Julien Devaureix: On a mission to decode the Future!

Join us as Julian Devaureix, founder of the Sismique Podcast, explores the evolving world of work and offers insights for navigating a rapidly changing career landscape. With a background in digital marketing and transformation, Julian shares his personal journey and discusses the critical shifts shaping the future, from environmental concerns to technological advancements and the search for purpose. Discover actionable strategies for staying curious, embracing ambiguity, and building a resilient, meaningful career in today's complex world.

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· Vanessa Iloste (Host)

· Vanessa Teo (Host)

· Aaron Wu (Producer)

Transcript

Vanessa T: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of the Career Transitions Podcast. 

Vanessa I: This week we are thrilled to have Julian Devaureix with us. Julian is the founder of a popular podcast called Sismique, which has reached over 10 million downloads. Over seven years. With a background in digital marketing and transformation, Julian has a keen eye on the future of work innovation and career evolution.

Vanessa T: In this episode, Julian shares his personal journey of continuous reinvention from his early career in marketing to his current role as a podcaster and author. He'll also dive into the importance of staying curious, embracing uncertainty, and how we can navigate our careers in a constantly shifting world.

Vanessa I: Stay tuned for a thought provoking conversation on the power of curiosity, the challenges of career reinvention, and how to remain adaptable in two today's complex landscape.[00:01:00] 

Vanessa T: Welcome to another episode of the Career Transitions Podcast. This is the podcast where we dive deep into the real stories behind career evolution, leadership, and the future of work. 

Vanessa I: Today we have an incredibly exciting guest, Julian Devaureix. I recently reconnected with him after listening to one of his fantastic episodes, and Julian has been the host of Sismique or Seismic in English podcast since 2018.

It's a very, very successful podcast. In France, it's among the top 50, and it has more than 4 million downloads.

Vanessa T: Whoa. Wow.

Julien D: 10 million now, actually. 

Vanessa T: Congratulations. Well Julian, your podcast has truly been so impressive. Your work spans innovation, understanding the future, and you help others navigate a rapidly changing world.

So huge, huge welcome to our show. 

Julien D: Thanks. I am really glad to be here and I'm not sure what we're gonna talk about, but I'm sure it's gonna be interesting. 

Vanessa T: [00:02:00] We're gonna be talking about careers today, Julian.

Julien D: Yes.

Vanessa T: And you certainly have had quite an amazing career yourself. After graduating from a French business school, you started your career in marketing... advertising, and you continuously move towards digital marketing, transformation and innovation. In 2015, you took a full year of sabbatical to explore the world, and when you came back to France, you worked at the LVMH group, and since 2018, you have now become an author and a podcaster.

So we're very curious, what is really at the heart of your quest for knowledge and for transformation? 

Julien D: Well, it started with a deep need to understand what I call the underlying forces, you know, that are shaping our world today. Basically, I had the intuition early on that traditional carry path wouldn't be enough to navigate the complexity of the world we're entering.

And also, I had a lot of questions related to, okay, what's going on? What's going on with the world? And I was seeking more coherence also for me, like between what I do [00:03:00] and what I believe and also what I was seeing coming. So it started with that strong desire, desire to stay kind of intellectually alive.

Basically, I lived in Hong Kong from 2010 to 2015, and I was working in a luxury industry. At Burberry to be precise and I was a media director for the brand for Asia, and a lot of my job was to try to anticipate, you know, what was coming in the market. So my job was to read all the reports and to anticipate how these new trends were changing the business and changing the world and changing the way we should approach marketing and all these things and business overall.

I was reading also more and more things on the side, related to overall trends and global trends. When you start doing that, you start realizing, okay, there are so many things that are happening and so many things that I don't understand that most of the people around me don't talk about and don't see, and that look quite important.

I was starting to look at the news very differently. I was kind of disappointed by most of the conversations I had privately and also in in business meetings. And at some point it became [00:04:00] so big and so frustrating that I decided basically to quit my job with my wife. We both quit our job. We decided basically to leave Hong Kong to leave our jobs and to take one year off to explore all the topics that we were interested in.

So we took a year doing that, try to investigate new things to understand what we didn't understand before and make a better sense of what's going on. And then I came back into working in France for LVMH in a digital transformation team. This is where I started to really organize my own investigation.

