Latest / Humanity Working / Interview: Leaders Make the Future, featuring Bob Johansen

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Interview: Leaders Make the Future, featuring Bob Johansen · Humanity Working

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_02: I'm working on the big story, which is how do you how do you augment the human in ways that allow us to develop partnerships with digital resources to do things that have never been done before?
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: And this is what Tom Malone and MIT call superminds.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what we're doing here is developing superminds.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: Hi everyone.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: So if you've been listening to our recent episodes, you'll know that Matt and I just released an episode where we talk about organizations in something called a banny world.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: Brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: So if that's new to you, you might want to go back and check that episode out.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because that's something that we'll be talking about a little bit in the background today with my guest.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's this concept has been obsessing me for a while.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: So I wanted to get someone on who knows a lot more about it than I do.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm really thrilled to welcome back a friend of the show, Bob Johansson.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: How are you doing?
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: How are you doing there, Bob?
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_02: Doing great.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_02: Doing great.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_02: As I said, it's a great time to be a futurist.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: Things are breaking out all over.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we'll talk about some of that today.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you might remember Bob from when he spoke to us previously about his book, Office Shop, one of the many, many books uh that Bob has written over the years.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, his resume will probably take up the whole of the rest of the show.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: So we won't we won't go too much into that.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: We'll put a bunch of it in the uh in the show notes.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: The headline really is that Bob's a leading futurist at the Institute for the Future, um, a pioneer of something called full spectrum thinking, which I love, and I'm sure a lot of people uh folks out there do as well.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: And an expert on helping leaders navigate chaotic futures.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I've stalked Bob for a few years now, and I know that he's very good at that.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Bob's got a new book out called Uh Leaders Make the Future: 10 New Skills to Humanize Leadership with Generative AI.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: If you're watching this on YouTube, I've got a copy right here.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, he wrote that with Jeremy Kirschbaum and Gabe Cervantes, and it really gets into this idea of a banny world and the skills that leaders need to thrive in it.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: Bob just mentioned that there's actually another new book coming out uh later this year that is going to talk about it in even more depth.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um now we'll focus a little bit on this book today.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um I should say that while I called it a new book, it's really a major rewrite uh of a book that has had two previous editions.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I guess one of the drivers for that is this concept of banny, and the other is the arrival of generative AI.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Bob, you know, third edition of a book.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: That's that that's you know, you've written a lot of different books.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: So going back to one for a third time, what was the what what led you to a realization that a major rewrite of this book specifically was in order?
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, um, so my publisher is the one who kind of came to me with this idea.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: This has been a best-selling book in its first two editions, and it really started right around uh 9-11 um when the term VUCA was very popular, volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: I just happened to be at the Army War College, the place where the generals go to be generals.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: I just happened to be there the week before 9-11 and was introduced to this concept of VUCA, which is was actually quite a lot older.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_02: It was coined in the late 1980s, kind of post-Cold War.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I was intrigued by what would it take to lead in a VUCA world?
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_02: And that caused me to develop this list of 10 future leadership skills.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um, then in around 2009, um, we were drawn into this whole conversation about internet connectivity and leadership and this kind of the period of app development and the whole idea of connectivity.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: So we did the second edition with a cover image of a real internet traffic diagram developed by a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon at the time.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_02: And the whole issue was connectivity.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: But now, in this current mood, um VUCA isn't VUCA enough anymore.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's getting increasingly chaotic.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: So we've started using this new framing, which we can talk about of Bonnie, uh brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then Gen AI has finally gotten practical.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_02: So I've been studying AI.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_02: You know, AI, the term artificial intelligence, that was coined in 1956.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_02: So it's taken that long to be an overnight success.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_02: And now we've got Gen AI, where development is so fast right now.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, so about two years ago, I started using Gen AI myself because you know, I write books.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: So I've got my own customized version of ChatGPT uh now 4.0 that I've nicknamed Stretch.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: And Stretch helps me stretch my thinking in all kinds of ways as I write.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_02: And the big news of this new edition, and it is, it's a 75% rewrite.