I've had time to begin digesting the amazing week at TEDGlobal 2011 in Edinburgh. I'm in London this week, enjoying the energy of the city despite continued rainy weather in the UK, and I wish that I could say I've got some really pithy take-aways from the event to share here. TEDGlobal, I'm discovering, takes time to understand. Thursday, Day 3 was particularly overwhelming in terms of both personal, human content and larger making-a-difference-in-our-world stories (I cried at least four times during the sessions.) At the Grand Party that night, I was discussing my emotional exhaustion with an executive recruiter from Shanghai who called it a "TED-ache" -- a TED-ism that's probably been around for awhile, but you get the idea.
What I can do is provide my TEDGlobal 2011 Top Five Ideas: people, trends, ideas, that are resonating with me now. Here's the first:
TED Long Beach 2011 Prize winner JR is a visual and media artist who's Inside Out Project is being documented as a Web series playing on YouTube. The first episode launched July 14th and you MUST see it. This first episode follows a group of artists in Tunisia who respond to the ouster of their dictator by replacing his official portraits all over the country with photos of the average Tunisian. The response from the Tunisian people will blow your mind. Watching this up-close and personal paradigm shift makes it clear that the Internet and social media, combined with brave young people who gain strength by linking together, are changing our world at light-speed -- and we get to be the generation that watches it happen.
So, how do we manage such cultural shifts that are fundamentally transforming? It's easy to say that we need to change the way we do business, but that misses the key dynamic here. Communicating has already changed, are constituents have already changed, our organizations are vastly altered from anything we can hope to manage change in. We're already behind if we think we can prescribe a methodology or process for evolving. Evolution is now a blur.
Which is why TEDGlobal must be digested over time. The profound impact becomes a hyper-blur that exhilarates and exhausts, like a rock concert on acid. More Top Five ideas soon.
Comments