From carving out space for deliberate thought to building positive friction into decision-making, lessons on how leaders can navigate uncertainty, preserve human trust, and thrive in an AI-driven world.
By Caroline Stokes, Author of AfterShock to 2030: A CEO’s Guide to Reinvention in the Age of AI, Climate, and Societal Collapse
This week at Thinkers50, it was refreshing to see CEOs and leaders modelling the approaches needed to thrive in our post-pandemic, AI-driven world.
Here are a few top-line takeaways:
- Create time to think and dream new possibilities. We can outsource so much to AI, but our minds don’t have to emulate that always-glued-to-AI pace. Instead, we can create and power new futures by carving out deliberate thinking time. I heard that thinking time is now a luxury. It doesn’t have to be that way.
- Build positive friction into your work so you can build, iterate and execute ideas. Revise, iterate, execute. In some circles, it’s a 15-second loop.
- Update your own operating system by creating war simulations (or dark scenarios) to test old-paradigm thinking for new world realities. This is part of the program in my AfterShock Labs service.
- Identify the human-to-human dilemmas in how you operate so everyone speaks and acts in service to the mission. People pattern-match values that don’t align with human behaviour and this breaks trust. Unintentionally clogging up your organization won’t get you where you need to go.
- Identify what’s scarce and will inevitably become more so in a world that doesn’t live within planetary limits, so you can act around it. Your CFO will love that as prices go up when resources are limited. And if you don’t want “enshittification” complaints from your customers, some forward planning or sounding the alarm will go a long way to securing the future of the organization.
- Activate explorer mode. The only certainty is rough terrain, and we each need to learn and write a new playbook. Take time to write the new one with the leaders you want to venture into this new, uncertain world with — where your product, service and organization are powered by people and supported by AI — that everyone can get behind. Expect your customers to want to see that in the near future, as belts continue to tighten.
If I were to word-cloud what I can remember from Thinkers50, words like “humility” showed up more than once, as well as the willingness to say “I don’t need to know everything” while still leading in an unknowable future. No-one called this a “polytunity”, but with a dash of optimism and space for thought, new tools and radical thinking, we can find opportunities in the multi-stream changes we experience every day.
Thinkers50 was so good, I’m already looking forward to attending next year’s gathering. The topics for 2027 — trust, accountability and power — are close to my work in AfterShock to 2030 and AfterShock Labs.
