Author Archives: Robert B. Tucker

About Robert B. Tucker

Robert B. Tucker is a globally recognized business futurist and president of The Innovation Resource Group in Santa Barbara, California. He has advised clients in 54 countries and authored eight books, including the bestsellers Managing the Future and Driving Growth Through Innovation. Tucker’s insights have guided organizations from IBM, Citibank, and American Express to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Dubai government. As one of the founders of the Innovation Movement, Robert has appeared on Bloomberg, Channel News Asia, Network 18 India, PBS, and was a featured guest on the CNBC series The Business of Innovation. A regular contributor to Forbes.com, Robert’s latest book is Build a Better Future: 7 Mindsets for Navigating the Age of Acceleration.

6 Leadership Conferences For Those Without a Davos Invite

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6 Leadership Conferences For Those Without a Davos Invite

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

If you didn’t receive an invitation to Davos, the annual World Economic Forum happening now in Davos, Switzerland, don’t feel deprived. By most accounts, Davos is no longer what it once was.

For decades, Davos was the most prestigious conference attended by global political and business leaders committed to improving the state of the world. Topics frequently included sustainability, corruption, and income inequality. But in an era defined by acceleration, authoritarianism, and disruptive technologies, Davos increasingly resembles what it has tried to avoid becoming: just another elite business meeting, heavy on power, light on moral imagination.

This year’s willingness to set aside core principles to accommodate political spectacle underscores how much the event has drifted from its founding spirit.

But the fading luster of Davos should not diminish the value of leadership conferences. As a business futurist and innovation speaker, these are my favorite and I highly recommend them. Stepping away from daily demands to engage in perspective-shifting conversation is especially important today when there is so much change. As someone who has participated in all sorts of conferences across industries and continents, I’ve found leadership conferences — done well — to be among the most personally rewarding investments leaders can make.

Unlike plain-Jane business conferences that focus on tactics or transactions, the best leadership gatherings expose you to ideas that stretch your assumptions. They introduce you to movers and shakers outside your usual orbit. And they help you align your organization — and your life — with the Mega-Forces shaping the future. At their best, such conferences allow you to “trade minds” with thinkers and practitioners who are wrestling seriously with the same questions you are.

What follows are six leadership conferences worth considering in 2026. Each offers a different doorway into the ideas, values, and conversations leaders need in the Age of Acceleration. Attend even one, and you’re likely to return changed — not just better informed.

1. SXSW Austin, Texas | March 12–18, 2026

I was so impressed after my attendance at SXSW in 2018 that I wrote a Forbes column about the experience. Founded in 1987 as a music festival, SXSW has evolved into one of the world’s most influential cross-disciplinary gatherings, drawing leaders from technology, media, film, music, and culture.

The conference endured a near-fatal crisis in 2020, when it was forced to cancel just days before opening due to COVID-19 — the first cancellation in its history. Subsequent virtual and hybrid iterations helped it survive, though many would agree the event is still rediscovering its pre-pandemic rhythm.

That said, if you can handle large crowds, SXSW remains a powerful collision point for ideas and serendipity. It offers a rare opportunity to see how cultural, technological, and societal shifts intersect — and where new possibilities may emerge.

2. Lead Where You Stand Conference, Santa Barbara, California | June 4–5, 2026

Founded in 2015 by visionary leader, Dr. Gayle Beebe, this intimate West Coast conference has become a quiet must-attend for business and NGO leaders seeking to create greater impact, no matter where they are planted. Anchored in Christian moral values, this annual gathering emphasizes character, community, and forward-thinking responsibility in leadership.

Since its inception, The New York Times columnist David Brooks has been a central voice and a guiding light. (Full disclosure: I’ve been invited to speak this year on “Leading and Flourishing in the Age of Acceleration.”)

Formerly held on Westmont College’s bucolic Montecito campus, sell-out demand has pushed Lead Where You Stand to move to a nearby resort hotel. The test ahead will be preserving its reflective intimacy as it scales.

3. ALIVE: Intentionally Evolving Our Futures, Asheville, North Carolina | April 23–25, 2026

ALIVE is not a conference in the conventional sense — it is an immersive experience designed for leaders who believe the future is not something to predict, but something to shape. Limited to 100 participants, the gathering brings together foresight practitioners and organizational leaders from around the world.

There are no traditional panels or slide decks at this conference. Instead, ALIVE unfolds as a co-creative journey organized around becoming future-ready, future-empowered, and future-conscious. Participants are invited to sit with uncertainty, learn alongside peers, and renew their sense of agency and empowerment to build a better future.

In an era saturated with screens and algorithms, the value of in-person, human-to-human engagement — free of bots and buzzwords—cannot be overstated.

4. The Future of Everything Festival, New York City | May 4–5, 2026

Produced by The Wall Street Journal, this high-impact convening brings together CEOs, scientists, policymakers, technologists, and cultural thinkers to examine the forces reshaping business and society. Topics range from AI and geopolitics to climate, health, and the future of work.

What distinguishes this conference is its intellectual range and seriousness. Big ideas are grounded in real-world implications. Attendees leave with sharper insight into emerging risks, overlooked opportunities, and the strategic choices leaders must make in an age of relentless change. This one is not about tactics — it’s about perspective.

