Breakfast with Stephen by Stephen Matini

June 26, 2024 The Future Is Now - Chris Marshall on Big Trends, Playfulness, and Disruptive Change

Chris Marshall is a futurist, behavioral scientist, and founder of the Playfulness Institute. Futurism is not about predicting the future, but it involves looking beneath surface-level events to identify trends that drive seismic changes.

Chris's journey as a futurist highlights the importance of curiosity. In his experience, being multi-passionate and embracing diverse interests is advantageous in a world of rapid change and disruption. A curious mindset fosters resilience and creativity, allowing entrepreneurs to adapt more effectively to uncertain environments.

Our conversation revolves around adapting to change and embracing a multi-dimensional perspective in navigating disruptive environments.

Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast platform.

Check Chris Marshall’s Decoding Change: Understanding what the heck is going on, and why we should be optimistic about our future, and use the affiliate links to support Pity Party Over at no additional cost to you.

Subscribe to Pity Party Over for more insightful episodes. Questions? Email Stephen Matini or send him a message on LinkedIn.

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TRANSCRIPT

Stephen Matini: My first question for you, which probably would serve a lot of people listening to this episode, is who is a futurist?

Chris Marhsall: So what's a futurist? A futurist basically, it's not sci-fi. It's not predicting the future even, because that's what a lot of people do think it's about. It's kind of we have a crystal ball somehow and go, oh, well, this is going to happen at this date and this time.

The way I approach it is I look at the big drivers, the big trends and megatrends, which are just kind of bringing about seismic change, but often under the surface. So I guess for me, the definition I like to use is that a futurist looks below the surface level events and look to what is happening beneath the surface, which might not be being picked up by mass media and things like that.

And really, when we start to understand that, we start to see that everything is always in flux. Everything's always changing. You know, this isn't new thinking. In fact, Eastern philosophies have talked about this kind of natural law of impermanence for millennia.

Being a futurist, the way I try to look at it is, well, what's the current trend? What's currently powering society? If we're looking at kind of societal philosophy or we're looking at business technology, what's the current trend?

What's the one which is potentially coming in because that's the one that's then maybe going to take over? And then we can build out scenarios around that crossover. And you can also go further out and go, well, actually, what's right at the fringes, what's being developed right at the fringes today? And this has less probability, has less certainty around it.

It makes you aware of what's happening, what might change the world, what might move this market or this group of people or this business or organization. It's a far more scenario-based way of looking at things rather than the typical, let's go back to business and the business plan, which typically has one scenario, and it's normally very, very positive, and I'm going to get 1% of this market share. And hey, Presto, it's an amazing business.

Futures thinking really just tries to bring in the different scenarios and then paint kind of, well, what are the pros and cons? What are the things we need to be aware of in each of those?

Stephen Matini: As you're talking, I was also wondering when you realized in your life this passion of yours, because for me happened really, really early on, and I could express it as a passion for patterns. You know I could see patterns in everything. How did you find out this attitude of yours?

Chris Marshall: So I lived in North Wales. I still live in North Wales. Obviously, a few hundred years ago, 1,000 years ago now, the Romans came and kind of conquered Britain. And Welsh roads, they weave in and out. They have a corner every about 30 centimeters. The joke is that there used to be sheep paths. And the Roman roads in contrast are pinned straight. Now, whether this is true or not, my parents told me that this would kind of save travel time and it would stop bandits lurking around a corner and all these kind of things.

And for me, I was always interested in these big shifts that we had these kind of, I'm going to call them scars on the landscape from eras gone by that no longer exist, but they're still visible to us. And so I was fascinated by these big moments of change, kind of pivotal moments or paradigm shifts. That kind of like lay dormant in me for decades.

Obviously, just curious. And I think that's probably the key is I'm a highly curious person. And that sent me down an awful lot of rabbit holes of, you know, kind of if I list the titles of things that I've done. I'm a master distiller. I'm a psychotherapist. I'm a performance coach, a behavioral scientist, a futurist, an investment manager.

