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Over the past six months, I've spent my time

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traveling. I think I've done 60,000 miles,

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but without leaving my desk.

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And the reason I can do that is because I'm actually two people.

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I look like one person but I'm two people. I'm Eddie who is here,

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and at the same time, my alter ego is a big green boxy

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avatar nicknamed Cyber Frank.

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So that's what I spend my time doing. I'd like to start,

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if it's possible, with a test, because I do business stuff,

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so it's important that we focus on outcomes.

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And then I struggled, because I was thinking to myself,

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"What should I talk? What should I do? It's a TED audience.

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It's got to be stretching. How am I going to make — ?"

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So I just hope I've got the level of difficulty right.

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So let's just walk our way through this.

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Please could you work this through with me? You can shout out the answer if you like.

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The question is, which of these horizontal lines is longer?

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The answer is?

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Audience: The same.Eddie Obeng: The same.

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No, they're not the same. (Laughter)

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They're not the same. The top one is 10 percent longer than the bottom one.

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So why did you tell me they were the same? Do you remember when we were kids at school,

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about that big, they played the same trick on us?

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It was to teach us parallax. Do you remember?

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And you got, you said, "It's the same!" And you got it wrong.

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You remember? And you learned the answer, and you've carried this answer in your head for 10, 20, 30, 40 years:

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The answer is the same. The answer is the same. So when you're asked what the lengths are,

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you say they're the same, but they're not the same, because I've changed it.

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And this is what I'm trying to explain has happened to us in the 21st century.

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Somebody or something has changed the rules

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about how our world works.

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When I'm joking, I try and explain it happened at midnight,

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you see, while we were asleep, but it was midnight 15 years ago. Okay?

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You didn't notice it? But basically, what they do is,

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they switched all the rules round, so that the way to

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successfully run a business, an organization, or even a country,

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has been deleted, flipped, and it's a completely new

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— you think I'm joking, don't you — there's a completely new set of rules in operation. (Laughter)

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Did you notice that? I mean, you missed this one.

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You probably — No, you didn't. Okay. (Laughter)

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My simple idea is that what's happened is,

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the real 21st century around us isn't so obvious to us,

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so instead we spend our time responding rationally

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to a world which we understand and recognize,

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but which no longer exists.

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You don't believe me, do you? Okay. (Applause)

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So let me take you on a little journey of many of the things I don't understand.

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If you search Amazon for the word "creativity,"

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you'll discover something like 90,000 books.

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If you go on Google and you look for "innovation + creativity,"

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you get 30 million hits. If you add the word "consultants," it doubles to 60 million. (Laughter)

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Are you with me? And yet, statistically, what you discover

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is that about one in 100,000 ideas is found making money

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or delivering benefits two years after its inception.

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It makes no sense. Companies make their expensive executives

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spend ages carefully preparing forecasts and budgets

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which are obsolete or need changing before they can be published.

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How is that possible? If you look at the visions we have,

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the visions of how we're going to change the world,

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the key thing is implementation. We have the vision.

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We've got to make it happen.

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We've spent decades professionalizing implementation.

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People are supposed to be good at making stuff happen.

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However, if I use as an example a family of five

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going on holiday, if you can imagine this,

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all the way from London all the way across to Hong Kong,

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what I want you to think about is their budget is only 3,000 pounds of expenses.

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What actually happens is, if I compare this to the average

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real project, average real successful project,

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the family actually end up in Makassar, South Sulawesi,

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at a cost of 4,000 pounds,

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whilst leaving two of the children behind. (Laughter)

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What I'm trying to explain to you is, there are things which don't make sense to us.

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It gets even worse than that. Let me just walk you through this one.

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This is a quote, and I'll just pick words out of it.

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It says -- I'll put on the voice -- "In summary, your Majesty,

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the failure to foresee the timing, extent and severity

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of the crisis was due to the lack of creativity

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and the number of bright minds," or something like that.

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This was a group of eminent economists apologizing to the Queen of England

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when she asked the question,

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"Why did no one tell us that the crisis was coming?" (Laughter)

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I'll never get my knighthood. I'll never get my knighthood. (Laughter)

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That's not the important point. The thing you have to remember is,

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these are eminent economists, some of the smartest people

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on the planet. Do you see the challenge? (Laughter)

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It's scary. My friend and mentor, Tim Brown of IDEO,

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he explains that design must get big, and he's right.

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He wisely explains this to us. He says design thinking

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must tackle big systems for the challenges we have.

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He's absolutely right.

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And then I ask myself, "Why was it ever small?"

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Isn't it weird? You know, if collaboration is so cool,

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is cross-functional working is so amazing,

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why did we build these huge hierarchies? What's going on?

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You see, I think what's happened, perhaps, is that

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we've not noticed that change I described earlier.

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What we do know is that the world has accelerated.

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Cyberspace moves everything at the speed of light.

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Technology accelerates things exponentially.

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So if this is now, and that's the past,

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and we start thinking about change, you know,

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all governments are seeking change, you're here seeking change,

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everybody's after change, it's really cool. (Laughter)

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So what happens is, we get this wonderful whooshing acceleration and change.

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The speed is accelerating. That's not the only thing.

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At the same time, as we've done that, we've done something really weird.

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We've doubled the population in 40 years,

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put half of them in cities, then connected them all up so they can interact.

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The density of the interaction of human beings is amazing.

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There are charts which show all these movements of information. That density of information is amazing.

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And then we've done a third thing.

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you know, for those of you who have as an office

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a little desk underneath the stairs, and you say, well this is my little desk under the stairs,

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no! You are sitting at the headquarters of a global corporation if you're connected to the Internet.