5. Harvard Flourishing Summit, Cambridge, Massachusetts | March 18–19, 2026

Conceived by Harvard professor Tyler J. VanderWeele, Director of the Human Flourishing Program, this summit invites leaders to ask deeper questions about what success truly means. Drawing on research across public health, psychology, economics, and philosophy, the gathering reframes flourishing as a rigorous, evidence-based framework encompassing meaning, relationships, character, health, and contribution.

At a time when leadership conversations are dominated by speed and scale, the Summit offers something rare: space to reflect on values, direction, and purpose — and to ask not just how fast we are moving, but toward what kind of future.

6. Aspen Ideas Festival Aspen, Colorado | June 25 – July 1, 2026

Founded in 2005 by the Aspen Institute, a liberal think tank, the Aspen Ideas Festival has become a flagship gathering for exploring the world’s most pressing issues. Policymakers, business innovators, scientists, artists, and authors converge for a week of deep dialogue across disciplines.

With roughly 3,000 attendees and hundreds of sessions, the festival blends structured programming with informal exchanges over meals and mountain walks. Topics span public policy, technology, health, culture, economics, and leadership — offering both breadth and depth in equal measure.

Why One Leadership Conference a Year Matters

In a world moving faster than our institutions — and often our leadership capabilities — can keep up with, attending at least one leadership conference each year is no longer a luxury. It is a discipline. The right gathering can restore your sense of perspective, sharpen your foresight, and reconnect you to the values that first called you to leadership.

You don’t need an invitation to Davos to engage seriously with the many forces driving the future. You simply need the courage to step out of the day-to-day, enter an environment where ideas and values still matter, so that you return home prepared to build a better future.

This article originally appeared in Forbes

Image credit: Unsplash

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Why Intuition is the Maximum Form of Intelligence

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Why Intuition is the Maximum Form of Intelligence

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

Have you ever had a bad feeling about a relationship or business deal, but you went ahead with it anyway? Later, after things went awry, you remembered a faint alarm that went off in your mind — your intuition.

During a 35-year career studying and coaching business innovators, I have witnessed firsthand how intuition is an indispensable navigational compass, if only we understand it and listen to this subtle, often misunderstood form of intelligence.

“Every time I’ve made a bad decision about a person,” one business owner observed, “I eventually recalled how much I knew about that person before I made the decision. I knew perfectly well that person couldn’t be trusted. And yet greed or something made me believe the opportunity was so great that I didn’t listen to what my intuition was trying to tell me.”

Your intuition can help you sense when a problem exists. It can slow you down and help you avoid making rash, emotional decisions. Intuition can help you spot both threats and opportunities in today’s fast-changing world.

“I don’t care if the numbers say we’re going to make a billion dollars,” one CEO in the natural foods industry explained. “If I don’t feel good in my gut about a decision, I won’t go ahead. When it doesn’t feel right, it’s like a nervous stomach. When a decision feels right, it’s like a great meal. It just feels good.”

If We Are “Needy” or “Greedy,” Our Intuition Lacks Ignition

Intuition is a kind of “sixth sense” early warning system. If we are attuned to it, our intuition can help us in all sorts of ways: to sense when a problem exists, to alert us to changes in the environment, and, most importantly, to prevent us from making rash, emotional decisions, especially about people. However, if we are needy (“I need to fill this position right now”) or greedy (“This deal is too good to pass up”), our intuition has no impact on our thinking.

In today’s exponential world, the earliest indicators of change sometimes show up first in premonitions: “something is not right,” or “something has changed.” Despite the raging popularity of data (“In God we trust. Everyone else bring data”), dashboard metrics are lagging indicators and may not yet reflect a marketplace change. Leading indicators, on the other hand, could be anything from a seemingly random comment at a conference or a feeling of unease that merits further attention and investigation. For example, this quarter’s numbers may still look normal, yet you sense something important has changed in the market for your services, or imminent danger bubbling beneath the surface.

Intuitive customer-facing employees often pick up on changing customer expectations well before surveys or quarterly reports capture the trend. When leadership listens to those employees and treats their intuitions as valuable inputs rather than useless hunches, such weak signals can become an early warning that changes are afoot and action is required. While competitors wait for lagging data collection to catch up, those who recognize early signals are often the ones who ride the waves of change.

How Some Leaders Tap Intuitive Intelligence

Over the years, the popularity of intuition in business has waxed and waned. University of Texas professor Weston Agor’s seminal research measured intuitive intelligence, using the Myers-Briggs test. He discovered that successful executives used intuition in a variety of ways: to size up people they are dealing with; to make quick decisions, such as in negotiating sessions when they must “think on their feet” and especially in making decisions when all the facts simply aren’t available.

Agor’s research has been confirmed by further studies. Harvard Business School professor Daniel Isenberg reached similar conclusions after studying the thought processes of 16 senior managers in large corporations and smaller mid-sized firms. Isenberg followed each executive for an average of two days, observing them as they went through their day.

