Skip to main content

Learn How To Achieve The Upside of Disruption

Today’s leaders navigate an increasingly complex and volatile world that changes by the minute, facing uncharted forces from AI-driven disruption to talent scarcity and geopolitical risk. Yet we often overestimate the risks of bold decisions and underestimate the downside of standing still. 

More specifically, according to Hack Future Lab:

 

93% of leaders expect significant AI-driven disruption over the next five years, but only 27% have the right mindsets and capabilities to respond.

 

81% of leaders agree that they feel overwhelmed by the speed and scale of business disruption.

 

77% of leaders believe that their organizations suffer from talent-crushing bureaucracy.

 

64% of leaders agree that their future readiness muscle is an obstacle to boldly seizing the future.

 

59% of leaders agree their organizations prioritize control and efficiency instead of agility and intelligence.

 

51% of leaders agree they don’t have enough time in their day to achieve their must-do priorities.

 

Fortunately, Terence Mauri wrote his new book, The Upside of Disruption: The Path to Leading and Thriving in the Unknown. That’s because in the book, Mauri distills how business leaders with the right mindsets and choices can unlock the huge upside of disruption, turning barriers into breakthroughs. The book is published in collaboration with Thinkers50, a global authority on today’s top business thinkers.

 

“In our age of Meta Anxiety and relentless pressure to perform, it's surprisingly simple to miss the upside – particularly with our human bias that craves certainty,” explains Mauri.

 

By challenging the outdated belief that risk and volatility are to be avoided at all costs, Mauri instead shows you how to embrace change with a future-forward mindset, urging leaders to explore disruption’s distinct advantages and how to transform it into a tailwind for laser-like focus and strategic courage.

 

As you read the book, you’ll learn:

  • How to unlock cultures of courage over conformity.
  • Why good leaders learn, but great leaders unlearn.
  • How to strengthen the future readiness muscle.
  • How to use actionable strategies that help harness the upside of disruption.

Terence Mauri

Today, Mauri shares these additional insights with us:

 

Question: What do you find is the hardest part of embracing disruption?

 

Mauri: One of the hardest parts of embracing personal or organizational disruption is to reframe our mindset that disruption is harmful and to avoid it at all costs. Disruption is a source code for courage over conformity and humility over hubris.

 

Disruption and its closest cousin, Courage, offer two choices: 

  1. Learning and growth when disruption is intentionally embraced as a tailwind for renewal, or 
  2. Statis and decline when disruption is avoided, or worse, is ignored in the hope it will disappear (it rarely does). 

Question: How should leaders approach disruption and future thinking for the best results?

 

Mauri: Leaders should approach disruption and future thinking with courage skills (proactive, pro-learning, pro-growth, and pro-resilient) to achieve the best results.

 

Here are some strategies to consider:

  • building a future-ready workforce through talent marketplaces and becoming a skills-based organization.
  • strategic foresight on what’s new and next.
  • humility-led leadership to identify blind spots that leaders are blind to. 
  • asking the questions that aren’t being asked.
  • testing what if scenarios against foreseen and unforeseen hypotheticals.  

Question: What actionable steps can leaders take today to sharpen their organization’s future readiness?

 

Mauri: Future readiness is a muscle strengthened or weakened daily through our mindsets, choices, and voices.

 

To unlock disruption's huge and hidden upside, we must sharpen at least three readiness themes:

  • Lead at the speed of AI, which means choosing dare to explore over wait and see.
  • Unlearn the traditional, always-done ways - the ultimate form of agility amid today’s overload and complexity.
  • Not taking a risk is a risk because we always overestimate the risk of doing something new and underestimate the risk of standing still. 

Question: Why do you believe many people overestimate the risks of bold decisions and underestimate their potential upside?

 

Mauri: In life and business, we always overestimate the risk of doing something new because of fear of the unknown, failure, inertia, or even hubris, and we always overestimate the risk of standing still. Even for everything to stay the same, we must embrace a mindset of perpetual learning for today while reimagining for tomorrow or risk obsolescence.

 

Question: What is the downside of avoiding risks, and how can standing still be the greatest risk of all?

 

Mauri: The downside of avoiding risks is missing the hidden upside of learning, growth, and action. Not taking a risk is a risk in a world of accelerating and multiplying change, and standing still is a losing strategy when the only certainty is uncertainty.

 

Question: How can leaders shape cultures of courage within their organizations?

 

Mauri: Cultures of courage embrace ideas that challenge the status quo and are a source code for daring humility and future readiness. The bad news is that two-thirds of organizations today don’t have cultures of courage. They have cultures of conformity that reject ideas that challenge the status quo.

 

The best way to get started is to model and reward the curiosity to learn (the gap between what we know and want to know) and the courage to unlearn (eliminate outdated ways of working).

