The Transcript
Setting the scene
Today I’m with Jillian Reilly. Jillian has explored the future and change-making for many years. Her new book is The Ten Permissions, with the intriguing subtitle, Redefining the Rules of Adulting in the 21st Century. She combines activism, future oriented thinking, and practical ways to move forward.
Well Jillian, it’s a real pleasure to be here with you today. I want to talk about your new book of course, Ten Permissions, but I also want to go back and plate that in the context that I think is, from what I understand about what you’ve done is really important. Could you talk to us a little bit about your, to my knowledge, the first book you wrote is called Shame: Confessions of an Aid Worker in Africa? Talk about a strong title. What is that about?
Shame: Confessions of an Aid Worker in Africa
Well firstly, thank you for making that connection because you’re absolutely correct. There’s a deep connection between the two projects, between the experiences that I’m trying to capture in both books. Shame: Confessions of an Aid Worker in Africa is about my own experience coming to South Africa as a young woman. I was 23 years old, from the United States wanting to be a part of South Africa’s transformation to democracy. It now feels like ancient history, but for those of us who were around and remember, 1994 was the year of South Africa’s first democratic elections and I wanted to, for reasons that I can’t certainly in this space of this conversation fully articulate, I wanted to be witness to this profound social change exercise.
And so I managed to get myself here, to South Africa, because that’s where I am currently based, to work with a human rights organization and that sort of set off, again in the spirit of my book, a path that I couldn’t possibly see at that point and a body of work that was about sort of supporting people through profound change experiences and oftentimes failing. And I think the title, Shame, is a reflection of my own shame that I felt for perhaps not bringing myself as fully and completely and honestly and as authentically to those processes as I could.
We had all the money in the world. I worked for a big US aid agency. We were throwing a tremendous amount of resource at very complex social challenges and quite honestly, often coming up short, not because of bad intentions, not because of mismanagement or malpractice, simply because it was more complex than we were able or willing to engage with. And we kind of knew it, but we weren’t prepared to deal with it. And I really felt like I, at the time, did not have the agency or authority to step in and step up in those conversations the way that I, in retrospect, wish I had.
New mindset needed
So yeah. I got a real crash education in, what happens when people are attempting to navigate really profound change, either by choice or by force, by default, because change is occurring in their environment and I learned a huge amount. And in many ways, The Ten Permissions kind of brings that conversation further because a lot of what I learned, and I’m sure we’ll come back to this, is around this theme of permission. Am I allowed to, as I said, be as authentic, to have the agency, to call on my fullest authority to try to bring about change? Those were the questions that I started asking at a young age and I kept asking them and I still am and The Ten Permissions brings that around to our current context and the ways that we are all right now trying to deal with complex change in ways that I don’t think we’re really prepared for.
JANE
You also had a podcast called Courageous Conversations-
JILLIAN
Yes.
JANE
And I found that interesting because in your Shame: Confessions of an Aid Worker in Africa, it was you, primarily you were speaking for yourself, then in a podcast talking to other people, and then in Ten Permissions, which of course we’re going to get into in more detail, you’re actually sharing, encouraging others. It seems to me you’ve gone like in three stages from yourself, to dialogues, and then now to really you feel like you have learned enough that you can really help other people.
JILLIAN
No. That’s a wonderful way of viewing that and I think if I’m honest, it took me a while to make that transition as I think it does for a lot of us. You know, I spent many years on this book in part because I was grappling with what was it that I had to share with people? Did I trust my own authority? Did I back my own experience and my own insights? So yeah. That has been a path of a career and of a lifetime to get to a point where I felt like I could share my own insights.
Courageous Conversations
Courageous Conversations sits right in the middle of this body of work in terms of really wanting to engage other activists, other people, trying to sort of support change and what the lived experience of that is because again, I think we often underestimate the challenge that comes with trying to show up to difficult change processes and we flatten it out and we simplify it and I really wanted to kind of talk to people in a more unvarnished and intimate way about what it feels like to everyday try and engage with really complex social challenges because I think it can get cast as sort of heroic and dramatic and the truth is it’s often just your willingness to persist through all sorts of internal and external challenges and I wanted to create a platform for people to explore those experiences. So yeah. I’m really proud of that piece of work.
