A personal catastrophe occurred to me a week ago – my iPhone wouldn’t charge. To be more precise the charging cable, which had become difficult to insert into the phone, then it refused to go in at all. Such is our reliance on smart phones that I panicked and saw my personal and work life becoming severely limited. Charging problems can be fundamental if not terminal and visions of time consuming and possibly visits to an Apple Genius Baralso loomed large. 
 
Then I calmed down and did what I do for every technical challenge these days – I Googled it typing into the search engine literally “how do I fix an iPhone that won’t charge”. The top and surprising answer was a not very technical Remove any debris from the charging port on the bottom of your device.The recommendation was to do this with a wooden stick to avoid damaging the charging point. I used a cocktail stick and removed a load of fluff after which the cable worked perfectly again.
 
Prior to the Internet and increasingly smart search engines the only way to repair a complex electrical appliance was to take it to a (probably expensive) local repair shop or send it back to the manufacturer or for large items arrange a call out engineer (also costly). However, our knowledge sources have now drastically changed and this fundamentally affects us as professionals.
How we research and locate the very knowledge we need for our work has been completely revolutionised. As Richard Susskind comments in his book The Future of the Professions:
 
“Half of US doctors use the app known as Epocrates, a digital drug-reference resource that computerizes the task of finding out how different drugs interact. This task was once a time-consuming, often inconclusive piece of excavation from a 2,500-page drug-reference manual, known as the Physicians Desk Reference.”
 
In the legal field I use a very useful appdeveloped by a law firm called DLA Piper on the GDPR. And if the doctors and lawyers can use this sort of app why cannot their patients? How long is it before an app exists which enables any citizen to look up any law applicable in their country. Francis Bacon coined the phrase “Knowledge is power” and it is with arcane and hard to find knowledge that we professionals have to some extent protected our preserved our privileged position in society.
 
The second part of the title of The Future of the Professions is “How Technology will Transform the Work of Human Experts”. This is the challenging and also liberating aspect of our rapidly evolving professional world. In the future our clients will not need to come to us and ask us what the law on GDPR or anything else is. Google or some app or other will arm them with that knowledge.
 
What they will not know is how best to apply that base knowledge in any given context. For this reason I remain optimistic about our future as professionals. In a recent World Economic Forum articlethe global chair of the law firm Baker McKenzie commented: The fundamental issue is trust. Our human instinct is to want to speak to a human. I don’t think that will change. Trust is what we crave, it's what separates us from machines; empathy, human instinct, an ability to read nuances, shake hands, and build collaborative relationships.
 
George Bernard Shaw said “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” We as professionals must be reasonable and adapt to changing technology even if it shakes the very foundations of our work as it inevitably will do.  
 
Whatever we do we must continue to learn and adapt in our professional life as knowledge forges ahead – as the old Chinese saying goes Studying is like sailing against the current: a boat must forge ahead or it will be swept downstream.
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​I was playing in the semi-finals of a tennis tournament recently and I and my partner were in serious trouble. We were a set and 5-2 down to good opponents who were playing well, which means we had virtually lost. I said to my partner let’s at least win our opponent’s next service game. We did. Then we said to ourselves well let’s at least get to 5-5. We did. And then let’s get to a tie break. We finally won the set and the match 1-6 7-6 7-5, and went on eventually to win the tournament.
 
My point is that when faced with a challenging or seemingly impossible situation in our work or leisure lives all you can do is try and work out the next small step to resolving the situation, and then try to achieve that. Worrying about the awful position you are in as a whole doesn’t really help.
 
Stephen R. Covey in his book the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (see this informative synopsis) advised: Putting first things first means organizing and executing around your most important priorities. It is living and being driven by the principles you value most, not by the agendas and forces surrounding you.
 
It also follows that the first step has to be the right one – it would have been useless in my example I suggest for me to have exhorted my partner to “play better”. What does that mean and how do you achieve it? I’s just rhetorical. See this articlein Forbes which discusses how The Most Successful People Take Small, Smart Steps Toward Their Goals.
 
While this article Taking Small Steps is the Key to Success in Entrepreneurshipcites the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu “Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step”. It starts as follows “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and spoke these words, it was transformative. It was anything but “one” or “small.” Executing that first successful U.S. mission to the moon was composed of thousands, and maybe even millions, of small steps and victories.
 
You just have to recognise what that first step is and take it - and make it a smart step. As Vincent Van Gogh the great impressionist artist said “Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together”.

As experienced professionals we have a tendency to assume that even if we don’t know everything we know an awful lot. We may do – but this is a dangerous assumption and there is a lot we don’t know.
 