When he interviewed each executive, he found that they tapped intuitive judgment at almost every turn to support and interpret whatever data was relevant. “Particularly when faced with highly complex problems or issues for which there are no precedents,” Isenberg reported.

Five Ways to Activate Your Intuition

As academic studies have proven, leaders who consistently make better decisions don’t rely on gut instinct alone—they train their minds to tune in to subtle, often faint alarm bells. Here are five techniques for how to tune in and maximize this high form of intelligence.

1. Create White Space to Detect Signals.

Intuition emerges when the mind is allowed to connect dots beneath conscious awareness. Continuous input crowds out insight. Leaders who deliberately step away from screens and meetings give their brains time to integrate weak signals—subtle shifts in markets, people, and timing that data has not yet captured. Resilience coach Eileen McDargh starts each year with a one-week silent retreat in Mexico and recommends starting each day quietly with no screens.

2. Elevate Intuitions to Hypothesis Status

Intuitive impulses should neither be obeyed blindly nor ignored completely. Treat them as an early hypothesis. When something feels “off,” that is a cue to explore assumptions, scan for confirming or disconfirming evidence, and run small experiments.

3. Broaden the Signal Field

Strong intuition depends on exposure. Leaders with the sharpest instincts read widely, listen across boundaries, and stay close to customers and frontline realities. Their pattern recognition improves because their mental models are continuously refreshed with diverse inputs.

4. Listen to Somatic Signals

Experience often registers in the body before it reaches conscious thought. Tension, hesitation, or unexpected premonitions are not answers—but they are data. Ignoring them because we are needy or greedy reduces decision quality; noticing them expands it.

5. Think Future-Back

Intuition sharpens when leaders mentally rehearse multiple futures. By imagining success and failure two or three years out, hidden risks and overlooked opportunities surface early—when action is still possible.

In the final analysis, intuition is not guesswork. It is a compressed experience, activated by reflection, tested by foresight, and converted into results through human agency. Wise decision-makers treat both as inputs, not conclusions—signals that prompt foresight, sense-making, and deliberate action rather than blind acceptance.

This article originally appeared in Forbes

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Why Human Flourishing Decides Who Thrives in the Future

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The human flourishing movement in modern leadership

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

As we enter the final stretch of this decade, one reality is becoming impossible to ignore: innovation alone is no longer enough. In an era defined by compounding political, technological, demographic, and environmental disruption, the decisive question is not how fast we can change, but whether human beings can still flourish amidst all that change.

The gap that now matters most is not ideological or economic. It is the widening divide between those who are flourishing and those who are floundering.

For more than three decades, my work as a futurist has focused on helping leaders anticipate what’s next. But in recent years, the focus has shifted — from unleashing innovation to safeguarding something even more fundamental: human flourishing. With the publication of Build a Better Future: 7 Mindsets for Navigating the Age of Acceleration, flourishing has moved from the margins of leadership conversations to the center. It will also be the focus of my presentation at the Lead Where You Stand Conference next June in Santa Barbara.

Why flourishing? Because we are entering a decade in which there will be more change than in the prior 100 years. Gauging how we’re doing — not just financially, but emotionally, socially, and psychologically — will become essential. This isn’t hyperbole. It is the result of compounding mighty Mississippi Rivers of political, technological, generational, social, and environmental MegaForces of Change converging all at once.

Too Much Change, Too Fast

An Ipsos Global Trends Survey confirms what many of us feel intuitively: large segments of the population in advanced democracies are struggling to keep up with the pace of change. Seventy-five percent of respondents in Germany and nearly 90 percent in South Korea report that their world is changing too fast. In the United States, multiple studies suggest that a majority of adults are not truly flourishing. Among Gen Z, roughly 60 percent report high levels of anxiety, depression, or loneliness, with only about 39 percent thriving in recent surveys.

While political movements on the right have learned to weaponize this sense of unease, their proposed solution — reclaiming a mythologized past — has delivered few tangible results. Promises to fix healthcare, affordability, and government dysfunction ring hollow amid recurring shutdowns, widening inequality, and the erosion of basic social supports.

Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, speaking recently in a BBC lecture, described our moment as one of “wild possibilities.” Yet he also chastised today’s elites across the political spectrum for failing to help societies navigate these turbulent times. Drawing parallels to the decline of ancient Rome, Bregman points to cowardice, corruption, and “moral rot”: billionaires dodging taxes, politicians performing instead of governing, and media systems that profit from outrage and division.

“Today it is not the most capable who rise,” Bregman observed, “but the least scrupulous. Not the most virtuous, but the most brazen.”

What people yearn for — across cultures and ideologies — are leaders who deliver solutions, not slogans and insults. Leaders who can help societies navigate volatility while restoring a sense of agency, safety, and hope. The real divide today is not between red and blue or left and right. It is between those who are flourishing and those who feel left behind.

Enter The Human Flourishing Movement

That is where the Human Flourishing Movement comes in. Based out of research initiatives at Harvard and Baylor Universities, this growing effort seeks a broader and more holistic measure of what it means to thrive. As scholars dig deeper, flourishing has emerged as a more complete lens for understanding human potential — one that goes beyond income or productivity metrics.

