Two weeks ago, I spent the most amazing time in Prague. It wasn’t my first time to the city. In fact, it was my third. My first was in 1992 with just a backpack and some serious wanderlust after graduating from college. The day I stepped off the train coincided with Prime Minister Vaclav Havel stepping down from office. The streets were filled with crowds celebrating the poet-turned-freedom fighter who would the last to preside over Czechoslovakia. Twenty-two year old me stepped off the train into a huge party and it was glorious.
My parents had gifted me the trip which was funded as part of a reparations program, as both my mother and father were refugees of World War II. My Jewish father and his parents fled Prague when the Germans invaded in 1938. They made their way to England and thankfully survived. The rest of my father’s family was not so lucky and fell victims to Hitler’s concentration camps at Terezín. All of them murdered.
I’m the last of the Lindner lineage.
Nine years ago, just as my speaking career was starting, I was asked to keynote the biggest tech conference in Czech Republic, WebExpo, a brilliant gathering of designers, software and web developers, and business folks like me. It was the first time I gave my talk on Innovation Storytelling, and I was blown away by the reception. It gave me the inspiration to keep going as a professional speaker and workshop leader.
A lot has changed since I first gave that talk, but I was so honored to be asked back to give the new and improved version of this talk and workshop to a whole new generation of smart, nerdy techies who in the age of AI, need storytelling more than ever.
The crowd was just as vibrant as the Web 2.0 teams that I met nearly a decade ago.
What was different was going from talking about cloud back in the day to talking about AI and it struck me how many technology innovations we’ve all survived over the last 3 decades.
We look at AI as some brand new, life changing innovation, and maybe it is. But what strikes me most of all is how adaptable, hungry, eager, terrified, excited, and nervous we become in the face of any innovation, good or bad. Some of us are always going to be at the cutting edge and some of us are going to linger behind watching and waiting in the hopes that maybe the status quo will come back or suffice.
Each time I go to Prague, I’m reminded of how important it is to really look the present and the future right in its face and make the decision to be one step ahead of what’s here and be aware of what’s coming next.