, talk about the motivation to do so. The unstated answer when I press people on it is that it is because of fear. If they don’t learn, they’re going to lose their jobs and be marginalized. While people can learn through fear, it’s not the most powerful motivator for learning, particularly if you’re learning in the form of creating new knowledge through action, which requires taking risks. A key theme in my book is the notion that we have to find within us the passion of the explorer, of which there are three key elements. One element is a long term commitment to being in a specific domain. And not just to be in it, but have an increasing impact over time and to find ways to move the frontier. The second element is the questing disposition. When explorers are confronted with an unexpected challenge, their reaction is excitement as opposed to fear because they know it is the vehicle to getting more impact. The third element is the connecting disposition. As they confront these challenges, they connect with others who can help them get to more and more impact faster. One key is coming together in impact groups. It is typically three to fifteen people who are working closely together, developing deep trust-based relationships with each other and with a shared commitment to action and impact. It’s a beautiful balance between challenging each other and supporting each other. In five years from now, I hope that we will be at a place where we are drawing out the passion that exists in all of us and creating environments that encourage and reward that passion.
How do you see technology helping us to live our lives with less fear?
What has been striking to me is the number of people that I run into who have said that this crisis has given them an opportunity. It’s been a catalyst for them to step back and ask if what they’re doing is really meaningful and recognizing that, in fact, their time is consumed with tasks and activities that aren’t that meaningful to them. I have a feeling that we’re going to come out of this with people saying that they want to do something very different and then looking for technologies to help do that. There is certainly a recognition that technology is increasingly a force that can shape our world both for good and bad. My advice to tech creators is this: As opposed to a lot of the technologies that we have which focus on how we can get that person to do what we want them to do, we should focus on what that person wants and what’s really meaningful to them, and to keep asking that question. Who is this person? What’s their context? What are the emotions that are waiting to be expressed or developed? What are the emotions that are meaningful to this person?
What are your thoughts on space exploration, regenerative travel, and designing our spaces for learning and curiosity?
I think space exploration can address a key need and opportunity here on Earth, which is developing technologies that will allow us to do more with less so that we’re not consuming as many resources while delivering more and more value to the users of the technology.
With regenerative travel, in the past almost 50 years, it has been viewed as a leisure time activity to just relax and unwind. I do think that there is a great opportunity to rethink and reframe travel as an opportunity and reinforcing cycle to learn.
Lastly, with the design of our spaces, a key part of learning is the notion of feedback loops and being able to read your context in much richer detail more rapidly than you have been able to in the past. I think that technology in our environments can accomplish a lot in creating that feedback and that it is going to be a key driver of accelerating performance. The often missed opportunity is feeding the information from the feedback loops directly to the people who are there having that experience.
How do you view narrative, and what is its potential?
I have a very different concept of narrative than most people. Most use narrative and story to mean the same thing. For me, there’s a key difference. To me, a story is self-contained. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end to it. And, a story is not about you – it’s about the story-teller or some other people. The difference for me is that a narrative is open-ended with no resolution yet. There is some big opportunity or threat out in the future, and it is not clear if it’s going to be achieved or not. And crucially, the resolution of the narrative hinges on you. It’s a call to action where your choices and actions are going to help resolve this narrative. I believe there’s a huge opportunity for the use of narratives in companies. In the early days of Apple, they came up with a narrative condensed into the slogan of “Think different”. For decades, we had digital technologies that took away our names, gave us numbers, and put us in cubicles. For the first time, there is a technology that can allow us to express our unique individuality and potential. But the narrative was that it’s not going to happen automatically. You, as an individual, needed to “think different”. It was a call to action to people outside of Apple, and it wasn’t about Apple. With that, narratives are a key element of creating a sense of agency in a world of fear where we feel helpless. We need to shift to seeing and getting excited about opportunities that are available to us and then being aggressive in calling others to act with us.
