(My) Leadership Life Lessons

Embracing “Emergence” as a Life Strategy

Last Fall, I attended a conference on the Future of Disruptive Tech. En route to the event, I read Daniel Kahneman’s book, “Noise” which apart from being another great read on cognitive bias and decision making also talks about how horrible people are at predicting the future — even futurists only have a marginally better hit rate. This got me to reflect on several recent conversations I have had with students anxious about where their lives are heading based on their current life challenges and perceived future prospects. In our discussions, I used the image of a marble rolling down a hill. If there is no “Noise” in the path of the rolling marble, i.e., no bumps and no obstacles then the chance of predicting where the marble will stop increases but even then will still fall short of certainty. However, a marble that rolls over uneven terrain, and encounters chance collisions along the way may stop in countless unpredictable spots. My point is that your future path is not foretold, it is written en route — your path can be widened, adjusted, and even redirected if you remain curious and have the courage to seek out new “collisions” with your fellow travelers. The keynote at my tech conference was a well-known futurist who shared how he had predicted many of the disruptive changes that have emerged these past 10 years — all with the power of hindsight.