What's happened in the last few years is really, I think it was when I was researching for the book "Decoding Change," I realized that all of this life experience, this kind of life of being a multi-passioned person, this highly curious person, actually, they do have crossovers.

They have transferable skills and transferable insights. So for me, it was really just a life of being highly curious and often getting stuck into things which fascinated me, which I found interesting. Some people would just call them distractions from what I was meant to be focusing on. But essentially, over that time, I just found all these different avenues. And then eventually it all came together.

This is maybe going back only maybe seven, eight years into this field that, okay, if we actually add all these together in this kind of beautiful Venn diagram almost, then right at the center is the overlap between all of these things. So that's for me, and I constantly draw on all of those different experiences and skills I've built.

Stephen Matini: Basically, based on what you're saying, you need to have so many different tools to navigate in a way that makes sense. I don't think you were unfocused. You were building your resilience, probably.

Chris Marshall: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, and I couldn't agree more. In fact, most of my work now not only draws on all those different skills, but helps people promote it in their own lives. And this isn't to say that if you are a highly focused person with one focus, one job, one project, that that's bad. You know, the world needs both types.

But what we've done, I think, in the modern world is promote this kind of idea that we go through school and we continually specialize until we come out with this hyper-focused specialization in this niche area. And that's all we do and all we look at. But as you'll know from your teaching in your own life and seeing this in businesses, when we kind of look for creative solutions, they tend to come from spillovers. So I think Einstein described it as creativity being combinational play.

So this idea of knocking two molecules together which have never met before. And you don't get that very easily when it's just one molecule. It's got nothing to bounce off. So you can get it in a committee, you can get it in a team, you can get it in an organization, but you can also get it in individuals.

And the world we've promoted, I mean, if you even think about how you promote yourself individually, if you're a multi-passion person, the question I hate the most is, what do you do?

I struggle to answer that one because it's like, well, what's your interest? And I'll tell you what's relevant. But the way we've promoted the world, these kind of 30 second, 60-second elevator pitches that we're all told to have, they don't allow for multi-passion people to kind of promote themselves and thrive. In fact, all too often, they're hit back with these ideas of, "You're not focused," or, "You're a jack of all trades," which is kind of this derogatory term for you're not really a master of anything.

But in a world of disruption and change, I actually believe having that multi-passioned mindset, that highly curious one, is a distinct advantage. We haven't had to have it in the last 250 years, and we can dig into why, but we're moving to an era of radical social change, radical disruption.

And if you can't see things from different perspectives, not only do those situations become stress-inducing, anxiety-provoking, you're engulfed in that situation, but you haven't got the skill set and experience to see it from different perspectives. So actually, the multi-passion mindset is extraordinarily important as we move into a disruption, disruptive era, which I believe we are.

Stephen Matini: And I think probably of all people, what you're saying is something that may resonate very deeply with entrepreneurs. They have to wear so many different hats. And sometimes your budget is just nothing, and you have to make the best out of nothing. Is that maybe the reason that you enjoy working with entrepreneurs?

Chris Marshall: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's creatives in general. So I've kind of founded two different companies around, not specifically entrepreneurs, but multi-passioned people, curious people, creatives, whatever label people want to kind of give themselves.

And the first was a company called the PPM method or “pause play move” method. It's a decision-making framework that allows people to pause more, be more playful, and we can dig into why those two things are kind of highly relevant.

But yeah, it teaches people to deal with this constant bombardment of wearing multiple hats, being pulled in different directions. And if you look at kind of stress levels, burnout rates, then entrepreneurs are normally pretty high on the top of the table. So there's a downside to being multi-passionate as well. And that's why also as a psychotherapist, I set up a company called The Refuel Clinic.

