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Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change
There’s an epidemic of change exhaustion, yet more change and uncertainty are ahead. When – and how – will this ever improve? Being adaptable and flexible have always been hallmarks of effective leadership, well-being, and a fulfilling life. But in a world of ever-more change, an ever-faster pace of change, and relentless uncertainty, flexibility and resilience can be stretched to their breaking points. The quest becomes how to find calm and lasting meaning in the midst of enduring chaos.
A world in flux calls for a new mindset, one that treats constant change and uncertainty as a feature, not a bug. In this talk, April Rinne helps you open this mindset — a Flux Mindset — and develop eight “flux superpowers” that flip conventional ideas about leadership, success, and well-being on their heads. You’ll learn to see change in new ways, craft new responses, and ultimately reshape your relationship to uncertainty from the inside out.
Whether you’re leading a team, strengthening your culture, inspiring engagement, sizing up your own career, reassessing your priorities, or simply want to show up more fully in the world, opening a flux mindset and activating your flux superpowers will keep you grounded even when everything around you is shifting. You’ll learn to see that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel… and it’s not an oncoming train.
Key Takeaways
Beyond the Ladder: The Future of Talent & Careers
What does the shape of a successful, meaningful career look like in today’s workplaces full of change – and how can you (and HR) design your best one? Across the professional spectrum, people are reassessing what they want from their careers – and lives. This has led to unprecedented job-hopping (without the stigma), freelancing, quiet quitting, and career pivots as well as exhausting debates about hybrid work. And this was all happening before the breakneck ascent of generative AI and the uncharted territory it entails. Taken together, it’s a lot.
One of the keys to future-ready professional development and sustainable, thriving work cultures is to rethink the shape of our careers. The one-way, up-or-out 20th century “career ladder” isn’t just creaky. It’s breaking. For talent and HR alike, this has profound implications – and represents a new world of opportunity for more useful career shapes and dynamics.
April Rinne has been working on “career portfolios” for more than 25 years, including her own. She helps organizations change how we think about work and individuals unleash their best, full selves. This isn’t about outsourcing one’s job or hiding side hustles. Rather, a portfolio approach is about seeing talent and career development with a fresh lens. Whether you’re running a Fortune 100 company, series A (or E) startup, venture capital fund, accelerator, association, think tank, or government, it’s a key tool for talent acquisition, retention, and thriving organizational cultures. It’s how to identify and nurture all of the skills on a team. Moreover, a career portfolio is essential for success in a world in which skills are evolving and changing fast. Creating your career portfolio is also one of the 8 Flux Superpowers in April’s bestselling book Flux.
Note: This talk is a perfect fit for “career weeks,” team L&D, HR gatherings, and Future of Work summits.
Visit April’s Career Portfolios resource page to learn more.
Finding Certainty in an Uncertain World
Just because the future looks really chaotic doesn’t mean your approach to it has to be. For leaders everywhere, success hinges not only on understanding the macro forces that will affect your business and team, but even more so on how you see these forces: Your mindset towards change and uncertainty and your tolerance of the unknown. Imagine the time, effort, or resources you could’ve saved if you’d seen the full implications of smartphones back in 2006, hybrid work back in 2015, the covid pandemic before it hit, or generative AI today? Today, you can develop this vision – these superpowers and savviness – moving forward. Not only can you: Given the relentless pace of change, it’s safe to say you ought to!
April Rinne’s gift is to see key shifts early amid chaos and disruption, and to help leaders and teams navigate the unknown in ways that catalyze inner peace, growth, and future-fit perspective. As the world’s leading Humanist Futurist, April speaks with both head and heart. Drawing on nearly 30 years of experience in 100+ countries as well as insights from her bestselling book Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change, she’s your #1 guide to today’s uncertain world. She helps you see what you’ve been missing, overcome your stumbling blocks, and boost your capacity to harness uncertainty to your advantage. With your team and for your organization, you’ll learn how to stop fighting uncertainty, transform not-knowing into wisdom, and be the flux – ready and excited for whatever changes are ahead.
Key Takeaways
The Economy & Business Models in Flux
Fifteen years ago, the sharing economy — including companies like Airbnb, Lyft, Turo, and TaskRabbit — was seen as an impossible dream. Who would ever stay in a stranger’s home or get in their car? Often called “access over ownership,” these business models have exploded far beyond the mainstream. Today the sharing economy includes many billion-dollar businesses and is positioned among a universe of “new economies.” The digital economy encompasses the platform economy, gig economy, and attention economy. The circular economy, donut economy, experience economy, subscription economy, BOGO (buy-one-get-one) economy, and trust economy share some common principles — yet each is unique and evolving in its own ways.
And this economic transformation has only just begun. More disruption and uncertainty lies ahead. How might people live, work, learn, collaborate, create, invest, and plan for this tangly, thorny future? How might capitalism itself change? And of course, how should you and your organization prepare? In this talk, April Rinne will take you on a global tour of what’s possible, what’s likely, and what it all means. April has kept a front-row seat to these shifting dynamics for the past 25 years. She was in the vanguard of unlocking access to finance and mobile money long before smartphones existed. Later, she was one of the earliest voices in the sharing economy, advising startups and policy makers on responsible innovation and growth. Today, as the pace of change has quickened, she’s stayed ahead of the flux — quite literally, as she wrote the bestselling book Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change — and she’ll help you do the same. Channeling Mr. Miyagi and Brene Brown, April will help you anticipate what’s ahead, expand your universe of opportunities, and — rather than fighting change — be the Flux.