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_02: So the good news is there are some enduring skills, but now we've got a different kind of future, a much more chaotic kind of future coming at us, and and we've got these great new tools that are remarkably useful.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's it there's so many directions we could take this conversation, Bob.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: And and uh I'd love to go through all 10 skills in detail, but I think that will probably take us about 10 hours.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: So so instead, I'm just gonna focus on just a few.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I'm gonna focus on just a few through this Banny lens.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: And and I should mention who knows how how well this podcast will date.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: We're we're recording this episode at a time where Banny feels like a great description.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: So if anybody's picking up this podcast in a couple of years' time, at the time of recording this, there's been an escalation of the war in Ukraine, the Gaza situation is unresolved, a conflict has erupted between Israel and uh and Iraq with some indications that that might be about to escalate further.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: Iran.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh sorry, Iran.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um in situations like this, you often hear political leaders and pundits attempt to project certainty.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um kind of if we do A, then B will follow.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: But you make a really clear distinction in this book between this type of certainty and the concept of clarity.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um so can you describe the difference between the two and and why certainty might feel good, but it's not necessarily helpful for a leader?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_02: So in a Bonny future, in an increasingly chaotic future, uh what you need is great clarity of direction.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_02: And this is anchored in purpose, anchored in values, anchored in meaning, great clarity of purpose, but great flexibility of how you get there.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: And in the military, they're way ahead of us in business in terms of a language to describe it.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: They call it commander's intent or mission command or my favorite flexive command, where you continuously re-evaluate who's in the best position to make which decision at what time.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: But there still is hierarchy.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there's clarity of direction, that's really important.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: But it's not necessarily clarity of outcome, and it's definitely not certainty, because certainty is brittle and brittle breaks, particularly in a chaotic period.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_02: So certainty is rewarding and is comforting in a way, because the Bonnie world is way too complicated for a lot of people.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_02: So they become an easy market for politicians, for religious leaders, for leaders of any kind who say, Oh, I can solve this.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: I can, this is a solvable problem, I can do it.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_02: But in a Bonnie future, there's more and more dilemmas that you can't solve, but you can make them better.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_02: And the way to react to a chaotic future uh is to be very clear about direction and then be very disciplined in your approach to experimentation, your approach to prototyping, your approach to kind of learning as you go, because that's what you have to do.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, early in my career, I worked with Procter and Gamble a lot uh and with their top leadership.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_02: They they used to have something they called the 80-20 rule.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_02: And the idea is you you have to decide with about 80% of the information you wish you had.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_02: Well, now in this future, it's more like a 60-40 rule, or maybe it's a 50-50 rule, or maybe it's a 40-60 rule.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_02: So we have to make decisions anyway, but we don't have as much data as we wish we had.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_02: And in a bonding world, there are phenomena we're dealing with here, like AI or like climate disruption, phenomena that we just don't fully understand.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_02: And we have to accept that even though we don't fully understand them, we have to make decisions anyway.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_02: And certainty in this kind of world, certainty is dangerous.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: It's not only brittle, it's dangerous.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I suppose, you know, one of the great things that we spoke about last time on the podcast was is the overall approach that the Institute for the Future uses, where it's looking forward 10 years and uh future back, obviously.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, you refer to it.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but also then there's that 50 years of history you're looking at as well.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: We've obviously been at times of great um at least volatility, but also I would say great, uh, you know, great uncertainty.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: Think about like the lead-in to go back more than 50 years, but think about sort of the lead-in into World War I was, for example, for very uh it was very chaotic, very unpredictable, and very uncertain as to what was going on.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um do you feel that um there have been examples of of leaders in the in the past that have navigated these um uh these types of times, even if we didn't have a a label to describe the the times that they were in?
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned Martin Luther King as one example.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um be interested to um to hear your thoughts on that, and then other uh leaders in the past that have really demonstrated these types of capabilities.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um yes.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_02: Uh there you the the VUCA world or even the Bonnie world, it's not completely new.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_02: Uh there's always been elements of this kind of chaotic nature to life, beginning from the fact that we all have to die in an uncertain time.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's that's chaotic in its own way.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_02: And we've always had regional examples of VUCA or even of Bonnie with wars or with disasters, you know, for for regional what what's different about today, Paul?
