Johan Serè is Night Supervisor and an Innovation Agent at PSA Antwerp. He is a consistent contributor of ideas on iCAN, and passionate about the importance of getting everyone aware and involved with innovation in PSA.

“If you can dream it, you can build it.” For Johan, this conviction has been a personal mantra since the age of 13, when he built his first curtain-assisted, wind-powered wood go-cart. What underpins this conviction is not some magical ability to dream up things to build, but rather the ability to ask many, many, many, many questions from different perspectives and to come up with new combinations and solutions.

“How will I drive the go-cart without a steering wheel? How will I stop the cart? How do I keep it stable? What will the world that my three children will grow up to be adults in look like? What changes will they experience?” Johan shares with us how he is forever questioning the world around him, be it at work, at home, or on vacation. Even in his sleep, he is dreaming up new questions and perspectives!

When faced with someone telling him “no, you cannot do this” or “it is not possible”, Johan’s response is to find a way to continue until “cannot” turns to “can”. Failure motivates him to find new solutions, because nothing is impossible. As he quotes and points out: We live in a world where we train students for jobs that do not exist yet; to work with technologies that have not been invented yet; to find solutions for problems we do not know we have yet. Anything is possible!

Just for fun, we asked Johan: “You are an ant on a burning rope. What would you do?” His response was short and insightful – he would go back the way he had come and find another safer route as there can be several paths that will lead him to the same goal!