Oh, the pungent smell of the smoke,
my eyes are watering.
In the near distance, a fire is burning on our mountain,
and our corporate office of 35 years
stands right in the path of the growing flames.
We could lose everything, and here, in the midst of all this,
I am sitting here, thinking about what I’ve done with my life.
I’m getting ahead of myself.
Have you ever woken up one day
and suddenly, realized that years and years have passed you by
almost in a blur?
Well, it happened to me.
And when I asked myself the question,
“Is this where I really want to be at this point in my life?”
The answer was, “Well, not really.”
I was running a very successful company, have a great family, had my health,
but I hadn’t taken the time to think deeply about my future,
where I wanted to be, and where our company could really go.
Ironically, as a second generation family business leader,
I had a role model I could have learned from: my dad.
He was a brain researcher, artist, author, physicist, successful exec.
At one point, I said, “Dad, how did you accomplish all of this?
Did you know that you’d be here, now, having done all of this?”
He said, “Well, I was a sole survivor of a plane crash.
Then after that, having successfully battled a life-threatening illness,
I realized I needed to decide exactly
what I wanted to accomplish with my life, or it could pass me by.
Who knew how much longer I had to fulfill my dreams.”
So he took a piece of paper that he had completed years earlier.
In the upper right hand corner, he’d put a date out into the future,
and listed all of the things he wanted to accomplish.
In the lower left hand corner,
the current date and what he was doing at the time.
He drew a line between the two and put in a few milestones
that he felt he needed to achieve to get to that future.
This one piece of paper became his roadmap to achieve his dreams.
Did he do everything that was on here exactly the way he wrote it? No.
But it didn’t matter. He knew where he wanted to go.
I call it the one-sheet approach; one sheet to design your future.
Without it, you know the old adage,
“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”
So what can you do?
Here’s the first of my five thinking hacks or recommendations for you
to design your future:
create your own one sheet.
You can do it as an individual, at any age,
you can do it for your business, or you can ever do it for a community.
Start by imaging yourself out into the future,
waking up one day and saying to yourself,
“Oh God, I’m so satisfied with all I’ve accomplished.”
Where are you? What have you done?
What is your legacy at that point in your life?
Now, capture that on your one sheet.
Have fun with it.
Work it until it feels just right for you.
I’ve been teaching the one sheet for a long time in my work.
Suddenly, it hit me. Where was my one sheet?
I realized that my path had actually been an extension of my dad’s one sheet.
I’d inherited his.
And I was having a really hard time thinking about my future,
how I might reinvent myself and my company along with it.
Don’t get me wrong. I loved what we were doing.
Helping thinkers all over the globe at the world’s best companies,
improve their thinking, and we had a vision statement.
But it didn’t really provide a roadmap to an exciting, new future.
I felt stuck.
So, like my father, a student of neuroscience,
I thought I’ll look at what the brain can tell us
so I can learn more about this.
Now, the brain is specialized in its very essence – our neurons,
and the fetal brain, those specialized neurons,
actually migrate to their specific locations in vitro.
Our lives are all geared towards specialization.
You get on carrier tracks, choose majors,
get really smart about certain things,
which makes us really successful on the one hand,
but on the other, creates a mindset, even a bias,
which impacts what we really think may be possible in the future.
In fact, our specialized knowledge can actually limit our ability
to learn and think about the future.
It creates a thinking trap.
I knew from our research
that our brains patterns can be understood through our thinking preferences.
Those preferences impact how we make decisions,
how we solve problems, and how we think about the future.
The basis of that research is the whole brain model.
It’s really a metaphor
for how our brain works and how we think.
And we know from our analyses of millions of HPDI thinking preference assessments
that we all have access to all four of these thinking areas.
But 97% of us strongly prefer one or two or three versus all four.
Those thinking preferences impact everything in our day-to-day lives.
For example, even something like reacting to an idea about a vacation.
As a describe how each of these four preferences
might react to an idea about a vacation,
I’d like you to make sure you have your cards.
They should look like this.
Think about which ones best describe you.
Perhaps, you’re more of a blue, bottom line kind of thinker.
Your reaction to an idea about a vacation might be,
“How much is this vacation going to cost us?”
Any of you relate to that?
Perhaps, you’re more of a green, chronological thinker.
Your first reaction might be,
“We got to get an itinerary put together. Ideally, hour by hour.”
Maybe, you’re more of a red, people-oriented thinker.
You might say,
“Let’s just get everybody together and talk about it.
Let’s decide where we want to go together.”
Perhaps, you’re more of a yellow, big picture thinker.
You might say, “You know what?
Why don’t we just be spontaneous and figure it out as we go?
It’s a lot more fun that way.”
Which of these best represents your preferred thinking?
Pick the card or cards that best represents that,
and let’s hold those up and see what we have here in the audience.
Hold up the card or cards, and look around the room once they’re up.
Hold those up.
Look around the room.
You might check out the people you came with.
OK, so you see we’re all different.
We strongly favor some of those preferences.
And we’re not so crazy about some of the others.
So why was I stuck?