So it's a small psychotherapy practice specifically for multi-passioned and creative people, because we experience different sets of burnout and stress and anxiety because we're constantly flicking between tasks, we're constantly wearing different hats, we're constantly being pulled in different directions. We're normally behind because we're not that well organized. And so firefighting as we go. But yeah, absolutely.

I find it an incredible group of people to work amongst and with because it's my tribe of other people who are creative and insightful and innovative in their nature.

Stephen Matini: You know what I just realized? You said past play a move. I did not realize this, but the tagline of my podcast, you know pity party over is a pause, learn and move on. You know So maybe I'm a little bit of Chris, but I love yours more, I have to say. I love the word “play.” Why you picked that word of all possible words?

Chris Marshall: This was kind of, again, some research into what makes us resilient. At the time, one of the avenues I'd kind of dive down, I'd set up a micro distillery in the UK. This was 2014. The reason being was essentially, I was working in an investment management space. I wanted to do something a little bit more creative. There is quite a lot of creativity within investment management, but I wanted something more tangible.

And I was starting to notice this trend of people wanting things which were authentic, that they were artisan, that they were small batch, you know all these kind of things. I nearly opened a brewery and then I found out I was gluten intolerant, so I can't drink beer. And I thought, well, that's not the best company really to own, is it? So I set up a distillery because they start in similar ways. And I've always loved chemistry. And it's really just a big boy's chemistry set with a nice ending. You get to drink the product.

And at the same time, I was obviously still head of investment strategy, a fund manager. I was doing research into behavioral science, particularly around resiliency. And this is where it becomes a little bit embarrassing, because while I was doing academic research on resiliency and mental toughness, I actually burnt out.

And the irony for those who don't really understand those concepts is that those mindsets, states, personality types, however you want to construct them, they are meant to protect you from the very thing I was experiencing.

I realized kind of lying on my back in hospital for three days, you know I did a pretty good job of burnout because you know that's if you're driven and you're committed, that's what you do.

And I'd come from a world of professional sport as a young child. So I raced on the British ski team up until about age 17, 18. Within there, we talk about mental toughness a lot, but the construct of mental toughness and resiliency within elite sport is very different to within a business and an organization.

But the mistake we've done is we've just transported it from elite sport and gone, this is what entrepreneurs need to do. But with an elite sport or any sport, you tend to have both short timeframes of when you're competing. So you might be mentally tough for a day and then you can chill out or let's extend this. You might have to show resiliency for a season and then you have an off-season. Being an entrepreneur, you don't get that. Often you don't even get that while you sleep. I was kind of looking at this and going, "Okay, I think we've actually got things wrong here.

There's a lot that we can take from the mental toughness research and resiliency research into entrepreneurship and organization psychology and things like that. There's a missing piece. And the missing piece is within organizations. And as an entrepreneur, it's constant. It becomes chronic rather than these more acute periods where we have to be mentally strong. So I was then looking for what's the missing piece. And for me, I stumbled across research on adult playfulness.

And adult playfulness is so under-researched, so underrepresented. I mean, it's overlooked. When you kind of tell somebody as an adult to be playful, particularly if they're in a professional setting, they tend to kind of look at you as if you've lost your head a little bit. You can see what they're thinking. They're thinking, yeah, kids play. I'm a professional. I make the joke that as kids, we're second nature and we're very playful and creative.

And then when we become an adult, somewhere along the lines, who knows quite what happens, but there's a defining moment when we go, okay, well, I'm going to be a professional and that means I need to be stressed and serious. When we actually look at playfulness, what it brings us is incredible. I mean, the benefits of cognition, of thought, of creativity, of curiosity, of collaboration, we can keep going and adding on all these things that happen when we're playful.

And I'd actually go further and say, if we even draw on lessons from the animal kingdom, playfulness is not only an adaptive response. So if we meet a situation where we're failing or it's not going our way, play is a way of exploring new options without being too hung up on the outcome. It's actually when we consider it, it's, I believe, the optimal state of being human.

