The day before the race, Fangio had seen a photograph of a similar accident in 1936. As he approached Tabac, he noticed something different about the crowd – an unusual color. Fangio realized that, instead of seeing their faces, he was seeing the backs of their heads. He was leading the race, but they were not watching him. Something further down the road had to be attracting their attention. That made him recall the photograph.

Like Fangio, leaders must have their eyes on the future and scan the world for signals of change. Intelligence about the future is a key resource for building robust strategic trajectories for companies. We live in a world that increasingly requires what psychologist Howard Gardner calls searchlight intelligence. That is, the ability to connect the dots between people and ideas, where others see no possible connection. An informed perspective is more important than ever in order to anticipate what comes next and succeed in actualizing emerging futures.

“The best way to predict the future is to create it,” Peter Drucker advised. But how can business leaders make meaning of a playing field that is constantly changing shape? Is it possible to create the future without having an updated navigation system to live, learn and lead in a digital age?

To find their way in societal shifts, leaders cannot rely on old maps to guide them. Reinvention and relevance in the 21^st century instead draws on our ability to adjust our way of thinking, learning, doing and being. In 1946, Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares co-authored On Exactitude in Science. This is a story of an empire where cartographers draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the whole territory, eventually leading to the downfall of the empire. It highlights how people confuse perception with reality.

Our fixation on managing complexity often has unintentional consequences. Rather than clinging on to habitual scientific-management thinking, leaders must get comfortable with living in a state of continually becoming. This is a perpetual Beta mode, where balance and progression is created through motion. Simone de Beauvoir touched on this in her book, The Ethics of Ambiguity, when she wrote: “Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.”

The best leaders are the best learners

Leaders that stay on top of society’s changes do so by being receptive and able to learn. In a time where the half-life of any skill is about five years leaders bear a responsibility to renew their perspective in order to secure the relevance of their organizations. It is rarely recognized, but the core activity in any change or transformation process, personal or organizational, is learning.

As we attempt to transition into a networked creative economy, we need leaders who promote learning and who master fast, relevant and autonomous learning themselves. There is no other way to address the wicked problems facing us. If work is learning and learning is the work, then leadership should be all about enabling learning. In a recent Deloitte study, Global Human Capital Trends 2015, 85 percent of the respondents cited learning as being either important or very important. Yet, more companies than ever report they are unprepared to address this challenge.

John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davidson have described the shift toward a massive transformation from institutions designed for scalable efficiency to institutions designed for scalable learning. The key is to find ways to connect and participate in knowledge flows that challenge our thinking and allow us to discover new ways of connecting, collaborating and getting work done faster, smarter and better.

Personal Knowledge Mastery

Sustainable competitive advantage depends on having people that know how to build relationships, seek information, make sense of observations and share ideas through an intelligent use of new technologies. Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) is a lifelong learning strategy that can help people do just that. It is a method for individuals to take control of their professional development through a continuous process of seeking, sensing-making and sharing.

Seek is about finding things out and keeping up to date. In a world overflowing with information, we need smart filters to sort out the valuable information. It requires that we regularly evaluate and adjust the information sources that we base our thinking and decision making on. What matters today is being connected to a wise network of trusted individuals who can help us filter useful information, expose blind spots and open our eyes.

Sense is how we personalize information and use it. Sensing includes reflection and putting into practice what we learn. It is a process based on critical thinking where we weave together our thoughts, experiences, impressions and feelings to make meaning of them. By writing a blog post, a tweet or noting ideas down, we contextualize and reinforce our learning.

Share includes exchanging resources, ideas and experiences with our networks as well as collaborating with our colleagues. Sharing is a contributing process where we pass our knowledge forward, work alongside others, go through iterations and collectively learn from important insights and reflections. In social networks the sharing part is where we build respect and trust by being relevant.

There is a wide range of digital tools out there for each of the PKM activities that can be fitted into a busy schedule and help people become self-directed, autonomous learners. Which tools to use depends largely on the context and personal preferences. Tools are important, but mastery in a digital age is only achieved if you know how to establish trust, respect and relevance in human networks.

By working strategically with PKM, everyone in an organization can become part of a sensing organism, listening at different frequencies, scanning the horizon, recognizing patterns and making better decisions on an informed basis. Just as Juan Manuel Fangio did it in the 1950 Monaco Grand Prix.

About the authors:

Kenneth Mikkelsen is a leadership advisor, learning designer, speaker and writer. He is Co-founder of FutureShifts and currently writing a book, The Neo-Generalist, about the way generalists shape our world with Richard Martin. Follow him on Twitter @LeadershipABC.

Harold Jarche is an international consultant and speaker, helping people and businesses adapt to the network era. Harold provides pragmatic guidance on connected leadership, social learning, personal knowledge mastery, and workplace collaboration. Follow him on Twitter @hjarche.