True flourishing, according to this research, includes mental and physical health, but also meaning and purpose, strong relationships, character, and even spiritual fulfillment. In short, it is about building lives — and societies — that work.

Some of my futurist colleagues see artificial intelligence as a powerful catalyst for human flourishing. Tech visionaries speak enthusiastically about abundance, the end of work, and a New Renaissance driven by AI-enabled creativity. Zack Kass, former Head of Go-To-Market at OpenAI, has articulated visions that go well beyond productivity gains—imagining breakthroughs that elevate human potential itself.

Yet for many people, the darker realities of AI are far more tangible than its promises. In 2025 alone, more than 1.1 million layoffs have been announced. Anxiety has become the new workplace pandemic, as forecasts suggest that up to half of all entry-level jobs could disappear within a few short years. At the same time, digital technologies are weakening our ability to communicate, collaborate, and act in the common good.

Our central challenge is this: our technological prowess — and too often our greed — has outpaced our commitment to human flourishing. We can split atoms, edit genes, and build machines that rival human intelligence. What we have not yet done is articulate a compelling, inclusive vision of a better future for all.

That, ultimately, is the work ahead. And it is work that leaders in business, government, and civil society can no longer afford to postpone. If the Age of Acceleration has taught us anything, it is that the future does not simply happen to us — we help shape it by the mindsets we adopt and the choices we make. Human flourishing is not a soft aspiration; it is a strategic imperative. The leaders who will matter most in the decade ahead will be those who can combine foresight with humanity, innovation with purpose, and speed with wisdom. Building a better future begins not with grand promises, but with the daily practice of thinking — and leading — differently.

This article originally appeared in Forbes

Image credit: Pexels

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Why Everyone’s Future Depends on Strategic Imagination

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Why Everyone's Future Depends on Strategic Imagination

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

One of the most valuable practices I encourage my corporate clients to adopt is shifting constantly between the demands of the present state and the possibilities within their future state.

The ability to mentally step out of today’s activities and spend time visualize tomorrow’s opportunities is a discipline shared by the innovators, former prisoners of war, elite athletes, and top performers I’ve interviewed throughout my career. They imagine the future as they want it to unfold, and once that picture is clear, the next essential step is developing a strategy to bring it to life.

Innovators think strategically even when the chips are down. When change was slow and largely linear, strategy was optional. But in an era of accelerating disruption, crafting and executing a personal strategy is not just advisable – it’s necessary. Webster defines strategy as the art of maneuvering forces into the most advantageous position prior to engagement with the enemy. Today the “enemy” is complacency: resistance to change, isolation, a poor information diet, and the false comfort of familiar routines. Your strategy shapes how you respond to the unexpected, but just as importantly, it guides you toward opportunity and helps you make your own luck.

Change Your Narrative with Strategic Imagination

What can you do to ensure your relevance and viability in a post-pandemic, fast-shifting world? The first step is to begin incorporating yourself mentally. Think of yourself as You, Incorporated. A global enterprise with one employee and one mission: your long-term growth. You may currently serve a single client, your employer, but your unique mix of capabilities, experiences, and aspirations belongs to You, Inc. Research suggests most knowledge workers will have five careers in their lifetime. That makes it vital to continually build the skills and aptitudes you’ll need for your next move.

Equally important is becoming a lifelong learner. Not long ago, what you learned in school could carry you for decades. No longer. We now generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of information daily, and the pandemic only accelerated the knowledge explosion. Endless Zoom calls and digital distractions create the illusion of keeping up while pulling our attention toward celebrity dramas and political theater instead of toward meaningful signals of change. The innovators I’ve interviewed learn out of curiosity, not fear. They binge-learn. They discover a topic, plunge into it, consume the books, devour the articles, and seek out experts who stretch their thinking.

Another vital mindset is to consider yourself a student of change. Recent history — from 9/11 to Moore’s Law to the global financial crisis to COVID-19 — reminds us that no one is insulated. Events far beyond your industry or geography can reshape your career, your livelihood, and your future. Innovators are students of the past and the future. They monitor technological, political, demographic, social, and environmental shifts because they understand these forces can upend markets overnight.

The next dimension is managing your mental environment. When IBM surveyed 1500 CEOs about the most essential leadership trait in a fast-changing world, they named creativity. Whether you’re running a company, leading a team, or guiding a household, your effectiveness hinges on the quality of your mental inputs. By curating your information diet — choosing what you read, watch, and think about — you shape the conditions for your own future success.

Finally, unleash your inner visionary. We have never needed visionaries more. Vision isn’t limited to think tanks or ivy-covered institutions; it’s a mindset available to anyone willing to imagine what will be needed next. My hometown of Santa Barbara is praised for its vision because, after a devastating earthquake in 1924, leaders re-imagined the city’s architectural future with intention and aesthetic ambition. Their vision shaped a place now known for its distinctive Spanish-style architecture and rare sense of coherence.

To tap your own visionary potential, reflect on the question: What do you see when someone asks about your next breakthrough idea? The answer reveals not just your imagination, but the future you are preparing to create.

This article originally appeared in Forbes

Image credit: Pixabay

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What’s Next for Humanity in the Age of Acceleration?