JANE
Is the podcast still online?
JILLIAN
It is. It is. It’s so interesting. Yeah. It was funded by the Ford Foundation and I like to think of myself as an OG podcaster because it was quite a while ago. But the beauty of the internet being that everything lives, so it is still there. It is South African activists, but I believe that they’re experiences are universal and what’s quite interesting for me when I go back and check it out again is that some of it is more relevant than ever in this specific moment as we talk about human rights, as we talk about LGBTQ issues. So those struggles and challenges carry on, for better, for worse, and there’s a lot of richness in those conversations.
Actionable permissions
Interesting. When we move into Ten Permissions, what strikes me, and I’ve read tons of books about how to work better, how to do this better, I’ve always been an independent person. Never an employee. But I have worked as a consultant to very large organizations. UN groups, regular corporations, a whole bunch of types of organizations. And one thing I wanted to say first, most books are not as actionable as Ten Permissions is. I was struck by that. I think that’s important because, first of all, there’s to many books out there now about how to do this, how to do that, but they’re not actionable enough. That had to be one of your goals because it’s so obvious and-
JILLIAN
I’m so pleased with what you’re bringing up. It makes me feel so happy that that’s something that you picked up on because absolutely 100%. Again, a lifetime spent in the business of change was that this is not about ideas. I have spent so much time, and it sounds like you have too, in rooms, in conversations, flip charts full of good ideas. Post-it notes a plenty. The reality is to begin to show up differently to your life, to begin to make different choices is a set of small actions.
So it is very much grounded in the reality of action and response. And there’s a workbook that readers will download, can download, when they buy the book and it immediately takes you into an active space because for me, especially now when our brains are so overburdened, when we’re so drawn into a sort of passive cognitive state so much of the time, it’s really critical that we put ourselves into an active state of exploring new ways of showing up to our world. So yeah. 100% it was intended to be that way.
JANE
It comes across that way. In all the different organizations I’ve worked with say over 20 years, and I worked with a lot of UN organizations and a lot of corporations, corporations of hundreds of thousands of people and smaller companies. For me a small company is under 10,000 because I’ve worked with a lot of large organizations. And the ones who struck me the most were the peacekeepers.
JILLIAN
Right.
JANE
UN peace force, which I worked with for a week in Italy on some military base somewhere because a lot of them, they were from all over the world, and a lot of them from Africa couldn’t get the right to enter the United States. If you want to reach the UN property in the US, you have to go through the United States. You can’t get off the plane and go straight to the UN headquarters. And so they held it outside the United States and those people, talk about activists. They were so strong in what they were doing and they lived a reality that none of my other clients, or that I, had ever experienced.
Old and new logics
Now something you talk about is the old logic and the new logic. Each chapter you begin you have the old logic is, the new logic is. I know you can’t go into too much detail because we only have a relatively short time to talk, but overall, for you, what’s the difference between the old logic and the new logic?
JILLIAN
Yeah. It was important to me with the book to kind of create an awareness of the sort of operating system that we’re using because I think a lot of it can sit unconscious in our daily lives and in our ways of working. It’s so deeply imprinted on us that we might not even be aware that it is a guiding logic in how we work and I think, in many ways, we are, certainly my generation is and I think younger generations are sort of torn between old and new is sort of what I would call a 20th century logic that was very much predicated on predictable outcomes, stable operating environments, linear paths, fixed hierarchies.
And that produced its own kind of logic in terms of how to move through it, which makes sense. Your strategies and your rules were born of a certain operating environment, which we all know is radically changed. We all know we’re living completely different lives in many ways to what we did 20 years ago and yet, our logic for how we move through that hasn’t necessarily caught up in an intentional way. So this more fluid world, this less boundaried world, this more unpredictable world, requires a different logic in order to find your way through it and I think most people would say, “Yeah. Of course.”
But I don’t think we’ve consciously gone through a personal or collective exercise and saying, “Right. How do I need to update my mindset, my worldview, my set of expectations, for how I believe I should move through this world and what I expect to happen as a result?” So the old logic and new logic is really an attempt to kind of shine a light on what might be an unconscious way of operating for people and to nudge them towards thinking about, “Is there a better way now that is better suited for these conditions?”