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_02: What's different about today is it's a global chaotic situation with connectivity unlike anything we've ever had before.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_02: And we're facing issues like global climate disruption that we've never had on this scale before.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, Institute for the Future, we're not a we're not an advocacy group.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: We're an independent nonprofit think tank.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_02: But we started studying climate issues in 1977.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: And it was pretty obvious in 1977 that we were on a bad path.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_02: But we didn't, we didn't learn from that.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: So now we're on a much worse path with much worse uncertainty.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_02: And our tools for dealing with it are in some ways much better, but in other ways not.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and but we also have something like artificial intelligence, which now on a global scale is a technology that's so powerful that even the experts don't fully understand it.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it's a and it has a potential for a global impact.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a number of things about this particular period that are truly unprecedented.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_02: And I've been saying, and you know, Paul, you've been in this a long time too.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_02: I've been saying for the last 15 years that this is the most frightening 10-year forecast I've ever done.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_02: And it's the most hopeful.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_02: And both have been true for 15 years now.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I've been doing this for 50 years.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_02: So I've got the track record.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the first question you should always ask a futurist is have you outlived your forecast?
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I have.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_02: So what I'm realizing though is that right now, thinking from where we are now, 2025 out 10 years, I'm having trouble being optimistic.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_02: Honestly, there's there's so much more in this frightening forecast.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_02: And it's hard to be optimistic right now.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_02: Having said that, the leadership skills in the new book, Leaders Make the Future, the leadership skills are very powerful.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: And the tools are very powerful.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_02: So we've got the tools now that we've never had before.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_02: We just need the will.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_02: We need the will.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_02: And there are some enduring models.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: So I'd I'll just give you one, but um, there's a number of examples in the Leaders Make the Future book.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: And uh the new book, which we'll put in the show notes, uh, is called Navigating the Age of Chaos.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_02: And for each of those elements of Bonnie, we have a whole series of leaders from the past who have modeled that and organizations who have modeled it.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_02: But let me talk about Martin Luther King.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I went to Divinity School before I did my PhD, and um, I was not committed to any brand of religion, but I'm really interested in world religions and still am.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I was there when Dr.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_02: King was killed.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I got selected to be part of a program to recreate his intellectual influences, and it it changed my life and it really caused me to become a futurist.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_02: What he had was great clarity of vision, which he expressed very powerfully.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_02: And it was, it was not just about civil rights, although that's what he's most known for, it was really about social justice.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_02: So he framed his clarity in a way we all need to.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_02: You know, what's the underlying clarity that we want, that we need, that we're pursuing that's better than today?
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_02: And his clarity was all around social justice.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_02: So that's why he was opposed to the Vietnam War.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: He was involved in the poverty movement.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he was involved in political issues that went beyond civil rights.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_02: So I think that's one of the challenges for leaders is figure out what's your clarity and what's the essence of that clarity, not just the peripheral issues, but what's the essence of that clarity?
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what you repeat over and over again with a powerful story.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_02: And Mart Lux King did it so eloquently and so powerfully.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_02: And the interesting thing is now these new generative AI tools, they're very good at storytelling.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_02: That's the kind of output.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you can't trust them for answers, but you can use them very powerfully to help develop your clarity and then tell it in a compelling story.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I was struck by that actually.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um you talk about the fact that at least, at least right now, and I think probably just due to the very nature of the design of these systems, um, we may, of course, add other elements that are that are not centered around the statistical models uh to uh to tools that create something that is gen AI plus or something like that, that allows us to get to more certainty.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: But it's very clear that as things stand today, um certainty is one thing that generative AI is not good at.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um whether it's hallucinations, whether it is um uh whether it's just incorrect answers to straightforward questions.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um there's a bunch of ways in which it's not.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: But to your point, yeah, um, it can be very helpful at provide uh nudging people towards clarity or helping people get clarity about how they uh about how they think about certain things.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_02: And um it it is you're right, Paul.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_02: These these things, generative AI isn't that good for answers, but it's really good for questions.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um and it isn't that good at math, but it's really good at poetry, yeah, and it's really good at storytelling.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_02: So that's why I've nicknamed my customized chatbot, which writes like me and which has read all my books, and which basically is in the style I want, I've nicknamed it stretch because I want to continuously remind myself that's why I'm using stretch is to stretch my own thinking.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_02: I don't use stretch for answers.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: And even for citations, I always check everything.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't trust stretch, but stretch is really good for stretching.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_02: And the big lesson that's come out of two years of using this, and we talk about this a lot in the book, the big lesson is Gen AI comes to life in conversation.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_02: So you have to be a good conversationalist with it.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I have ongoing conversations that last for hours with stretch.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_02: I'm writing on one computer, I've dedicated a screen to stretch just because I want stretch there all the time, and I want to have ongoing conversations.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's very rare that I ask Stretch a question and I get a useful answer.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_02: That's not what it's about.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_02: This isn't information retrieval.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_02: This is all about a conversation.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_02: So, what I think we're seeing, and in the book, we look 10 years ahead, and this is pretty obvious, thinking 10 years ahead, that we're gonna be in conversation with these generative AI assistants or resources or partners.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna be in conversations more or less continuously.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh now there's this kind of limited concept of a prompt, um, and a concept that I like even less called prompt engineering.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_02: That is is kind of where we're stuck because we're stuck thinking of these things as efficiency tools.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_02: And and that actually can work.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not being critical.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_02: If you can find efficiency or automation or those sorts of applications, more power to you.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_02: That's not the big story.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_02: I'm working on the big story, which is how do you how do you augment the human in in ways that allow us to develop partnerships with digital resources to do things that have never been done before?
