 Hi, good evening. Good morning, good afternoon wherever you are joining us from and this is probably very true of our guest today who is joining us all the way from Australia. So it is a really late hour of the day, actually night for my guest. But what makes this guest really so interesting that he does a bunch of different things. He's a futurist which is what is going to be the main aspect of our talk today. And I must confess that like a lot of people, I didn't quite know what really does a futurist do. Do they really predict things much like maybe an astrologer would? And if the answer to that is no, what's the difference? So of course, we'll find out from this person what that is all about. But I can tell you one very important aspect of my guest today, which is that he spent a certain amount of time living in a Zen center in Tokyo, where at the end of the workday, he would spend time in the Zen center meditating. And all of this goes into the kind of accent that he has. And one thing that we will explore today is the kind of accent if it is not your native accent, your native country accent. Is that an indication of a life well traveled? Is that a giveaway? And for answering many of those things, let's get started with our show today. And my guest is Ross Dawson, keynote speaker, author and futurist. Hey, Ross, welcome. Thank you so much for joining my show. Where are you joining us from which city? I'm in Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. Of course, I have to ask you what time of the night is it now? It is 12.30pm. Gosh, all I can say is I'm deeply grateful for you having agreed to do this at this unearthly hour for you. But thank you so very much. Ross, I just thought that we'll spend a little bit of time getting my viewers familiar with the very rich and diverse life. And I was mentioning to them that sometimes when you look at your accent, it's not Australian. And that's potentially a clue that somebody who has traveled and lived in multiple places. Is that true for you too? Well, I have certainly lived a very international life. And the first time I started living overseas was the age of three. So my father worked for the Department of Trade in Canberra, and he was offered a job in the United Nations. So I spent almost all of my schooling at the International School of Geneva. So various 65 nationalities there, certainly very cosmopolitan, and I was very fortunate to have that breadth of perspective. And then went to university in England, came back to Australia, and then I worked in Tokyo and London for six years before coming back. And my work is very global. In fact, at the moment, very little of my work is in Australia. So if I have to get on aeroplanes, it's a long way. But I am very fortunate to live in Bondi Beach, which is an extraordinary place to live. Absolutely. It's a beautiful place. And I was reading that you'd like to get into the sea every single day. Pretty much, yeah, all year round. And so that's one of the wonderful things here is that there are places which you have global cities with beaches. But few of them are where you can, the temperature of such that you can get in every day through the year. I mean, people here think that it's cold, but it's not really very cold compared with the water in a lot of other places. And it's just, I spend a lot of time in front of computer screens, writing, and speaking, or on aeroplanes when those things are allowed. But the thing which brings my brain alive is just immersing myself in nature, literally. I'm literally in nature, and that just invigorates me incredibly. And it's the energy that I get from that that I be able to express in my work. Great. And, you know, I'm going to sort of say that for all the viewers who are joining us, do share with us, you know, where you are joining us from. Tell us your name and where you are joining from. I can see Pratik is already there. You know, he's the early bird. And there are, of course, many others who will be joining in. We are talking to Ross Dawson. And I wanted to also talk to you about some of the work that you do, which is around scenario planning. You know, talk to me about how does it work when a futurist does scenario planning? What's the advantage of working with somebody like you as compared to, let's say, you know, every company has somebody in the strategy team who does scenario planning? What's the difference? Well, I suppose the first thing, as you were saying about a futurist, a futurist is not somebody who tries to predict the future. Futurist is someone who helps leaders and organizations to think effectively about the future so that they can make better decisions and act better in the present. So that requires exploring the future. You know, we can't know what the future is, but there's many things that we know about what are the trends, what is emerging, and also we can get some sense of what are the deepest uncertainties. So it is quite a scenario planning is quite a rigorous methodology. And it takes a process of particular going beyond your current assumptions. And there's a phrase in those who are, you know, use a lot of experience in scenario planning, which is the official future. And for many organizations without it being written down, without it being stated, people, you know, essentially tend to agree that this is a particular way the future will come. And you need to have external perspectives in whatever guys be that as a facilitator or people coming in, people that are able to challenge and to present other perspectives and have other ways to be able to engage and take leaders on that journey from where it is that they are thinking now to other possibilities. So scenario planning, and you know, what I think of as more scenario thinking, is a way to understand that not just what you might expect, but many other possibilities could be possible. And that these are all part of that ways in which being able to be a true leader to navigate uncertainty, to understand the scope of uncertainty, so that you can make better decisions. And when you think