Science provides a useful road map for knowledge here. As this article in Live Science explains The answer to the enduring question of the smallest thing in the universe has evolved along with humanity. People once thought grains of sand were the building blocks of what we see around us. Then the atom was discovered, and it was thought indivisible, until it was split to reveal protons, neutrons and electrons inside. These too, seemed like fundamental particles, before scientists discovered that protons and neutrons are made of three quarks each.
 
“Quarks” for those of us who don’t know everything are a type of elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons. Now this articleabout Atlas which is one of the six particle accelerators at CERN's Large Hadron Collider facilities in Switzerland asks if in fact quarks themselves have sub components asking But are quarks fundamental? ATLAS searched for signs that quarks may have substructure in its most recent data, collected from the LHC’s proton-proton collisions in 2012. This seems to have been supported by further experiments – see this article.
 
In Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy the man who ruled the universe turned out to be a solitary individual who questioned everything he could not feel or touch – see this summary. The characters conclude that “the universe is in good hands.”
 
This may be going a bit far in real professional life but keeping an awareness of how little we really know and how much we should keep learning is very healthy. Malcolm Forbes the American entrepreneur who published Forbes magazine said What's an expert? I read somewhere, that the more a man knows, the more he knows, he doesn't know. So I suppose one definition of an expert would be someone who doesn't admit out loud that he knows enough about a subject to know he doesn't really know how much.
 
And recognising and retaining such expertise in organisations can be a real challenge even in this day and age when you can Google anything (witness my research into quarks!). This Harvard Business School article Make Yourself an Expertdiscusses this problem identifying colleagues who have “deep smarts”—business-critical expertise, built up through years of experience, which helps them make wise, swift decisions about both strategy and tactics. 
 
As this second Harvard article comments: Asked if he would be willing to share his hard-earned knowledge with others in the company before he retired, the engineer laughed. “Why would I do that?” he asked. “First off, I don’t owe this company anything more. I’ve given 35 years to this outfit, and I hope they miss me when I’m gone. Or,” he added with a bit of a twinkle, “hire me back at double pay as a consultant.”
 
So I suggest as professionals we need to recognise how little we do know even as experts, and to develop an attitude and a mind-set of continual learning. As Henry Ford said Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.
 
At the same time as cultivating this individual approach we should seek ways to recognise and retain expertise in professional firms, encouraging knowledge sharing throughout the organisation. As the Dalai Lama said Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.

Somebody once asked me if there was any wind in the Mediterranean. They had obviously never been on a yacht there. Sailing in Croatia recently on the last day of our charter the weather at 11 in the morning was sunny and calm if a little humid. But rain and thunderstorms were forecast for noon. We arrived back in our home port of Trogir in the central Adriatic, queued to refuel at around 12.30 and returned to our yacht’s marina at 13.00 – just making it into our berth before a thunderstorm heralded high winds and very heavy rain. We had seen the forecast and abandoned anchoring off an island on the way back. I also had a proper sailing wet weather jacket – so we were prepared. We could have done more and had all of the crew been equipped with wet weather gear, but we had anticipated the situation, sought to avoid it and were prepared should it happen.
 
This is equally true in large outsourcing or service contracts whether you are the customer or the supplier. You plan for success but must understand, articulate and prepare to manage or mitigate risk on the basis that the unexpected may happen. The customer may get taken over and need to cancel the contract. The supplier could discover during the delivery phase that the customer’s requirements are ambiguously expressed and what the supplier has costed is not the same as what the customer expected.
 
I have worked in private practice and in industry with some very professional salesman and bid leads in suppliers who understand and manage contract risk properly. A few however take the “OK In understand, but it will never happen, so let’s not worry about it approach.” Well they don’t care do they because they will have their commission and be long gone before the contact delivery goes wrong and proverbial hell breaks loose as customer and supplier strive to remedy the crisis. “It” has truly “happened”.
 
In pastimes such as sailing or skiing or cycling you have to be prepared – for bad weather, for heavy snow for a puncture – and then when the inevitable happens it may be a challenge but not a crisis. In outsourcing contracts if you cannot gain full protection from the contract wording so there is a risk exposure, develop a plan to mitigate and manage the risk.
 
I am not advocating unnecessary worry just anticipating and avoiding problems. As Benjamin Franklin said: By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.
 
This Harvard Business School Article “Even Small Negotiations require Preparation and Creativity”First, preparation. Preparation is the key to any successful negotiation, but few people spend enough time on it. I’ve had sales leaders tell me that they prepare in accordance with how long it takes to get to their customer’s office. That’s fine if your meeting is in Tokyo and you live in Manhattan. But it’s a recipe for disaster if you’re meeting the customer in Brooklyn.
 
How much more so is preparation, anticipation and risk prevention essential in a major contract negotiation or indeed in any field of professional life. As Thomas Fuller the Seventeenth Century English churchman and historian said He who cures a disease may be the skillfullest, but he that prevents it is the safest physician.