My pre-retirement retirement speech

I will be retiring later this year. As is often traditional with such things for staff at my level of seniority, the company I work for wanted to give me a send off ... but my group’s national manager wanted to come, and he won’t be available later in the year, so I had the send off recently. 

As is also sort of traditional, I was expected to give a bit of a farewell speech. I’ve become reasonable at such things over the years - starting from when I was doing community activism in the 1990s, when speeches were always about my community, not me, and I could take the advice to speak from my heart to heart (pun intended), and speak my mind. 

However, I still don’t enjoy them, and, as I had a bit I wanted to say, I decided to write a few prompt notes. 

As it turned out, I didn’t use the notes much, but I think I more or less got everything I wanted said, said - more or less in order, but not quite ... and with a few extra things said along the way. 

There’s no recording, of course (I'm not THAT significant), but I decided to try to create something based on what I intended to say, plus what I can remember of what I actually said (I tend to lose my memory of such events shortly after having given the talk - maybe my brain is so focused on the speech it forgets to activate the memory cells 😁 ). 

So, for better or worse, here is a speech based on what I wanted to say. I’ve taken out some personal and company specific material, and make no guarantees as to how accurate this is or isn’t, but it’s pretty close. Including the things I hinted at, but left unsaid. 

This is written for the context of a Western nation, and a professional consulting company.

***

I’d like to begin with a consideration of change. 

Owing to a visionary teacher, my maths class in high school was the last to learn how to use a slide rule, and the first to use a computer - a mostly idle, card-fed monstrosity at a nearby agricultural science facility. Since then, I recall the various companies I was working at celebrating the first electronic typewriter (we used to compete to have our work typed on that - my projects more important yours, not its not), the first telex, and the first fax ... and those are all gone by the board now, no longer in use to any significant degree. 

On the other hand, planes and cars have become ubiquitous - and my adoptive grandparents were born before heavier-than-air flight or the widespread use of cars.

Some other changes I've seen in my life include engineering bouncing about between public and private, going from one end to the other, and now settling in to working at a reasonable but adaptable middle-ish point, and Australia has been in four major and several minor wars - and I have relatives who’ve been scarred by those. 

I’ve also had relatives affected by major illnesses that seemed to come out of the blue.

Some of these changes could, perhaps, have been predicted - climate change was predicted by women scientists back in the mid-19^th century. 

Even the increasing rate of change was predicted by Alvin Toffler, in his 1970 book “Future Shock”.

Other changes were not so much predictable as expectable - there have been films about disease outbreaks going back to the 1980s, and we even used to have a government department with the job of ensuring we were prepared for pandemics ... that was lost to a round of spending cut backs. 

Nevertheless, we don’t really know what is coming. 

My adoptive grandparents were born before planes, and lived to see humans reach the Moon. I’ve  gone from slide rules to smartphones. 

You don’t really know what changes are coming - you don’t really know what disruptions are going to happen in a few decades ... other than the climate crisis. 

But there are a few things we do know. 

Graduates now are likely, in general, to live longer, and, with retirement ages being pushed back, work longer than any other humans in history. 

Take a moment to think about that. 

Young people now will, in general, live longer, and work longer, than any other human who has ever existed ... 

That’s a tremendous opportunity to influence the world for better, but it also means taking care of yourself, taking care of your health and wellbeing, making sure you do work in a sustainable way, is also going to be more important than ever. 

You also might need to consider a career change after 30 years or so, so keep that option open - and CPD * will be more important than ever. 

Here’s something else that we know is going to be important despite all the change: taking the time to think. 

Taking time to think ... 

You can choose how you engage with change. In the 80s and 90s when we started getting PCs, my manager at the time said “This is great - we can do everything for less time and money”, while I said “This is great - we can do more in the same time” - and we eventually settled on a bit of both. 

When new things are developed, the focus is often on what is good about them, but you need to think through the limits and implications - as was done in the mid-19^th century around burning coal. 

Change is not always good.

Something else that is always important is speaking truth to power. 

When that pandemic preparation unit was removed - that was a decision made in a room somewhere, and I would have hoped someone there, when asked “we haven't had a pandemic for years - do we still really need that?”, that someone would have said yes, we still need it because of the risk. 

The risk was there, and we paid the price. 

So ... you young people will, in your lifetimes, see more change than I have. Be excited about that, but be prepared to think, to speak truth to power, and be kind - including to yourself.

 

* Continuing Professional Development

 

If you appreciated this post, please consider promoting it - there are some links below.

Finally, remember: we need to be more human being rather than human doing.