 

Question: What new mindset shifts do leaders need to prepare their organizations for the future?

 

Mauri: The future isn’t just about tech or trends. It’s about mindsets and choices, too. I call it Return on Intelligence (ROI)—a new human metric for a post-AI world. To shape the future deliberately and sustainably, leaders must evolve from mindsets of ‘wait and see’ to dare to explore, from preservers of the status quo to challengers, and from infrequent evaluators to continuous coaches.

 

Question: How do you think leadership styles will change in the face of AI?

 

Mauri: Leadership styles are likely to evolve significantly in the face of AI, with several fundamental changes emerging, such as AI as a co-leader and a greater focus on human-AI collaboration. Trust, belonging, and connection will take center stage as a global epidemic of loneliness, automation anxiety, and burnout or even bore-out (cognitive underload) reach record levels.

 

Question: Why are leaders increasingly resistant to change when facing emerging technologies like AI?

 

Mauri: Change used to happen as a breeze. Now, it feels like a category-five typhoon. Leaders resist change for several reasons, including automation anxiety (Will AI displace me?), change fatigue (Not another change!), and fear of the unknown (What happens in a post-AI world?). Some leaders are also cynical about another shiny new thing syndrome. Remember the Metaverse?

 

Question: How do you see AI evolving in the next five years, and what implications will this have for businesses?

 

Mauri: Over the next five years, AI will evolve in several ways, and the changes will be particularly profound in energy, manufacturing, and medicine. For example, the drug discovery and trial pipelines will be supercharged as simulations incorporate the immensely richer data that AI makes possible.

 

Throughout history until 2022, science has determined the shapes of around 190,000 proteins. That year, DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2 discovered over 200m, which have been released free of charge to researchers to help develop new treatments. By the time children are born today in kindergarten, artificial intelligence (AI) will probably have surpassed humans at all cognitive tasks, from science to creativity.

 

Question: What distinguishes good leaders from great leaders?

 

Mauri: Great leaders show the curiosity to learn and the courage to unlearn the always-done ways that have gone off, like yogurt in the fridge. They also show the clarity to focus when attention is the new oil, the conviction to decide, and the trust and community to co-create the future when the only constant is change. Leaders must help prepare everyone to embrace a Forever Beta world of learning for today while reimagining for tomorrow. 

___

 

Mauri is a world-leading expert on the future of leadership, AI, and disruption. As the founder of the future trends think tank Hack Future Lab and a highly acclaimed author, Mauri is the mind behind the movement for leaders to find the upside of disruption and rethink leadership for a post-AI world.

 

Mauri’s actionable insights and myth-busting thinking have been featured in The Economist, Forbes, Inc. BBC, Reuters, Business Insider, and The Drucker Forum.

 

Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Business Leaders Need To Know About AI

Mastering AI  by  Jeremy Kahn  is absolutely a must-read for every business leader who wants to better understand the history and evolution of AI (Artificial Intelligence), and more important, the promise and perils of AI for businesses and society. Even if you think you have a basic understanding of AI, this book is an essential resource for you.   That is because Kahn delivers not only a timely, thorough and thought-provoking examination of AI’s benefits to humanity as well as its potentially chilling dangers, but also and vitally, a declaration for how we should proceed as AI evolves. Reading  Mastering AI  reminded me of the popular  The Popcorn Report  by Faith Popcorn – where in 1992 she identified and forecasted trends to chart the future's impact on our businesses, our lives, and our world.  Similarly,  Fortune  magazine journalist, Kahn, draws on his expertise and extensive contacts among the companies and scientists at the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Great Business Quote

Here's a great quote from author and speaker Harvey Mackay : "When a person with money meets a person with experience, the person with the experience ends up with the money, and the person with the money ends up with the experience."
Post a Comment
Read more

How To Unleash Your Full Potential

To accomplish something great, author   Matt Higgins   says you need to toss your Plan B overboard and   burn the boats . “You have to give yourself no escape route, no chance to ever turn back. You throw away your backup plans and your push forward, no longer bogged down by the infinite ways in which we hedge our own successes.” You’ll learn plenty more about what it means to burn the boats, how to unleash your full potential, and how to tear down your barriers to achieving success in Higgins’ new book,  Burn The Boats  – a business-advice and self-help book. Five of the most powerful takeaways are these according to Higgins: Trust your instincts and reject conventional wisdom : We are the only ones who know the full extent of our gifts, and the paths we are meant to follow. Proprietary insights are the keys to game-changing businesses : you don’t need a unique project to start an empire, just an intuition all your own. Your deepest flaws can be fuel for your g...
Post a Comment
Read more

