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Hello, everyone. Welcome to the 5 Minutes Podcast. It's so strange, right? One more year. This is the last episode of 2022, and I have done this on the last episode since 2007. So 15 years trying on my last podcast of the year, trying to make sense of what happened in the year and what the future looks like. And, you know, time runs fast. And what I can say to you is that this year was, in some ways, a different year. And why I'm saying this because I'm sure that all of you will say, of course, it's different. Every year is a different year, of course, but I don't see it as an ultra-positive year. So we had COVID last year and the year before, and COVID just dominated our minds and our hearts and everything in our life. But this year was different. We didn't have COVID in the main stage like it was last year and the year before. It seems that we are something like a hangover from COVID and all the impact of COVID. And we are, you know, living on the wave, you know, and the disaster that COVID brought to us in the economy, in the geopolitics of all the recession and everything, most of them, we are paying the price of the decisions we made two years ago. And I have three things that I truly want to share with you that I want to say about this year. The first one is unpredictability. This was a year that was very hard for you to predict.
Clearly, in February, we started a war inside Europe. It's something, trust me, I live in Europe. It's something that nobody thought one year ago, thought clearly, okay, there will be a war. I'm saying a big war. And today, we have the war in Ukraine and there is no hope that this war will come to an end soon, at least based on my knowledge and the media and the public information I have. There is no way. The second is climate change; we spoke a lot about, oh, we need to take care of climate change. Otherwise, our children and our grandchildren will suffer the consequences of climate change. What changed is that everything they said was right. There is only one thing that is wrong. It's not for our children and our grandchildren. We are suffering the climate change now, this year, next year, and the year after. It's not something for our children. It's something that we are suffering from. You know, massive heat, floods everywhere at crazy rains. I live in Portugal. You saw what happened last week. So it's all the impact that we thought would happen 50 years from now, and it's happening today. So I don't even think about what could happen ten years from now in terms of climate change. These are just two examples. And the third example I want to connect these with, my second point, is technology. It's technology. Just to start, recently, the US released a breakthrough news in the scientific community about nuclear fusion. I know it's a very complex process, but I want just to summarize it to all of us in a simple way.
This is one of the most relevant breakthroughs in terms of energy that we have ever seen. Just to give you an idea, if this becomes, I would say, commercially viable, financially viable, it will shape completely how we get energy. There is no need for fossil fuels anymore. There is no need for a power grid anymore. It's just completely different. And this energy, I know that many people think, but this is nuclear energy. Yes. Yes, it's nuclear energy because it talks about the nucleus, but there is no nuclear waste. It's clean energy and going connecting to number one, They were expecting to have this kind of breakthrough discovery decades from now, and they just anticipated it this year. So this is how unstable and unpredictable things are. Maybe in ten years from now, we'll have a power generator the size of half a shoe box that will give power to your house for 100 years, 500 years, or 1000 years, depending on the efficiency. So imagine this. Imagine how this changed completely, completely everything. We may think about energy. On the top of that, the evolution of AI. We saw the chart GDP from Openai. Recently, you know, mimicking humans in generating A.I.. We're talking about the use of technology everywhere in technology that was, I would say, a supporting area in most of the organizations. It was brought to the center stage digital transformation, banks, banks. Every single organization is now embedded in the technology.
And we as project managers, we really must to get into that because otherwise it would be just impossible. Because even for project management, technology is improving dramatically the way we do business. On the third one is that, you know, the word stability only exists in a dictionary. There is no such a thing. And this is the problem because we love stability, but stability just does not exist anymore. And why I'm saying this because imagine one year ago what would be the nicest job on earth, You know, for someone that is young, a company admired, it's Facebook or Metta, it's Amazon, it's Microsoft, this kind of, you know, dream company. My wife worked for Microsoft for many, many years. These are the dream companies. And they led some of the most relevant layoffs of this year, You know, and then we start saying, okay, we stable now if even this company, because one thing it's one incumbent company that is failing on their business model. And so they decide to dismiss people and they decide because they need to do that, otherwise they will collapse. But when we see this coming from companies like Meta, like Microsoft, like Amazon, then we say, Wow, oops, something is happening. When we saw this roller coaster of Netflix this year coming from losing 2 million, winning 2.4 million, you know, I wrote an article for a London School of Economics Business Review talking exactly about that. And on that paper, I shared what I think is critical for us moving forward.
And what is this? It's about our human abilities. The first one is the emotional ability. We need to be prepared because we are not prepared for that. We are not emotionally prepared for this insane roller coaster that we are facing now. And trust me, 50 years ago the society had its challenges, but it was a much lower roller coaster with much less turns, with much less loops. Now it's just unpredictable. Everything can happen and everything can happen tomorrow. And this challenge, our emotional ability, our ability to understand what is reality, our ability to understand what is success, how success looks like, and how we can cope with all this pressure of this uncertainty that is against the nature of who we are. If we go back, you know, we harvest, we have trees, we have plants, we have our cattle. Why? Because we want predictability. We want some sort of stability. But today it's very, very hard to get that. So we need to have emotional ability. And this is the second advice. It's how do we manage fear? And this is an emotional ability because fear is natural. Fear is part of being human. And I need to tell you, even knowing that, you know, I made some good progress in my career, in my life, I have fear and a lot of fear. You know, am I going to the right direction? Should I change what is going on? What should I do? So it's natural. So you need to understand and be able to cope with your own, I would say, ghosts around you.
And last but not least in the world, I want to wrap up this year and I said this so many times in all my keynotes. Every time I was invited to speak, I said this The biggest competence you and I, all of us, need to develop is adaptability. It's our capacity to adapt to different circumstances. If the world shifts this way, we can adapt. If the world goes to that way, we can adapt. And this is the biggest asset I think you should focus on next year and how you can improve your adaptability to operate in this completely chaotic, unpredictable, unstable scenario that is coming. And it's here. Look, I don't have any forecast for these. Would change. I think it will probably change to become more unpredictable and more unstable. So this is why adaptability for all of us becomes really a key target for us in the future. So I hope you enjoy this podcast. Thank you very much for following me. So we are reaching almost 12 million views on the podcast episodes. It's an exercise of persistence from my side to record all of this and also from your side to listen. So thank you very much for being together this year and I wish you and your loved ones a wonderful 2023 with all positivity, all energy for you to really do wonderful things, not only for you and your loved ones, but also for our society. Happy New Year and all the best to all of you.