of the value that you add to the mix, you know, for your corporate clients, you do, I know you do a lot of work across the world on this. And when you do that, what kind of scenarios do you think leaders usually, you know, miss out? I mean, you know, one of the frameworks that I find very useful is when you think of the acronym PESTO, P-E-S-T-O, which is political economic social technology, and others. When you look at that, do you have your favorite, you know, acronym or scenario planning trigger that you use? Not so much. It's really this journey of looking for other possibilities. And so part of that is, you know, it's not just myself, but also other people outside to be able to bring out the perspectives. I think one of my favorite quotes is from James Cass in his wonderful book, Finite and Infinite Games. An entity says that finite players play within boundaries, infinite players play with boundaries. And in for many organizations and many leaders, what they think of as their boundary is their industry. This is our industry, and there are others who are playing in different industries, but this is our industry. And what we have seen already, of course, and we were going to see far more, is that it is all blending into different forms of value creation and connection and building value out of ecosystems. And I think that is really this taking beyond the current boundaries. And it's really finding what are those boundaries to explore what you can do when you play with those and look at the potential of what an organization can become rather than just thinking of it in a particular sector or industry or position or client base. And when you look at, you know, the largest players in the world, you know, when you look at the companies like Amazon or Google and all, it's very hard to say what business they are in because they compete with so many different sectors and industries. Is that the way you would see businesses growing in future? Is that going to be our trend? Because there was a point of time when people were advised to stick to your core. And you know, today it's very hard to do that. What is your take on that? And this goes to the, what I think is in a way a broader point in saying that organizations are becoming more and more unique. And this is very much in terms of what they are as an organization, in terms of their culture, the way in which they are expressed, the different ways in which they are able to work, the increasingly diverse ways in which organizations work, in terms of the ways in which they use technology such as AI and bring that together with people, how distributed they are as an organization. But also in terms of their unique positioning in terms of value creation. And so that is a one of the most greatest opportunities for creativity is indeed being able to find that unique place. Not say, you know, this is, we are in a particular industry or we are particular, we're similar to other organizations. And I think it's one of the, when you ask a leader who their competitors are, they should, you know, you should never say there is no competitors, but it's more well, there's that on that side, there's that on that side, and there's that on the other side, they're all around them, but they own have their own unique positioning that no one else shares. When you look at, you know, I was having a conversation with another person who's going to be on my show next week. And we were having this conversation that potentially the place where you see competition, who do you compete with? We are in the head of the founder or the head of the CEO or the leadership team. Very often that determines the kind of price point they operate from, you know, that, okay, we are competing in the lower zone, we are competing as a premium product at the mid-range. And that in turn, sometimes can be a kind of a shackle. It's a limitation because, you know, how do you change that? So when you apply the same principles to the individual, you know, when people think about their career, can some of the work that you do in terms of scenario planning be useful for individuals as they think about themselves and what options do they pursue in future? Should they be generalist, specialist, a combination or is there going to be no such thing? What are some things we can learn from you? So just on the scenarios piece, I mean, scenario thinking I think is enormously valuable to individuals in charting their career. And there's two particular ways, which are most obvious. One is being able to think about your, how the world is changing simply or how it might change. So this, you know, I do believe we do need to have an area of expertise, you know, the whole idea of the T-shaped manager that we're all familiar with. So we need breadth and we need depth and possibly more than one area of depth and the whole pie shaped, you know, but we do need to be, we of course need the breadth to be able to collaborate effectively to understand our context, but we do need to make some choices. It's incredibly difficult to choose to be the generalist without already having been a specialist in at least one domain. So when we choose our area of specialization, one of the ways in which we use scenario thinking is to think, well, what might the world look like in, you know, at least 10 years or possibly beyond for this particular area of expertise? What will the role of AI be in that? What sort of organizations will require that? How will that create value? Who will I collaborate with? What is the role of that? And what are different worlds in which that might, you know, that might become less relevant or more relevant or require different applications? The second way in which scenario thinking is very relevant for the career is being able to chart out possible pathways. And that's something which I certainly did in my career earlier on, where I mapped out 20 years and I said, well, this is one path I could take where I would start here and then I might move to there, move to there and there'd be a follow and logical sequence. This is another