When we're playful, we can think with like this swiftness and clarity. We can collaborate with others. We're not rigid. We're not closed-minded. We're open-minded. We're happy to kind of be adaptable and flexible. And so the challenge for us all is how do we cultivate playfulness?

And that was really what led me to both the poorest play move and the play part as a middle pillar in the PPM method. It was stumbling across this research and it was really just trying to find out what was lacking. Why was I burning out?

Why was I lying in hospital when I was a researcher on mental toughness and resiliency? I mean, it was ridiculous. And it was finding that missing part because if you take the mental toughness or hardiness construct, you have commitment challenge as kind of these two big pillars.

But really, as an entrepreneur, if you're very high in those kind of if you're self-challenged, high commitment, then essentially what you do is you just bury yourself in the ground eventually.

You need something to break that and to actually make it more fluid and fun and be prepared to ports. So for me, you know again, how I typically describe this is we have to go back to kind of our stress response. And when we start looking at stress, we start understanding stress isn't just about a situation we find ourselves in. Stress is the total load, if you like, on our body from our behaviors, what we consume, the environment we're in, you know all of these different things.

And our stress response is incredible. So when we meet a situation that we detect as threat, we're not detecting safety and comfort anymore. If we go back far enough, it would have been a lion at the cave door. It would have been an angry tribesman from the tribe in the next valley across. What happens is our body goes through this incredible shift to prepare us for what might be imminent physical danger.

Now, what's happening in our modern society is the email that comes in with the angry tone, the message that goes, "Where's this report?" Or, "That report you sent was rubbish," or whatever it might be. It's also triggering our stress response. And our body is reacting the same way as it would have when we were cave-dwelling Neolithic men, but we don't require the same physical change. We don't need for our cortisol to spike and cut off our prefrontal cortex or limit access to it.

We don't need our heart rate to increase and digestion to actually kind of take a pause so that we're physically ready to tackle a line. But that's still what's happening. And the issue in our modern society is it's happening so frequently that this stress response, which is amazing if it only goes on and off very quickly, is we're keeping that stress buzzer jammed on.

The link with playfulness is built into this whole stress response is when we see stress increase, and I want you to think about stress not as either on or off, but as a scale. So level five might be that you're actually past fight flight at level five. You're completely depressed, immobilized. It's freeze response, an animal playing dead, essentially, that we can link this with things like depression. That's a highly stressed state, but low energy.

At four, this is where you're ready just to punch anybody. 'Cause it's just like, they've got in your way and they've just said something, which is really annoying. You hopefully don't act out on that, but within you, you are ready to fight or run away.

And so I want you to think about it as a scale, 'cause most people don't live at level one, which is joy and calm. They live probably at like level two and a half, sometimes three, and they're easily spiked to level four. So you see this in road rage because they're detecting all these threats and they're easily just moving up that stress scale, but harder to actually move back down to level one. And again, kind of bringing this back to playfulness.

When you're in the higher stages, you can't be playful, because being at the highest stages, your body is now hyper-focused on the threat. It's hyper-focused on the outcome. It's hyper-focused on understanding everything about that single situation and it becomes completely engrossed in it. Engulfed is probably a better word. This is where emotions can completely consume us.

Playfulness happens at the lower stress levels. Stress levels one, maybe just as we come into level two. As soon as you go two and a half, three, you can't access it. And it's got evolutionary properties. If a lion was coming at you at the cave, the last thing you want to be is playful.

You don't want to be curious. You don't want to be wondering, oh, well, I wonder what it had for breakfast, or I wonder what shampoo it uses in its mane. You want to just be either kind of preparing for this run of your life or tackling it if you're protecting other people. Those are the choices and your body completely prepares you for that.

