Aidan McCullen, whose name you might recognise, has reinvented himself after a 10-year rugby career with over 100 caps playing for Leinster, Toulouse and London Irish.  Aidan is now a change consultant and works with organisations to improve how they collaborate and create an environment for change.  He hosts and is the founder of the Innovation Show, a series of podcasts that sees specials guests, from neuroscientists to organisational psychologists, speaking about how we can work smarter in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world.  He’s recently authored a bestselling book, "Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention for Individuals, Organisations and Life" which I’d like to highlight in this article by signposting a few of its key concepts that I hope will encourage you to pick up a copy for yourself.

The pace of change is accelerating

In his book, Aidan points to the now famous Moore’s law, that computing power doubles, halves in price and halves in size every 18 months.  Exponential growth.  This is something that engineers and scientists are all too familiar with, but the tangible impact that exponential growth can have on a business can be hard to visualise.  To put this exponential change in perspective, imagine for a moment that the Aviva stadium began to fill with water at an exponential rate, one drop, then two drops, four drops, every minute.  The entire stadium would be full in just 49 minutes!  So, a rugby fan in the stadium that day could be easily fooled into thinking they had an eternity to escape the rising water level, the stadium would only be 25% full after 25 minutes, a mere minute later, 50% and a mere minute after that, completely full.  This is the pace of innovation and accordingly the business environment that engineering organisations operate within.

The next stage of the S-Curve

Aidan points to the Sigmoid curve or “S-Curve” of learning as a powerful tool in our arsenal to deal with the exponential growth of technology in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world.  The S-curve is broken into 5 stages of growth, with can be both personal and organisational.  These are Development, Introduction, Growth, Maturity and eventually Decline and with each new challenge we face comes a new S-Curve that we must “jump” to in order to stay agile.  Aidan discusses the S-curve and how (and when) to jump in great detail in his book, so no spoilers here!  But Aidan brings his own unique spin to the S-Curve and equips us with another lens to view the world through, the ouroboros: Infinity curve.  This curve, shaped like the symbol of infinity, depicts two snakes eating each other’s tails and brings a new modification to the S-Curve in which one’s previous challenges and the resulting growth are what feed the next phase of our growth, and so on.  This process of taking what worked and abandoning behaviours or attitudes that didn’t serve us before beginning our next phase of growth is a wonderful reframing of the S-Curve as a model of continued professional development.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Aidan’s book and I would strongly recommend it to you both for your own personal growth and as a set of fresh insights you can bring back to your organisation.

Darren Carthy, Ph.D.

Darren works with Engineers Ireland as a Continued Professional Development (CPD) executive, auditing and providing support to engineering lead organisations who hold or wish to hold the CPD employer standard, a framework of best practices in Learning & Development (L&D). Darren is passionate about research and practice in L&D, particularly curriculum design, test development and assessment and was awarded his PhD in engineering education by TU Dublin in 2021. Darren has a number of publications relating to the career-readiness of engineering graduates in the proceedings of conferences & symposia, and journal articles. He has presented his research to both industry stakeholders in Ireland, Belgium & the Netherlands and to academics in the UK, Denmark, Hungary & the Netherlands alike. Darren is a member of the Learning & Development Institute (L&DI) and his focus over the next 3-5 years is on becoming a Fellow of the L&DI.