Overachieving for approval
You have a number of statements in your book that I think will startle people. They seem counterintuitive like I said in my earlier comments to you. And one in particular is that you talk about achieving and overachieving. Seeking approval and you say it’s not a good thing to achieve and overachieve and seek approval. Now most people would think seeking approval and achieving things is important.
JILLIAN
Yeah.
JANE
And you’re saying it’s not a good way to be thinking.
JILLIAN
Yeah. I think it can’t be the foundational logic of your new operating system because this is not a world in which you can immunize yourself from uncertainty through achievement, which is what you could in the old logic. If you achieved a certain number of things and certain types of things because of course the goal in the old logic was to satisfy the needs of institutions and systems, right? They protected you in exchange for your labor and your loyalty.
So it starts in school and it moves onto corporates and it goes on and on and the idea was if I satisfy the needs of the institution it will look after me. And of course when we’re working within systems we need to do that, but we mustn’t assume that by doing that we will garner security and stability because we won’t. And we’re living within that right now. Everybody’s sort of preparing for themselves to get chucked out by corporates that will soon see them as irrelevant and unnecessary.
So what I say in the book is that we’ve always believed that if we spin out enough achievers, that will then prepare you to move through your adult life. What it prepares you for is to satisfy the needs of an external institution. And what you need to start doing now is learn how to identify your own needs and wants and satisfy those. So to use more familiar terms it might be moving from an external set of motivations to more of an intrinsic set of motivations. Or what I describe as sort of finding rather than following, right.
You’ve got to bring that sort of locus of control inside that agency and that authority and certainly meet the expectations of whatever your role that you will be playing, but not necessarily assume that by doing so you can sort of sit back and assume that the rest of your path will be clear.
Forget about the future
Yeah. You say that we need to forget about the future.
JILLIAN
Yeah.
JANE
You don’t mean erase it.
JILLIAN
No.
JANE
You said that deliberately I’m sure-
JILLIAN
I did.
JANE
To startle people. Yeah. Of course.
JILLIAN
Of course.
JANE
And that many of us are trying to work towards a better future and here you are telling us to forget about the future. Now explain what you’re doing Jillian. You’ve got to have a strong idea.
JILLIAN
I do. Well I mean it’s probably one of my favorites because again, going back to my experience in sort of change and in large scale change, I mean the late 20th century again was, in corporates, was your strategic plan and your five-year plan and you magically plan and you had your big vision and you work backwards from there. So it was very much a sort of deductive way of working that worked very well when we believe that we could see the future.
In an incredibly volatile environment, it is very hard to work deductively. And so a lot of people start to feel deeply insecure because they can’t see five years in advance. They don’t know what the outcome is going to be and they can get paralyzed by that. As you say, the deliberately kind of cheeky prompt to forget about it is what I call sort of marry big intentions with small attentions. So have a guide, not a plan. You don’t know. Nobody can sit here right now and know what a long-term future looks like.
So have a general idea, but be super attuned to sort of your shorter time frames. Really lean into learning as much as you can and being hyper alert and aware to your sort of near-term operating environments so that that’s the thing that’s informing your steps forward. And to get a little bit more comfortable with shorter operating environments and more inductive ways of working because I think that it’s necessary in this environment.
Think small
That’s one thing that struck me, might have been the first thing that startled me, because I sort of scanned the book and then I went back and looked at certain sections more than others. One that really caught my attention the first time through was when you said you need to think small.
JILLIAN
Yeah.
JANE
Because so often we tell people, “You need to think big. You need to have a vision. You need to have a strong sense.” And your response is that you need to think small and then you say you have to distinguish thinking small from small thinking.
JILLIAN
You’re right. You know, again, I think one of the legacies of the past sort of several generations was this idea of everything bigger was better. And I’ve got two teenage sons and I’m around a lot of young people and I think the reality of the current environment is that they are surrounded by possibility, but they’re finding their way through it. They can’t make it into an elevator pitch. They can’t contain it in such a way that it can be their big plan. And so if you feel like the only way to move forward is by having this big plan that will inform the rest of your actions, you might feel like you’re coming up short when you can’t see it that clearly.
