DISRUPTION KEYNOTE SPEAKER – HOW TO BOOST CREATIVITY, INNOVATION

As a disruption keynote speaker and futurist who trains thousands of executives every year on how to lead through change and disruption, I’m often asked three simple, but challenging questions:

• How can a working professional see what’s coming next, let alone successfully plan for it?
• What does it take to future-proof your business or career, even if you’re not a disruption keynote speaker or someone with futurist training?
• Which strategies can you adopt if you want to put yourself on the fast-track to success, even if an age of growing uncertainty?

Happily, as I note in recent book FAST >> FORWARD, learning to set yourself up for success – even in challenging years like this one – doesn’t have to be as much of a headache as you might suspect when you purposefully take time out now to pursue the following nine activities.

The operating thesis – while ongoing disruption and volatility will continue to keep working professionals on their toes throughout the next 12 months, as many disruption keynote speakers will tell you, this is a year to focus on growth, reinvention, and bouncing back. Noting this, five skills that would come in handy are:

Creativity and Ingenuity – Becoming a practical innovator and learning how to mix and match ideas, concepts, tools, technologies, and solutions in clever and inventive ways. (In other words, how can you make evolutionary vs. revolutionary changes that set you up for success.) Even simple changes in how you package and present yourself and the solutions you offer can have a profound effect on helping you and your company differentiate and stand out and establish value in audiences’ eyes.

Strategic Planning – No one can predict the future – but we all can plan ahead for it. If this is a year of constant disruption, that means having to more deeply think through the different directions that markets, career paths, industry trends, etc. can take in coming months – and plot ahead to have plans B, C, D-Z, etc. in place if Plan A falls through. In other words: The more we prep ourselves to greet an unexpected future, the better equipped we’ll be to roll with it if it takes a sudden, unforeseen turn.

FOR MORE, SEE PART 2 OF THIS ARTICLE