Well, all of my specialized knowledge about our business,
combined with my lower preference for the green planning quadrant –
you know, I hadn’t created my own one sheet plan –
meant that I was having a really hard time thinking differently about our business.
I should have known better.
Thinking hack number two:
get insight about how your thinking preferences
may be limiting your thinking about the future.
Then, literally, walk around your thinking brain,
visiting each of these perspectives so that you can get unstuck.
Now, I knew that I needed some new thinking about our business.
So I shifted into the red quadrant,
and decided that I would ask for some help.
I asked employees, customers, even my kids –
one of whom decided to join the company.
With their help, we came up with a new vision:
a better thinking for a better world.
We brought on new people, put in new processes,
started to see new possibilities, and everything started to change.
Except, to be honest,
I wasn’t 100% bought in with the change.
I was out of my comfort zone. I was uncomfortable.
I remembered a mentor who told me years earlier,
“Discomfort is a sign and an opportunity for learning.
In fact, your comfort zone can actually be your danger zone.”
Rather than resisting the people who make you uncomfortable,
thinking hack number three is get an outgroup of people
who challenge your thinking intentionally, making yourself uncomfortable.
For me, this meant hiring my third generation son, a millennial.
I knew he would challenge my thinking.
That has so proven to be true.
We hired other people who would challenge our thinking.
In fact, we have a whole new company.
I’ve learned you can’t completely outsource your thinking about the future
to others who challenge you.
Have you ever been in a situation
where something changed in your world and caught you off-guard?
And afterwards, you realized,
“You know, I could have seen that coming if I’d just been paying attention.”
The way to prevent that is to become a keen observer
of the changes that are happening in your world around you.
Then, track those changes.
Thinking hack number four: become a change tracker.
That means expanding your perspective beyond what you normally see every day.
Here’s a little metaphor I’d like to share to make this point.
Put your arms out in front of you with your two thumbs in front of you.
I want you to really focus on your thumbs.
Move your left and right arm apart,
trying to keep both of your thumbs in your visual field at the same time.
Don’t hit your neighbor.
Now, try it again, but this time, I’d like you to use what I call soft eyes.
Look beyond your thumbs, and try it again.
See if you can keep both of your thumbs in your visual field and see beyond.
This is an example of what I mean by expanding your thinking
beyond what you see today.
Seek out future oriented podcasts, websites, go places you’ve never been.
Then track those changes.
I use a notebook. You can use your phone, a tablet.
But that allows you to begin to see trends emerge.
I’ve since learned that you can be really aware of all the changes
that are going to come but not change.
That ever happen to any of you?
It’s because you’re afraid of the change.
It happens to all of us, even leaders.
Some people hire coaches for help, other people seek therapy,
I hired my son.
But we don’t necessarily change, because we’re afraid.
What was I afraid of?
Well, all of the changes we were making in our business
were creating tremendous ambiguity, and uncertainty was a little terrifying.
Let me give you an example.
For years, my team had been telling me that our very remote location
made it difficult for us to grow our business.
We had a really hard time attracting the talent we needed.
So we talked about moving our headquarters.
This kind of went on for years.
Until one day, out of frustration, they came to me and said,
“Anne, we have a new idea.
Why don’t we become 100% virtual? Forget about moving.”
“100% virtual,” I thought. “OK. Alright.”
Even more uncertainty. I started to freeze up.
Then I remembered some research we had done
in the world of creativity and innovation
where I learned that ambiguity and uncertainty
can either freeze you in your tracks or it can be an invitation
to get curious and creative about the future
by simply asking one question, “What if?”
Thinking hack number five: ask “what if?”
when you’re facing ambiguity and uncertainty.
We know there’s a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty out there right now.
What if we didn’t have a building?
Well, I could get rid of brick and mortar costs.
What if we didn’t have a centralized headquarters location?
We could hire people anywhere in the world.
So as I was asking myself “What if?”, I began to realize with some dread,
what if this meant letting go of everything I’d grown up with?
Little did I know a fire would set me free.
We talked about becoming 100% virtual, we hadn’t even started with that yet.
That’s when I learned
that the fire was less than a mile away heading in our direction.
We had to take action immediately.
There I stood, in this really smokey building
with 900 firefighters right down the road,
trying to decide what do I keep, what do we leave behind,
and sorting through 35 years of stuff.
Then, it hit me.
I had been holding on to that building and its contents –
my childhood, working side by side with my father.
It was time to let go.
It was both a metaphoric obstacle and a real barrier to our progress.
Of course the location no longer made sense,
but it took a fire for me to realize that I needed to let go
and deal with some unfinished emotional processing.
I stood in that smokey building
and let out a scream of frustration while tears were rolling down my face.
It was time to say goodbye,
goodbye to all that had been.
And that goodbye was the first important step
to set me free to build my new future,
to let it all burn.
I realized that I had not fully grieved my father’s passing, years earlier,
and all of the painful emotions attached to it.
It turns out the fire actually never got to our building.
(Laughter)
But I felt the burn.
What do you need to burn to get that emotional release?
What are you afraid of?
What are you still holding on to that’s preventing you
from building that new future and making it happen?
Think like your future depends on it, because it does.
If you don’t start now, you might never get there.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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