I think again that what I say is small thinking is kind of narrowed and blinkered, but thinking small is sort of step-by-step finding your way. And it treats the uncertainty and the lack of clarity not as a threat to your ambition, but as an invitation to explore what’s possible because we just don’t know right now what is possible and I think to try to contain it in something that looks familiarly big right now is to possibly do a disservice to what you could create if you were willing to spend a little more time in that sort of small navigation mode of moving forward and discovering as you go.
JANE
One thing that is similar to what you’re talking about now that I loved is when you talk about that you need to look for trouble.
JILLIAN
Yeah.
JANE
No, that is so good. It’s like you don’t want, it’s a thing I teach all my clients, you don’t want consensus in your organization.
JILLIAN
Right.
Look for trouble
You want diverse thinking, you want discussion, you want back and forth, and so on. I mean, you know about that as much as I do, but I’ve never gone so far as to tell my clients to look for trouble.
JILLIAN
Yeah. Yeah.
JANE
So talk about that a little bit.
JILLIAN
Yeah. I mean it could play out in so many different ways and I’ve written those permissions very intentionally to allow for individual interpretation of them, but yeah. Everything that you just said in terms of what I think has become a world in which we’re frightened of friction. The world is at once so polarized and yet so sort of engineered for ease that it creates this strange situation where we’re fighting with each other in the comments section and yet we’re afraid to walk out our front door.
So the willingness to engage in challenge, in hard things, in difficult problems I think is critical right now and yeah, it’s a bit of a clarion call especially to younger generations to say, and this again goes into that conversation around achievement because I think we’ve prepared a lot of young people to just build that golden resume and they’re afraid that anything that looks to hard or to contentious will get them into trouble and then somehow smudge their record.
And what I say in the book is go looking for a teacher, not a fight because all the hardest things in the world are the best teachers. All the challenging conversations, the thorny problems, the stuff that requires you to pour over it for a while, those are the places where you learn and you grow and I think, because where we’re being replaced by robots as we’re told every single day now, our ability to problem solve, our ability to create, our ability to connect as humans is going to become and is right now evermore important.
So we’ve been engineered for ease and I think now we need to kind of dig a little bit more into our willingness to go to the places that feel a little bit more troublesome.
JANE
And you think that’s going to trigger innovation also.
JILLIAN
I think, yeah. It must, it does, and I define innovation very broadly as a better way to do something. So whether that’s at an interpersonal level, whether that’s at a social problems level, whether that’s just at a corporate innovation level, I think our willingness to do hard things and have hard conversations in person in front of each other, blood, sweat, and tears is something that we need to kind of reinvest ourselves in.
Go astray
Does that go along with a phrase you used how we need to go astray. Does that mean simply off the common path?
JILLIAN
Yeah. Again, I mean, those first two permissions, which is be willful and go astray, I sort of see them as a foundational sort of mindset or worldview concepts which were you filled a role and you picked a lane and you stayed in it and that was how you succeeded and your path forward was straight if you ask somebody to envision it, of course they would envision a straight one. And the permission to go astray is one that recognizes, one, that those are unrealistic now given the amount of change that we are experiencing and creating, but they’re also undesirable because in those straight paths you’re learning as much, right.
Every time you turn left or right, every time you pause, every time you make a conscious decision not to just keep doing what you’ve always been doing, you will learn something. And so embedding learning, embedding change, embedding adaptation into your worldview and into your approach to how you move forward I think is absolutely critical. And again, I’m speaking a lot to young people about that, which is to say don’t feel like there’s something wrong if everything doesn’t lead seamlessly one thing to the next. You don’t necessarily want it to. And by the way, it’s probably not going to. That might not be the way your generations lives look.
And that doesn’t mean that there’s a flaw. It doesn’t mean that you’re not capable. It just means that the world is operating in a different way now.
JANE
Does that make them feel sometimes or do you encounter young people who are concerned about how they will make a living, how they will eat, how they will feed a family?
JILLIAN
Of course.
JANE
I mean, that’s sort of a fundamental thing that you as you’re a high level thinker and you’re practical also, but there is that fundamental feet on the ground approach that you need to have with people also.
JILLIAN
Of course. I mean, and I speak to that context in the unraveling of a lot of our set of expectations for how our lives are going to look. And what we believe was what I describe as a series of sort of if then. If I do this, then that’ll happen. If I get my college degree, then I’ll get a job. Well no. If I pick the right industry, then I’ll probably have a job for the rest of my life. No.