path I might take where I would, in order to move to another area I might like, I would first need to work a number of years here and then possibly there and move on to there. So you can actually chart multiple pathways for yourself. So I think that is certainly people should not just be planning their career as in where do I expect to be in five or 10 or 20 years, but say, well, actually I could use this path or this path, this path. This is the steps that I would take on that way. These are the ways in which these fulfill what I want to achieve in my life. And how would go about that? This is a phenomenal idea and I'm just really intrigued by that. Talk to me about the way you did it with your career. I know that you spent some time in different industries. Just give me a little more clarity in terms of the way that you charted it out and the choices that you made and then how did you go about making those shifts to where you are? So did you always think that you wanted to be a futurist or a strategic thinker or somebody who would do keynotes? I mean, what did you begin with? So in fact, yes, from quite young, just my late teens, I was, I thought the idea of what was called at the time a futurologist would be just a dream career. But I needed to, it's a long journey to be able to get there. And there was, I suppose, those other thoughts of which I had of various kinds, but I suppose many of them have very similar characteristics, this idea of being the futurist. But I did a degree in physics. And the reason I did a degree in physics is that I didn't know what pathway I would take. And I certainly hadn't thought as far as thinking, are there any degrees which are more appropriate for a futurist? And so it's an interesting area to study. So I'll study that and then decide what I do after that. So the time it was, you know, coming back to Australia is quite vocational. And people said we're not looking to hire physicists. So I was very interested in computers, and found that there was nobody willing to take me on without the experience in any technical applications. But I was able to get a job in computer sales. And that was actually, whilst it wasn't my original idea, that was I found this was a provided opportunity to really learn business, you know, in terms of, you know, what is the application, learn the businesses of the companies that I was selling to. I learned a lot of the technological foundations for distributed computing, which I was working in. And at a certain point, I felt that I needed, if I was wanting to know the whole world, if I was really wanting to think about the future, I needed to understand the world. I thought, well, money makes the world go round. It's something I need to understand. And at the time, I was very fortunate to apply and without direct experience from many hundreds of applicants, was got a job as a stockbroker. And this was a opportunity to learn about, you know, the whole structures of capital and money and investment and, you know, getting enormous amounts of information. So it was a path of growth of being able to understand the world of finance. But again, my attention was limited. And after a while, I said, I need to go further afield. And in the end, I actually resigned and I got on an airplane to Tokyo and I landed at Narita Airport with nowhere to stay, didn't know anybody, didn't know any Japanese, didn't have a job. And there was an interesting time. But I ended up taking what I had done and was able to take that and was very fortunate to become a financial journalist. And this was part of the journey which would been I wanted to express for a long time is to be able to, how do I communicate? I want to be able to write, want to communicate and that was brought together my experience in finance to be able to then be the financial journalist and work in that domain. And I was after a little while, I was just very fortunate to receive a many whole series of very rapid promotions. And I ended up as a global director of capital markets for Thompson-Manchel and moving to London. So looking at the, you know, essentially becoming an executive in charge of the whole operations of our real time reporting and analysis on global capital markets. And that was time said, well, I always wanted to work myself. And so I chose to leave my job, travel for six months to think about things and come back to Australia and then set my path. And part of that was a journey of what I called design a life where I looked at what are all the characteristics of the life that I want? What are all the options available? How do they fit up against that? And ultimately, I did want to commute think and communicate. And so settle on the path which has led me to where I am now and having my own ventures, but also very much writing, speaking, communicating and being able to share what I think about with the world. Oh, that's phenomenal. So Ross, when, you know, I just thought that for those of us who've joined in a little late, I'm talking to Ross Dawson, who is a strategic thinker. He's a futurist. He's also a terrific writer. He's the host of a absolutely totally recommended podcast called Thriving on Overload. And, you know, one little secret that I'm going to share upfront, which is that, you know, this is going to be coming out in the form of a book that Ross has been working on. And in September 2022, we are going to see this book. And I cannot tell you how much I'm waiting to read that book. But in the meanwhile, don't forget to check out his podcast, which is called Thriving on Overload, which we will of course come and refer to. I was asking Ross, how did he actually land up being a futurist? And so if you think about it, if you deconstruct it, he's built a series of experiences like a portfolio of experiences, you know, whether it's in the financial sector, whether it's, you know, the travel that he did, a certain amount of clarity that, okay, you know, he trained as a physicist, but when there wasn't, you know, the role of a physicist that anybody wanted to hire, he actually went and