Good morning, and welcome to the future. Regular readers will perhaps have noticed a theme in Leadership Notes in recent months. It is increasingly evident to me that technology is dramatically changing the landscape in which we live and work. That was brought home again this week with Apple’s announcement about the new iPhone 6, Apple Pay and the iWatch. http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/apple-watch-iphone-6-models-apple-pay-unveiled-1.2759617 For those of you who are in credit unions and other financial institutions, Apple Pay is huge! They have between 500 and 800 million credit cards sitting in iTunes. Those apps you see people using at Starbucks are now so 2013; imagine paying for pretty much everything with a tap; do I need a cash machine, let alone a branch network?! And the iWatch could change much of how we work and play as well; stay tuned I say for iWatch 2, 3, 4 and 5 in the next few years.
And so I return to my overarching question this year, what does leadership look like in the midst of an increasingly networked workforce? Obviously we are still humans, but we are still evolving as a species. There is a really great piece in this month’s National Geographic  http://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/evolution-of-diet/ called the “Evolution of Diet” where geneticist Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania says, “are humans still evolving? Yes!” Now, I don’t mean of course that we’re going to see dramatic differences in the next couple of years; generally evolutionary change takes thousands of years and generations. Our jaws for example have slowly gotten smaller in the last 10,000 years since we first started agriculture. But the speed of change in our cultural environment will have an impact on how we learn, how we communicate (remember actually talking on a phone instead of texting?!), and how we work together. The image I learned about a couple of years ago uses a lake and a river as a metaphor. Those of us who are older learned by storing as much information as possible in our memories; so that whether we were memorising which plants were good and which were poisonous, or learning to memorize pages of text so we could recite it accurately, or how to bake bread or build an internal combustion engine, we used our minds like a lake of data into which we swam around to operate in the environment. Those of us who are born much later, and looking at the kids born from now on, much of the information they will need will be stored somewhere else, and accessed when they need it through some kind of device, like dipping into a river full of data when we need it.  Here’s Trinity in The Matrix, learning to fly a helicopter; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AOpomu9V6Q for example. We may become experts in how to find out, not experts in a particular thing.
One implication I see will be the increase use of the phrase, “I don’t know, and I’ll find out.” Managers and leaders will be less expected to be the fountains of technical knowledge we have been in the past. Rather I think our greatest asset will be our ability to leverage our wisdom. Wisdom is not created by the number of birthdays, but by the number of experiences. So, I may not know how to fly a helicopter, I can learn that. However, how to use one most effectively (as opposed to simply escaping ‘bad guys’), how to fly one in difficult circumstances, or even when to fly an airplane instead is a matter of wisdom and experience. It will be that wisdom that will mark us as leaders in the coming years.
So may this week be a week of experiences that build wisdom.