The Big Picture 101 (personal edition)

The Unconventional Consultant's own path of exploration of The Big Picture is not uninteresting.
Back--way back!--in my earliest working days, the Unconventional Consultant was a somewhat conventional logger. (My twin brother and I did our first stint "in the bush" as a summer job at the age of 15 through the company our Dad worked for, so perhaps not entirely conventional.)
My twin and I both went logging for two more summers, then we both continued upon graduation from high school. ("Why go to further schooling when I can make all this money now!") Less than two years into this somewhat lucrative means of making a living as a full time 'job', I could see the writing on the wall. This was an industry under rapid pressure from external and internal forces, and, to me, that future didn't look bright.
The Unconventional  Consultant then began his career as an Unconventional Carpenter. (the 'conventional' has never been part of my general make up).

Within that career, I got to live through and try work through three of the construction/homebuilding boom and bust cycles.
In 1992, a cycle was again affecting the nature of my means of earning a living.

While already having a pretty good personal experience and model for thinking of the bigger trends, the bigger picture that affected my life, it was then, in the early 1990's, that I began to study in earnest to better understand the trends that shaped our future and how I could find ways to better adjust and adapt my life for these trends.

Three things were evident early.
Technology was changing and evolving at a pace never before experienced in human history.
This deal called the internet (the web browser--aka WWW--hadn't been 'invented yet!) was going to change everything.
People were going to be able to connect (or collide!) in ways never before seen in human history.

I was hooked. My life and how I looked at life and the world would never be the same.

What did I learn?
My consulting services and my Transforming organization projects are the direct result of what I learned:
--We need to change and adapt our ways of thinking, our ways of seeing how the world worked, with a 'systems thinking' point of view.
--We need to make learning and sharing knowledge a way of life.
--We need to use the internet enabled social media to create communities of that shared knowledge with a high degree of trust and reputation.

Oh. And this. Being a "lone wolf" in this day and age is not a strategy I'd advise.