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Polycrisis

What's Next for Humanity in the Age of Acceleration?

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

Never in the three decades I’ve been a practicing futurist have I been so uncertain about what lies ahead. Think of the many issues that confront humanity right now: a nagging war in Ukraine, job loss due to automation and AI, the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S. and other countries, and potential bubbles setting off the next global financial crisis.

The future arriving at our doorstep will be unlike anything we’ve seen before. As I illustrate in Build a Better Future, a book that probes where we’re headed in the next 10 years, colliding issues such as these are likely to ignite the next “polycrisis,” a disruption where multiple crises occur simultaneously, interacting in ways that amplify their overall impact.

Unlike isolated crises, a polycrisis involves interconnected challenges that feed into one another, making them harder to resolve.

The COVID-19 pandemic gave us a stark illustration of how a polycrisis ignites. What started as a flu virus in Wuhan, China, quickly morphed into a public health crisis, economic meltdown, supply chain disruption, and a social upheaval, all at once.

More recently, the CrowdStrike crisis on July 19, 2024, was a stark reminder of just how deeply interconnected our systems have become and how fragile our systems are.

On July 19, 2024, thousands of travelers found themselves stranded in airports worldwide as flights were canceled en masse, their carefully laid plans thrown into disarray. In hospitals, the consequences were even more dire. Emergency rooms struggled to access patient records, delaying critical treatments and surgeries, while doctors and nurses were left scrambling to work around the digital blackout.

Meanwhile, as ATM’s stopped working, banking customers faced their own disruptions, transactions froze, and businesses and consumers were unable to process payments. While Microsoft was able to restore systems in a matter of days, it was a polycrisis wake-up call — a seemingly isolated tech failure that cascaded into worldwide economic turmoil, public frustration, and operational paralysis, exposing just how vulnerable we are to the unintended consequences of our digital era dependencies.

The war in Ukraine is an example of a poly-crisis multiplier. What started as a regional conflict quickly became a geopolitical crisis unseen since WWII. As Europe scrambled for alternatives to Russian gas, a food crisis ensued as wheat exports from the region ground to a halt, and an inflationary shock rippled through global markets. Layer in climate-driven disasters — wildfires in Canada blanketing the U.S. East Coast in smoke, record-setting heat waves in the Middle East, and extreme flooding in Asia—and you begin to see how today’s crises can combine and multiply.

The rapid advance of technology is bringing both promise and peril. AI and automation upend industries, displacing millions, while social media platforms — once heralded as tools for global connectivity — become breeding grounds for misinformation and disinformation that further erode trust in institutions.

Add to this a world where biodiversity loss threatens food security, and geopolitical conflicts spark energy crises that send shockwaves through global markets. Those who can anticipate these polycrises and navigate their complexities will not just survive, they will prevail in the future.

Looking ahead at the rapid proliferation of AI and the trend of nationalism and isolation, the world is facing not just individual problems, but deeply intertwined issues that exacerbate one another and require holistic, systemic approaches. The question is: are we prepared?

This article originally appeared in Forbes

Image credit: Pexels

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Strengthen Your Human Agency to Thrive in the Age of AI

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Strengthen Your Human Agency to Thrive in the Age of AI

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

In a recent podcast, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, was asked: “Who are the 20-something company founders of our era?” His response was telling: “They seem to be almost nonexistent. It’s not good. I hope this is just a weird accident of history. But something has really gone wrong.”

Actually, we do know what has gone wrong. In my just-released book, Build a Better Future: 7 Mindsets for Navigating the Age of Acceleration, I argue that what has gone wrong is a condition the futurist Alvin Toffler described 50 years ago: future shock. Too much change in too short a time. We are currently reeling under the pressure of so much political, technological, and social change. We are simply not ready for the profound changes just ahead.

While Silicon Valley tech “visionaries” promise that A.I. will bring quantum benefits in productivity, with our lives filled with abundance, superintelligence, and even a coming renaissance, other observers see a New Dark Age ahead for humanity.

Already, A.I. is responsible for the loss of tens of thousands of white-collar jobs, with more cuts on the way. On a recent edition of “60 Minutes,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that A.I. could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, beginning with consulting firms, law firms, and financial service firms. Already, A.I. is not just helping employees with tasks; it is completing them.

For many young people, the age of A.I. is anything but abundant. The system seems rigged by robots and algorithms, and is a dizzying maze of complexity. The first rung on the ladder is missing entirely. There is little talk of the New Renaissance nor of A.I. as an enabler of human flourishing.

Instead, there’s bewilderment that we’ve travelled so far, so fast from that period in 2021 that came to be known as “The Great Resignation,” when 41 million Americans voluntarily left their jobs, exercising their agency to pursue new careers, start businesses, or follow their bliss.

Today, a leaner employment picture has taken hold. Large employers are shedding jobs at a pace not seen in years, shrinking career paths that once sustained middle-class families and long-term security. Nearly two million Americans have been out of work for six months or more, according to government data.