So playfulness has to do with stress. Now, as I said, the issue in our modern society, we can look at data on this from stress and anxiety and burnout and everything else. Since the '80s, something has been going fundamentally wrong in society. The rising level of stress, the rising level of anxiety shows that collectively, we are no longer coping with the environment that we're in for whatever reason. And actually there's a whole myriad of reasons and sometimes it's very individual.

But on aggregate, the collective is no longer coping as well. And I believe that we just need a new way to actually navigate highly disruptive environments. Since the '80s, the world's been disruptive. And I think from this point on, it's going to become even more disruptive. If we're not coping already, then we need something drastically new in the way that we think, the way that we compose ourselves, the way that we deal with our stress response, the way that we actually come to behaviors and relationships and everything else so that we can manage ourselves so much better.

But nothing is being presented. That was the whole reason why I developed this PPM method, because I could see there was something. Even me who understood all this stuff, I was still falling foul of the environment I was in.

So playfulness, yeah, has so much to do with stress levels. And unfortunately, the environment we're in and the ways that we've been taught to think and behave and calm ourselves, coping strategies, they aren't good enough anymore. They aren't strong enough.

Stephen Matini: I think that what happens probably to everyone, but for sure to entrepreneurs and definitely to small entrepreneurs is that you are ambitious. You want to achieve things, you have all kinds of different stuff, and it's very easy to go, go, go, go, go, go, go. And our environment is loaded with information. It's going way too fast. In the meantime, as you know, way better than I do, our brain has not evolved as rapidly. And so we are in overload.

You pointed out these many, many important things, playfulness. You pointed out the importance of being aware that we are in this particular moment in time of great, great, great change. And then you talked about the fact that there are so many stimuli that we are constantly in this state of alertness.

And to me, you are a positive person. And I would say most people these days feel very scared. So the question to you is, why are you positive despite everything?

Chris Mashall: I am a positive person. You know I have my own doubts. I think that's the important thing is when you're looking out to the future, there is a lot of fear and anxiety. And I think we need to bring this back. Let's join this up to the conversation we've just had, because what you're doing with your body in your kind of exercise regime is what we need to also do cognitively. We need to shift how we're cognitively looking after ourselves. The physical body can help cognition, absolutely, but also the way that we think helps cognition.

And coming back to this environment of increasing stress. Now, one of the key things that your brain and my brain hates and everybody else listening to this podcast, we all have different windows of tolerance, we can cope with, some people can cope with a lot, some people can cope with a little bit. But the fundamental thing that our brains hate is uncertainty. In fact, our brains will do almost anything, even lie to ourselves, to create certainty because uncertainty is the biggest threat to this organism.

And if we really think about what the brain's job is, it's not to perform amazing kind of calculations to put rockets into space. It's to keep this organism alive. That's fundamentally what it's there for. We've used it for other things and it's amazing. But fundamentally, it's to keep us alive. And it can't do that job if it doesn't understand what the environment is, if there's a lot of uncertainty around it.

So when we have disruptive change, we have tons of uncertainty. We have tons of different scenarios and everything else. And as that stress level increases, because that's essentially one of the roles of that stress response is to give our body energy, our brain energy, to go find more information, to solve this problem of uncertainty, to find, well, what is the outcome? Because I need to know the outcome. Even if it's terrible, we'd rather have an outcome which is terribly bad in our head than sit with no outcome at all.

Now, also what happens with the stress response, and I promise I will come back to optimism. What happens with the stress response is as we become more stressed, we become more pessimistic. And that's quite obvious why, because we're detecting threat. We're not looking for optimism. We're looking for things which are going to hurt us. That's what the stress response is. It's an energized, mobilized state of finding the things which are dangerous.

So if we add together all of these things, higher disruption, higher levels of stress, higher levels of uncertainty, is it really too surprising that we see rising levels of anxiety and fear about the future? Absolutely not. Add in that, we really do have some hurdles to overcome. I completely agree with that. But we've got this additional layer of fear on top. And that additional layer, I believe, is psychological. And you can actually trace this back to other time periods through history where it's been radical change.

