Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change

So, I've written this book "Flux," and I will say that losing my parents unexpectedly and tragically, in many ways marked my entry into flux, into this world in which like: what do you do when you don't know what to do?

And it happened at an age... 20 is really interesting, I was at university so I was old enough to be living independently, I could take care of myself in that way, but I was too young to know how the world really worked and my place in it, if you will.

So, it had profound effects and I would say, I'd put these on two different levels. There were lots of practical changes – all of a sudden, I was self-sufficient, or had to learn how to become, really, responsible for myself on every metric, and that really forces you to grow up fast. It also taught me to get to know myself much better.

The second layer, though, is more existential, I would say. And now, many years later, I often look back and realize that, in effect, I had the equivalent of kind of like a mid-life crisis when I was 20. Now, I wasn't in crisis, but the questions that I was asking about myself and the world and my future, and how things fit together, and importantly, what really matters, they are the same kinds of questions that I find people ask who are experiencing mid-life crises much later.

And, in particular, that sense that I was very aware of my own mortality. And I kept asking myself, if I were to die tomorrow – because I now realize how easily that could happen – if I were to die tomorrow what would the world need me to do today? And that put me on a very different kind of journey, I would say, both personally and professionally.

Rachel Salaman: Yes, and I mentioned in the introduction that you are a futurist. We don't often get to speak to futurists on Expert Interview. What is this? And why do you think you were picked for Forbes' 50 leading female futurists list?

April Rinne: It's a great question and I do love talking about the world of futurism! 10 years ago futurist as a job title was barely known – it existed, but it was always this kind of intrigue. And even today there are more futurists in the world and futurism as a discipline, as a study is more common, but still relatively rare.

So, as a futurist, what I'm trying to help companies, organizations, again governments, for-profit, non-profit – as you mentioned I work with all kinds – understand is, where is the future heading? And not in a kind of, "crystal ball, we're going to predict the future," but what could happen in the future, and how does that affect you and your organization, and your position and what you need to be thinking about today.

So it's a lot of "horizon casting," it's a lot of what we call scenario mapping, so mapping out different scenarios for what could happen and then starting to prepare for them. Not bulletproof, watertight solutions – because that’s never possible, because we don't know what's going to happen in the future – but to help organizations prepare and just be ready for the kinds of things that could happen, as well as some of the macro forces that may be outside your radar, [that] may not be in your sector or in your discipline, but absolutely are going to have an effect on what happens to your industry, to your organization moving forwards: the role of technology, the role of public health.

There are lots of examples we can point to even over the last year that you start going, "wow, the future could play out in lots of different ways." So, how I ended up on that list – a great question! I think it's partly a signal to the role of futurism and the importance that it plays moving forward. I think also, thus far, if you look at futurism's background and history it was almost entirely male: all men. And women are now playing a much more prominent role which is fantastic. And so that's a marked difference, which I'm really proud to be part of.

Rachel Salaman: "Flux" is your first book. What drew you to this topic for your first book?

April Rinne: So partly what drew me to this idea of flux and a world in constant change goes back to what I experienced young with my parents – again, personal experience with flux.

Secondly, the futurists, and how a futurist looks at a world in flux. And thirdly, just the global diversity and cultural aspect of how we can learn about flux together. All of those things really led me to write this book.

I will note that I would say, even though it was three years in the writing but three decades in the making, for much of those three decades I can't say I thought I was going to write a book, and then it just happened with a really strong force, and that was over the last several years.

Rachel Salaman: You lay out in the book eight "superpowers" for thriving in constant change, and the first of these is "run slower" – warning that if we're not careful we'll run, as you say, "straight past life." So, what do we gain from slowing down?

April Rinne: This is where I put my futurist's lens on, and... let me [give] just a little bit of context here. So, on the one hand, we know that change is relentless: there's more change every day, lots of change, etc. But it's not just change, though, it's also the pace of change.