And then that led to me doing the podcast and I'm driven by my curiosity and it's a never ending project. 

Vanessa I: I must say, you do it very well and you do it...

Julien D: Thanks.

Vanessa I: With a lot of consistency. I want to really commend this quest for knowledge. We have listened to some of your episodes in English so that we can prepare together with Vanessa, but we do have this quest for knowledge, a little bit like you, towards a very specific topic, which is the the future of work.

We wanted to understand when it comes to the future of work, what are the [00:05:00] significant shifts that you have identified and the things that you can see throughout all these interviews that you have done so far? 

Julien D: I guess one of the big shifts is related to what I call the playing field. The fact that we are beyond planet, what we call planetary limits.

The fact that we have already started to destabilize a very complex system that is the natural world. You know, earth systems. You cannot totally comprehend, you know, how such a complex system as the Earth works. So things like climate, which is one of the most documented and most talked about. But things are so, like the quality of soils or the balance of the oceans, or all the chemicals and the plastics that we put everywhere that are changing the way our body and the way living things operates and everything that's living, you know, that creates the balance of the system overall.

And so because we are destroying life, destroying forest, emptying the oceans, putting plastics everywhere, twisting all sorts of chemicals everywhere, not just plastics. Also, because we are destabilizing the balance of the atmosphere, we [00:06:00] have ignited something that we don't really control anymore. I mean, we, we keep destabilizing it.

So that's a thing that will change the world as we know it. That will change the physical world. So that's one thing, and that's a very important thing because all our models and all our habits and the economy is based on a kind of a stable world that allows us to make predictions. We are also consuming a lot of finite resources to make our economy work.

There is a big questions related to how long can we operate the same way? How long can we tap into finite resources? And we already know that oil is not forever, and it's not the same to live in a world where oil becomes much more expensive, more scarce. Same for minerals, same for water in certain places.

Same for, you know, soil in which you can grow things. There will be scarcity on a lot of things that we don't know. Another big thing is related to the acceleration of technology and AI in particular. Of course, we can go into geopolitical risk, et cetera, and then there is a [00:07:00] collapse of stable narratives or the breakdown of coherent narratives because we are no longer living with single story about progress, about success, even about reality.

So we are questioning now the old myth. Career ladders, infinite growth, meritocracy, all this is starting to crack. And then I would say there is another crisis that is growing, which is the crisis of meaning. More and more people are asking, okay, what's the point? No, it's not out of laziness, but it's also because they are looking for coherence between the inner and the outer world.

We see this a lot in new generations. Like a lot of this narrative is cracking and that has consequences when it comes to recruiting people and motivating people. 

Vanessa I: It's interesting to see like among all these shifts that you are sharing, there are many of them that will be connected to the future of work.

You mentioned the collapse of coherent narratives in the workplace. You also talked about the crisis of meaning or the sense of purpose On the other side of thing, that is also very [00:08:00] important. So when you reflected about these themes, what are the shifts that you can anticipate? 

Julien D: I think one of the biggest challenges that people face today is navigating ambiguity, because that's all related to what I just said, like the big uncertainty.

That's quite new for a lot of well trained people with degrees. I mean, I'm not talking to everyone here. I guess the people listening to this are looking at their career. You go to a big university and you get the right degree and then you start in a nice company if you can, and then you go up the ladder, right?

You climb the ladder, and now there is a lot of ambiguity related to the outer world related to that promise of grow. The promise also of happiness related to getting more money and consuming more and having the right business card and all the accesses. So I guess the challenge is also is how you let go of the illusion that we can control also what's coming.

Because we've been raised in a world where predictability and planning and linear progress where the norm, and actually most [00:09:00] systems, you know, like education, corporate careers, and even social expectations were built on the assumption that if you work hard and follow the rules, you will advance. But that model is crumbling for a lot of people.

Even if you are really good at what you do and have an amazing career, you know that when you get to your forties, maybe you will lose your job and that will be more and more difficult to find another job, and AI is coming and you may become irrelevant. That stability is gone for most people, and suddenly we are in the world that behaves more like a very complex adaptive system than a well old machine.

