this is an experiment for profundity as you know those of you watch the program i'm committed to making sure that lots of thinkers leaders get a chance to talk to each other not about politics necessarily but about the things that matter and jim spellman has written a book about things that matter living in a real time world six capabilities to prepare us for an unimaginable future and on the program we have some other thinkers and we're going to start out with a couple of those lego bron is a colleague of mine in with us and with the program for now a while since its beginning but more importantly he's one of the philosophers and speakers that i known even longer and right was introduced to me in the television world but primarily also as a great thinker and author and someone i value deeply in my life  and people do seek her out for her wisdom as well live right welcome it's great to have you here good to see you i we're going to have other people joining us in this conversation jim but jim since you've written this book we're going to start with you and ask you why this book what was your purpose in writing this book well i think my purpose was in a way to clear my own mind because like most people i've been struggling for the last few years maybe even longer about what's going on in the world and what does it mean in terms of day to day living and individual satisfaction and meaning in life  think that most people that i'm speaking to are either desperately hanging on to the past or either terrified or trapped in some kind of prediction about the future so generally speaking this to be a kind of time in life where history is happening and the real question is what's our part of that and what's going on basically i concluded that most of the questions that we're asking there is no answer for  that we have no idea what the future is going to be and as a consequence the question is are we prepared for any future and are we ready for whatever happens be a wonderful or be it just open but we need to be prepared in any event  and i think i liken this to sort of the star trek enterprise my my view is that we're all going where no one's ever gone before we don't have maps and we're not sure what's there when we arrive well that describes how the day to day experience can be not just that seems like a lot of us are lost in the technological shift but that's another topic i invite my colleagues to ask you any questions that they might have on their i have  everybody everywhere and most of my work overseas is working with in the corporate context however most of the people that i do speak to i think do share this kind of perplexity and i think that it's a fairly universal phenomenon in the sense that it's aggravated by climate change political upheavals a lot of things are happening in in a lot of different directions simultaneously so i think yes i think that  perplexities pretty universal and you've written six capabilities to prepare us for an unimaginable future while what are the six as you see th well i think i think we it's a longer conversation but one of the major capabilities is to confront that we let me let me back up a little bit first so as an answer another question first because it has to do with what is a real time world and what do i mean by real time world it's my experience that in the sixty's when i started my career in computers  computers were just information machines but then as they as the gap between inputs and outputs got faster and faster and faster the gap almost disappeared and that's when the concept of real time came into sort of the popular lexicon that computers were transformed from informing to performing and in that moment it was no longer the same tool it was no longer the same machine it had actually taken on a different role and relationship in life now my experience is that now i think this is generally accepted that the change is happening faster and faster i've been in the change business more or less for forty years and yet i've never been  or so where of how fast things are changing things are happening in months that used to take years when there was always change i mean in the early one nine hundred to me you had the car in the radio and a whole lot of other things come into existence but it took twenty thirty forty fifty years before many of those inventions and technologies became mainstream now that's happening in months so excel rating changes one of the more central characteristics of life today  in addition to that or maybe along with that comes a really a shocking realization which is that we can no longer trust the past to inform us about the future and and that includes perhaps even trusting our common sense you know what used to be fairly shared understanding is now pretty much up for grabs the other thing that's happening is that we're real we're losing if not having lost any real meaningful control over our circumstances and so forth particularly the human domain and cultural domain remake control processes that we don't control what's occurring and the final thing is that that's all accompanied by a kind of massive complexity any string we pull on sort of brings up everything else so the two to say that in a simple way the gap between the future and the past is disappear the nature of reality in our relationship to reality is disappearing and as a consequence of that the question is are we prepared for whatever happens now the capabilities that i've identified are by no means all of the capabilities  perhaps would be important or useful but they're some of the major ones that i've been working on over the last few decades in the ones that i think are most central to individuals having meaningful and satisfying  lots one of those i call except that's where the artist surrender and by that i don't mean succumbing or being a victim of what's happening but it it's really about acknowledging that life and reality is whatever it is and can we accept it and embrace it's not simply tolerate it can we understand that reality is happening regardless of what we think and feel and begin to develop a healthy happy accepting relationship with reality whatever it is and that's difficult for some people and and yet it's also pretty profound when you find out that that reveals that we have a choice of whether we either accept reality or whether we resist reality i have to push back a little and again i have colleagues to ask you you know the american revolution was an example of people resisting reality you're not