The impact of these powerful attitudinal shifts are playing out in the workforce and how organizations attract talent.

We are shifting as individuals and societies as younger people mature through an unprecedented environment. But what we are in the process of discovering is what is fundamental and unchanging about us, and what can change.

Older people have always prescribed patience. Today perhaps that is not the right approach.

Most importantly, I believe that broader societal shifts are not just generational, we are in the midst of a secular transformation of attitudes across all generations, young and old.

Particularly for internal corporate events, one of the most popular themes is ‘Embracing the Future‘, in which I not only point to the dramatic shifts underway and the potential of the future, but show that the attitude of embracing those changes will bring the greatest personal opportunities.

I recently created a short video to help describe the main themes of the keynote, shown below.

My keynote on Embracing the Future is always tailored to the audience, industry, and context, but the underlying attitude of having employees embrace rather than shy away from change and emerging opportunities is critical for every company.

I’d love to hear any thoughts or reflections on the video.

The story in summary, told at more length in the Unlock the passion of the Explorer report, is that:

* Technological change is creating ever-increasing pressures and challenges for institutions and individuals;

* In this world the rationale for large organizations to exist is no longer scalable efficiency, but scalable learning;

* The Center for the Edge looked to find examples of “sustained, extreme performance improvement” that reflects this scalable learning;

* What they found in common was deep passion, but a particular type of passion that they dubbed the passion of the “Explorer”

The passion of the Explorer has three attributes:

• Commitment to Domain — Long-term commitment can be understood as a desire to have a lasting and increasing impact on a particular domain (industry sector or function) and a desire to participate in the domain for the foreseeable future. Commitment to Domain helps individuals focus on where they can make the most impact. Having domain context enables an individual to learn much faster, allowing for cumulative learning. This commitment, however, does not imply isolation or tunnel vision. Quite the opposite: these individuals are constantly seeking lessons and innovative practices from adjacent and new domains that have the potential for impact within their chosen domain.

• Questing — The Questing disposition drives workers to go above and beyond their core responsibilities. Workers with the Questing disposition constantly probe, test, and push boundaries to identify new opportunities and learn new skills. Resourceful and imaginative, they try to identify novel ways of using the tools and resources available to them to improve their performance. These workers actively seek challenges that might help them achieve the next level of performance and explore the undiscovered. If they cannot find these challenges, individuals with a Questing disposition get frustrated by the pace of learning and move to another environment (team or organization) that does offer these opportunities.

• Connecting — The Connecting disposition leads individuals to seek out and interact with others to share interests. Although workers may intuitively understand that an effective way to advance is to connect with and learn from others, workers with a Connecting disposition often seek deep interactions with others in related domains to attain insight that they can bring back into their own domain. Workers driven by the Connecting disposition build connections, not to grow their own professional networks, but to seek out experts and continue to learn and develop no matter how knowledgeable they already are.

Many of the people I know and admire the most absolutely match these attributes.

The Center for the Edge’s study showed that 11% of American employees are Explorers. As John noted, this is actually an encouraging result given the nature of corporate employment.

For institutions, the question is of course how to attract, develop, and retain more passionate explorers.

However passionate explorers, who have the attributes described above, are increasingly likely to choose a path of entrepreneurship. This opportunity is increasingly available to those who have the requisite passion.

Clearly there are today quite a few institutions that have been able to attract passionate explorers, by giving them leeway, resources, possibilities, and the network around them to achieve things that they could not achieve on their own.

However they are in a minority, and their competition for talented people is less competitors in their industry than the alternative of self-employment and entrepreneurship.

If you are a “passionate explorer”, what are the attributes of an institution that could attract you?

If you are a large organization, understand the scope of the task of shifting to become that kind of institution. Because it will be essential for your future prosperity.

Image credit: Hadi Zaher

It was just a one week holiday, my first proper break in the last year, which has been perhaps the most intense year in my life. Victoria and I did take a little time off between this last Christmas and New Year but I ended having to do a some urgent client work and many interviews including Sunrise, Today, and Morning Show over New Year so it wasn’t a real holiday.