It's unpredictable, and that means individuals have to learn to operate without a clear script and to make decisions under uncertainty and to act without full information. And to let go also of the need of control. And that's psychologically very difficult because we are not born in a world like this.

We haven't been trained for that. Especially when you grow up in a privileged environment, [00:10:00] you know where everything is stable. You don't need to improvise every day.

I would say another major challenge is balancing, you know, personal reinvention with the real constraints of financial and social stability, because it's kind of easy to say, follow your purpose or find your Ikigai, or pivot your career and you know, follow your dreams, et cetera. But the reality is that many people have responsibilities and families and mold cages and reinvention, you know, requires space. Mental, emotional and economic space, and not everyone has that buffer, you know?

So there is that tension between the inner need to evolve and the outer need to survive or maintain your level of comfort when it's not survival. Then there is the challenge of identity. 'cause we tend to define ourselves by our roles. I guess the real skill is to learn constantly and to unlearn and to continuously reframe who you are.

And that's not [00:11:00] just intellectual work, it's emotional and it can be even existential. So you have to be willing to grieve parts of yourself that no longer fit. That's a very difficult process and especially that in a place where we are not supported by a system around us. By a culture around us.

And finally, you know, there is this challenge of emotional resilience when complexity, you know, becomes overwhelming.

It's very tempting to check out, to become disengaged or cynical or just to ignore everything, just to catch yourself from the noise or even to burn out. There are no clear guidelines because we're in the middle of this change, and for a lot of people, this change is not apparent. Everything seems pretty stable.

Nothing changes for a lot of people. Let's just be clear. For the majority of people, change is happening already, very clearly. But for privileged people like us, it's not obvious that, yeah, we need to reinvent ourselves because things will change fast. 

Vanessa T: Julian, I really like how you talked about [00:12:00] the constantly evolving world and how the complexity, and you mentioned the need for us to be in a complex adaptive system and to recognize that the world has become such an unpredictable world.

And with that too, how careers have to evolve, what used to be a linear progression and predictable progression is not necessarily the case anymore, and people are questioning even the very meaning of the work that they do. What practical advice would you give maybe your top three and what people can do to really help navigate their careers in such an unpredictable world?

Julien D: First of all, if you don't anticipate, if you don't acknowledge the fact that it's happening, that change is happening over the place and there are all these trends. You don't see any motivation to do things differently. The first job is to dare looking at this seriously and to stop thinking about the fact that everything would be linear.

That's the first step to think about career today. You know, we need to also to abandon, I guess, many of the assumptions that shaped the 20th century, like the idea of a career as a stable and linear [00:13:00] path. You know, one that one person that choose early, climb steadily and retire from after 40 years.

Where it's just about work hard and everything will be fine. And actually, you know, in fact, I would say it can be more harmful than helpful because it sets expectations that are increasingly out of sync with the reality, with the world. So maybe you can say that today my vision would be that career is becoming more and more like a portfolio of skills, of experiences, of projects.

Portfolio of values, even identities, you know, that you create for yourself. Who you are right now is based on what you've been doing, but it's not who you are and nothing defines you except for yourself. So maybe who you want to become and who you want to be, and what you want to live the experiences that you want to have.

The values that you want to be aligned with. So I guess it's setting up a direction and find ways to improvise and to navigate and not to crash. If things don't go as planned, if suddenly, oh, I'm sorry, but we need to get rid of you because you know [00:14:00] we have these changes because we don't have any money.

Or we need to pay more people at the board level and we also need to get comfortable with multiple selves. 'cause you might be a strategist today and freelancer or entrepreneur tomorrow. Maybe later a mentor or maybe something completely different, waiter, I don't know. And these are all facets of the same person evolving through different contexts.

You know, in the end it's all about how do I adapt to the context? What are the possibilities in that context? And maybe there are possibilities that you can foresee today that would no longer exist tomorrow and new things that will emerge that you cannot see yet. So the question is no longer, you know, what do you do to rather something like, you know, what are you building or what are you exploring? Or what are you becoming, not there yet, but trying to do that. This is the direction.

So in that sense, you know, a modern career is kind of a process of authorship. Writing your own stuff. This is why I think it's key to stay curious and the [00:15:00] keys to remain attentive to what's changing. And that's very difficult again, because we haven't been trained for that.

