GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

If it feels to you like the world has shifted into overdrive of late, you’re not alone. As a futurist, I observe that we’ve crossed over from the familiar Information Age and have entered the Age of Acceleration. Since COVID, the pace of change has become exponential, rather than linear, increasing at an ever-increasing rate.

In the next ten years, we will experience more change than in the past hundred. That’s not hyperbole; it’s the reality of compounding and converging technological, geopolitical, social, and environmental forces.

These MegaForces of Change are rewriting the future in real time. They are creating new winners and losers, reshaping industries and institutions overnight. They are exposing how ill-prepared we are to navigate the whitewater rapids just ahead.

At such an inflection point in human history, it’s easy to feel powerless. It’s natural to feel as if events are happening to us rather than because of us. But that’s why I wrote Build a Better Future: 7 Mindsets for the Age of Acceleration.

After three decades advising corporate managers around the world on strategies for driving growth through innovation, I’m shifting my practice. My new passion is to accelerate human flourishing in light of this accelerated age. My goal is simple: I want to assist not just managers but everybody to regain a sense of agency, purpose, and hope amidst the biggest deluge of change we’ve experienced in our lifetimes. In short, I aspire to change the direction of humanity by helping people change their mindset.

The World Is Changing — But So Can We

Yes, the world is changing crazily, but here’s the good news: the same forces that threaten to destabilize us also contain the seeds of renewal and abundance. From my research with hundreds of innovators, entrepreneurs, and futurists, I’ve found that what separates those who flourish from those who falter isn’t intelligence, resources, or position — it’s mental hygiene.

Among the seven mindsets I explore in Build a Better Future, two feel especially urgent today.

The first is the Preparedness Mindset — the discipline of scanning the horizon, challenging assumptions, and thinking several moves ahead. Prepared leaders don’t wait for the next crisis; they actively anticipate it. They train themselves and their teams to see weak signals of change before they become tidal waves.

When you start thinking like a futurist, something remarkable happens: you start thinking about the direction, implications, threats, and opportunities in change. You begin to see the connections between events rather than reacting to them one headline at a time. You learn to differentiate signals from noise. You stop being a passive consumer of the future and start proactively shaping it.

The discipline of forward-thinking prepares you to make decisions, manage risk, and allocate your attention to what matters most. You begin to pounce on opportunities earlier, adapt faster, and feel less anxious because you have a framework for making sense of the chaos. The future stops being an abstraction — and becomes something you influence, moment by moment.

From Overwhelm to Agency

The second mindset is what I call the Human Agency Mindset. As A.I. grows ever more capable, the winners will be those who focus on nurturing what makes us uniquely human: our empathy, creativity, moral judgment, and the ability to imagine future possibilities no machine can conceive.

We now possess technologies that our ancestors could scarcely imagine. We can split atoms, edit genes, and train machines to mimic human cognition. But as technological capabilities soar, our wisdom capabilities have lagged. The real question isn’t whether we can unleash a certain technology, but whether we should, and what the implications are. How to ensure that progress serves humanity, not the other way around, will be a huge issue going forward because we can’t outsource wisdom. We must cultivate it. The danger isn’t that AI will become “smarter” than us — it’s that we’ll stop exercising our own capacity for creative thought and reflection.

Reclaiming Our Dreams

At the book launch party in Santa Barbara, I told a story about starting as a young journalist working from a tiny San Fernando Valley apartment. It was so small, the joke was you had to go outside to change your mind. But I didn’t mind because I was on fire with how journalism allowed me to subsidize my curiosity. I interviewed and profiled the visionaries and thought leaders of that era, and the experience of being around these tomorrow-builders changed my life. The big thing I became aware of was the importance of mindset in realizing your potential, and in turning visions into reality.

Today, 40 years later, I believe we all need new mindsets for what’s ahead. We need loftier visions that transcend fear and fatalism and misinformation. We need to reclaim a vision of a world that works for all — a world where technology amplifies human creativity, where wisdom keeps pace with innovation, and where we dare to believe that we can solve even the most vexing problems.

With a new set of mindsets, we can see that our best days lie ahead. That our children and grandchildren are not resigned to live lives of quiet desperation. With renewed mindsets, we can believe that nothing about the future is written in stone. The future is what we make it. It’s not something to fear or flee from. It’s something we can build — one mindset, one decision, one act of imagination at a time.

Image credits: Pexels

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