Consider the plight of job seekers today. For any open position, applicants are competing with hundreds of other job seekers on multiple job websites. For employers, A.I. performs the first few rounds of culling, so job seekers have no choice but to try and game the system. And when an interview is obtained, the exchange is often with a bot rather than a human being. The rejected applicant receives no feedback on which to hone their approach for the next opportunity.

AI did not set off these trends, but has exacerbated them. And combine AI with the “affordability crisis,” and you have a sense of why young people are often depressed and cynical.

People under the age of 40 are 24 percent less well off financially than a generation ago. Very few of them can afford a home, afford college, or pay off debilitating debt. Young men are especially challenged by the dawning age and are simply checking out instead. In five years, projections are that two women will graduate from college for every one man.

As AI changes how we work and how we add value, new mindsets will be needed. Meanwhile, problem-solving, critical thinking, and numeracy are in decline. A 2024 global assessment found that 34 percent of U.S. adults possess math skills below primary school level. One study noted that 45 percent of college students showed no significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, or writing skills upon earning their four-year degree.

For many, “adulting” is becoming more difficult. Everything from paying bills on time to scheduling your own doctor’s appointments, keeping track of passwords, living within your means, cooking something that isn’t microwaved, and navigating modern life is what adulting entails. Young people often report struggling with these very tasks, especially relationship building. Surveys suggest nearly half of Americans have no close personal friends.

A key component of flourishing in the years ahead will be nurturing one’s human agency, or what people used to call motivation. By whatever name you call it, unleashing one’s agency to meet the challenge of hyper change will be essential to success in the Age of Acceleration.

Human agency is the capacity to act intentionally. It’s the ability and willingness to make choices and shape our own futures, rather than be controlled by circumstances. Human agency is the “make it happen” component in ourselves that is essential to navigating change, seizing opportunity, and building the future we most desire for ourselves.

Whatever we call it, it involves believing you can make your way in this world, and that “if it’s going to be, it’s up to me.” Start by noticing your thought patterns, replacing reactive thinking with intentional thinking. Practice self-management by asking, “What can I control here?” and acting on that. And you cultivate the conviction that your ideas and actions still matter — no matter the headlines. In an era of accelerating change, rediscovering and strengthening that sense of agency may be the most vital skill we can train ourselves to master.

When I speak to audiences of young people, I emphasize that we are not powerless. Even when it feels like the world is being driven by algorithms and A.I.-generated bots, your choice is to strive to become a fully functioning human being. Even when you’ve applied for a hundred jobs, been interviewed by bots, not by humans who gave you zero feedback, agency is a muscle. Agency is the belief that your choices matter.

Agency is the belief that if one door closes, another door opens, and it may turn out for the better.

This article originally appeared in Forbes

Image credit: Gemini

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To Survive the Sudden Acceleration You Need a Navigator’s Mindset

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To Survive the Sudden Acceleration You Need a Navigator's Mindset

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

When I began writing Build a Better Future six years ago, I thought I was writing a book about managing change. I didn’t realize we were entering the fastest-evolving era in human history — an era where the pace of change sometimes outstrips our ability to process it.

Events kept overtaking me. Drafts grew outdated before the ink was dry. What I came to see is that thriving in what is being called the Age of Acceleration demands something new; not a roadmap, but a compass. Not a fixed plan, but a mindset. That compass, I’ve come to believe, is made up of seven essential navigational mindsets. Together, they form a way of thinking and meeting reality that equips us to meet the future with resilience, clarity, and purpose.

1. The Preparedness Mindset: Learning to Expect the Unexpected

Preparedness begins with the acceptance that disruption is the new normal. COVID-19 taught us that the unthinkable can become tomorrow’s headline. Leaders like Dr. Andrew Smith of the Rowan-Salisbury School System in North Carolina didn’t have a pandemic playbook to follow — but they had a mindset. Smith stepped back, assessed, and used a simple business tool to restore order amid chaos.

Preparedness isn’t about fear; it’s about readiness. It’s the ability not just to bounce back, but to bounce forward. Whether facing the next pandemic, a job transition, or a technological revolution, this mindset helps us stay grounded when the winds of change howl.

2. The Futurist Mindset: Learning to Spot the Signals Amid the Noise

Futurists don’t predict the future; we can’t. What we do is forecast change, whether social, demographic, technological, geopolitical, or otherwise. Like meteorologists, we forecast what is most likely to occur. We look beyond the noise of the daily news cycle to discern patterns and “weak signals” of what’s emerging. In Build a Better Future, I introduced the D.I.T.O. framework: Direction, Implications, Threats, and Opportunities. It’s a simple but powerful tool to think through what’s changing, why it matters, and how to respond.

The challenge today isn’t the lack of information; it’s information overload. We live in what I call an “attention-fracking economy” — where our focus is mined, monetized, and sold to the highest bidder. Adopting the Futurist Mindset gives us a tool for reclaiming our attention and redirecting it toward insight rather than distraction.

3. The Adaptability Mindset: Learn, Unlearn, Relearn

As an innovation advisor and “coach” to C-suite executives for 30 years, I’ve had a ringside seat working with disrupted companies and industries. In the Age of Acceleration, denial of marketplace change is a growing liability. Kodak, Nokia, and Sears learned that lesson too late.

