“Be a threat to the Future before the Future threatens you”.
This is the tag line of Rich Mulholland’s new book “Relentless Relevance”. It’s a book that focuses on staying relevant in a time where change is almost too fast to track.
As I get older – I’m facing the BIG FIVE O this year – I find myself thinking more and more about whether I still have a voice, and if I do, how long will it be a voice people want to listen to. For a long time I thought that I feared getting old, but after listening to Rich speak at his book launch this last week, I’m pretty certain that it is not aging that I fear, but the irrelevance that inevitably comes with getting older.
Thinking that this must be some deep psychological syndrome, I googled “fear of becoming irrelevant” and I had to laugh at the search results because they proved the point. The official name for my deepest fear is FOBO (Fear of Becoming Obsolete) or FOBI (Fear of Being Irrelevant). In the “old” days, there would have been some kind of “-osis” or “-phobia” attached to another word rooted in Ancient Greek. In today’s world, an acronym will do. Talk about feeling irrelevant!
I’ve heard it often: “If you want something to work on your [INSERT DEVICE HERE], just ask a teenager.” It’s usually said as a joke, but you know what they say about jest.
Am I really on the other side of the relevance bell curve?
And thus it was with some sense of cautious optimism that I started reading Rich’s book. On page two, he put in my place. He says that if you find yourself asking the question “Am I still relevant”, the answer is probably “no”. The correct question, he postulates, is “What can I do to stay relevant?”
The implication is unmistakable – there must be things even us quasi-dinosaurs can do to stay relevant.
According to Rich, the core values of relevance are curiosity, mischief and optimism. It sounds almost child-like. And to be honest, it sounds wonderful. Imagine going through your day asking questions about everything, wondering what would happen if you pushed THAT button, and hoping that confetti would fall out of the sky when you did push it. The reality is that pushing THAT button rarely results in confetti rain, but imagine having the chutzpah to push it anyway?
And “chutzpah”, by the way, is a Yiddish word that means “unbelievable gall, insolence or audacity”.
How would your world change – how would your relevance change – if you had the unbelievable gall, insolence or audacity to do something differently to the way it’s always been done? I postulate that at the very least you’d have a story to tell, but maybe – just maybe – you’d do something that makes you (and/or your business) a threat to the future.
I have said it before: lawyers are NOT innovators. The whole system is based on precedent – how things have been done before. There is some comfort to this approach in that it creates certainty and predictability to legal issues, but it does not take into account that the society it is trying to serve is moving on. The best judgments I’ve read make a point of recognising that things have changed, and so must the law.
And so must the lawyers.
I don’t know what this looks like, exactly, but I do know this: in order for the system I work in (and still believe in) to stay relevant, so must I. And I’ll be asking myself what I (and what NLA) can do to stay relevant. Some answers will be wrong, but some may very well be correct, and I have a feeling that when they are right, the results will be earth shattering (in a good way!) for us and for our clients.
Watch this space.
