This is not the first storm I am in personally; I had my challenges as most of us people face a big wave from time to time. And every time I took this as an opportunity to change certain things but also to become more myself. When you go fast, you need to be agile in the curves to stay on that road. Every stress test is also an opportunity to make your network stronger.
I am a big fan of the music of Noa, no co-incidence that my eldest daughter’s name is Noa. She wrote many beautiful songs but one of them has been in my ears when things got though before in my life. It is a song written for the remarkable movie “La vita è bella”. One of the most beautiful sentences of that song is: ‘Smile no matter what they tell you, don’t listen to a word they say as life is beautiful that way’.
My device is not to avoid listening to others, on the contrary you learn the most when you listen to smart people. But you need to be able to trust them before you will accept anything they say.
I have been feeling like a little girl going to school again during these last Fridays being at 3 PM in front of my screen. You may know the feeling when you are happy to go to a class of an inspiring teacher wondering what you will be able to pick up.
Ivy Vanderheyden from SAS asked me to share my thoughts on what I take with me from these past sessions and speakers as I was a big fan of the virtual inspiration show hosted by Peter Hinssen inviting his friends to talk about what the actual corona crisis brings us as opportunities.
I found it remarkable how the SAS experts all blended in perfectly sharing the technologies they work on and proving that ‘curiosity’ is really part of the genes of the SAS people and spirit.
I agree with Peter Hinssen that it takes a network to fight a network and that you need to be ready to fail if you want to grow.
But it is indeed every time again a big challenge for us humans to trust that every crisis has an opportunity somewhere deep inside. We must think about how to reinvent ourselves and what the limits of this stress tests we are facing now are. And however, we are still in survival mode, like many companies, we do believe that tomorrow will be a brighter day.
We are all facing the same corona storm now, but some will have more dust to clean before the sun will come out again that is for sure.
One of the lesson’s I have learned from all the speakers is that we should never ever deny our emotions. They guide us to make the right decisions, they are the ones that makes us different from the many technologies we can work with. Technologies and strong interfaces will help us to balance in how we address our customers. To bring them that offer they cannot refuse on the right moment.
To my dear friend Rik Vera, I must say that the anti-fragile state of mind is what became my top 1 priority. It explains to me how you can combine flexibility with a certain core. Never change a winning plan they say, but what do you do when the plan is gone….be anti-fragile indeed.
We are in culture that is a lot about sharing, but please think about what you share and become that critical human being that sees the genuine messages from the fake ones as Tom Van de Weghe was talking about. In our swipe culture information is used as a weapon, so always be suspicious about your emotions, they will guide you a lot.
Remember you are part of the life journey of your customers. How are you going to help them to solve the issues they have on the quest of their dreams? Steven Van Belleghem is correct by stating that people expect more than excellence.
It was interesting to hear from Pascal Coppens that what we can learn from China is how to use technology for the health and growth of a society. It is not about innovation just for the fun of it because it is cool. It is about massive scaling and adopting to the new technologies because you believe it will make your life better as a human.
We can explain a lot with mathematics, but Ann Dooms did not make any prediction on how humanity will look like in the future. As there is no such thing as the definition of a human. But what is sure is that machines should become our companion. We need to understand that AI will not solve all our problems, but it will for sure change our lives and it might help us to make our decisions differently.
So never waste a good crisis and think about how you become that fast fish, ready to fly on the waves of the red ocean.
Let me end with another sentence from Noa’s song: “Now that you are out there on your own, what is real and what we dream is love alone”
And did someone talk about Normal?
If there is anything I hope I will never be it is normal.