And the pace of change has never been as fast as it is today, and yet it is likely to never again be this slow. So, if you just pause and let that sink in, it's kind of exciting and kind of terrifying.

Now, think about what society typically tells us to do when the pace of change increases, or when things go faster – we are supposed to run faster, we are supposed to keep up. And I'm all for striving and trying to move forward and trying to make progress and all of that, but if you map these two trends to one another... So, let's just say, today, from this day, every day, moving forward, we know that the pace of change will be faster, and society says, "Just keep running faster." What I've just told you and everyone listening is that, for the rest of your life, you're just going to need to run faster.

At best this is major burnout across the board, but at worst this is just more like none of us reaching our full potential. So, when we learn how to slow down – and when I say run slower, I do not mean do nothing, I do not mean stop: I mean run at a sustainable pace – so that you can actually see what's happening around you, you're running slow enough to notice what really matters. You're able to filter information better, you're able to make wiser decisions, you're able to show up more fully with greater presence, etc.

So, the benefits of doing this are everywhere. But I think it's important to see how so much of how, I think, many people – including myself for much of my life – behave, runs counter to what's actually in our best interest. And, what society tells us to do, often, is also not necessarily in our best interest.

Rachel Salaman: But if we do slow down, we may miss opportunities that other people get because they don't slow down. So, how do you convince people that that's OK?

April Rinne: I love this because my immediate reaction is, "Oh no, those people that are running and running at a fast pace, they are the ones who are missing out." Because think about the information flows that you try to deal with today, every day. Just the barrage of information, content, read this, do this; think about how your brain feels when that happens – it just gets overloaded, it just shuts down.

And when we're running fast just trying to get to the next thing and "de, de, de, de, de, de, de," we're not actually able to slow ourselves down to pay attention and take stock of those things, including those opportunities that matter most. So, I think running ever faster doesn't necessarily mean you're doing more: it means you're actually running by a lot of stuff that you might otherwise [not] miss.

Rachel Salaman: The next superpower for a flux mindset that you discuss in the book is "see what's invisible." What kind of thing do you mean here?

April Rinne: So, this superpower basically says that when life feels uncertain, or the future is blurry, focus not on what's straight in front of you – what often society tells you, "focus on what's right in front of you, what you can see" – but focus on what's invisible, what's on the periphery, what's beyond your horizon, oftentimes what you don't know.

So, what's invisible can take make different kinds of manifestations, if you will. I like to think about this as, for example, invisible value. Like we're taught to focus on only those things that have dollars and cents or euros, or whatever currency: if you can buy it, it has value. But what about things like trust and love and dignity and integrity – those things really matter but we can't put a price tag on them, so we often treat them as "invisible," the business context, in terms of... Yes, we try to foster them, but at the end of the day, what do we prioritize? We prioritize the money.

That is one example. But also, you find invisible opportunities – and I think when it comes to your career this sense of, what are those opportunities you could pursue if you actually had them on your radar? It's a great example of what's invisible.

Rachel Salaman: Do you have an example, of what can be gained with this superpower, from your own life that you could share?

April Rinne: From my own life, I often put this as, what was I blind to, what couldn't I see? A big one for me was actually my own anxiety.

For most of my life, I have been blinded by just how much anxiety I felt. And it was only very late – certainly in my professional life, but just my life in general – that I realized that the amount of anxiety that I was feeling was unhealthy, abnormal, and not helping me at all.

It was invisible to me though because I had normalized it. I had normalized that always feeling anxious was OK. And what's interesting is, to some degree, there's an amount of anxiety that's normal, that's natural, that even helps us do things, right? A lot of times we're driven to accomplish things because there's a kind of anxiety or tension. To some degree that can be helpful, but there's a point after which anxiety is toxic and unhealthy.

And what I realized is, I was completely blind to where that line needed to be drawn. And when I learned to see what's invisible and just how bad my anxiety was wracking me and not helping me live a full or meaningful or productive life, that was the wake-up call, and honestly it just made so much difference.