And actually, there's been an equal fear within society. I mean, let's take the Industrial Revolution. The Luddites, the group of bandit-like people who were reasonably in their own head, kind of burning down factories because it was taking away their livelihoods. And whenever we kind of have these massive moments, that there's always this additional fear and anxiety. So we have that.

Yes, we have hurdles to overcome, but I think the biggest lesson I learned from writing “Decoding Change” was in the research, one of the things that stood out, and perhaps even the prominent thing which stood out is us humans, when we're at our best, when we learn to pause and play, actually, when we're at our best, we are the most incredible, creative, innovative creatures to have ever walked this earth. We are adaptable, we are flexible, we are collaborative, we're cooperative.

When we're not at our best, we're rigid, closed-minded. And so my optimism comes from seeing through history how humans as a species have walked out of situations that we should never have walked out of. And if you bring that forward, and there is a kind of a hope that, you know, some of the, me and a very, very small part of this, helping people basically find their best decision making to reduce their stress, to unblock emotional blockages and everything else, that hopefully, collectively, if we can get towards our best, our optimal state, that we can embrace those human qualities.

And what happens when we do that is just stunning. We can't even forecast what might be. I mean, again, come back to the Industrial Revolution. All the Luddites could see was that their industry was being taken away. Let's fast forward this to AI. Countless careers and jobs are on the line. If AI manages to do half of what it is supposed to be able to do, we're looking at that from, oh my word, 50% of the world's going to be unemployed. And if there wasn't any progress or innovation or creativity, absolutely.

But what happens is we are innovative. Whole new industries pop up. I mean, just look at some of the industries which have kind of gone by the wayside. There used to be people with a long stick who used to come, they were called tapper uppers, used to walk along the streets to wake people up in the morning because there weren't clocks, there weren't alarm clocks. And it was a big career. You could have that as a lifelong career. And there are countless other careers and industries like that.

Every wave of technological progress, every paradigm shift in cultural philosophy or natural environment absolutely changes the status quo. But as we said right at the start of this podcast, there is no such thing as the status quo. It's always constantly in flux. And what we're trying to do when we're stressed is go, we want to keep this piece of ground we're standing on exactly the same. We can't do it anyway, even if we wanted to.

That's where my optimism comes from, is seeing what humans can be and do when they're at their best. It's not a naive optimism. I completely agree we have lots of things to sort out. The shifting natural environment will certainly be one of the biggest things, which makes many, many changes to how humans live and where we live and how we migrate. Technology will change the industrial and career landscape, no doubt about it. We also have the shift in cultural philosophy, which is stunning at the moment.

Normally, if you look at kind of tribes and communities, elders pass down their wisdom to the younger generations. What we're actually seeing for the first time in human history, as far as I can see anyway, is that the younger generation is influencing the older generation just as much as the older generation is influencing the younger. And we have this kind of collective wisdom of different perspectives. And it's bringing friction. Absolutely. It's bringing friction at the moment because it's different.

But if we can embrace collective wisdom, then all of a sudden we start to bring in so many different perspectives. And this is where the diversity piece, you know diversity and inclusion piece is so important. It's not about box ticking at a company. It's about making your organization or your team the most collaborative and creative and innovative group of people you possibly can. You can't do that if you select just from one type or group of person.

Stephen Matini: By listening to you, your insights, your energy, my stress level is going down. You do have this soothing feeling that, okay, maybe it's not as bad as I thought. I'm not as weird as I thought I was. If we could have in this moment, you and I talking, if we could invite a couple of people from the past, a couple of great minds from the past, who would you invite? Who would you like to have here with us?

Chris Marshall: I think I'd have to go with the physicist, Richard Feynman, to start. That's probably a controversial one because he was fundamental behind the hydrogen bomb. But where Feynman for me gets things right is in this idea, what we should be looking at from learning is how everything is connected. And when you start to actually see things clearly, you start to see how things move together and how you can transfer skills from one to another.

