Now is tomorrow

A mighty CEO whom I regard very highly mentioned that the rocket ship had taken off and that there was no coming back. He was referring to the speed at which technology is changing and said that what will happen in the next fifteen years is going to make what happened in the last twenty look like it never happened.

As I swivelled my chair, scanning the faces of some of the most intelligent people I know, I saw that very intelligence attack his words like a time-lapsed bacterial hedge covering its victim with its tendrils.

Their eyes widened as the fear of obsoleteness embraced their brains and the scenario in which they were no longer innovative and therefore irrelevant cast itself like a prophetic augmented reality across their vision.

I've got to say I nearly got sucked into that moment of corporate "fear pressure" but then my video team who were filming someone else in the building on a corporate journalism project walked past the big glass window and pulled faces at me, breaking the spell with Hollywood scripted timing.

Ah, the video team. My scrambled egg was now cold.

That CEO I mentioned earlier recently shared an astounding piece of old new media content with me. In it are hundreds of notions written years before Y2K was ever going to destroy the earth and MySpace was my printed article in the school's annual Facebook.

One of those notions suggests this:

"Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice."

This brings me to my point. The solutions that will become the innovations of tomorrow (the solutions fuelling the rocket ship of obsoleteness) are ultimately timeless and are born through our ears, eyes and hearts being connected to today. By being in the now we get to listen to the human sounds the human beings around us are making and in turn can come up with human focused answers to these problems. When these answers, whether stunning content based campaigns or truly engaging platforms take off it is because they make human sounds to meet human needs in the present and as they grow into the future they become innovations.

Now is tomorrow. Be present and you'll innovate. All you have to do is listen carefully to the sounds being made around you and be sure to pulse your own authentic sounds back out there.