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What's happened is, we've changed the scale.

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Size and scale are no longer the same.

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And then add to that, every time you tweet,

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over a third of your followers follow from a country

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which is not your own.

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Global is the new scale. We know that.

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And so people say things like, "The world is now a turbulent place." Have you heard them saying things like that?

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And they use it as a metaphor. Have you come across this?

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And they think it's a metaphor, but this is not a metaphor.

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It's reality. As a young engineering student, I remember

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going to a demonstration where they basically,

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the demonstrator did something quite intriguing.

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What he did was, he got a transparent pipe — have you seen this demonstration before? —

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he attached it to a tap. So effectively what you had was,

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you had a situation where — I'll try and draw the tap

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and the pipe, actually I'll skip the tap. The taps are hard.

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Okay? So I'll write the word "tap." Is that okay? It's a tap. (Laughter)

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Okay, so he attaches it to a transparent pipe, and he turns the water on.

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And he says, do you notice anything? And the water is whooshing down this pipe.

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I mean, this is not exciting stuff. Are you with me?

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So the water goes up. He turns it back down. Great.

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And he says, "Anything you notice?" No. Then he sticks a needle into the pipe,

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and he connects this to a container, and he fills

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the container up with green ink. You with me?

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So guess what happens? A thin green line comes out

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as it flows down the pipe. It's not that interesting.

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And then he turns the water up a bit, so it starts coming back in. And nothing changes.

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So he's changing the flow of the water, but it's just a boring green line.

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He adds some more. He adds some more. And then something weird happens.

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There's this little flicker, and then as he turns it ever so slightly more,

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the whole of that green line disappears, and instead

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there are these little sort of inky dust devils close to the needle.

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They're called eddies. Not me. And they're violently dispersing the ink

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so that it actually gets diluted out, and the color's gone.

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What's happened in this world of pipe

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is somebody has flipped it. They've changed the rules from laminar to turbulent.

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All the rules are gone. In that environment, instantly,

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all the possibilities which turbulence brings are available,

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and it's not the same as laminar.

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And if we didn't have that green ink, you'd never notice.

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And I think this is our challenge, because somebody

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has actually increased — and it's probably you guys with all your tech and stuff —

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the speed, the scale and the density of interaction.

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Now how do we cope and deal with that?

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Well, we could just call it turbulence, or we could try and learn.

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Yes, learn, but I know you guys grew up in the days when

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there were actually these things called correct answers,

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because of the answer you gave me to the horizontal line puzzle,

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and you believe it will last forever.

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So I'll put a little line up here which represents learning,

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and that's how we used to do it. We could see things,

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understand them, take the time to put them into practice.

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Out here is the world. Now, what's happened to our pace

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of learning as the world has accelerated? Well, if you work

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for a corporation, you'll discover it's quite difficult to work

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on stuff which your boss doesn't approve of, isn't in the strategy,

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and anyway, you've got to go through your monthly meetings.

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If you work in an institution, one day you will get them to make that decision.

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And if you work in a market where people believe in cycles,

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it's even funnier, because you have to wait all the way

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for the cycle to fail before you go, "There's something wrong." You with me?

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So it's likely that the line, in terms of learning, is pretty flat.

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You with me? This point over here, the point at which

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the lines cross over, the pace of change

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overtakes the pace of learning,

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and for me, that is what I was describing

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when I was telling you about midnight.

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So what does it do to us? Well, it completely transforms what we have to do,

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many mistakes we make. We solve last year's problems

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without thinking about the future. If you try and think about it,

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the things you're solving now, what problems are they going to bring in the future?

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If you haven't understood the world you're living in,

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it's almost impossible to be absolutely certain that what you're going to deliver fits.

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I'll give you an example, a quick one. Creativity and ideas,

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I mentioned that earlier. All the CEOs around me, my clients, they want innovation,

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so they seek innovation. They say to people, "Take risks and be creative!"

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But unfortunately the words get transformed as they travel through the air.

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Entering their ears, what they hear is, "Do crazy things and then I'll fire you." Why? (Laughter) Because —

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Why? Because in the old world, okay, in the old world,

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over here, getting stuff wrong was unacceptable.

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If you got something wrong, you'd failed. How should you be treated?

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Well, harshly, because you could have asked somebody who had experience.

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So we learned the answer and we carried this in our heads for 20, 30 years, are you with me?

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The answer is, don't do things which are different.

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And then suddenly we tell them to and it doesn't work.

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You see, in reality, there are two ways you can fail in our new world.

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One, you're doing something that you should follow a procedure to, and it's a very difficult thing,

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you're sloppy, you get it wrong. How should you be treated? You should probably be fired.

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On the other hand, you're doing something new, no one's ever done before,

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you get it completely wrong. How should you be treated?

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Well, free pizzas! You should be treated better than the people who succeed.

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It's called smart failure. Why? Because you can't put it on your C.V.

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So what I want to leave you, then, is with the explanation

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of why I actually traveled 60,000 miles from my desk.

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When I realized the power of this new world,

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I quit my safe teaching job, and set up a virtual business school,

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the first in the world, in order to teach people how to make this happen,

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and I used some of my learnings about some of the rules which I'd learned on myself.

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If you're interested, worldaftermidnight.com, you'll find out more,

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but I've applied them to myself for over a decade,

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and I'm still here, and I still have my house, and the most important thing is,

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I hope I've done enough to inject a little green ink into your lives,

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so that when you go away and you're making your next

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absolutely sensible and rational decision, you'll take some time to think,

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"Hmm, I wonder whether this also makes sense

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in our new world after midnight." Thank you very much.

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(Applause)

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Thank you, thank you. (Applause)