Ep. 372: A Survival Guide in Rogue Times
Guest: Jonathan Brill, author of “Rogue Waves”
When COVID-19 hit, the world went into shock.
Virtually no one was prepared for the dramatic shift in every aspect of their lives that was cascading down on us. Well, not everyone. In 2015 at a TED Talk, Bill Gates warned a “Spanish flu”-like pandemic was coming. He observed the response to West Africa’s 2014 ebola outbreak and the poor response from the rest of the world. Gates rightly predicted a future pandemic was going to hit us.
It was as if the world was hit by a “Rogue Wave,” says global futurist Jonathan Brill, the author of a book by that name, in which he points out rogue waves are far more likely to happen than previously understood – that in fact, they are not rogue waves. Rogue quantum harmonic oscillations or modulation instabilities are present in a wide range of media and environments. The key, according to Brill, is to spot the harmonic changes on the horizon that foreshadow their arrival.
Spotting the telltale signs is, however, only step 1 in the development of appropriate responses that ensure you can successfully navigate the choppy waters ahead. Brill encourages readers to adopt a “Sherlock Holmes” approach to observing, assessing or deducing and then eliminating the impossible, which means that whatever remains, no matter how mad it seems, it must be the truth.
The challenge with this approach is that it is antithetical to the processes most of us individually and as companies employ – those processes were built for less volatile times. Brill says those processes “presume that you can deliver compound growth year after year, if you reduce risk, improve efficiencies, and keep your products up to date.”
We invited Jonathan Brill, a Global Futurist and the author of “Rogue Waves,” to join us for a Conversation That Matters about how you can future-proof yourself and your business to survive and profit from radical change.
