Mobility is Water

Or, How a Bunch of Smart Post-millennials Blew My Mind (Again)

I get on stage in front of two dozen student leaders from AIESEC, a global youth leadership community, to speak about “Unleashing Innovation with Mobility”.

I started my spiel the same way I always do.

“How many of you are local, from Beijing?”

Nobody raises their hands.

“Neither am I… but here we all are. Collectively, we’ve travelled tens of thousands of miles to be here in this room together. And for us, that’s totally normal — we’re always on the move. We travel in a single month more than our parents did in a decade when they were our age. More than some of our grandparents have travelled in their entire lives.”

I see them nodding.

“And look at the friends around you here. Some of you are meeting for the first time, but if I had to guess I would say you feel a stronger connection with your peers here — students from all over the world bound together by the AIESEC community — than you do with the neighbors that grew up next door to you in your hometowns.”

More nods. Something is resonating.

“So I’d like to begin this conversation about ‘mobility’ by trying to understand what that word means to us all, and how it affects us as individuals, as organizations, or as a society. I’d like to quickly go around and hear from each of you what the word ‘mobility’ means to you — right off the top of your head, single-word associations, what does ‘mobility’ make you think of?”

And that’s when this group of ~20 year-olds completely blew my mind.

Usually when I do this kind of a flash-poll, I get a mix of jargon from the automotive, transportation, and telecom fields, words like “driverless,” “infrastructure,” “digital.” But here are what elite college kids think “mobility” means:

Liquidity*

Change

Freedom

Flow

Water

Open

Wave

Potential

Over two dozen associations with “mobility”, and not a single reference to transportation or digital connectivity.

It struck me then that their generation — young people who were mostly born after 1995 — doesn’t think of enhanced mobility as something as new or exciting or empowering. It’s just a basic fact of life. Mobility is like the water they drink or the air they breathe — they were born in it, they live in it… and they can’t imagine living without it.

At the ripe old age of 32, by contrast, I still remember Life Before the Internet, life before accelerated globalization, digitalization, and cheap airfare. I remember how our lifestyles and businesses and social institutions were primarily local, and to me it’s still exciting that we now get to zip around in jets, trading terabytes of data back and forth, working on projects with like-minded peers in distributed teams all around the world.

But to them, that stuff is just, you know… water.

That doesn’t mean they take it for granted; their references to freedom and potential (and still others such as access and convenience) show their respect for the power of mobility to further improve human lives. And whereas our generation is still struggling to define mobility, their generation’s perception reveals a more fluid dynamic: the themes of change, liquidity, openness and flow hint at a kind of “transcendent empowerment”.

For the rest of the workshop, we broke into groups to brainstorm how mobility could be leveraged to enhance their projects, and finished off by sharing takeaways about how mobility is applied to our own lives, organizations, and projects.

But the biggest takeaway for me was from the word-associations; from the reminder that to the future leaders of our world, mobility doesn’t represent new tools or trends or business models… it’s just water.

*Language note: To be fair, this was a bilingual event and the Chinese term we were using for mobility was 流动性, which contains a literal reference to “liquidity” or “flow”, which might partially explain the pronounced hydro-emphasis of the responses (water, flow, wave, liquidity, etc). But very little vestige of the term’s watery connotations are left in modern usage, and the word-association poll and all of the responses we conducted were in English anyway.

Special note: Thanks to Enoch Wang and CareerX for inviting us to speak!