suggesting that we lay down and that at all surrender is acknowledging that you don't have any possibility when you when you when you when you realize that you can't win the game you're playing you need to give up the game you're playing in order to create a  new if you keep playing the old game when there's no possibility of winning all you're doing is resisting what's happening you're resisting reality and you're fighting against time and against change in a way that you become a part of the problem that you are  complaining about and as a consequence you become a victim as as a result of your own  a long discussion but in my experience the shorthand would be that our moods are a consequence of the historical background and history that constitute our lives and when reality doesn't match our expectations or when we realize we didn't have control that we thought we had it then begins to aggravate and produce the kind of negative moods that you're talking about now in the context of the question  phyllis asked one of the capabilities that i would encourage you to cultivate ok and it's a cult it's a capability has all these capabilities that you already have it's just a matter of cultivating it is realizing that you're you have a choice about how are you going to relate to that agitation and upset that you just described there is the upset and then there's how you relate to your upset if you if you relate to the upset as simply  they naturally expression of interest into new ideas or new possibility or another way of looking at something then it's not such a bad thing it's sort of like sore muscles after exercise it can even acknowledge that your common sense isn't working jim let me ask you a question one of the things i appreciate about the six qualities that you left out in the book is there's an old saying wall street that the four most expensive words in the english language is this time it's different and of course we do have differences that occur and rise up i thought i would add a fifth were that the expensive word is this time it's completely different so i really appreciate that the six qualities you put out there in the book would have been welcomed in any age they're there they really are part of the human arsenal for dealing with life so if we look at the preparing for the future as filling up a suitcase of course you want to put new capabilities and new ways of dealing with things but you probably want to leave some room for the old ways that have been time tested over the last hundred thousand years and you seem to do that a lot of what you talk about harkens back to buddhism twenty five hundred years ago i think socrates would have been very comfortable with your questioning approach to the fact that nothing is really certain though we believe it is so my question is as you're filling up your suitcase for the future what do you have in there from the age old west that really really speaks to you label thank you for that because one of the core ideas i say over and over again in the book is that what i think might be different than in a lot of books is that i'm not proposing anything new i'm not suggesting this is some new model or set of beliefs that you should in breaks what i'm pointing to are what i believe to be universal human capabilities that's a come with being alive i use the analogy of the ability to read we all have to really read because we're human beings that doesn't mean we're all literate and so the words i'm using is not that you should begin learning something but you should begin to cultivate like sort of watering a garden capabilities that already exist within you or that you already have available to and so in a way in that history again i would i would not even use the word purpose in the sense that that tends to to point at a kind of functional relationship with his capabilities i wouldn't say i have a i would repurpose my reading i might be different books written in my capacity to read is a part of my natural self expression and my development and growth as a human being so what i'm really saying is in the past you might have gotten away with not cultivating these capabilities but that the uncertainty that comes with the future makes these capabilities essential for human survival they're no longer optional and they're extraordinarily large consequences if you don't cultivate this is this is so and i want to open the questioning up to everyone who's on the call please feel free to ask him a question can i ask you  that something we can't tell us well thank you for the question gene the first thing really that if the term i use in the title of the book unimaginable future i'm not suggesting it's going to be good or bad i can negative view of the future by the same token there are amazing things that with technology and health and and human psychology and neuroscience physics there's a lot of new thinking it new possibilities emerging simultaneously so i could also imagine if i wanted to make a positive scenario that we were entering into a kind of age of transformation in which people suddenly realize that the future is a choice and they take responsibility for creating a future that can work for everyone so you can go either direction but my question is are you prepared either way otherwise i think what happens is a lot of us become stuck in a kind a hopeful relationship to what's happening and become spectators sort of watching history happening you know trying to take an optimistic or pessimistic point of view none  of the slightest bit of difference what i hope people do is they develop these capabilities is appreciate that we're all making history happen we're history making people and there are people our history making i don't think dogs and cats have the same kind of history that we had it was it doesn't persistence and so this comes with with human history and it comes with the possibility of basically having it turn out well so while the future's unimaginable i think if we're prepared then we're going to make wise choices and those choices will hopefully be in the direction of a world that can work for lots of us all of us if you look book is living in a in a real time leading in a real time but it in in talking to some friends and counsellors they said you know this is a lot bigger and leadership this is life and as a consequence you could look at all of us are leaders when we're living in a real time world or life is now happening in real time i guarantee you so i want to take you to this question of leadership