Staying complacent? You know you are killing yourself with inaction. You’re stuck. Fading into irrelevancy! Dying from organizational sclerosis every single day. What are you going to do about it?

You know it's true, don't you? Because you keep on making the same old excuses, each and every day, that validate your belief that you don't need to change. As that famous philosopher once said: LOL. The joke will be on you!

I'm a futurist. I'm not a clairvoyant, but I know who you are. I know what you think. I know how you act. I know the aggressive indecision that lies deep within your soul. I know you are dying inside and that you can't confront your reality.

How do I know? Because I KNOW!

Here's what I know about you:

You are in denial:

  • you don't want to talk about the reality of the disruptive change that you are faced with
  • you don't want to challenge your team to think about the big, bold steps they need to be thinking about to get ahead in the era of acceleration
  • you don't want to acknowledge the new competition and new challenges that surround you

You are complacent:

  • you prefer to keep a blind eye toward the future, complacency rules your day, and the status quo is your only objective
  • you don't think it is important to wake people out of their complacent slumber, thinking that tomorrow is going to be exactly like it is today
  • you don't want to talk about what you need to do to reinvent your product or service lines to keep up with the fact that what you currently sell is becoming old and obsolete
  • you don't want to talk about the opportunities that come from building an effective, collaborative, globally cooperative team

You are unrealistic:

  • you don't want to think about why agility, flexibility, and fast response are critical success factors to survive and thrive tomorrow
  • you don't want to focus on why customer-oriented innovation is redefining your markets and redefining your product, and you don't want to know why it is a critical wellspring for success

You deny reality:

  • you prefer to keep your staff and leadership team in the dark about the business model change occurring all around you
  • you prefer not to acknowledge that maybe your current strategies might not work so well going forward into this fast, disruptive future
  • you have a mindset that the boat should not be rocked, and that's what drives your day. You are on autopilot, doing the same thing over and over again

You seek simple strategies:

  • at your conferences and events, you prefer to keep booking the same old type of speaker, year after year, delivering the same old tired "motivational" message
  • you think it's ok to pick a safe inspirational message that might excite your people for a moment but will do little to get them to confront the reality of what is occurring around them
  • you'd prefer not to have substantive, in-depth conversations with your chosen speaker to ensure that the message they will deliver is closely aligned with your goals, objectives, and issues
  • you prefer useless, meaningless, motivational pap

You think your world won't change:

  • you don't want to understand how the pace of technological change now defines the future of your industry, and why your ability to align to Silicon Valley velocity is critical
  • you don't want to know what other companies are doing to ensure that IT is not just an infrastructure for transactions, but the lifeblood of your future

You aren't organized to do what you need to do:

  • you don't want an in-depth appreciation of why your ability to access critical skills through innovation partnerships will become an increasingly important focus for success
  • you don't want to understand why your ability to form fast, cross-functional teams might just be the most important thing you can do

You run yourself by deadly consensus:

  • you have a committee making important decisions, and you are willing to let the decision sink to the lowest common denominator of the least controversial topic

You are okay with failure:

  • you think that mediocrity is OK, a race to the bottom is a good race to be in, and it's better to keep your people feeling comfortable and complacent rather than being somewhat scared and deadly motivated

You don't think history is a good guide to your future:

  • you think that Kodak, Blackberry, Blockbuster, Sears, and Motorola had awesome, sustainable world-class business strategies
  • you prefer not to know what world-class innovators are doing to keep up with the era of acceleration.

LOL. With that, Just keep doing what you are doing.

Go back to sleep.

Because the joke is on you!

Futurist Jim Carroll originally wrote a variation of this post in 2019, after hearing from a client that they decided not to have a leadership event oriented on their disruptive future, because their leadership team 'didn't think it was important right now.'

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