But adaptability is not about giving up your principles. If you told your employees that diversity and inclusion are important values, but then capitulate to political winds, that’s not adaptation but conformity. True adaptation requires discernment: knowing when to bend and when to stand firm. People like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Nelson Mandela, and Aleksey Navalny remind us that sometimes the most courageous adaptation is moral resistance.

4. The Human Agency Mindset: Take Back the Inner-Compass

Even as AI and automation reshape work and life, we remain the authors of our own story. Yet our sense of agency — our belief that we can influence events — is under siege. Endless scrolling, algorithmic manipulation, and the loneliness epidemic are symptoms of a deeper erosion of human will.

Reclaiming agency starts with awareness: What’s going into your mind each hour? What are you allowing to shape your worldview? Technology can amplify our creativity or numb it; the choice is ours. As I like to remind my audiences, we’re not backseat passengers in someone else’s self-driving car. We can grab the wheel.

5. The Long View Mindset: Think Beyond the Quarter

Most of us live in the tyranny of the immediate — the next deadline, the next quarter, the next news alert. The Long View Mindset restores perspective. It reminds us that today’s actions echo into tomorrow’s outcomes.

As former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin once noted, “Evaluating past decisions is one of the most overlooked leadership disciplines.” History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. When we connect past, present, and future, we make wiser decisions — and build legacies that endure.

6. The Anticipatory Mindset: Learning to See Around Corners

Every decision — from choosing a career path to making a certain investment — is a bet on the future. The Anticipatory Mindset helps us make those bets intelligently. Psychologist Philip Tetlock’s research shows that the best forecasters aren’t gurus with crystal balls; they’re thoughtful people who continually update their assumptions, seek diverse viewpoints, and stay humble about what they don’t know.

In organizations and in life, the goal isn’t to be certain — it’s to be ready.

7. The Visionary Mindset: Lead With Imagination and Integrity

Our age is not short of visionaries; it’s short of genuine ones. The tech barons who promise that AI will “save humanity” are often selling something — mainly their stock. The Visionary Mindset calls us to look higher.

History offers models of authentic vision: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionary spirituality, Barbara Marx Hubbard’s call for conscious evolution, Buckminster Fuller’s insistence that we design our way to abundance. Real visionaries don’t surrender to decline; they create alternatives. They see the possible amid the peril — and they invite others to help build it.

Becoming a Modern Navigator

Taken together, these seven aptitudes form what I call the Navigator’s Mindset — a way of approaching life with curiosity, courage, and moral clarity. Navigators are those who don’t fear change but face it with intelligence and resolve. They see opportunity in turbulence and responsibility in leadership.

The world will keep accelerating. Technologies will keep advancing. Institutions will keep straining under the pressure of transformation. But your mindset — your compass — remains yours to shape. There is no final destination in the Age of Acceleration — only direction, purpose, and the daily courage to keep steering toward a better tomorrow.

The future is not set in stone. It’s something we build: one day, one choice, and one good decision at a time.

This article originally appeared in Forbes

Image credit: Pixabay

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Reclaiming a Vision of a World That Works

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Reclaiming a Vision of a World That Works

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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Something Critical Gets Lost When Robots and AI Take Over

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Something Critical Gets Lost When Robots and AI Take Over

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

My wife and I just returned from a week in the Côte d’Azur region of France. A miracle of sorts happened! All of our flights were on time! Psychologist Jennifer Freed was not so fortunate.

During an eight-hour flight delay at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, Freed was unable to talk to a single airline employee at the gate. Monitors kept giving out false information. “Hundreds of people were stranded without any human compassion, comfort, or accurate updates,” Freed fumed on Substack. “I wrote five separate emails to American Airlines only to have each one replied to in a bot-AI way that completely missed the content of my complaints.”

As we leap into the digitized Age of Acceleration, the unstated goal seems to be to reduce or eliminate all human-to-human contact. Automate everything – it’s going to be great. But observers like Jennifer Freed are not so sure. They are noticing a huge side effect that technologists don’t seem to want to admit: humans need face-to-face contact lest they languish.

As a futurist and innovation coach, I sometimes invite my clients to envision what life might be like “over there.” After we’ve gotten across the river and are on the other side of something. While tech visionaries spin tales of utopia and freedom from drudgery on the other bank, in fact, the goal of removing humans from business and social interactions might well have the opposite effect.

In the name of efficiency, convenience, and cost savings, taking humans out of the equation could have far-reaching consequences. In fact, it already has.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has looked at the effects of smartphones on the social and psychological development of teens. Many of them are using TikTok for four to five hours a day on average. Haidt warns that the shift from a “play-based childhood” to a “phone-based childhood” amounts to a radical rewiring of social development, and his research leads him to believe it’s doing real damage.

The problem is not just that teens stare at screens instead of each other. The real issue is that the scaffolding of face-to-face trust, emotional attunement, and shared presence is eroding. In The Anxious Generation, Haidt argues that social media provides faux “connection” while subtly replacing eye contact, interpersonal reciprocity, and the unspoken calibration that real human encounters afford.