So all those if then equations have fallen apart to a big series of what ifs. And in many ways the book is sort of saying you get to design different paths for yourselves now then the ones that I did because the ways forward have multiplied and unraveled in all sorts of very confusing and absolutely glorious ways. But the reality is, the idea that you could seek security within a corporate and that it would look after you for your life I think is the single biggest piece of the social contract that has fallen apart and that is leaving a lot of people sitting there going, “Okay. So if it doesn’t look like that, what do it look like? Is it just me bouncing around from one corporate to the next hoping that they give me a job or they give me a job?”
Design your own portfolio
And in many ways, be willful and go astray is to say, “You need to be designing your own portfolio. You need to be driving an approach to your own life that is not about a singular role, a singular company, a singular set of capabilities, but something that’s much more strategically diverse than that.
JANE
I think young people would really take to that. They would understand what you’re talking about.
JILLIAN
They do.
JANE
What about middle-aged people? That’s a little different. Someone who’s 40 years old and loses a job.
JILLIAN
Of course.
JANE
I mean, to think that they need to sort of think about their path forward. I mean they do, but it’s a much harder thing, much harder to do I think.
JILLIAN
You’ve just hit the nail on the head. They do. I mean my husband is a 50-year-old entrepreneur who’s putting together, he’s a fractional sort of commercial guy. If you’d asked him to 10 years ago what his life would look like now, he would never have said this, but this is the reality that he is, I don’t want to say confronting because that sounds like it was kind of laid at his feet in a fully undesirable way. I think what he’s also, if he steps into it and feels it fully, it’s like, “Ah. Okay. This is kind of interesting. I get to sort of manage a variety of different roles.”
One of the things I talk about that I think is important for all of us regardless of age is this kind of I can versus I am mindset. So sort of divesting your identity from your role or your profession, which we very much do. We were accountants and lawyers and doctors. And I think what we need to do now is see ourselves as people who are capable of doing a variety of different things and need to intentionally build those capabilities so that we can look at ourselves through a more flexible lens because at middle age if you do lose a job, going out and trying to find another one in exactly the same way now is probably not going to happen.
JANE
Pretty much impossible.
JILLIAN
It’s pretty much impossible. So how, even at that stage, you start to build this portfolio approach. It’s not to say that it’s easy, but it is the reality and in many ways, you will have a richer and fuller toolkit to carry along with you than that 23 year old will. You’ll have more burdens and responsibilities, which makes you feel more frightened, but you’ll also have more assets and resources to help you figure out where you go from there.
You know, in some cases the book will speak to people who want to make change. In other cases it will speak to people who have to. Regardless, I think we are dealing with a landscape where we’ve got to approach it in sort of novel ways and that’s what I hope the book will help people sort of feel more allowed to explore in a clearer, more courageous way.
Gig Mindset Advantage
Something I’d like to do sometime, but I didn’t want to do it before our talk today was, I don’t know if you’re familiar with my book The Gig Mindset Advantage.
JILLIAN
Yes. Absolutely.
JANE
And it’s not about the gig workers at all. It’s a mindset and the way people are in organizations.
JILLIAN
Yes.
JANE
And I had some case studies that were really interesting in all that. There are a number of features that I identified in my research that are very close to what you’re talking about.
JILLIAN
100%.
JANE
Very close.
JILLIAN
Of course. Very close.
JANE
When I talked about portfolio for example, that portfolio thing is I think essential.
JILLIAN
It is. And Jane, I think we could do … you know what’s interesting for me is that of course for a lot of people when you talk about portfolio, investments will come to mind, right. I mean that’s an intuitive link to that word. And in that, it would make a lot of sense to you that you would have a variety of things that would perform differently under different circumstances. That you would want it to be diverse. That you’d want to keep some of it liquid and you’d want to perhaps have some other things that were long-term.
Like there’s an intuition around a portfolio that we deploy in other areas of our life and in many ways bringing that back to the work of your own way forward, I think that’s where I see the opportunity for a lot of people and the fact that you were talking about that, I think long before a lot of other people were, is one of the reasons that I was so excited about having this conversation with you and having you read the book because absolutely, these are very resonate ideas and I think you were bringing these things to our attention well before people were actually ready to start to engage with them as much as they are now.