Rachel Salaman: And in the book, you do share your story about dealing with anxiety, and you wrap it into some tips about turning around worry. Could you share the main points with us now?

April Rinne: Yes sure, and I share this just as an offering because I have my own story and journey with anxiety and worry and fear, including around change. And what's interesting is, as I've peeled back the layers on the onion, I've just discovered how many people struggle with this, and often don't talk about it, and often just feel off but don't know why, and yet the more I can help uncover this the better.

One of the things that I have found works well for me, and others as well – when we think about anxiety and worry, where does our brain typically go? It typically goes to, "What's the worst thing that could happen?" And pretty quickly we're like, "Hmm, pretty bad." We kind of go into doomsday mode quickly when we're wracked with anxiety.

But there's a really interesting small, but subtle and important, shift that we could make. When change happens, rather than saying, "What's the worst thing that could happen?" Ask yourself, "What's the best thing that could happen as a result of this change?" And go wild with just how awesome this particular change could be. And what you'll find is, it actually could be pretty awesome. And I say this on the vast majority of changes, not all but so many that just that one flip of imagining what's the best thing that could happen takes us to a very different place, a very different ending.

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Rachel Salaman: If we could skip to your fourth superpower now which is "start with trust." In times of change unfortunately hoaxes and frauds do proliferate, and we've seen this in the pandemic with a rash of new scams. Now of course mistrusting everything is limiting, and no one would want to do that, but how can we avoid being tricked or let down if we always start with trust?

April Rinne: So, I'm looking at this in terms of how do we navigate change. Now, when I say start with trust, I do not mean blind trust, I do not mean naïve trust – I do not mean willy-nilly, just trust everybody, like "kumbaya." Not at all.

You have to do your homework. So, with scams and hoaxes, this isn't something that you trust on its surface. Any time I get an email, I want to make sure I know who it's coming from – to do otherwise would be blindly trusting or being naïve.

What I'm looking at though is when change hits and how do we navigate it. We navigate change together, being able to navigate change with others requires trusted relationships. But what we've done today is designed a system, or so many systems, I should say, from the basic assumption that the average individual cannot and should not be trusted. And in the process what we're doing is we're snipping the relationships – the human connections that actually bind us together and help us navigate change.

I would like to think of the bad apples in the bunch as the exceptions, not the rule. Yet we've completely designed our world towards the exceptions, and, in the process, we've snipped all of us off from one another, in terms of the trustworthy bonds that keep us together and that help humans thrive.

Rachel Salaman: So, have you never been burned by trusting someone, when in hindsight you should have been a bit more wary?

April Rinne: I have absolutely been burned by people in the past, and have been given lots of reason not to trust everybody. I think most, if not all people have been in those kinds of situations. But there's a difference between having one or a handful of bad experiences with others, and then allowing my brain or my life to go into the category of "everyone is untrustworthy."

So, at the end of the day, I come back to that question of, what's the kind of world I want to live in and, in future, I want to help create? And I want to help create a future that has more, not less, trust in it.

And the way that you do that is by resetting some of these assumptions and defaults, and designing from a place of trust rather than mistrust. But, again, protecting for the bad actors, protecting for those exceptions, but not designing as if they're the rule.

Rachel Salaman: Another of your superpowers is "know your enough" (and "your" here is spelled y-o-u-r), although you also mean "you are" enough. Could you explain this one for us, including the double meaning?

April Rinne: Yes, I love this, and this continues to be one of the most popular superpowers, so I'm glad we get to chat about it today. I have had so many people come to me and say, "There's a typo in your chapter. It's 'you are,' not 'your,'" And I'm like, "No, actually I got it right!"

But, "knowing your enough," includes knowing that you are enough. Now this chapter, this superpower, really gets at our obsession with more. That humans, we have been socialized, we've been taught, on so many levels, that we will only really matter to the world if we have more, more, more, more, more.

