My Stance

1 Jan

What I’ve learned.

I’ve spent 20 years building companies in rapidly changing industries. For the first 12 years I believed real success would be measured by exiting my own startup. As the years passed, my co-founders and I often talked about how much we hoped to reach that outcome together.  

When that success came, it taught me an unexpected lesson, which was that reaching my big goal didn’t make me especially happy. It did bring financial stability after many years of sacrifice and uncertainty, which I appreciated a lot. But it soon turned out that what I’d lost was my sense of me, my purpose and identity and I was left with a sense of emptiness that I had not bargained for. 

I’d thrown myself into it as a CEO, absorbed myself deeply within a company life and away from things that matter more to me. I’d become disconnected from my family and close relationships, distracted from making good decisions for my long-term health and disinterested in the personal interests and perspectives that made me happy.

My reflection.

It has taken me many years to draw my own truth from this. The best version of my life isn’t filled with deferred achievement of driving at far off career goals, because that brings me anxiety, disconnection and loss of identity. Instead, the best version of my life is lived directing my energy and attention towards contributing well and crafting the best things I can each day.

Remaining curious about the opportunities that life will bring next, not stressing out about staying in control.

Building more authentic connections with others based on trust.

Being more connected with my own needs, and in touch with what’s important. 

Cultivating creativity, and enjoyment with others, and avoiding being too fixed on the role I play.

My life does of course still bring the modern versions of those ancient pressures of surviving, protecting, and providing for loved ones. But in this best version of my life, learning not to retreat into that safe space in my own head, living in my own narrative, or operating behind my screen as a comfortable product of a two-dimensional, blue light world. I have learned that life is more satisfying when we lead it in a more human way and find progress from this alternative outlook.

The tension. 

Whilst I was optimising for success in those transforming sectors, I learned a lot about how we build the systems that we live in. However, having realised where I stand, it is harder for me to escape the thought that there is a tension between the accelerating technical systems that I’ve been building and inhabiting, and the realisation that living with human agency cannot be assumed within that setting.

I am both a child of and an architect for these corporate systems and our increasingly digital existence. As such I have a good life, it is enriched by corporate success and my own adoption of a digital lifestyle.

But I experience large parts of these systems as headwinds to tasting life’s whole flavour. 

Today, I’m building an energy business on the cornerstone of AI. That comes with many emergent potentials but also some significant responsibilities. Like many others in tech, our business is grappling with human concerns over the future of jobs and our roles as intelligent agents within them.

As a parent I see both my children’s fascination with the unending tech led opportunities to learn, socialise and play and at the same time, their off-screen difficulties of staying focused, creative and social.

Leadership.

I see the need for leaders that piece together the answers to the problems of the 2020s, turn headwinds into tailwinds and build whatever supersedence comes next. 

I’ve not seen any roadmap nor heard about any ideal answers to this tension and the grapple of remaining happy humans in an age of accelerating systems. But in my view, this must be one of the most compelling areas for leading today.

Naming the big problems.

I think it is helpful at this point to name the big problems of the 2020s that in my view cannot be sensibly ignored by leaders, but at the same time don’t get insufficient mainstream focus and attention: 

·  Our dominant economic system still depends on ecological extraction.

·  Our attention economies still distract people from deeper self-reflection.

·  A persistent materialist world view may now be thinning our understanding of what being human is.

·  Business models increasingly treat people as commodities to be shaped, though society seems to be telling its politicians that places and communities hold a deeper value.

·  If AI does more of our work for us, then knowledge workers may either be confronted to rediscover human depth or struggle for a role.  

What next?

I’d like to understand more about the human endeavours that create the arenas, big and small, where we develop from here. Our accelerating systems gave me an opportunity, but they also surprised me because I hadn’t realised the amount of take as well as give. My question is how do we preserve and strengthen human agency in our age of accelerating systems?