And it's a far more kind of nothing is thrown out in his way of thinking. Everything is kind of brought in as a kind of, oh, well, let's kind of it was actually a very playful way of thinking that, oh, well, okay, that's new to me. How does that fit with the current model rather than I have to be very defensive and throw it out because it doesn't conform to my understanding right now?

Stephen Matini: Well, you know there's a lot of people that I really admire, and it saddens me to think that I would never meet them. They're no longer here. But one person that I've always been so curious because it's so veneered would be Leonardo, you know Da Vinci.

Talking about someone who could multitask! But it would be amazing to hear his point of view. It's like, hey, look at all this. What do you think? He was such a disruptor for your time. That would be one that I would love to.

Chris Marshall: I had like three in my head. One would be definitely Sir Ernest Shackleton. So actually in the TEDx Talk, which I know you've watched, he kind of features as my kind of the person I've put up there as having this playful attitude in the most ridiculous of situations.

And for those who don't know his story, Sir Ernest Shackleton was the captain of the Endurance. He set out on a mission to basically cross Antarctica, thousands miles of pack ice. I mean, we're going back to like wooden boats here. It's a ridiculous feat, thousands miles of sailing through pack ice. And they were one day's landing away from their kind of intended landing and disaster struck and the temperatures dropped and the ship became pinned in the ice.

And what people don't realize is not only was there the world's most incredible rescue mission, 800 miles in a small lifeboat that isn't designed to go ocean going travel. But they spent 10 months on the ice before this. It's incredible. And he embodied this idea of playfulness, even in that situation. In fact, when he was talking about how he selected his crew, there's this incredible quote from him that talks about withstanding the agonies of thirst with laughter and song.

Now, he used the word optimism. And in the TEDx talk, I argued that if he was living in our modern day, that would have been playfulness. Withstanding agonies of thirst with laughter and song, that's not optimism. That's not you looking going, "Oh, isn't it a nice day?" That's completely framing and reframing a situation, which is terrible, which is life-threatening in its literal sense.

Stephen Matini: Have you seen any video of Mikaela Schiffrin?

Chris Marshall: Yes.

Stephen Matini: She has a series on YouTube, “Moving Along,” I love her and I love her attitude. I love how hardworking she is, and at the same time, humble and always curious. You know What a phenomenal athlete.

Chris Marshall: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And interestingly, I saw reading a piece the other week on her, because obviously I kind of keep up to date with the World Cup Circuit. And she said she found inspiration from Taylor Swift's playbook.

And I found this really interesting because if you look at Taylor Swift's playbook, whatever your view of her music and her as a person doesn't really matter, is she's been able to consistently generate music, which resonates with the zeitgeist of the time and just get this incredible following. You know, I would put her up there in the likes of kind of other artists who've managed to do this over multi-decade careers like Elton John.

And Schiffrin kind of was citing this, just saying how not only Taylor Swift has been this inspiration and her albums always seem to get her through whatever emotional crisis is unfolding in her life, but also just this constant adaptability and flexibility. And that's really what we're talking about.

If you want to remain relevant in a changing environment, you can't just go, okay, well, I'm charting a course from A to B and I'm going in a straight line. It's got to constantly have this awareness of what's going on and adaptability and flexibility.

But we don't often talk about this or even teach it. And so yeah, I kind of bringing it back to what we were talking about. Absolutely incredible career that Schiffrin's had. But I just found it fascinating how she was finding inspiration from another artist. They're very similar ages. I think they're both about 33. And so kind of going through these life-changing moments almost together in a virtual way, almost, but also just this whole adaptability and flexibility piece that Taylor Swift has shown.