sort of worked in technology, picked up that skill, all of which you tuck in and create a portfolio of skills. And this portfolio of skills you've got to sort of really figure out, what does this add up to and where can it be used? Is that a good reconstruction? Or did you say that these are things I have, where can I do this? And I can think of being a futurist and a writer and everything. Or did you have that notion in your head, right off the bat, and you were just sort of really aligning something, which way was it? Well, I think it's both, or all of the above. And that you had this dream of being a futurist or something of that effect. And earlier on, there was no evident pathway. But the pieces came together over time. And to be the futurist, you need to have very diverse perspectives. And so that's one of the fortunate things, having worked in many industries, having lived in many countries, having learned quite a few languages, and being able to bring together those perspectives. So in terms of the curiosity or the interest in this, the continuous exploration of what's going on, this has been the foundations of that ability to create that. But when people say, how do you become a futurist? I somewhat jokingly say, you claim you are, and people either believe you or they don't. And at the moment, of course, there are plenty of people who are claiming that they are futurists. But what I have, I suppose, established on the way is my credibility, and particularly through my books. And so the books, my first book, the subtitle was the Future of Professional Services. And again, that's all of that's come to bear. And in fact, my second book was Living Networks, which came out 20 years ago, just released the 20th anniversary edition. And almost everything in the book has turned out to be correct 20 years later, or sometimes earlier, but a lot of it is still coming to pass. So these are now my credentials for being able to think about and to share this thinking about the future. You know, we have a comment from there, lots of comments actually, which have come in. And so those of you who want to ask a common, ask a question to Ross, you know, please do type it in and I'll bring it up. But we have an interesting comment from Anshubant Tiwari, he says, Abhijit Ross could be straight out of David Epstein's book range, diversity of experiences, shape and makes progress possible also enables growth in adjacent spaces. So very, very true. My question is related. Do you think this is the way people should pursue their career in future because it's far more fluid with things merging into each other? Would you think that that's a recommendation which would be valuable? Well, I think, I mean, I actually take David Epstein's book with a little bit of caution, because I think what his thesis is, is actually not quite what the title suggests. And if you, in his book, he, he says, yes, you need lots of diversity. But from that, you actually need to choose a path. And you, and so he uses the example of Roger Federer, compared with Tiger Woods. And then Roger Federer at, you know, tried many ball sports before he chose tennis. But it was actually the age of, I think it was 13 or 12, yeah, it was 12 or 13, where Roger Federer gave everything else up and did only tennis. So yes, he tried many sports, but then he was completely focused. And I think there's in order to become a generalist, you know, generalists is ever harder to maintain as a position. And in order to be a generalist, you actually need to have some depth first. You need, you can't start just by being generalists, you actually need to have, be a specialist in at least one domain and to move on for that. So I think I can fairly claim to be a generalist. But that is because I have actually had deep expertise in a number of domains over a period of time and can see the relationship between those different domains. So I think that I agree with the broader thesis. Yes, we do need breadth. We absolutely need to have many perspectives on things. But the journey to that is often through having an area of specialization and possibly moving on from another. I think that PI shaped things. I actually did a blog post many years ago where I had the hypothesize of a T shaped PI shaped and comb shaped, where you can have many areas of specialization. But of course that you there is a trade off. You cannot get as deep if you have more than too many demands. But to your broader point around the, I suppose, this journey, it's as we in a world that moves faster and faster, we must be more and more specialized in order to have a world class expertise. We are all competing in a global economy and we need to consider ourselves or move towards being world class in whatever it is that we do. And that requires focus and depth and digging down into that. Now that means that the corollary of specialization is collaboration. We must be able to understand the context of our discipline, understand the people we are working with and have to work with are doing. We need to be broader and broader in the scope of how we collaborate. So in a way the deeper we go, the broader we also need to go. And this is the real fundamental platform to succeed in what is faster moving world, but one which requires more than ever before deep collaboration. So when people become specialists, you are getting depth and your recommendation is that they need to fan out and build human relationships across different kinds of ecosystems. So they have to be part of different ecosystems is that the thesis of your book Living Networks, what does it really talk about? So Living Networks is simply saying that the networks are literally coming to life. So the networks that connect us, the networks that connect, so there's many layers to those networks. So our brains of course are networks of neurons and they're all richly connected. An organization is a network of people who are richly connected. And any successful organization today must be a network, not a hierarchy to succeed. We then have network industries as ecosystems