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By challenging the outdated belief that risk and volatility are to be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.
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:
- Learning and growth when disruption is intentionally embraced as a tailwind for renewal, or
- 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.
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