What the World Can Learn about Happiness from the World’s Happiest Country
How might we learn from Finland about happiness, a skill they seem to possess in abundance? April’s Finnish roots put her in a unique position to share wisdom from the land of sisu — inner strength — and satisfaction.
For the past six years running, Finland has been ranked the happiest country in the world. In this talk, April guides you through Finland’s culture and pillars of happiness, drawing on her personal Finnish heritage, global perspective, and unique experiences as a Finnish happiness coach and advising the Finnish government. Prepare to be surprised, refreshed, inspired to visit Finland — and grow happier!
Event Moderator, Facilitator, Host, Interviewer, Emcee
In addition to her inspiring and insightful keynotes, April is frequently invited to moderate and interview panels and roundtables, facilitate workshops and lead open space sessions. She is known for catalyzing new conversations, emerging ideas and bringing fresh perspective wherever she goes. From kickoff to closing, April has led a variety of such conferences and convenings as The Collaborative Economy Canada Tour, the Cape Town Sharing Economy Think Tank, Singapore & The Sharing Economy, World Tourism Day Summit - Happiness 360 and Reinvent’s Future of Work series. Several of these engagements were first-time events for their host organizations, industries or locations. Often asked to collaborate on structuring for the day or event, April is happy to assist meeting planners with creating a truly immersive and memorable experience for your next meeting.
Finding Certainty in an Uncertain World
Just because the future looks really chaotic doesn’t mean your approach to it has to be. Success hinges not only on understanding the macro forces that will affect your business and team, but even more so on how you see these forces: Your mindset towards change and uncertainty and your tolerance of the unknown. Imagine how much time, effort, or resources you could’ve saved if you’d seen the full implications of smartphones back in 2006, Airbnb and Uber in 2010, remote work in 2014, or the covid pandemic in 2019? Today, you can develop this vision — these superpowers and savviness — moving forward. Not only can you: Given the relentless pace of change, it’s safe to say you ought to!
APRIL RINNE’s gift is to see key shifts early amid chaos and disruption, and to translate this vision in ways that help people and businesses find peace, catalyze growth, and flourish. As the world’s leading Humanist Futurist, April speaks with both head and heart. Drawing on nearly 30 years of experience in 100+ countries as well as insights from her bestselling book Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change, she’s your #1 guide to today’s uncertain world. She helps you see what you’ve been missing, overcome your stumbling blocks, and boost your flux capacity (aka your “fluxiness”) to harness uncertainty to your advantage. She’ll show you how to transform not-knowing into wisdom and tools for a brighter tomorrow. As an individual, team, or organization, you’ll learn how to stop fighting uncertainty and rather be the Flux — ready and excited for whatever changes are ahead.
April Rinne has been weaving her own story about how to thrive amid flux, personally and professionally, for as long as she can remember.
Today April is an acclaimed speaker, thinker, advisor and writer. She is known today for her many keynotes each year to business, industry, investment, policy and educational audiences around the world, and for her role as a bridge: between startups and governments, between developed and developing countries, between those excited about change and those resistant to it. She is also an impact investor, mental health advocate, yoga teacher and insatiable handstander. April's handstands underscore her upside-down perspective on the world: they help her see differently, stay flexible, and bring joy (and occasionally amazement) to others. Earlier in her career served as a global development executive, microfinance lawyer, and hiking and biking guide.
April holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an M.A. in International Business and Finance from The Fletcher School at Tufts University, and a B.A. in International Studies and Italian summa cum laude from Emory University. She is a Fulbright Scholar and studied at Oxford (University College; one full academic year), the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and the European University Institute (the EU’s premier graduate institution; one full academic year). In 2011 the World Economic Forum named her a Young Global Leader; she has attended Davos multiple times as well as WEF summits worldwide.
But April’s CV and educational pedigree don’t begin to capture April’s story, her perspective, and her understanding of the world. Both of her parents died in a car accident when she was 20, which threw her into a world of flux. She put the expected path on hold to deal with the aftermath, ultimately letting go of how she thought her own future might unfold. Rather than the Ph.D. her parents expected, or the Wall Street analyst position society expected, she spent several years leading hiking and cycling tours from Puglia to Patagonia, which in turn provided enough income to travel widely (and alone) from the Golden Triangle to the Darien Gap. From there, her unconventional journey took off.
April spent the first half of her career focused on global development and financial inclusion. She was very early to the world of impact investing. She led microfinance teams on four continents, wrote microfinance legislation, was in the vanguard of mobile banking innovation, and created new investment vehicles for the world’s underserved before Muhammad Yunus made microfinance a household term.
When the digital economy and smartphones began to take root, April shifted her focus to how these new platforms could help build more inclusive business and more robust opportunities for income generation. The second half of her career has focused on how this “new” economy and the future of work will play out worldwide, advising numerous startups, established companies, governments, policy makers, financial institutions, educational institutions, think tanks and others along the way.
Taken together, April’s breadth of experience and exposure to other cultures and ways of life provide her with an enormous lens through which to see change. On the one hand, she is as comfortable at Davos as she is talking with microfinance borrowers in an urban slum. On the other hand, she has seen how – regardless of age, income, or background – humans genuinely struggle with navigating the unknown. She is convinced that the disciplines of a Flux Mindset can help. So does Thinkers50, who have recognized the Flux mindset as a "Breakthrough Idea."
April brings a practical perspective and a global worldview. She has lived with, advised others on, experimented, researched, prototyped, traveled long and far to experience, speak with and learn from others about how to embrace flux.