as networks where there's value creation across not just organizational boundaries but across industry boundaries. And one of the higher levels networks is that of the global brain where all of the people on the planet are as the neurons in the brain. And this idea that as we are a network, these are literally coming to life. So this means that we must connect as diversely as possible with ideas, with technologies, with the industries and so on. And I suggest and ask people that they help to bring the networks to life. And to bring the networks to life is not about connecting yourself, it's about connecting others, recognizing there is a connection of value. That if these two people were connected or if these two organizations were connected or if these two ideas were connected, this would create value. And if you help bring the networks to life through these connections, just by the by, you create value for yourself because you are then part of and more central to a richer and richer network of value creation. So for those who have just logged in, I'm talking to Ross Dawson, keynote speaker, a fantastic strategist, and of course, a futurist. And Ross, I must tell you, you've got a huge fan base in India as well. So people who really love what you write and your podcast, which is called Thriving on Overload, all of that when you've been doing this podcast called Thriving on Overload. And this is all about the information overload that comes to us every single day. You've spoken to a whole bunch of people, what are some of the key takeaways? How do we manage this? Because you've got your emails to read and you've got your WhatsApp messages, which are pinging, you've got your phone, which is delivering stuff, then you've got the television, you've got the social media information channels, you've got everything else. How do you manage it? So you as a futurist, in any case, are reading all the time. So what is your personal method of doing this? So the framework which I use in my book is five elements. There are five powers, which we require to thrive in a world of unlimited information. Those are purpose, framing, filtering, attention, and synthesis. So purpose simply starts off by saying, why? Why do I need information at all? How does that serve me? What is the reason that I want information in helping to understand that this is not relevant or unimportant, or that it is central to supporting my ability to become an expert or to help the well-being of me and my family or to be able to create more opportunities. So framing, and I love what you do with sketch notes, because this is a wonderful example to me of framing information, and we can have a visual representation or other ways of connecting. So information by itself is valueless. It is only when we connect it with other pieces of information that it actually becomes valuable. So in the many exercises and practices we can have. So filtering, there's a whole set of techniques in choosing what are the channels that we access from? How do we choose what we take in and what we don't? Descerning what is useful to us in terms of attention and saying attention is not just about while I'm focused or I'm not focused. There are actually many forms of attention, including the ability to make serendipitous discoveries to be able to regenerate our attention. And so to have a schedule or time boxing our time into different forms of attention to taking information. And finally synthesis, which is this process of bringing together all of the things which we see and encounter to make meaning, to understand the whole, to build understanding, to be able to make better decisions. And a lot of that's around our having the state of mind and pulling back to make the pieces come together. So those are the frameworks, which I find distills in a way, the way in which I take all of the everything that I have to be able to help my clients navigate the future. It's just such a powerful framework. I just really love the way that you structured it through those elements. We've got a question here from Dr. Mithy Jaswabhastav. His question is, it's a great discussion on scenario planning and scenario thinking. However, I'm curious to understand the role of luck and resilience in scenario planning, because it is quite possible you thought about something and then there is a war in Ukraine or there is something else that comes up, which is some people talk about it as a Black Swan event. The pandemic was one such thing, which can completely change the game for whatever you would have done. How do you deal with those? As I often say, the value is scenario thinking. The reality is any good scenario planning exercise will come up with a number of scenarios and the reality of what happens will contain elements of all of the scenarios you've created and other things as well, which you have not anticipated. That's just the nature of it. But the scenario thinking, first of all, brings about in the leader this ability, this heightened understanding that what they expect to happen might not happen, that there are many possible pathways of the future. One of the key elements, I think, of this idea of moving from scenarios to strategy is this idea of contingent strategies, where you say, okay, well, given all these scenarios, we can build a robust strategy, one which will work reasonably well across all the scenarios, rather than falling completely in a heap if some things come to pass. But what you can also say is this idea of, all right, well, I have my core strategy, but if we start going down this particular path, then I will recognize it because I've built that scenario and then I'm able already have a contingent strategy one ready to go out, ready to roll to be able to implement as soon as possible. So of course, scenarios are famous through developed by Shell. And what happened was when they developed the scenarios, the 1974 oil crisis, they were the seven sisters, the major oil, the oil giants at the time. But when the oil crisis came and the price of oil rose dramatically, they were had their