Switching off

During the holiday I was almost completely switched off from digital world, with limited connectivity where we were staying helping me avoid more than very briefly glancing at email or Twitter every day or so, though I did need to respond to a couple of enquiries.

Over the last while I have seen quite a few tweets from leading entrepreneurs, saying how they love entrepreneurs because they are always on, they never turn away from their passion.

Absolutely, as an entrepreneur when you are switched on, you always want to do anything and everything possible to advance your cause, to push things forward.

However it is certainly not a good thing not to be able to switch off at all. For an entrepreneur, because there are no half-measures when it comes to work, the only solution is to switch off as fully as possible when you can.

Every time I switch off I find it to be an amazing and extraordiinary experience. If I make the choice to switch off, I find it pretty easy to dismiss the recurring impulse to check on messages.

Interrupting habits

The vast majority of connected people on the planet have very well-developed habits to check their email or social media, almost all of them more than is useful or even sane, really.

My digital habits are not entirely dysfunctional, partly since I have the fortune (?) to have my work significantly based around social media, however I am absolutely guilty of over-habitual checking in.

Humans adopt habits easily, and we need to have power over them. In my 2014: Crunch Time report I wrote that:

We must all choose how we want to participate in a world increasingly driven by digital connections. It is a valid choice not to engage, as long as you understand the extent of the lost opportunities. More of us need to know how to sometimes switch off, to avoid being sucked into an online vortex that ultimately subtracts from us rather than adding possibilities.

Space

When you switch off, you are giving space to ideas and feelings to emerge that are suppressed by constant busy-ness.

These feelings are critically important for allowing our humanity, individuality, and personality to develop. However focused we are on our entrepreneurial ventures, these are not dispensable.

The ideas that emerge into a little space in your life are also often immensely valuable in your ventures. Perspective is critical for anyone involved in creating things.

Health

Supposedly more than half of people gain weight on their holidays. That is terrible. They find it hard to keep fit and healthy during their usual working life, then go backwards when they are on holidays.

Each time Victoria, the girls and I go to Jervis Bay we focus on exercise and very healthy food, and almost completely cut out sugar, alcohol, and other toxins. Every day I go for an ocean swim and beach run at least once, and often twice.

You can readily reset your habits and palate in a week, meaning that well after a break you will shun unhealthy or excessive food, and feel compelled to exercise regularly.

During last year’s holiday and the following weeks when I maintained good habits, I managed to lose close to 5kgs of excess weight I’d been trying to get rid of for over 10 years. I have kept it off this year and I’ve lost a little more weight on this holiday.

The difference in well-being when you have less excess weight is extraordinary. I have felt far better over the last year.

Energy

Victoria and I both believe it’s very likely this coming year will be the most amazing in our lives, in both our work and personal lives.

For that, we must be as fit and healthy as possible. We will be working immensely hard. My upcoming schedule and planned ventures for the next few months are already looking extremely intense, including speaking engagements in four continents and potentially launching two new companies, and that’s just the beginning.

What you achieve is largely dependent on your energy levels. Grinding yourself into the ground with insane amounts of work without respite vastly deducts from your store of energy. Entrepreneurs sometimes feel they are in it for a short dash of maybe a few years. But being completely burnt out when you find you need yet more energy destroys opportunities. Entrepreneurs should always be in it for the long game.

Nature

Entrepreneurs are blessed to experience extraordinary scope in our endeavours. Yet the immense focus required brings us to detail and away from broader vistas.

The cities and towns around the world where almost all entrepreneurship happens have many qualities, but rarely that of natural beauty. (Though Sydney does pretty well on this score.)

Spending time in a wonderful natural environment gives us perspective. It can inspire us in very practical ways. Business models as well as materials and products can be bio-mimetic.

Returning

I have to say it doesn’t take too long of a holiday before I start thinking about work, getting new ideas, and raring to go again. I’m sure the majority of entrepreneurs experience this.

