Speaking in the opening keynote session at IP EXPO Europe, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield said that if you ever want to be able to push the very edge of technology and what is considered normal, you need to “deliberately affect change.”
However, “change involves risk,” he added, and it requires an extremely high level of risk to “do something new.”
Reflecting on his illustrious career, Hadfield said that “impossible things happen when someone sets an idea, technology advances forward and people apply themselves to try and map that transformation – it’s incredible where it can take you!”
However, whenever you look to make changes and try something new, “things go wrong,” he continued. It happens in business on a daily basis, and it happens inside a space station– “things fail all the time,” he said.
“When you’re attempting to transform and change, it’s really important to have an idea of what perfection looks like and what your goal is – that’s how you unify your team – but you have to absolutely expect that things will go wrong, and you will not be judged on what your goals were, you’ll be judged on what you did next.”
To conclude, Hadfield said that driving technological change requires us to never be satisfied with our own level of competence at anything. “No matter how component you are, even if you get 100% on a test, six months from now you won’t – either you will have forgotten or the technology would have changed.
“You folks [tech professionals] are in the cutting-edge technology business, you need to be relentlessly dissatisfied with your own expertise, always. Things will never be this slow again and the necessity for you to step up to that is the first fundamental step in transformation and change.”