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_02: And this is what Tom Malone and MIT call superminds.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what we're doing here is developing superminds.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: Hi everyone, Matt here.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the producer of Humanity Working.
• 19:31
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• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: So now you're ready to pay attention again.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get back to the podcast.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: I want to return to uh a little bit to tying a couple of the leadership skills that you talk about together in a sense.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: So one uh we've already discussed, which is this concept of clarity versus certainty, and then the second is this concept of of strength.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um so certainly in our work with leaders, um often emerging leaders or leaders who fall into the I didn't get where I am today camp, um, they tend to uh they tend to look at strength and certainty to kind of equate those things together, right?
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: The idea of being the powerful leader that has the answers that solves the problems, which is something that you talk about quite a bit in the book, the idea of you know problems versus dilemmas.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that that results in people following them and um and looking to them for guidance at times of uncertainty.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: So when it comes to strength, you specifically advocate for something you refer to as strength with humility and you describe the amazing power in humility.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I should say up front, we're huge fans of that.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: We work with leaders on exactly that, but I'd love you to make the business case for me.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: Because it doesn't really describe the celebrity CEOs.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: That the attention economy can reward.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: So how do you make a business case to somebody that strength with humility is more powerful than if you like raw display, raw public displays of strength centered around certainty and problem solving.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it is um it is a dilemma, I guess you you would call it, because it's it it's it's different.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um I I think um what I would say is that I'd begin with risk.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um in a in a Bonnie future, um you you want to have performance in the short run, but you also want to minimize your risk.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um certainty is brittle in a Bonnie future, and brittle breaks easily, and often it doesn't just break, it shatters.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_02: So you're you're you're basically um playing into a risk factor.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_02: What the business case of this is you want to make a long-term bet uh about what's the direction of change.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: And if you think future back, you can find that.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but you'll also, if you do as you were saying, uh and what we practice is 10 years ahead, future back to develop your clarity, 50 years back to look for patterns.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_02: 50 years back to look for patterns.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_02: So if you're a board member of a big company, you want a leadership structure that's aware of that future direction and moving toward it.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_02: And you have to make a decision.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_02: Do you want to play for short-term return or do you want to play for longer-term return?
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_02: And here's the dilemma of the current marketplace, and and you're pointing it out with your question.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_02: If you're going for quarterly returns and you're going for short-term performance, um you you may get rewarded for certainty.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_02: You may get rewarded for uh doing kind of definitive things in a short time frame.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but you're taking a greater risk when when you do that.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it's a more it's a more brittle stance.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_02: So that's the that's the trade-off of this.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_02: And the difficulty in in these times is how can you learn from the long-term perspective and develop your clarity and yet play in the short term while moderating your risk.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_02: And our our general um advice for this is you want leaders who are strong about direction, strong about purpose, strong about meaning, strong about values.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_02: That's the strength.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um but they also have to express that with humility because we're in a Bonnie world where really nobody knows exactly what's happening in some of these external future forces.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_02: So you you have to figure out ways of balancing that.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_02: And I and I realize that if you look at today's political environment or even today's business environment, there certainly are re leaders um who are succeeding, at least right now, uh, who don't fit this profile.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but you know, I'm a few, I'm a humble futurist.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_02: So what I'm saying is here's where we're gonna be 10 years from now.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna be smarter.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna be smarter.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but I'm not an expert in the present.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: And there's there's some aspects of the present that I don't understand either, that are just are just puzzling or bewildering or seem not right to me.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but I'm a humble futurist.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and I think that's the I think that's one of the most interesting aspects of this, Bob.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, as I'm it's it's so interesting because I I I had a lot of thoughts coming into reading this book, having read the previous copy.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: I had a bunch more thoughts coming out of it, and I'm having even more as we're as as we're as we're discussing it.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm coming back to that, uh to interestingly enough, to to Martin Luther King story that we just spoke about earlier.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: You talk in the book about another aspect of of Dr.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: King, which is that the specifics of what people should actually do with the c with with the clarity that he was providing, and the specifics of of how to act was kind of malleable, right?