Various studies echo Haidt’s assertion that humans are not modules you can replace with bots or chat windows. When you eliminate or drastically reduce real, in-person contact — eye to eye, side by side, speech flowing both ways — you strip out the micro-moments where empathy, synchrony, trust, and emotional regulation are built.

In effect, the promise of “automate everything” may economize interactions. But it risks hollowing out the relational substrate of society. As Freed lamented in that Dallas gate delay, the absence of any human to lean on, any eyes to meet, any moment of presence, reveals what robots can’t replicate — and what we lose when we try to put everything on autopilot.

“I remember a time when customer service meant something special,” says Freed. “When a friendly human would take my call and laugh with me about whatever the issue was. I recall when a waitperson would really look at you and take your order with a sense of pride and competent memory.”

This article originally appeared in Forbes

Image credit: 1 of 1,300+ FREE quotes for your presentations at http://misterinnovation.com

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Future Shock Is Here

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How To Thrive When Change Won’t Slow Down

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

If you’ve ever written a book, you know that “publication day” is a fraught moment. All your hard work to publicize the book can easily be overtaken by news events. I’ve had author friends come out with a book on September 11th, or maybe it’s just a random CrowdStrike attack that shuts computers down worldwide, and pulls attention elsewhere. It could be anything. All that hard work goes down the drain.

So, for October 5th, when we launch Build a Better Future: 7 Mindsets for Navigating the Age of Acceleration, I’ve got my fingers crossed. I’m hoping for a slow news day. Yet, I’m realistic enough to know that anything could happen to distract attention. And in today’s world, it probably will.

We’re living during a time when unimaginable things are happening. It’s a unique inflection point in history, complete with breakthroughs and breakdowns, everywhere all at once. Established ways of operating are becoming outdated. Institutions are groaning under the weight of rapid change. Whether we identify it or not, many people are experiencing “future shock,” anxiety caused by too much change coming at us too fast.

With the arrival of generative AI on November 30th, 2022, we’ve moved past the familiar agricultural, industrial, and information ages. We’ve stepped squarely into the Acceleration Age. Combine AI’s arrival with authoritarianism, social media, attention fracking, climate change, tariff wars, and other what I call “MegaForces” of change, and the world is rearranging itself at a dizzying pace.

We are simply not prepared for the future that is arriving faster than ever. And that’s why I wrote the book that comes out on October 5th.

The premise of Build a Better Future is that understanding the fundamentally changed nature of this emerging landscape is essential if we want to avoid being left behind. But as someone who’s devoted his life to taking people higher, let me put it another way. If you want to thrive and flourish, regardless of externalities, studying how to create the future should be part of your curriculum.

I sometimes hear people say, “I don’t keep up with the news anymore, it’s so depressing.” That’s an understandable reaction, especially to political trends like rising authoritarianism, because that’s not what the founders of this country had in mind 250 years ago when they embarked on this bold experiment called the United States of America. But it’s a prescription for sitting on the bench while disaster strikes.

When you begin to adopt some of these seven mindsets outlined in the book, you stop feeling so overwhelmed. You start seeing farther ahead. You begin to see where this confluence of MegaForces is leading us, and how we need to shape them.

You develop what I call “future fluency” – the ability to speak the language of change. You start using change as a stepping stone instead of a stumbling block.

Based on studying the rate of acceleration, futurists like Gerd Leonhard and others estimate that there will easily be more change in the next 10 years than there has been over the past 100 years. We’re going to need to adopt future forecasting tools like scenario planning and applied imagination to our work and to our lives. If we don’t, we can end up giving people bad advice based on faulty assumptions.

For example, if your kid came to you and said they were going to study to become a software engineer, up until very recently, you’d endorse their decision without further thought. But with AI, all bets are suddenly off as to the future of that profession. The tech areas – Silicon Valley, Seattle area, etc. – are shedding tech jobs left and right.

In the course of my work with industries, I often hear variations on “we didn’t see it coming.” It could have been an industry consolidation change, or it could have been a demographic, social, technological, or geopolitical change. In other words, they were minding the store and serving customers, and wham, some external force that they knew about but hadn’t paid sufficient attention to turned their world upside down.

When you begin to live with these navigational mindsets, you become what I call change resilient. You start building, not just reacting. Not just defending. You start bouncing back faster from external events. You stop feeling overwhelmed. When you adopt the new tools of innovation, things can change for the better very fast. Your perspective changes. You feel empowered.

One of the ways is to challenge yourself and your team with challenging questions. Or with this set up: “As crazy as it may sound and as impossible as it may seem, what if we …” and then have them finish the sentence with as many ways as possible. It gets the juices flowing, and that’s the point. Given the bludgeoning amount of change, we’re all treading water, waiting for the next shoe to drop.

In the age of acceleration, your imagination will be more important than how much information you have, because data is abundant. The most important role you can play going forward is to get in touch with how you inspire possibility thinking in yourself, how you envision the way you want the future to unfold.

Nothing about the future is written in stone. The future is what we make it. We can build a better, more inclusive, more sustainable future by the way we think about the future. Starting today.

This article originally appeared in Forbes

Image credit: Gemini

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