JANE
I think it was too early in some ways.
JILLIAN
It’s okay.
JANE
The book-
JILLIAN
It’s still there.
JANE
Yeah. Oh, it’s still there. The book was not a best-seller, which business books tend not to be anyway.
JILLIAN
Right.
JANE
And the thing I found interesting was though, the thing that for me was even more satisfying than selling millions of copies, honestly, was the fact that so many people came up to me, I talked for a couple years at a lot of conferences and I wrote, and so many people came to me and said, “You helped me understand myself. Now I understand why I’m uncomfortable in my organization.” Or, “Now I understand why my boss doesn’t appreciate whatever.”
And a couple people even told me they wished they’d read it earlier because they’d been fed up with their company, they’d left their organization, and one of my themes was once you recognize yourself as someone with a gig mindset, I’m sure you’ll identify with this, you can either stay in the organization and work on bringing about change or you can accept it and just be sort of invisible in the organization because you need the job, you need the money.
JILLIAN
Right.
JANE
Not so easy to do nowadays.
JILLIAN
No.
Paths in an uncertain future
Or you can leave and start your own business. You’ve got three paths. Things were not, I would say things were easier then JILLIAN than they are now.
JILLIAN
Very much so. Very much so.
JANE
I mean, the last five or six years have been something.
JILLIAN
Yeah. I mean, in many ways. So I started to write The Ten Permissions during COVID. It wasn’t called that. It wasn’t the framing. There was still the theme of how do we find our way through uncertainty and volatility, but there was no way I didn’t have AI on my radar. I didn’t have the dissolution of democracy in certain places on my radar.
JANE
Yeah.
JILLIAN
So I think that’s what keeps kind of catching our breath is like we keep waiting for it to stabilize and it doesn’t.
JANE
No.
JILLIAN
And that’s where it’s like this idea that if I just hold on, it’ll return to something that feels more familiar to me. I think what a lot of people are experiencing now is a sense of loss. That it’s not returning. Somebody described the loss of predictable progress or the end of predictable progress and I thought that was a really good way of summarizing what I think our generation got in the late 20th century this idea that everyone would continue to thrive and generations would better each other and I think now we’re sitting there going, “Maybe that’s not built into the story. Maybe that’s not an inherent promise offered to the human race.”
What do we do with that? It doesn’t mean that progress isn’t possible. It just means that it might not look the way that we expect it to. So I think there’s a real disorientation right now with understanding what that could look like and I think your work, obviously my contributions, are trying to say we need to intentionally update the way that we’re thinking about this because the old ways are not going to serve us in terms of finding our way through this, what I think is, to use a cliché, a new normal.
What future for our children?
Yeah. A question I always like to ask my guests who think about the future, which you clearly spend a lot of time thinking about, how would you describe the future that you would like to have your, for example, your children living in 20 years from now? You said they’re teenagers.
JILLIAN
They are.
JANE
So give me another 20 years. What kind of world?
JILLIAN
You know, I think about it as a marketplace where people are able to sell their best contributions unfettered by outdated expectations of how they’re supposed to behave where they’re able to create and recreate over and over again things that add value to companies, to communities, to institutions. A place where they are continually discovering and evolving and growing over a course of a lifetime as opposed to sitting fixed in a certain role that they execute and replicate year in and year out.
So a world of continued growth and contribution because once we get through this sense of loss that we’re not being held and told who we’re supposed to be and how we’re supposed to behave so tightly, we find it within ourselves to kind of come into ourselves a little bit more and figure out, “What do I want to be apart of creating? What do I want to create myself?” Whether that’s relationships or projects or companies, whatever it is, where there’s a spirit and an ability to bring our very best offers.
And one of the things I talk about in the book is, I don’t know if you got to it, but was like the DJ as the sort of image of the future creator who’s not necessarily creating master works of art a la Da Vinci, but is routinely bringing something of value to different situations and in the process, bringing meaning and joy and connection to other people. I would like them to feel fully able to show up to that marketplace as their very best selves with their very best contributions. And that within that space we’re able to kind of find new ways of moving forward together.