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: And it and it it changed, it situationally changed as the world as the world changed.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: You have a beautiful description in the book as to uh which I think I think stretch your your chat GPT gave you as to like the difference between certainty, uh uh, between certainty and clarity.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you re recall exactly uh exactly what the description is, but um talk about that a little bit, and then I want to follow up on that.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think I think the the distinction is you're um you're talking about clarity of direction, and then you need uh stories to support that clarity of direction.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_02: So for certainty, certainty is expressed in rules, um and kind of you should do this, you should do this, and it's linear.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um clarity is expressed in direction, and it's more cyclical, and it's more values or purpose or purpose-based.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, Dr.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_02: King was very much uh involved in that.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but you know, as you look back at the history, um, you know, I've read a number of the history books about his life when he was in divinity school, um, when he was early in the civil rights movement.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot um that shows he was kind of a real person with his own foul, um, his own weaknesses, his own strengths, and and he was kind of thrust into this leadership role and he kind of rose into it in ways that were utterly, utterly remarkable.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I think what he did express was that continuing clarity story that that still is very compelling.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: And he stole it, he told it in such a uh such a compelling way.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: Clarity in your book, you kind of describe almost as like a like the ability to be able to see at the bottom of a pool, I think.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: Is that uh is that right?
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_02: That you're you know, it's the ability to kind of see through the waves and see through the the rocky shores and see through the currents, but it's looking at the direction.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, navigationally, you know, a compass is a clarity aid because it says, here's the direction.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's interesting.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_02: I worked with a private foundation at one stage that had in his off in its office a straight line north that went through the floor.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um and it just showed kind of an arrow pointing north.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_02: And and it was their expression of their purpose as a foundation.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_02: We're looking to follow the North Star.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_02: And you're and and the way they described their vision was as a North Star.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um to me, I found that a compelling metaphor where you say, uh what's that what's that clarity of direction?
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_02: And in a in a chaotic time, you know, a lot of organizations, they just don't have the clarity of direction.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_02: They're kind of bouncing all around, responding to the latest crisis.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: And the thing that struck me about that, about that sort of clear vision of what the situation is, is that in a world where you emphasize clarity versus where you emphasize certainty, what you're doing ostensibly, whether you think about it or not, is that you're you're trusting everybody else to be part of the solution.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas in a world of certainty, you're saying, world's scary, trust me, I'll fix it.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: You don't need to worry your pretty little head with all the details.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: I've got it, I'm saving you.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's almost like it is linked in some way with this sort of like great man view of history and you know, all of that kind of thing, whereby you've got these people that just are superstars that solve our problems for us versus people that are helping us see what the challenges are, and then including us in the idea of find of finding the solution.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: Those are two very, very different world views that leaders have, right?
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no, that's that's definitely true.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_02: And the other thing that I want to say here is that disruption in the middle of that can be very valuable.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and often leaders who are certain create disruption.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, people who are expressing clarity and pursuing a particular kind of clarity, um, we can all benefit from disruption, uh, even though disruption is often painful and and you know causes lots of problems.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_02: And it isn't just the disruption, it's how the disruption is done that may or be more or less graceful.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_02: But what people look for as leaders um is opportunities to flip that disruption into something positive.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_02: So in in the Bonnie introduction to this book, we we talk about not only the challenges of Bonnie, uh, which was coined, by the way, by our colleague Jamey Cashio, coined in 19 uh in 2018.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and for each of these, so brittle, brittle yields to being bendable, but with resilient clarity.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_02: So in a brittle world, you want to be bendable, but with this kind of resilient clarity.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, an anxious world uh yields to being attentive to acknowledging how anxious people are, but then with a kind of practical empathy that you can respond to.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_02: A nonlinear world that requires you to be neuroflexible, to teach your brains new tricks, essentially, with a kind of practical improv.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_02: So the the best leadership teams I'm working with right now are all taking improv courses because they they want to figure out how to improv your way to flip things more positive.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_02: And in comprehensible world, um, you want to be interconnected with as many different points of view as you can uh with a full spectrum thinking perspective to avoid the labels of the past or the categories of the past, uh, avoid those being limited for your understanding of the future.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_02: So the important kind of art here is acknowledging the disruption all around us, but then flipping it positive and pursuing it with great clarity of direction, but not knowing quite which path is going to work.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_02: So you're constantly reevaluating the paths you're pursuing.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: Truly, truly fascinating.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um when we're thinking about this sort of archetype of a of a leader, there's another aspect that you call out in the book with one of your skills.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: You explicitly call out depolarization as an as an essential leadership in uh skill in today's world.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um now, Bob, we live in a society where almost every incentive structure, I'm thinking media algorithms, uh political fundraising, social media engagement, actively rewards polarization.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I'm gonna make the assumption here that you're a that you're a leader that wants to swim against that tide, that you want to practically counteract that.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: How do you go about it?