strategies in place, ready to respond. Whereas all of the other competitors were took so long to be able to even understand what was happening and to work out what their responses were. So I think one of the key things is the scenario thinking where you are already starting to prepare what you could do in these different circumstances. But one of the things that are also about scenarios is that they need to, there's always this balance between plausibility, as in you need to believe these could possibly happen and stretching your thinking. And the reality is that it's almost impossible to stretch your thinking enough for the realities of how diverse our world is. And we've had so many shocks in the last years that you would expect it would. And hopefully we are coming more used to understand the world is very deeply unpredictable. But it's still very difficult to put those in scenarios yet we can still prepare ourselves to respond. And I think those organizations that created a variety of rich scenarios, which might not have specifically included a pandemic, but other unexpected occurrences would have been far better prepared when we had COVID arrive and be able to say, ah, we understand that there are ways in which we need to adapt and we can respond to those rather than simply one hoping that it would go away, which I think many organizations did for quite a while. What is more important to be able to think of possible scenarios or to have agility to respond to a scenario, no matter what, or preparing the workforce so that mentally we don't spend all the time debating and discussing and doing stuff like that when there's an actual crisis. Which of these three would you sort of really take a bet on? Well, again, it's all of the above in that it is the thinking of the scenarios that enables you to respond faster. So the responsiveness is really the heart of effective scenario planning. And that that requires you then to be able to and so a good scenario planning process is one where at the end of that process, the leaders and the executives say, I believe this could happen when at the beginning they wouldn't have believed it. So all of these things which they don't believe happen, take them through the scenario process and they say, actually, yes, this thing which I thought was impossible actually could happen. So now that's part of my models and that's part of the thing which I need to be able to respond for and have my mental framework for it. So there are a number of different designs. So I have on my website, rostorsen.com, many resources including frameworks or rostorsen.com slash frameworks includes a lot of things. Well, you can search for scenario planning and action and have a little framework there for scenario planning, including the different objectives you can have. So scenario planning is not one thing. It depends on what it is you are designing. And to your point, one of the factors which you in designing scenarios is how broadly across the organization you want to make that happen. Is this something which is for the board or for the executive team? Or is it something which enables the organization to be aligned in its thinking and to be engaged and to understand the ways in which the leaders are dealing with uncertainty and responding to it? And I describe in my book, Living Networks, amongst other things, a participant of strategy. This idea that everyone in the organization can and should participate in strategy creation. Because amongst other things, that means that the organization as a whole is also far more able to respond to rapid change, uncertainty, and as well as emerging opportunities. When you look at the world as you see it today, do you think that certain sectors which are thriving today are going to grow further or some of their, do you think there are some sectors which could potentially be in decline even though they are thriving? Is there something that you see when you think of the various sectors as we understand them now? Is there anything that you see? Well, again partly, I don't want to necessarily think in terms of sectors because it is a whole fluid landscape. I mean, one of the most obvious shifts is in terms of energy. Where the transition, we look at all predictions, official predictions of shifts to renewable energies and they have all been far exceeded consistently. We'll see what happens out of the current turmoil, but all of these aspects are shifting the nature of energy production more broadly from, of course, fossil fuels to renewables, but also around energy being distributed. More and more we're seeing value creation being set from centralized creation to distributed creation and that is happening from many layers. One is in terms of shift to energy production and storage and distribution. Another is in terms of food storage and production. That's one of the implications we've had from the pandemic is towards more local production, both on a national basis also more local basis, which has implications for transport, for example, and logistics and in terms of also shifting this more and more localized, which I think take away, have some fundamental shifts in the way in which the nature of logistics, again shifting more and more to the local aspects where they were not seen less and less centralized, logistic structures. And all of these shifts are changing, I think the, well, amongst other things, the where capital has its greatest application, but also in terms of where the whole structure of the economy and of course, blockchain and some of its other manifestations are ways in which we are seeing these structures move more and more to a distributed basis. So this is not something in so much in terms of industries and this impacts industries in different ways, but this is, I suppose, part of the secular shifts, which point to some of the shifts in value creation. That's an incredible chain to sort of unveil when you link each one of these and sort of look at the whole question of so what if this happens, that gives you an indication of potentially, for