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We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.

A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think

Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.

Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.

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Transcript

Robert Kaplan: If you’re not talking to your people and you’re not seeking feedback from your people who are at the point of attack, or you’re not out with your clients or your customers sufficiently, you can find that you’re behind the curve and you’re a little bit out of touch, and you’ll catch these things too late. A leader needs to be out there, needs to be out there with clients, needs to be out there with his or her people and needs to be asking questions and seeking advice, but the other thing a leader needs to do is be stepping back every 6 or 12 months, or however often is necessary, and asking: what are the changes out there and, if we had to start with a clean sheet of paper, is this still the way we’d do it? Most of us in leadership positions often are too emotionally close to the way we currently do things to objectively do all of that exercise by ourselves.

Take two or three or four of your up and coming outstanding professionals and give them this assignment--it may be with the business unit or a department or maybe with the whole company, if necessary, and basically say: if we had to start from scratch, are these the markets we would serve, are these the people we would have here, are we organized in the right way, is this the way we would pay people, how should the leadership style of the leader change? Invariably, they will come back with fabulous advice. You as the leader may not agree with all of it, but you will get some great advice.

All of us have blind spots. I don’t care how good you are, how ever present you are, how insightful you are, there are just certain things that are going on in the world that you miss. A lot of change is almost imperceptible, and you can’t be everywhere, and so it pays to go back and ask this question and look at your business or your organization with a clean sheet of paper.

Directed / Produced by
Jonathan Fowler & Elizabeth Rodd