JANE
In order for that to work their need to be changes in the infrastructure around us, the human infrastructure around us.
JILLIAN
Yep.
JANE
And I don’t know what you think about the idea of sort of a basic income for everyone so that, I mean there’s so much money in governments that, if it were not spent on other things, it could be done.
JILLIAN
Yeah.
JANE
It could be low, but it could be just enough to give people that little safety net that they need to have in order to think about what they want to do, what they want to become, and how they can make things better. But if you’re worried about how you’re going to pay the grocery bill, you don’t have a lot of energy to think about how can you make things better? Yeah.
JILLIAN
Well I think the AI revolution is forcing and will continue to force a really deep rethink on, not to sound to lofty, but human existence. I mean, I watched Bill Gates on a podcast kind of questioning the fact that human beings exist for their labor. I mean that’s a fundamental framing of human existence, right? We are here to work. We are here to provide labor. And we have come to believe that and to see that as a result of hundreds of years of cultural framing around the reasons for us being here.
Now that a large amount of our work is going to be done by machines, what are the implications for us in terms of understanding our purpose? There’s a lot of AI is coming for your job narrative out there. I think alongside that is some deeper reflection around, “Is my job the reflection of my worth and of my value here on earth or am I allowed to imagine a world in which I make a contribution that isn’t entirely about my job?” So these are much bigger questions and you go there and it sounds like you’re getting into deep existential territory, but it’s not that far away that we’re going to be having conversations that only a decade ago were unthinkable.
JANE
Yeah.
JILLIAN
So I think we need to, again, give ourselves permission to have conversations that might freak us out a little bit in order to really explore the possibility that’s being laid on our doorstep at this moment.
Reframing science fiction
I like some science fiction for that purpose. One of the really great writers, a Chinese guy, that I interviewed, he was my first interview in fact over a year ago, Stanley Chen Qiufan, he co-authored a book, the title similar to 2041 Visions for the Future or something like that. And his co-author wrote the technical things that were going to happen. A lot of them are out of date now.
JILLIAN
Right.
JANE
And he had chapters in between each one of the technical ones that they had worked out this pattern together and his was pure science fiction, stories about people. And some of the stories are just really, really powerful. Really powerful. And I think that there’s some science fiction writers who are, with their feet on the ground, who are thinking about things that are important to all of us. I think they’re a good source of ideas.
JILLIAN
100% agree with you and I think we almost have to reframe science fiction. It was always this sort of sat in a world of fantasy and now I think it’s a permission slip in and of itself to go beyond the default narratives and the constraints that normally frame our thinking. Within that you’re allowed to kind of bring forth worlds that within real life would feel to frightening or to other to entertain, but in those spaces it’s like, “Huh. Yeah. Maybe it could look like that. Maybe that is a possibility, a desirability.”
So I absolutely agree with you. I think reading science fiction, engaging in those worlds and communities and conversations is a great way to kind of stretch out a little bit your own capacity for exploring the new and the different and what might feel unthinkable on some levels.
JANE
I think at some point it was Arthur C. Clarke who said that once work was gone, as far as we were concerned, education and entertainment would be the same thing. Our ways of educating ourselves would be entertainment and vice versa. I think that’s a strong statement. I like that a lot.
JILLIAN
Yeah. Absolutely and I think in many ways, I mean, my son’s, I would say their primary education and this might horrify us or whatever, but I mean the amount that they learn through TikTok, the amount that they learn online, the stuff that they come to me with that blows my mind that they know it and I know we sit and wring our hands about their digital lives, but the reality is, their digital lives are stretching them out into issues and parts of the world and people that were absolutely unavailable to me.
JANE
Yeah.
JILLIAN
So I think we’re already very, very close to that world where the lines between education and entertainment are blurring. I’m not sure the educators want to believe that, but I think we probably are very close.
JANE
Well I love your story about your sons. That’s an anecdote I will probably use again in the future.
Gen Z: passports to a new view
Yeah. I start off the book by saying, “I’m a mom to two Gen Z kids and they’re my passports to a different way of looking at the world.” And it’s critically important to me that I don’t keep them tethered to a world that makes me feel safe simply because it’s familiar to me. I mean it’s really important to me that I allow them to go out and explore what’s possible and don’t make them afraid of that simply because I don’t understand it.
