It could just be a ripple, before the next Tsunami | Jeremy Ghez | TEDxHECParis
The speaker argues that humanity must seek the "big picture"—a holistic view of complex challenges—because we are naturally dogmatic, short-sighted, lack imagination, and live in echo chambers. To achieve this, we must consciously embrace uncomfortable change, explore unfamiliar avenues, and actively engage with diverse perspectives, viewing the current turbulent business environment as a precursor to a necessary global rebirth.
## Theses & Positions
- The current business environment is *apoi* (ripe for disruption).
- Humanity needs to seek "the big picture"—the comprehensive view that shows the underlying patterns and potential challenges, which is often obscured by daily focus.
- Dogmatism, reliance on simple slogans, and living in informational bubbles prevent people from seeing the complex reality.
- The common equation, "yesterday equals today equals tomorrow," is dangerously wrong; change can be non-linear and abrupt.
- True foresight requires broadening horizons, exploring areas of no light, and challenging assumptions, analogous to looking for keys where the lighting is better.
- The coming era demands thinking beyond immediate threats to anticipate large-scale, non-linear global shifts, which might lead to a "renaissance or the rebirth of the world."
## Concepts & Definitions
- **Apoi:** A state described as being "ripe for disruption."
- **Big picture:** The comprehensive view of reality that provides context for understanding daily struggles and potential major challenges.
- **Non-linear change:** Change that is abrupt and unexpected, contrasting with gradual, expected shifts.
- **Exponential change:** Growth or change that accelerates rapidly, which is what the world economy must be prepared for.
- **Red team analysis:** A strategic exercise requiring one to anticipate how a competitor, or "the person you are not," would react to current actions.
## Mechanisms & Processes
- **Surfing the wave:** Instead of passively suffering a crisis (the tsunami), one must acknowledge the threat and actively redesign business approaches to ride through it.
- **Breaking bubbles:** To see the big picture, one must engage with people and ideas from outside one's established social or professional groups, an exercise likened to "climb[ing] in other people's skin."
- **Cognitive practice for big picture:** Requires deliberate effort to move away from immediate concerns toward holistic understanding, paralleled to training for a marathon when physically unfit.
- **Hypothesis Generation:** Observing generational aspirations (Gen Z/Millennials vs. Boomers) to predict future labor market friction and necessary corporate adaptation.
## Timeline & Sequence
- **Pre-Pandemic (Sept 2019):** Speaker felt the intuition that the business environment was *apoi*.
- **Pre-Pandemic to Present:** Experience of lockdowns, misery, and the subsequent global disorder period.
- **Historical Analogy:** Drawing parallels between current turbulence and periods that preceded "renaissance or the rebirth of the world."
- **Labor Market Transition:** Observing the cohort of Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z all on the market concurrently, creating chaos.
## Named Entities
- **Generation Z, Millennials, Boomers, Generation X:** Key generational cohorts currently on the labor market.
## Numbers & Data
- **280 characters:** The limitation of slogans and social media posts.
- **500:** Number of students the speaker meets in a typical week.
- **150 years:** Period over which human CO₂ has been added to the atmosphere.
## Examples & Cases
- **The Painting (Tsunami):** Used as a central illustration to argue that one must choose to either ignore a coming, inevitable, massive disruptive wave or prepare to adapt to it.
- **The Joke:** The anecdote of a man looking for keys under a lamppost, and the policeman asking if he lost them *there*, versus where the man insists they are, is used to illustrate the importance of looking in unexpected places ("where there is no light").
- **Generational Friction:** The observation that younger workers prioritize core values (like climate concern) over material stability (like buying homes), contradicting older generation assumptions.
## Trade-offs & Alternatives
- **Passive Suffering vs. Active Adaptation:** The choice between being swept away by a crisis or designing new approaches to "surf on this coming wave."
- **Linear vs. Exponential Thinking:** Choosing the comfortable, predictable progression ("yesterday equals today equals tomorrow") over the reality of abrupt, non-linear tipping points.
- **Comfort vs. Insight:** The trade-off between the safety of one's immediate tribal understanding and the pain/difficulty of confronting a massive, disconfirming "big picture."
## Counterarguments & Caveats
- The initial prediction that a tsunami was coming in September 2019 was based on intuition, not predictive certainty.
- The speaker acknowledges that "I'm not a great critic of art," but feels the painting holds the most telling illustration of the time.
- The process of achieving the big picture is described as "by no means a comfortable exercise" and "can be painful."
## Conclusions & Recommendations
- People should actively seek the "big picture" because it is the most helpful view but the hardest to see.
- The time demands abandoning comfort zones: "you should start looking for your keys or the key to the problem where you've never looked before where there is no light."
- Practitioners should conduct a "red team analysis" of their strategies to anticipate adversarial responses.
- The business environment is *apoi* and demands meaningful action to avoid being overwhelmed by the next global disruption.
## Implications & Consequences
- Failing to adopt a big-picture mindset will lead to being overwhelmed by non-linear, unanticipated change.
- Successful adaptation will position individuals and organizations to benefit from what the speaker foresees as a potential global "renaissance or the rebirth of the world."
## Verbatim Moments
- *"the tsunami is coming... you may wish it away hope for some biblical miracle and see it split into and ignore you or you may acknowledge it and start changing your ways start designing new approaches to business into life in order to surf on this coming wave rather than suffer from it passively"*
- *"The probability that we could face severe challenges to our very way of life was basically not zero."*
- *"it gives us the big picture the one we fail to see in our daily lives"*
- *"we live in bubbles that are so hard to burst"*
- *"if we belong to the same tribe we'll be just fine if we don't well we may never meet"*
- *"The equation yesterday equals today equals tomorrow is the most comforting equation humanity continuously believes in but there's a problem it's plain wrong"*
- *"it's about the possibility for non-linear change to happen abruptly"*
- *"when was the last time you looked for solutions where there is no light"*
- *"we are doomed to never understand our teenage children"*
- *"This is precisely the time ladies and gentlemen when you should look beyond what seems to be the immediate threat and what could turn out to be just a ripple before the real tsunami"*