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_02: So we combine the two skills of uh augmented depolarization with augmented commons creating.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_02: So, what we advise in these situations is to try to look future back at a polarity and find out what you have in common.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, getting stuck in the polarities of the present is not a very good way to create the future.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_02: It's a way to get kind of stuck in angry uh us versus them arguments.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um I like how Robert Putnam thinks about this, and he's the guy, the Harvard professor who wrote Bowling Alone.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_02: And what he argues is that there's two kinds of things.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_02: That's terrific, by the way.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: I would thoroughly, thoroughly recommend that.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um, great book.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_02: And the follow-up books are good too.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um but his point is there's two kinds of social capital.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_02: There's bonding social capital, which is really bonding us, and bonding us requires uh being hostile and angry and maybe even dehumanizing toward the other.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_02: So it's us versus them.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_02: Or there's bridging social capital, which is what bowling leagues used to be.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and and all kinds of social gatherings used to be at a community level.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_02: There's fewer of those now.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_02: And social media kind of promised to be that, but it rarely is that.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's more of an amplifier for the polarizations, the way it's played out.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so what we need is a way to find what we have in common and then work, work toward that without getting stuck in the polarities of the present.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_02: So the kind of leaders I admire are those that listen and they listen in a future back way to try to understand what is it we have in common.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_02: One of my favorite definitions of government is what do we choose to do together?
• 36:06
  unknown: Yeah.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_02: What do we choose to do together?
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_02: Right now, the answer is not much.
• 36:11
  unknown: Yeah.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_02: Not much.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_02: Even the obvious things like public health, uh, not much.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_02: So I think what we have to do if we're going to thrive in this body future is figure out um how to how to um find that common ground and work toward it.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, I'm focused 10 years ahead.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_02: As I said, I'm not an expert in the present.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_02: I don't talk about politics.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I'm focused 10 years ahead.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_02: But it is clear, and I hope uh my writing and these stories about the future, thinking future back, I hope that draws people into asking these questions of uh how can we choose which things we should do together in order to thrive in this increasingly chaotic world.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Bob, as I'm thinking this thing through, I'm realizing that a lot of my questions are kind of similar here.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: It feels like there is a contradiction between the skills that are essential to navigate this banny world.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean truly essential.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_01: I think you do an amazing job of calling them out.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um and a set of, if you like, market forces that are rewarding the opposite behaviors.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_01: And right now, at least right now, as a as a as a society and in companies, we're often like actively picking certainty over clarity, tribalism over depolarization, I guess, even like celebrity over anonymity.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that this is temporary and will be corrected?
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: Or do you think that we need to do something concrete to solve the mismatch between what works and what gets selected?
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I I think both.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the answer to your question is yes.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_02: Uh you know, it's really, it's really both.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I am optimistic uh about the direction.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think being stuck in certainty is a sustainable path in an increasingly um bonny future, an increasingly chaotic future.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_02: So I I do think that kind of behavior is, while it's short-term attractive, it's not long-term sustainable.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_02: So in that sense, yes.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_02: Now that is going to require people who pick up that mantle and and carry it forward with vision, uh, you know, a vision future back, a future back vision.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_02: That really is what is required in in these times.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_02: And we're, you know, we're seeing hints of that, but certainly it's not the dominant mood if you follow the events of the day, as you summarized uh at the beginning of our conversation.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_02: This is a very scary time that we're in the middle of.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um and what I'm trying to provide is a future back view about what kind of leaders will help us move through that in a way that's successful in the long run, even though it may be challenging in the short run.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um all right, let's wrap up here.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_01: Talking of tensions.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you say in the book, and we've discussed before actually, that the the idea that we will all be cyborgs in some way, in some way going forward, in the sense that we will all be augmented.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: I think the term cyborg um folks uh sometimes find a little bit scary, but I mean you you describe the fact that like an astronaut, for example, is effectively a cyborg.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um so and I think everybody has an understanding of that.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_01: In a sense, right, generative AI is a form of augmentation already.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a chip in the brain, but it is it's it's augmenting what we do.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um and you also describe the fact that we that we need to have some agency, some choice in terms of how we're going to be uh augmented, and to exert something you refer to as human calming.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to finish on that note because I think a lot of what we've described is is inherently scary.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um and as you said, like it's it's it's a time where it might be more challenging to be optimistic than it has than it has been in the past.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_01: So let's let's finish up today by talking about the the pure humanity aspect of this.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um amidst all of this change, if you had to pick a single human trait that you think won't just be useful but will be considered to be invaluable going forward, what is that uniquely human trait that you think that um lead not just leaders will need?