JANE
What you’re saying is incredible JILLIAN because two interviews ago I interviewed Debbie Urbanski, sort of a science fiction writer, but a fantasy science fiction. It’s hard to describe her. In her most recent book, it’s called Portalmania and the idea is we have portals that we go through or don’t go through. You would love it. You would absolutely love it because one of the things she says is exactly what you just said to me. Several of her stories have to do with the parent, I think it’s usually the mother, who either lets her kid go into a new world via the portal or tries to keep the kid back.
JILLIAN
Right.
JANE
And it’s very difficult for a parent because when the child goes through the portal, you cannot follow him. You don’t live in that world. And that child will see and experience things that you cannot imagine.
JILLIAN
Right.
JANE
That’s one of her very strong points and that’s exactly what you said.
JILLIAN
Yeah.
JANE
I’m amazed.
JILLIAN
And I think what’s, so I’m actually doing talks with parents right now because I think what’s really challenging for us, not every parent, every generation sees children off into a world that is, in ways, unfamiliar to the one that they came of age in, but I think there’s something more profound right now in that we are really sending them off into a world and a world of work and the fact that we’re sitting having conversations about the end of work is telling us that this is truly a world that it frightens us as parents and our instinct of course is to want to keep them secure and our instinct-
JANE
Of course.
JILLIAN
Of course is to treat familiarity as security and to double down on the known and the familiar, but we don’t do them any favors by doing that.
JANE
Yeah.
JILLIAN
It’s really hard because you don’t have a prescription. You don’t have a playbook to hand them to say, “Go on darling. Get your degree in accounting and sit in your corporate office for the next 40 years and you’ll be just fine.” We don’t have a story to tell them about what their success is going to look like and it can make us feel very afraid and very incapable.
JANE
Yeah.
JILLIAN
But I think it’s critically important that we don’t pass that fear onto them because they’re actually more capable for this world than we can imagine and we need to let them go and find their way into it.
JANE
Boy, it’s almost like taking words out of Debbie’s mouth. Do you know Debbie Urbanski?
JILLIAN
No I don’t. I think I want to.
JANE
Oh. I thought I’d be interesting if I could get the two of you on a conversation together about parents and children, that could be really interesting.
JILLIAN
Well it would and I’m telling you right now, as a parent, working with parents, there’s a fear narrative that has seeped into us over the last decade and before that. But the fear narrative is very strong and it shapes a lot of parenting logic and I think it does everybody a disservice and I think part of my ambition with The Ten Permissions is to allow us to let go a little bit of that fear because I think it limits our capability to really thrive in this world.
JANE
Jillian, is there anything, I think we’re going to draw this conversation to a close.
JILLIAN
Yeah. Absolutely.
JANE
Do you have any final thought or comment that you’d like to make?
JILLIAN
Well firstly I just want to thank you because I was so looking forward to this conversation. I admire the fact that you have been a consistent voice kind of helping us see our way through change and in a very kind of human way, which I appreciate it.
JANE
Well thank you. Thank you. I appreciate you saying that.
JILLIAN
No 100%. And I think for me, my 30 years of helping people find their way through change also brings me back to a deeply human place that I think, I said kids are equipped for it, I think we all are in our own way have this, in some of my work I used to describe the explorers mindset. We are able to go out and find our way, but we haven’t had to and now we have to and we’re kind of grumpy about it and we’re kind of scared about it, but actually it can be pretty glorious once you set off into the new and unfamiliar.
So I think that I’d love for people to start to find their way to a more optimistic vision for the future because right now cynicism and fear are rife and for me one of the foundational permissions and it’s where I start the book is permission to be optimistic.
JANE
Yes, yes.
JILLIAN
Because we won’t create a better way if we just sit afraid that we’re about to be rendered obsolete. So let’s dig a little bit in to some of the maybe even child-like optimism to see what’s possible in this moment. I’d really love for people to walk away from the book feeling a little of that.
JANE
Well that’s a great final statement. I want to thank you, Jillian. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. We covered a lot of good topics. I’ve enjoyed it very much. So thank you for your time.
JILLIAN
Oh, thank you. It’s a pleasure. Anytime.0314
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