I do aspire to having considerably longer holidays than one week, though that’s not feasible for the meantime.

However not having a holiday is very likely to reduce the chances of entrepreneurial success.

A wonderful 2014

Now, having had an awesome holiday, I am looking forward to throwing my invigorated self into the fray, working as hard and as smart as I can to create special things in the year ahead.

Make sure you take energizing holidays too. They will drive success and create a far better life for you and those around you.

Three of us – Jean Claude Biver, Chairman of watchmaker Hublot, Zeno Staub, CEO of Bank Vontobel, and myself – gave 10 minute presentations, followed by a panel discussion between us.

I spoke on Passion and the Future of Work. Below are some distilled thoughts from my keynote presentation.

The future of work is perhaps the most important lens to understand the future of business, society, and indeed humanity. 

Over the next decade and more we can expect the global landscape of work to change to an extraordinary degree.

There are two primary driving forces that are transforming work. 

In a connected world, almost all work can be done anywhere. 

And the exponential growth of processing power is enabling computers to outperform humans for an ever-increasing scope of work.

At the same time we have long been designing organizations in a way that dehumanizes work. As we design workflow around increasingly precisely defined jobs and roles, this has often taken out the scope for uniquely human characteristics such as imagination and ingenuity. 

Today we must focus on the work and activities at which humans can express their unique capabilities and excel far beyond machiines. (Read more on the dehumanization and humanization of work.)

What we are passionate about is very likely what we are best at, what enables us to express ourselves and our capabilties to the fullest. We can be sure that passion will be at the heart of the future of work.

For must of us there are two domains to have a real impact on the future of work: ourselves as individuals, and the organizations in which we are leaders or employees.

For individuals, real passion always comes from beyond ourselves, in being inspired by or having a positive impact on others, whether it be our family, or humanity, or even beyond. 

Organizations must understand the reality of an increasingly fluid global talent economy. 

One useful definition of talent is those who have complete choice in what they do and who they work for. These talented people are those who will drive the success of the organizations they work for. 

Money alone will certainly not attract the most talented. They look for far more, including the ability to develop their capabilities, to work with equally talented peers, to enjoy their work environment, to have flexibility and choice, and to achieve worthwhile things that have a broad impact. 

There will be a rapidly increasing gap between companies that truly offer these possibilities and can thus attract the most talented, and the rest.

One of the massive emerging opportunities for organizations is to tap the full breadth of capabilities of their employees. Everyone is multi-dimensional in their skills, of which usually only a part is expressed in a job.

Internal crowdsourcing is about tapping the ‘crowds’ inside companies, by drawing on their insights, experience, and creativity that may not be used within their formal job description. This not only gives the organization access to more capabilities, it also allows staff the ability to draw on more of who they are and their fullest potential.

Climbing mountains is a powerful metaphor for our lives. Early in our lives we can see the opportunity to rise from the valleys, to go up and engage with the extraordinary beauty around us. Yet after we have spent much of our life climbing a mountain, we may realize it is the wrong mountain.

We all have aspirations. It is important that we ensure those aspirations are true to ourselves, express who we are rather than what society or our parents tell us is important. Those ‘true aspirations’, when we find them, will always engender passion. 

That passion, and nothing else, will drive us to create a future of work that we want for ourselves and for our children.

A vision of what is possible is a prerequisite to visionary leadership. That vision can come from an individual, but more often it is the product of many people.

The vision that underpins visionary leadership is definitely not the ‘Vision’ that is encapsulated in a neat phrase and sits alongside the ‘Mission Statement’ and its ilk.

A vision needs to be something that people can ‘see’ in a way that makes them want to move towards it. There are seven primary characteristics to powerful visions that I identify:

– Compelling. Powerful visions must draw people, attract them, make them want to take action and overcome obstacles to achieve it. It must feel worth achieving, worth putting real effort into getting there.