Use A Board Of Advisors

David Burkus often provides valuable comments to my various Blog postings, and he's a person who effectively uses a board of advisors, instead of mentors, to help him achieve success. "I've found that in my life, it was easier and more effective to set up a board of advisors," said Burkus, the editor of LeaderLab . "This is a group of people, three to five, that have rotated into my life at various times and that speak into it and help me grow. I benefit from the variety of experience these people have." LeaderLab is an online community of resources dedicated to promoting the practice of leadership theory. Its contributors include consultants and professors who present leadership theory in a practitioner-friendly format that provides easy-to-follow explanations on how to apply the best of leadership theory. Community users can download a variety of research reports and presentations about leadership and leadership versus management. For example, a pr...
Post a Comment
Read more

How To Improve Your Internal Communication Skills

Here is this week's book recommendation.  It's a quick read, yet power-packed with useful tips for communicating effectively -- tips you can start to use tomorrow.  And, the eBook is free! As author David Grossman says, "good internal communication gets the message out, but great internal communication helps employees connect the dots between overarching business strategy and their role. When it’s good, it informs; when it’s great, it engages employees and moves them to action. Quite simply, it helps people and organizations be even better." I really found this book useful.
Post a Comment
Read more

Top Five Factors That Drive Employee Loyalty

A 2010 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management shows that job security is what matters most to employees. And, having that job security helps to keep employees loyal.  Okay, that's really not too surprising during these times of high unemployment. Next on the list is benefits . The unstable economy, coupled with rising health care costs, make employer offered benefits more important than ever. Third on the top five list is an employee's opportunity to use his/her skills . When employees feel good about their jobs and their abilities, and clearly know they are contributing to their organization they remain engaged and loyal.  In fourth place is an organization's financial stability . Compensation came in fifth on the top five list. Employee pay often is not the most important driver for employee retention.  Despite study after study that shows pay is not the top reason employees stay with a company, research results like these often surpris...
1 comment
Read more

5 Tips For Generating Ideas From Employees

Your employees have lots of ideas.  So, be sure you provide the forums and mechanisms for your employees to share their ideas with you.  Hold at least a few brainstorming sessions each year, as well. And, when you are brainstorming with your employees, try these five tips: Encourage ALL ideas.  Don't evaluate or criticize ideas when they are first suggested. Ask for wild ideas.  Often, the craziest ideas end up being the most useful. Shoot for quantity not quality during brainstorming. Encourage everyone to offer new combinations and improvements of old ideas.
Post a Comment
Read more

5 Reasons To Do An Employee Survey

Business leaders who wonder whether they should conduct an employee survey should think about these five good reasons for conducting surveys, as recommended by John Kador and Katherine J. Armstrong in their book, Perfect Phrases for Writing Employee Surveys : 1.  To discover what employees are thinking and doing – in a nonthreatening survey environment. You will learn what motivates employees and what is important to them. 2.  To prioritize the organization’s actions based on objective results – rather than relying on subjective information or your best guesses. 3.  To provide a benchmark – or a snapshot of your employees and their attitudes at a certain point of time that you can then compare to future surveys to spot trends. 4.  To communicate the importance of key topics to employees – by communicating with employees the survey results that shows your organization is listening to employees. 5.  To collect the combined brainpower and ideas of the wor...
Post a Comment
Read more

Give Positive Feedback. Don't Praise.

There is an important difference between giving your employees positive feedback and giving them praise . Positive feedback focuses on the specifics of job performance. Praise, often one-or two-sentence statements, such as “Keep up the good work,” without positive feedback leaves employees with empty feelings. Worse yet, without positive feedback, employees feel no sense that they are appreciated as individual talents with specific desires to learn and grow on the job and in their careers, reports Nicholas Nigro, author of, The Everything Coaching and Mentoring Book . So, skip the praise and give positive feedback that is more uplifting to your employees because it goes to the heart of their job performance and what they actually do. An example of positive feedback is : “Bob, your communications skills have dramatically improved over the past couple of months. The report that you just prepared for me was thorough and concise. I appreciate all the work you’ve put into it, as...
Post a Comment
Read more

Critical Questions To Ask New Hires

In  Paul Falcone ’s book,  75 Ways For Managers To Hire, Develop And Keep Great Employees , he recommends asking new employees the following questions 30, 60 and 90 days after they were hired:   30-Day One-on-One Follow-Up Questions Why do you think we selected you as an employee? What do you like about the job and the organization so far? What’s been going well? What are the highlights of your experiences so far? Why? Tell me what you don’t understand about your job and about our organization now that you’ve had a month to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. Have you faced any unforeseen surprises since joining us that you weren’t expecting?   60-Day One-on-One Follow-Up Questions Do you have enough, too much or too little time to do your work? Do you have access to the appropriate tools and resources? Do you feel you have been sufficiently trained in all aspects of your job to perform at a high level? How do you see your job relating to the organization’...
Post a Comment
Read more