are there any people leading today that are in fact representative of what you're trying to create or who are leading us in that direction that we can't pay attention  to let me answer that this way i think that there are a lot of people who are waking up to what i'm calling a real time world i think there are a lot of extraordinarily creative expressions of what can be what is possible if you begin to see the real time world is not a threat but what's happening my notion of leadership has changed a lot i've been teaching leadership for almost forty  years and the idea of what leadership me it's is changing a lot for example i think historically leadership has always been about individual qualities today in a real time context i think it's more about relationship i think leadership is is a relational competency not having the answer not not having to the big vision of the future i more important if i go back to the star trek enterprise metaphor  analogy i'm seeing leaders now more as navigators in durham and if we go back to the old times you know navigators who don't necessarily have maps navigators and don't have answers navigators it don't know any more than anyone else on the boat what's on the other side of the ocean or even if there is another side in the action and yet these navigators had to have two specific  ideas in focus one was they had to know where they were it in given moment and secondly they needed to know where they came from with those two data points with that kind of orientation you're never going to be lost you know where you're going or how to get there but you're never going to be lost but that means that leadership today is more about clarity of what's going on rather than  it's going and secondly they need to be grounded in that this is all the next phase or the next chapter in history in that they are that they are leaders in a historical context that's what i mean by history making and  as a consequence if they have that historical roots or historical foundation and they're oriented around right now in terms of what's happening i think if they can be effective leaders and in and recognize that all of us are participating in that side of that coin i don't know if you're familiar with the work of jeffrey b west he does a fascinating lecture on why corporations  cities thrive and everything gets faster and he looks at a really fascinating question the average age of the s and p five hundred company now from birth to when the brand no longer exists it's shrinking and shrinking and shrinking corporations are to this it very quickly cities however last for hundreds or even thousands of years and he he asked why the answer he comes up with is really interesting i think very germane to the topic you're talking about he says it's because cities have to accept crazies and corporations don't feel that the mainline thinking is not ready for the future but there are some crazy person in a city that has been thinking about what nobody else has been thinking about and comes up with in an innovation that helps the city through that bottleneck to the future my question would be what crazies out there inspire you right now well one of the most my favorite crazies unfortunately deceased which was steve jobs and and then i think i think almost eighty kind of people sort of fit that that crazy criteria and again not crazy it is not a fact it's a relationship to the future yes so so being crazy just means that you successful the successful kundan of the successful predictor and you know and there been a lot of the you know are increasingly having to deal with the the less and less reliability of what they predict saying i was using looking ahead more in terms of needs i mean to see what we're going to need in that luggage we're taking with us if anybody had told me twenty years ago that i would need this little device hanging off my belt which would connect me to the rest of the world i would have not known that i needed it i would not have known fifty years ago that i needed a microwave but people who can see needs ahead of other people well they're probably all billionaires today yep so i think that i think to anticipate without being attached to what you're seeing is a part of the idea of acceptance about  earlier so i'm not suggesting that we're going to give up thinking about the future and i think that any one who has an entrepreneurial nerve in their body is sort of attuned to what's missing what's needed what are the what are  the opportunities that are emerging and and and and hopefully if they're if they have the courage that they're taking action i want to one of my premises that i talk about in the book is that only this is my view that only the individual can make a commitment but that's the one thing that i believe a sovereign wes's individuals on the other hand i don't believe any of us going to can fulfill our commitments to at least in the significant commitments  without other people so commitment is interesting phenomena that that originates with individuals but are fulfilled in in a social context with other people in that way it begins to reveal pretty much the obvious that while we're independent separate from each other we're also universally permanently and and always connected to each other it's no longer a individual versus organisation or individual versus community or i think that communities are now starting to wake up to the fact that there they are of a whole and that that that we're learning that some of those capabilities and those of other ones in my list communication having to do with relationship to learning and the most important one perhaps is the last one which is the capability i call character you know that that that we are we are moving from an era of control i believe to an era of carrot and it's not just caring about the future it's caring about each other it's caring about the planet it's caring about  where we've come from it's appreciating and respecting and in the end of the day it's about love and it's about appreciating that love is not about feelings and i just as a broad found commitment to the ok is that each other and the ability to allow other people to be different than ourselves and then we begin to develop other practices for example of how do we collaborate our different with our differences or how do we have conversations that build on our differences rather than to keep having conversations to try to marginalize our thinking into some form of agreement and sameness that the enemy the