Now that is, I need to earn more income, I need to have more power, I need to have more love, more likes, more followers. More, just more. We're obsessed with it, and yet it's mostly making us miserable.

When we're after more, or fixated on more, we will actually never find enough. And that is enough being our point of satisfaction, our point of contentedness, our point of sustainability. Enough is not too much, not too little. It's a point of balance and harmony and contentedness. So when we're always searching for more, we will never find enough.

Yet if we know our enough, or if you know your enough, you will immediately begin to see abundance. So, I love this because when I talk to people, they're like, "Yes! I'm exhausted by this quest for more, particularly when it comes to, 'I will only be somebody, I will only matter to the world when I reach some kind of metric of more.'"

But it's always something on the horizon. There's not this sense of – and this is where the you are enough comes in – there's very little sense these days, in my experience, that you are enough right now, without ever doing anything more, you've actually always been enough, from the moment you were born you've been enough, and you are enough. Society does a really good job of stamping that understanding out of us and making us believe that, not only are we not enough today, but that we'll never be enough. And so in order to be enough we just need to keep acquiring or doing or being more.

And so, the challenge is we simply don't spend enough time talking about enough. And when we do, we start to reset what really matters and find happiness and contentedness much more quickly and much more easily than when we're constantly chasing more.

Rachel Salaman: I suppose a related question is that some people who could do more, don't – whether that's more for themselves or more for other people. They settle for what they're already doing, or what they've already got, regardless of possible improvements. So again, there's a balance to be found between enough, and positive ambition and growth.

April Rinne: Absolutely, and this does come up fairly frequently and I'm really excited to talk about it because when I say know you're enough, I am not saying settle for less. I am not saying don't strive – there is a big difference, and in fairness, and the chapter goes into some detail about this, you can look at know your enough from the perspective of having too much, which is excess or overwhelm or burden. Too much is more than enough, but also too little.

And too little is scarcity, too little is not reaching our full potential. And that can be both in terms of just access to opportunity, and I'm very aware of the systemic inequalities and injustices where a lot of people, we could say don't have enough, and the responsibility of those who do... I always like to ask, "What do you want? Do you want more for a few people or enough for everyone?" And so it's a resetting, helping everyone make sure that they've achieved their enough.

But what's interesting is, when you're able to find that point of enough, you are much more able also to help others. You have that bandwidth to help others earn or gain or come into their enough if perhaps there are ones who are struggling with not enough, or who are not as motivated or inclined to actually reach their full potential.

Rachel Salaman: In your book you advise people to create a "portfolio career," this is another flux superpower. Could you explain a bit more what you mean here?

April Rinne: By a portfolio career, what I'm looking at is how we think about our professional development, full stop.

A portfolio is your professional portfolio that you need to create. And you can create and curate it as an artist would – an artist has a portfolio with their best works in it. Or, an investor has a portfolio and, in their portfolio, they have lots of different investments. They do that to diversify what they're doing, build new skills, but also to mitigate risk.

And so when I say, "Have a portfolio career." It's a shift in how you think about what you're capable of doing, and what you want to do. So, every job, every skill, every role, whether it's been paid or unpaid, whether it's had a fancy title or no title, you name it, all of these things go into your portfolio. And then you get to mix and match what kind of skills you can use and combine and leverage into a particular job, into perhaps launching your own business, into all different kinds of things.

It's not about the hustling, the freelancing. Freelancing positions or being a freelancer, and the skills you use and develop as part of freelancing, are absolutely part of your portfolio, but even if you have one job for a very long time, that job also is part of your portfolio. At the same time, if you're a parent, the skills that you learn parenting, those are in your portfolio.

And what I love is that a portfolio includes a lot of skills, and a lot of capabilities, that traditional CVs and résumés leave out, yet are actually what make you the most qualified person for a particular role or uniquely positioned in your sector or in your organization. So, it's really empowering, at the end of the day.