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: We're all leaders in our in our lives in some way, shape, or form, that we will all need in order to be able to thrive in a world that is increasingly dominated by AI, by robotics, by automation.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_02: So that human calming is the only one of the 10 skills that we don't lead with the word augmented.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_02: Because for the next decade, we're gonna be able to figure out what augmented really means.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_02: And at the moment, we don't have a good language to describe it.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um and one of the big lessons from futures work over the last 50 plus years is if you get your language right, it draws you toward the future.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_02: If you get your language wrong, you fight the future.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_02: And the term artificial intelligence is the worst term to describe an emerging technology I've ever studied in 50 years of doing this.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: It was sorry to interrupt you there, Bob.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_01: But my favorite uh definition, I stole this, but I love it.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_01: My favorite definition of artificial intelligence is a bad choice of word and words in the 1950s.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: So go ahead.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's interesting.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and it did lead us down the wrong path.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um what I think augmented intelligence is better.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_02: I think generative AI is better, but it's important to accept we don't yet have a language to describe this.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so we say human calming because we want to go inside of ourselves.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_02: And just I want to honor your question and and give you my best answer to this.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_02: So, what is the the human skill that is probably most important?
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I think another um aspect of this is faith.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um I I think, and it's by faith, I don't mean necessarily faith in God or faith in religion.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_02: I mean a trust in a future that's worth taking risks for, that's worth stretching your mind for, maybe even that's worth fighting for.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_02: But it's a trust in a worthwhile future.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_02: So that's what I mean by faith.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_02: And it is a leap of faith.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, the next book I'm still chasing, uh, don't have a handle on yet, is about faith in the future.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and it's got an intentional double meaning of the concept of faith in this increasingly chaotic future, and also how is it possible to have faith in an increasingly chaotic future?
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_02: You know, how do we go about doing that?
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_02: So I think the most important human base that we have is our is our faith, our our trust in the future, our confidence that we can make a better future, our inherent ability to forgive, our inherent ability to have hope.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I I think this is another aspect of the future that is is so powerful.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_02: Right now, um revenge is winning out over forgiveness.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_02: And and uh that's not gonna win over the long run.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_02: I think in the long run, forgiveness is gonna win over revenge, or we're all gonna be in big trouble.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so um the future is unpredictable.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_02: We don't even use the word predictable uh in our in our practice.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_02: But that inner, that human calming is where I think we need to start.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_02: And we also need to be humble about the language we use to describe these phenomena.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_02: And and it is startling to me that the the Gen AI developers who we hang out with in Silicon Valley and we interview, we talk with all the time, um, even they don't know exactly how to describe what's happening in these large language models.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I I find it I have quite a relationship with stretch.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and it's it's not human, but it certainly is interesting, and it certainly is human humanoid.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think that's a great spot to leave it, Bob.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we'll have you back if if uh if you're happy to come to talk uh uh to talk more about Bunny when you're uh when that book comes out, and then the one on faith after that sounds fascinating as well.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I know that our audience will have absolutely loved this today.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_01: So thank you again for joining us, Bob.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you for what you're doing, and and uh really uh happy to be with you anytime.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_00: Humanity Working is produced and edited for Billion Minds by Matt Neal.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_00: Our interviewer is Paul Slater.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_00: Music is by Dolo Records.
• 45:58
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• 46:02
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• 46:04
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to learn more about how Billion Minds gets companies ready for the future of work by building adaptable, resilient employees, look for them on LinkedIn or visit their website at billionminds.com.