Cresting the Rogue Wave
What is your highest calling?
Participants were challenged to think about “their highest calling” by Aurora WDC founding chairman, Arik Johnson.
Johnson aspires to remove obstacles that prevent his team from achieving bold objectives, and believes this is the highest calling for all CI pros—to embrace “shockingly bold” challenges.
The Rogue wave will catch people by complete surprise.
Rogue waves are tall and come out of nowhere.
We are in such a wave right now, said Johnson. We need to realign ourselves to be optimized for this change, and nobody has recognized it will completely transform business models
Your job, as CI pro, is that of messenger.
“You are prophets of doom,” Johnson said. The highest calling is to let leaders know they need to refit themselves for our current realities. Companies have been designed for worlds that no longer exist. We need to call that out.
We need to learn to cope and live with fear.
We need to be teachable.
Organizations need to come to terms with their flaws, confront fear and uncertainty, and succeed in spite—or because of—it.
The next wave is a digital one, notes Johnson.
Think blockchain; it is a heuristic coping mechanism to deal with security issues. Is this well understood?
Blockchain will shortly become irrelevant.
What are the consequences of these digital disruptors?
Such things are “buzzwords” and create anxiety for leaders. They believe these technologies are the way to the future.
This is an untruth.
It is “gossip.”
You must stand at the precipice of change and confront “little waves” without letting fear stop you.
Know how to interpret little waves, because when they come together, they will crush us.
Companies need to cope with the fact that their offerings can be commoditized and imitated.
How do you get past that?
Consider resources, processes and values.
Resources can be imitated. They are not differential.
Processes are ways to transform things but can also be replicated.
Values remain.
Our job is to help decision makers prioritize the decisions to make, and to sequence them.
Values are almost impossible to copy.
Show the world the intelligence culture and demonstrate our values of teachability, humility and empathy.
These values set us apart.
Johnson challenged us to articulate our highest calling. What is the most important thing you have to offer? Why does anything prevent you from achieving that?
Your organization needs your perspective to get to truth, often poorly articulated in our companies, because they adhere to old truths.
We must awaken our companies and get them to a place of imagination.
We need to rehumanize the business culture, and make everyone see each other as fully built-out beautiful humans with unique perspectives that improve our own.
We all feel valued when our opinions are sought.
We are elicitors of opinions, and we synthesize them to paint true pictures of reality and the future.
Our job is to figure out who’s taking the next step so we can get ahead of it, control it, envelop it, and act on it.