– Achievable. A vision will only inspire action if people feel it is realistic and can be achieved, rather than simply a nice but impossible dream.

– Challenging. There must be a balance between having visions that are seen to be achievable, and that also challenge and stretch people. Too far either way and they lose power. However the right balance can inspire people beyond what they think of as their limits.

– Aligned. The vision must fit with the organization and its people, culture, and history. This requires an insider’s understanding of what will makes sense and work within the context, while possible stretching a little beyond.

– Inclusive. Too many visions focus on the interests of a limited group, such as one department or a single organization. Visions need to include the interests of the broadest possible community, well beyond the organization, in a way that everyone can see their value and can support them.

– Distinctive. Every organization is unique, and it is almost impossible to take another’s vision and expect it to be powerful. There is great power in a vision that is clearly distinctively relevant to the organization and people involved.

– Clear. A vision must be readily communicated and understood by a broad range of people. This doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to be simple, but the essence must be able to be captured and conveyed to achieve a common understanding.

Of course a powerful vision alone is not enough.

Leaders need to have the capabilities to co-create compelling, relevant visions with their teams and organizations.

Leaders absolutely also need to have a far broader set of capabilities to get groups to work hard to achieve those visions. There are always many challenges and difficulties on the path to any worthwhile vision. Effective leaders may use a well-articulated vision as a central theme to draw people forward, but they also need to keep teams aligned through the everyday realities and travails that underlie real achievement.

Image source: BBC News/ Glenn Hatton

The competition focuses on visualizing what our future may look like. The competition overview says:

We cannot change the past, but we can visualise the world of the future – the world that we want or the world we want to avoid.

We want you to send us your visual representation of the future.

There are two categories: still images and moving images (up to 50 seconds). So your entry can be a single photograph or drawing, an animation or video, or even a picture or video of a model or sculpture you’ve made. But it must be your own work.

The BBC asked six artists around the world to share their visions of the future to kickstart the competition. The image above is taken from an animation created by Australia’s Glenn Hatton.

I am honored to be one of five international judges who will judge the competition finalists.

The winner of each category will receive a laptop up to the value of £2,500, and of course significant global recognition for their work.

So, read the competition overview, let your visions of the future emerge, and capture them to share with the world.

I look forward to seeing an exceptional array of visualizations of what may come to pass.

Being in that environment helped me to recall my thoughts from when I was much younger, when it struck me that the world inside us and the world outside are isomorphic: they have exactly the same shape and structure.

We can learn about our minds and the richness of who we are by studying and exploring the world around us, particularly the natural world.

Equally, we can grow to understand the external world by delving into the unlimited richness of our minds. There is as much to discover within us as there is in the entire universe around us.

Years later, after I finally left employment to follow my own path, I travelled for 6 months from London before returning to Sydney to start my first business. My first stop was Rio de Janeiro and then the massive metropolis of São Paulo before wandering on through Brazil, soon heading off from Manaus, the capital of Amazonas, into the heart of the Amazon jungle.

At the time I reflected that within each of us there are highly structured, controlled, moderated parts of us akin to cities, and also far wilder, unstructured, uncharted, and possibly more beautiful parts of us that are similar to jungles and deep forests. Since who we are reflects the external world, both of these poles – and everything in between – are fully part of us.

Through our lives each of us makes choices about which of these domains we choose to spend our time in. We may live in cities, in deep nature, or somewhere in between. Our internal lives may be spent primarily in predictable structures, or we may mainly wander in the less charted spaces in our minds.

At our best, we can take and integrate the polar strengths of structure and chaos, plans and spontaneity, direction and emergence as we lead our lives.

The isomorphism of inside and outside is a metaphor, of course. But it feels like a powerful and useful metaphor to me.

The most important implication is of exploration.

How will we explore external worlds, through travel and stimulation, and what will we learn about ourselves from that?

And how will we explore our selves, discovering more fully who we are, and thus learn about the entire world as a result?

I wish you happy and fruitful exploration.