Rachel Salaman: The last superpower you talk about in the book is "let go of the future." Could you explain this?

April Rinne: So, this is one of the hardest superpowers for a lot of people to get their head around because what does it sound like, "let go of the future"? I have people say to me, "You're a futurist, you can't tell me to let go of the future! Like what's that?" I want to be really clear. So, this superpower is first and foremost about our relationship to control and getting clear on what we can and cannot control.

I want to be crystal clear that when I say "let go of the future" I am not saying give up, I am not saying fail, I am not saying throw in the white towel, none of this. The way I have framed this is: in order to thrive in a world in constant flux, we need to be able to let go of the future, get out of our own way, in order to allow a better future to emerge.

And what this gets at is really our obsession with wanting to predict and command and control the future and know exactly what's going to happen. And the fact is, that's never been the case, but especially a world in flux – we're looking at more, not less change in the future. So this is the kind of thing we need to gear up for, the long term.

To some degree, we've never been able to control the future – we simply like to believe that we can. What we're really after is a kind of illusion of control, and a world in flux makes it really clear how little we actually control.

At the same time, when we believe that it really has to be one future that's going to play out and it needs to go this way because that way is in my favor, etc. – we are blinding ourselves to a whole bunch of other futures that could play out, that probably will play out or at least are more equally likely to play out than the one that you have in mind. And, as a result, we are leaving opportunities on the table, we're not seeing all of the amazing things that could happen as well.

So, when you realize that you cannot control everything that's going to happen – the only thing you can control is how you respond – and you cannot control the future that's going to play out, neither you can nor anyone can candidly, but you can control whether and how you contribute to a future you'd like to see. All of a sudden, and I find this again and again consistently across people that I speak with and work with, when you can let go of the future, you're not giving up – what you're doing is breathing oxygen, or creating space, for more and better futures to emerge, and you also end up feeling a sense of relief.

You end up realizing, "Oh, this isn't all on my shoulders, this is something we have to figure out together. But if I can just let go of a little bit of this obsession with control, I actually find that freeing, I actually find that creating more headspace, more space in my heart to show up fully human."

Rachel Salaman: Stepping back a bit now, what would be your top tip for someone who wants to develop a flux mindset, starting today?

April Rinne: I think, for me, what I find again and again is that the vast majority of people – and again myself for much of my life – we don't spend that much time thinking about or getting to know our relationship to change.

We spend lots of time reacting to change, figuring out what to do about it, but not understanding what parts of change really resonate with me, what kinds of change do I really struggle with, what kinds of change do I love and hate, and how has that evolved over my lifetime.

So, I often say that the first step is actually to better understand your relationship to change. And in the book, I go through some different exercises you can do to get there, and I call it your "flux baseline" where humans typically love change that we opt into – a new relationship, a new adventure, those are all changes. But we tend to really struggle with changes we don't control, changes that blindside us, changes that go against our assumptions and expectations, changes that disrupt our plans.

That relationship has a history. You didn't just land on feeling about change any particular way on day one: it evolved. And that's really your relationship to change, and the better we can understand that, the easier it becomes to improve it.

It's sort of a necessary first step to then being able to open a flux mindset, and acknowledge that your relationship to change does need help, it could improve – and that's an exciting thing. And then, from there, you begin to dive into some of the flux superpowers. But it's that first step, of just getting to know your relationship to change, which has a huge element of overall self-awareness. So this is helpful, not only in your career or in the workplace, but these are skills for life.

So that's where I typically like to start and then from there, each person's journey is unique, but I find that almost everybody can benefit from that first step.

Rachel Salaman: April Rinne, thanks very much for joining me today.

April Rinne: Thank you. It's been a delight to be here.

Rachel Salaman: The name of April's book again is, "Flux: Eight Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change." I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.