The major transformational shifts that we face in terms of a growing world population, changing demographics in developed/developing countries, globalization, growing inequality, digitalization, The Internet of Things, 3D-printing, the rise of machines and automation of jobs, big data, radical transparency and the move from profiteering to purpose driven organizations based on shared values, are merely ongoing technological, environmental and social processes. However, when it comes to changing our perception of normal and understanding of the world, the effect cannot be underestimated.

Shifting vantage point

We find ourselves at a stage between The Industrial Age and The Network Age, which is hardly breaking news to anyone; but recent years have accelerated the interconnected shifts. So why is it that we as human beings continue to pursue strategies that we know are wrong? Why is it that we fail to change our course?

Charles Dickens offers some insight into that question. In 1859, he wrote A Tale of Two Cities to describe a period of turmoil in London and Paris.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.”

These words illustrate a crumbling elitist hierarchy. Louis XVI and other leaders at the time chose to ignore the many signs of widespread discontent around them and refused to see that fundamental change was on its way. The result was one of the most significant shifts in history: The French Revolution. It is worth remembering that Dickens wrote his book 70 years after social and political upheaval in France began. This illustrates that we often struggle to see progression in the moment because we lack the benefit of hindsight as major shifts unfold in society.

According to historian Thomas Kuhn, the change of a system is ultimately caused by the accumulation of anomalies – observations that cannot be explained by the prevailing paradigm of beliefs and mindsets. As anomalies increase in number and severity, the need for an alternative worldview becomes clearer, and eventually a new paradigm is developed that can solve more problems than the old one.

The closest comparison to the present change would be the Renaissance and Enlightenment collectively viewed as a period of transition from The Middle Ages and all that this entailed in terms of challenging existing knowledge, sciences and mankind’s self-perception manifested in its beliefs and values. It was an ‘in-between’ time with many regarding the rise of individualism, the new economic reality of states and the decline of feudal power as a paradigm shift.

Today, we find ourselves in similar ‘in-between’ times – a liminal state – between two major patterns of socioeconomic reality. The term liminality describes a state of transformation with huge implications for culture, community, identity and values. It is a stage of ambiguity and disorientation that precedes a breakthrough to a new way of thinking. During liminal periods, social hierarchies are often reconfigured, continuity of traditional habits becomes uncertain, and future outcomes – once taken for granted – are questioned. The dissolution of order during liminality creates a fluid situation that eventually enables new ways of thinking, learning, doing and being to become established.

A state of being

When life is changing and constantly in motion there is less stability to hold onto. When our worldview and what we hold to be true is challenged, we experience a sense of personal disorientation similar to a culture shock, the effect of unfamiliar life and radically different social environments, now, however, in an ongoing perpetual cycle of changing realities. We are under such constant bombardment that no illusion allows our mind to rest; instead, we are in a constant state of raised awareness. In Buddhism the term Dukkha describes that state of being. Dukkha is the pain you experience when you cannot figure out how to let go of what is no more. It is usually translated into English as “suffering” but it also means temporary, limited and imperfect.

Exercising good leadership requires human knowledge. Perhaps most importantly, it requires that you know yourself. Soren Kierkegaard described how important self-insight is in order to rise to the occasion as a human being. He emphasized that we must look inward in order to see outward, change obsolete strategies and make better decisions. This is a conscious process that requires contemplation, peace and a more focused attention than what we are seeing today, when we often find ourselves in a state of high intensity, which consumes the lives of many leaders.

The choice is yours

In the film The Matrix, the main character, Neo, is presented with a choice by a mysterious character called Morpheus. Morpheus offers Neo two pills – a red pill and a blue pill.

The red pill will answer the question: ‘What is the Matrix?’ The blue pill will allow for Neo’s life simply to carry on as before.

The question of which pill to take illustrates the personal aspect of the decision – whether to live on in ignorance or whether to lead what Aristotle referred to as ‘the examined life.’ The question then is not about pills, but rather about what they represent.

The blue pill represents the status quo. It will leave us as we are, in a life full of habits and things we believe we know. The red pill on the other hand represents an unknown quantity and the pursuit of trying to understand the world we live in. It symbolizes risk, doubt, questioning and, ultimately, enlightenment.

The scene in The Matrix illustrates the difficult choice that business leaders face nowadays. Do you acknowledge the new reality and adapt to it? Or do you choose to carry on with the same mindset, skills, behavior and organizational culture, knowing that it will potentially damage your future existence?

Enlightenment never comes cheap. The same applies to the transition from The Industrial Age to The Network Age. But one thing is certain: We live in a time that offers great opportunities for reinvention.

The question is whether you take the blue pill or the red pill?

Kenneth Mikkelsen is a leadership advisor, speaker and writer. He is Director of FutureShifts and currently writing a book about the need for expert generalists in modern organizations with Richard Martin. Follow him on Twitter @LeadershipABC.

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A blog following the Global Peter Drucker Forum 2014. An opportunity to share experiences and learn from one another in the context of The Great Transformation.