example, if you think that all the movement is from centralization to more distributed organizations, then potentially blockchain would be one of the ways in which information sanctity could be maintained. Now that's got its implication for governments, it's got an implication for human resources and organizations, it's got applications for multiple things. So yes, absolutely agree with that. If you think about in this kind of a world that we are living in, do you see that work is going to be and I'm not going to talk about hybrid versus not hybrid, but I'm going to ask you about if the work becomes asynchronous as you become more global, because technology makes it possible, you and I are in different continents, different time zones, and we are sort of coming together to create something which some people are viewing live, which is synchronous, but there's a whole range of people, you know, thousands of people will actually see it at different times, you know, maybe sometime later today, maybe tomorrow, maybe a week later. So asynchronous communication is increasing. One of the things that I read what you had written and I was really struck by it, which is I put it on Twitter too, that the importance of writing as a skill, you know, that that's going to come up. Talk to me more about why that would happen. When we shift this office to distributed work, then we need to learn from those organizations that have been fully virtual for a long time, things like automatic and top towel and get lab and so on. So all organizations of well over 1000 people that have been no offices ever and fully distributed. And the one principle that they all abide by is minimize synchronous, you know, meetings, things at the same time, and maximize asynchronous where people can coordinate whatever time zone are in, whatever they are doing to be able to spend that organize their time so that they can be focused when is useful to them, avoiding interruptions. So in order to be good at asynchronous work, we need to be good at structured communication, which in essence is writing. And I believe that there is a role for visual representations or other ways frameworks to be able to distill our thinking. But writing is the fundamental tool. And so this needs to be succinct, clear, and one which is also accessible to people who are not necessarily English native speakers or whatever the language of the organization is. So these are then the becomes a fundamental tools. And I think it's again, you know, writing long things is not necessarily you know, being able to write discursively is not nearly as important as being able to write with structure. So Jeff Bezos quite some time ago banned PowerPoints. And he said, anybody that has a meeting, they need to write a six page memo. And he said, you know, there's nobody way that you can write a six page memo not have clear thinking. Well, that's probably true to a point. But I think that, you know, in a way, we'd also need to be able to bring make sure that there is this structure that there is this distillation. People are saying, these are the key points. There is other ways to be able to bring that you don't, there's ways to be able to distill that message within not necessarily reading the whole six pages. There's there's ways in which we can start to build a discipline and structure and templates for writing, which I think are fundamental. And so those fully distributed organizations I mentioned all hire people amongst other things for their ability to write effectively. What, what, you know, what do you do to become better at writing, because you do a lot of writing and speaking, you know, and you've got some terrific keynotes. So what do you do to get that clarity? What's your method? When somebody tells you, you know, we are an organization, let's say we are a software company. And we are going to, you know, invite you to talk about the future of, you know, whatever the future of automobiles. And so when you have a trigger like that, how do you go about structuring your ideas? What do you do? So the, you know, to write well requires practice. So you can't be get good without doing it. And the more you do, the better you get. But in terms of structuring, for me, and again, as I mentioned, my frameworks, so at RossTools.com slash frameworks, the I try to distill it into visual perspectives. That's the framing which I mentioned before. So you use sketch notes, I create my own style of visuals. And part of it is simply being able to come out what are the key elements, trying to write those down saying and pull these together and saying, Well, what's missing? Where does that fit? And to first of all, just in taking notes in a document to try to sort of distill, you know, what are the most important elements? How do those relate? What are the connections and then start to sketch it out on a piece of paper? Not so much in in drawing things, but really looking at what are the relationships? What what's central? What's? Where does things where do things lead? What is the flow of time? And that's the way in which I, you know, real essence of how I think in a structured fashion is through these visual trying to distill and to visualize. And if I am just writing an article, I mean, I'll always come back. I always say, we need some sub heads. We need some say, what does this part of this thing say? And what is this part? What is this part rather than trying to have a long flow of texts? I think putting in headers and subheads in a document is actually a very, very valuable way of structuring. Be able to say, all right, I can see, and I think anybody should be able to look at the heads in the sub heads in the document before reading the content of it and actually say, I can see the flow of the argument. I can see how these ideas are moving from one to the other. You know, we are in the last couple of minutes of our show. I always love to hear from the guests. You know, what is your preferred method of getting information? Do you get more information from social media? Do you get more from your books? Do you