Stephen Matini: Now, because of the podcast, I interview a lot of colleagues, but I would say that I get most of my inspirations from completely different industries, not necessarily my industry. Like I watch a lot of interviews and Taylor, you know Taylor Swift, I'm not a Swiftie in a sense that I don't listen to her music, but I watch a lot of interviews of her. I love her as a director. I love how incredibly kind and eloquent and precise she is, how gracious she is.

I get inspired by all kinds of stuff, and kind of what we said before. You must have that cross-pollination. I was sharing this yesterday with the guest. You know I did another episode that the idea of doing this podcast with a lot of colleagues of mine came because for years and years and years, I watched a lot of makeup videos.

How incredibly cool the fact that all these kids, they do collaborations. So technically they are competitors, but they do all these collaborations. They review each other's products. The intention is to make this industry better. It's like, I wonder if this can be done in my own industry. And now that I've been doing this podcast for two years, I love it. It just gives me a tremendous amount of pleasure to work with my colleagues, you know to learn from them, to build something together.

Chris Marshall: Yeah. And that's one of the incredible things. So within Decoding Change, I was obviously looking at these big driving forces. And I stumbled across what I call information revolutions. And I think this is kind of really nice for the point that you're making there. So information revolutions are, they don't happen very often. So technological revolutions happen every about 50 to 60 years.

That's been quite consistent since the start of the Industrial Revolution. So the last one was the semiconductor in 1971. Hey, Presto, we're talking about AI and machine learning and robotics, 53 years on. But information revolutions happen at far longer cycles. So the first one that I'm going to cite is the kind of Guttenberg press, that all of a sudden knowledge was able to be shared not person to person, but freely shared by transporting a book.

And if we combine that with a transport mechanism of the great age of exploration, all of a sudden we had the printed press sailing around the world because we had Columbus and Diaz and Vasco Gamma, all kind of going on.

What happened is there was this massive change in cultural philosophy with that. I mean, it wasn't all positive. There was some pretty dark periods, but it was the ability as you bring more voices to the table, as you bring more philosophies to the table, you get this incredible kind of incubator of creativity.

Same thing happened when we got to, we could cite a few things, but I'm gonna use the telephone, partly because we just overlook the telephone. None of us even use the telephone anymore. I mean, if you think before the telephone, before they laid those cables into continentally, transatlanticly, before that, we were essentially relying on ships with letters. Steam ships kind of made it far more consistent the crossing from sailing ships, but still you're talking several days to get a letter to the states.

And okay, there were a few quicker mechanisms, but for the general public, that was the only way. Then all of a sudden, the telephone comes along. And not only is there a richness in the information, I can hear your voice and the tone of it and the sentiment of what you're saying, but it's instant. And you can reply to me instantly, not three weeks later. I mean, it's bonkers when you really think about it. We're at this next age, the Internet started this next information revolution and AI accelerates it.

And all of this stuff, I mean, even the way we're recording this podcast, you're sat in a completely different location in the world. Yeah, I'm speaking to you as if you're sat on the other side of the table. And the richness of data, we've not just got voice, we've got visual. And what happens with all of this is we get more voices around the table as long as we embrace it. And that's come back to why we need to learn to pause and play, is because we become open-minded and more collaborative.

But when we learn those skills, we can accelerate businesses, we can accelerate organizations, we can accelerate teams and everything else because we bring so many more views and technology enables that.

Information revolutions are fascinating. This is one of the reasons why I say we're at such a disruptive point in time. It's not just about AI, it's not just about natural environment. We're in the midst of so many different trends and mega trends.

Stephen Matini: Well, Chris, I have learned so much in this hour with you. I truly believe you are really special. And I don't mean it to flatter you, you know, just pointlessly, but I think I really, truly believe you are very special. Everything you say resonates beautifully. And I love the way that I feel now. I really feel calmer. You're very, very special. Thank you so much for this time together.

Chris Marshall: Oh, well, thank you so much for that compliment. And thank you for having me on and rabbiting on about my stories and research.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit breakfastwithstephen.substack.com

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