But that is skill and I guess that you can develop. Don't collapse when things don't go as you planned. You know, more psychological resilience is part of the game, I think more and more. 

Vanessa I: One of the question we had for you was around purpose, because there is a great book that you have written. We wanted to ask you the question around purpose because we're wondering what is the best way for me to actually engage.

Because there is a moment where you can decide to be cynical and to say, you know what, I'm not going to engage with all of that. 

Julien D: That's one of the hardest question and most important questions of our time, you know? And also, how do we stay engaged without becoming cynical, overall, without shutting down?

When you truly open the eyes, actually it is scary. The more you look at it, the more scared you become, to be honest. And it's a process, and it's tough. And this is what most people don't do it. There is the crisis of trust. You don't know who to trust anymore, what information to trust. So. I guess the real challenge is how do we [00:16:00] stay engaged with our eyes open, and how do we resist both, you know, naive optimism. It's a big thing today.

For me. I mean, the first step is to reconnect with what I call agency, so not as the illusion that you can fix everything. But as the capacity to act meaningfully, you know, within your sphere of influence. 'cause you can't solve the whole system, but you can choose how you show up and what you support and what you embody.

It invites you to focus on something smaller. And the end question is again, okay, what can I do? Who do I want to be? What do I want to live? You reduces the question to something that's actionable for you.

Another thing is to, we define success and impact. 'cause again, not everything needs to be massive or visible to actually matter.

You can have small, local relational actions like mentoring someone or just changing a process that's stupid in your organization, and that's useless and that consumes and have a negative impact. And sometimes you can touch very few [00:17:00] people, but that can have a huge impact, first of all, on that person that you touch.

But also suddenly you can have an impact because that person will touch other people and so on and so on and so on. So this is how you create feedback loops and reactions. And you never know what will happen.

Purpose doesn't always look like a grand mission. It can be a kind of a quiet form of alignment between what you do and what you believe little by little and what you want to live.

Another thing could be try to cultivate practice of meaning making, whether through writing, art, dialogue, or even contemplation. Basically, I think we need ways to metabolize the complexity, to turn overwhelm into insights and then insight into action. And that helps me turn cynicism into depth and sometimes resignation into discernment.

Vanessa I: I was wondering if you could share with us the way you have transformed and the way we can transform ourselves, the way we drive ourselves towards more curiosity, more openness. 

Julien D: For me, being [00:18:00] more curious starts by admitting we don't know as much as we think. I know that I don't know, you know, Socrates. These are questions that have been dealt with 4,000 years.

How do you build knowledge? And it's not an easy one, but it starts with doubt. It start with accepting doubt. It start with accepting that when you are sure of something, you should never be a hundred percent sure. You should be like, you know, 80% sure. Or sometimes 70. And sometimes it's enough to take a decision to take actions.

It's always a bet. So it's a bet that you have the right information. It's a bet that you digest the information the right way. And when you know all the biases that we have, attention biases, cognitive biases, social biases, and we need to have this. We need to have this stability in the world because we need to make choices.

We need to make bets. I'm betting on that career. I'm betting on that company. I'm betting on that skill. And of course, the more information I have. The more disinformation is of quality, the more changes I have to make a good bet. It also means replacing judgment with questions and certainty [00:19:00] with exploration. The mind opens not when we consume more, but when we slow down, when we listen better, when we listen more deeply.

And what you let and familiar ideas challenge your worldview. I guess curiosity is less about gathering facts. Which by the way, are more and more difficult to label as facts. Let's have conversations and be open and change and make the more informed possible. 

Vanessa T: Julian, what a fascinating conversation. I've written down so many great tips from you in terms of how we go about navigating a constantly evolving world and dealing with complexity and navigating our careers through all of this.

And your last point about taking bets and really moving forward with resilience and navigating ambiguity. Many great tips from you today, and we really enjoy listening to your thoughts about the world as it is today, and your thoughts about the future as well. Thank you, Julian, for sharing all of your words of wisdom, your thoughts about the world and your [00:20:00] expertise with us today.

Julien D: Well, thanks. Thanks, Vanessas. I would say. 

Vanessa I: Thank you so much, Julien.