listen to a lot of podcasts? What's your method of getting shifts over time and depends what I'm doing. So I have come back to books is really central to the ability to think there's a lot of people writing a lot of good things, but books tend to be written by those who know the most and have thought the most and have spent the most time distilling that into something which is really worthwhile. You know, not all books, but if you choose the right books, they are the most distilled form of understanding value that we have. Other than that, I tend to use social media as a signal for finding content, a little less than I did, in fact. And so I'm looking more and more for the aggregators that are excellent to be able to pick out the best articles, the best ideas. You know, I have a variety of places that I go to in terms of looking at the web, but I'm tending to try to look for longer form, you know, medium to longer form articles, rather than the little snippets, the ones, the people who have done the thinking, the people who are actually structured and put the thought into what they're doing as opposed to dashing off a few ideas. And also, yes, podcasts have it's just something the last few years that I've just come to find podcasts enormously valuable as a context and pulling in and just diversity of thinking. I, you know, over the last couple of years, I find myself listening to a lot more of podcasts. So, you know, it gives you the flexibility that you can actually walk around and still keep listening to the podcast. You know, I do it when I'm taking a walk in the morning or any other time when I'm just lying in bed and thinking, I just find it incredibly powerful to do that. So, yeah, that's my method. But you know, I wanted to ask you that besides writing, what are the other skills you would recommend we should be looking to build to prepare and be future proof? What are some of the other skills that you think? Well, there's, I think, you know, I've already talked about what one of them is simply the that ability to scan broadly to filter and to make sense of things to structure to communicate with intent. These are all practices that improve your own thinking and also your ability to create value. And one of the other ones is simply the connecting, connecting to others and to have the conversations and to find the people who can have complementary perspectives. That diversity of thinking comes from, you know, the conversations and the relationships which allow you to have those conversations with those interesting people. And I think, you know, and finally it is, you know, what has perhaps always been important, but more and more important is comfort with ambiguity. Where we try to distill things, we try to have clarity, we try to, you know, know what's going on. But we also need to, I think critically, all leaders need to be comfortable saying, I don't know. It's not clear. I'm trying to, this is, this is the shape of this is not something which is which I can, you know, make a judgment about and proclamation and have knowledge and be the expert that there is this search for knowledge which requires the comfort with ambiguity which is just the reality of the world that we live in. When you think about the world, let's say in the next five to 10 years, do you see the resulting of the ratio of people who are employed in organizations versus, you know, those who are freelancers or gig workers, etc. Do you see that the ratio is going to be more in favor of those who are employed or those who are going to be freelancers? Where do you think the world is going? Well, it's, I'd say it's been slower at moving to independent work than I expected. I long, long, long thought that would just become, you know, a small minority who are in permanent structured employment. And it certainly has been, that trend has been a place, not quite as fast as I expected. But what I would point to more is that, you know, one of the key facets of work in the future is that it is fluid. And fluid means that it is not in boxes. So currently, this rigid work is where people have a job, clearly job description. They know what their function is. They have to fill particular criteria to do that job. And so now we're going to see more and more fluid work where people will be applying different aspects of their capabilities or their inclinations in different ways within organizations. People will be creating value across organizational boundaries, increasingly. So it's again, not just employed and freelancers, but again, more and more those who are creating value across boundaries. So I think that one of the most fundamental shift is towards more and more fluid work, both for those who are employed in the nature of the work within the organizations, and for those beyond boundaries to be able to, you know, where again, it's not necessarily clear whether they're employed or they're not employed. What is their role, but they are more and more fluid and less fixed in their ability to take the full scope of who they are and their potential to create value. Well, Ross, I think that's powerful advice. So, you know, this is what I think the value that people are looking to get from somebody like you. Thank you so much for spending your time. I know that it's, you know, right now it's at about 1.30 in the morning for you. Ross, I am so deeply grateful that you are up at this time to talk to the audience and share your ideas and views. I cannot tell you how precious this is. So guys, those of you who haven't heard Ross's podcast, Thriving on Overload, check it out. He's got a great set of frameworks that you can refer to from RossDawson.com slash frameworks. He's got a list of futurists, there are courses that people can take. All those, it's a really, really rich source of information. Ross Dawson, thank you once again. And it's been such a delight when your new book comes out. Ross, you got a promise that you're going to come over to the show and share it again with people. Thank you. Great pleasure to speak with you, Babjit. I've really enjoyed it.