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AI, Cognitive Obesity and Arrested Development

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

Some of the biggest questions of our age are whether AI will ultimately benefit or hurt us, and how big its’ effect will ultimately be.

And that of course is a problem with any big, disruptive technology. We want to anticipate how it will play out in the real world, but our forecasts are rarely very accurate, and all too often miss a lot of the more important outcomes. We often don’t anticipate it’s killer applications, how it will evolve or co-evolve with other emergent technologies, or predict all of the side effects and ‘off label’ uses that come with it. And the bigger the potential impact new tech has, and the broader the potential applications, the harder prediction becomes. The reality is that in virtually every case, it’s not until we set innovation free that we find its full impact, good, bad or indifferent.

Pandora’s Box

And that can of course be a sizable concern. We have to open Pandora’s Box in order to find out what is inside, but once open, it may not be possible to close it again. For AI, the potential scale of its impact makes this particularly risky. It also makes any meaningful regulation really difficult. We cannot regulate what we cannot accurately predict. And if we try we risk not only missing our target, but also creating unintended consequences, and distorting ‘innovation markets’ in unexpected, potentially negative ways.

So it’s not surprising there is a lot of discussion around what AI will or will not do. How will it effect jobs, the economy, security, mental health. Will it ‘pull’ a Skynet, turn rogue and destroy humanity? Will it simply replace human critical thinking to the point where it rules us by default? Or will it ultimately fizzle out to some degree, and become a tool in a society that looks a lot like today, rather than revolutionizing it?

I don’t even begin to claim to predict the future with any accuracy, for all of the reasons mentioned above. But as a way to illustrate how complex an issue this is, I’d like to discuss a few less talked about scenarios.

1. Less obvious issues: Obviously AI comes with potential for enormous benefits and commensurate problems. It’s likely to trigger an arms race between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ applications, and that of itself will likely be a moving target. An obvious, oft discussed potential issue is of course the ‘Terminator Scenario’ mentioned above. That’s not completely far fetched, especially with recent developments in AI self preservation and scheming that I’ll touch on later. But there are plenty of other potential, if less extreme pitfalls, many of which involve AI amplifying and empowering bad behavior by humans. The speed and agility AI hands to hackers, hostile governments, black-hats, terrorists and organized crime vastly enhanced capability for attacks on infrastructure, mass fraud or worse. And perhaps more concerning, there’s the potential for AI to democratize cyber crime, and make it accessible to a large number of ‘petty’ criminals who until now have lacked resources to engage in this area. And when the crime base expands, so does the victim base. Organizations or individuals who were too small to be targeted for ransomware when it took huge resources to create, will presumably become more attractive targets as AI allows similar code to be built in hours by people who possess limited coding skills.

And all of this of course adds another regulation challenge. The last thing we want to do is slow legitimate AI development via legislation, while giving free reign to illegitimate users, who presumably will be far less likely to follow regulations. If the arms race mentioned above occurs, the last thing we want to do is unintentionally tip the advantage to the bad guys!

Social Impacts

But AI also has the potential to be disruptive in more subtle ways. If the internet has taught us anything, it is that how the general public adopts technology, and how big tech monetizes matter a lot. But this is hard to predict. Some of the Internet’s biggest negative impacts have derived from largely unanticipated damage to our social fabric. We are still wrestling with its impact on social isolation, mental health, cognitive development and our vital implicit skill-set. To the last point, simply deferring mental tasks to phones and computers means some cognitive muscles lack exercise, and atrophy, while reduction in human to human interactions depreciate our emotion and social intelligence.

1. Cognitive Obesity The human brain evolved over tens of thousands, arguable millions of years (depending upon where in you start measuring our hominid history). But 99% of that evolution was characterized by slow change, and occurred in the context of limited resources, limited access to information, and relatively small social groups. Today, as the rate of technological innovation explodes, our environment is vastly different from the one our brain evolved to deal with. And that gap between us and our environment is widening rapidly, as the world is evolving far faster than our biology. Of course, as mentioned above, the nurture part of our cognitive development does change with changing context, so we do course correct to some degree, but our core DNA cannot, and that has consequences.

Take the current ‘obesity epidemic’. We evolved to leverage limited food resources, and to maximize opportunities to stock up calories when they occurred. But today, faced with near infinite availability of food, we struggle to control our scarcity instincts. As a society, we eat far too much, with all of the health issues that brings with it. Even when we are cognitively aware of the dangers of overeating, we find it difficult to resist our implicit instincts to gorge on more food than we need. The analogy to information is fairly obvious. The internet brought us near infinite access to information and ‘social connections’. We’ve already seen the negative impact this can have, contributing to societal polarization, loss of social skills, weakened emotional intelligence, isolation, mental health ‘epidemics’ and much more. It’s not hard to envisage these issues growing as AI increases the power of the internet, while also amplifying the seduction of virtual environments. Will we therefore see a cognitive obesity epidemic as our brain simply isn’t adapted to deal with near infinite resources? Instead of AI turning us all into hyper productive geniuses, will we simply gorge on less productive content, be it cat videos, porn or manipulative but appealing memes and misinformation? Instead of it acting as an intelligence enhancer, will it instead accelerate a dystopian Brave New World, where massive data centers gorge on our common natural resources primarily to create trivial entertainment?

2. Amplified Intelligence. Even in the unlikely event that access to AI is entirely democratic, it’s guaranteed that its benefits will not be. Some will leverage it far more effectively than others, creating significant risk of accelerating social disparity. While many will likely gorge unproductively as described above, others will be more disciplined, more focused and hence secure more advantage. To return to the obesity analogy, It’s well documented that obesity is far more prevalent in lower income groups. It’s hard not to envisage that productive leverage of AI will follow a similar pattern, widening disparities within and between societies, with all of the issues and social instability that comes with that.

3. Arrested Development. We all know that ultimately we are products of both nature and nurture. As mentioned earlier, our DNA evolves slowly over time, but how it is expressed in individuals is impacted by current or context. Humans possess enormous cognitive plasticity, and can adapt and change very quickly to different environments. It’s arguably our biggest ‘blessing’, but can also be a curse, especially when that environment is changing so quickly.

The brain is analogous to a muscle, in that the parts we exercise expand or sharpen, and the parts we don’t atrophy. As we defer more and more tasks to AI, it’s almost certain that we’ll become less capable in those areas. At one level, that may not matter. Being weaker at math or grammar is relatively minor if our phones can act as a surrogate, all of my personal issues with autocorrect notwithstanding.

But a bigger potential issue is the erosion of causal reasoning. Critical thinking requires understanding of underlying mechanisms. But when infinite information is available at a swipe of a finger, it becomes all too easy to become a ‘headline thinker’, and unconsciously fail to penetrate problems with sufficient depth.

That risks what Art Markman, a psychologist at UT, and mentor and friend, used to call the ‘illusion of understanding’. We may think we know how something works, but often find that knowledge is superficial, or at least incomplete, when we actually need it. Whether its fixing a toilet, changing a tire, resetting a fuse, or unblocking a sink, often the need to actually perform a task reveals a lack in deep, causal knowledge. This often doesn’t matter until it does in home improvement contexts, but at least we get a clear signal when we discover we need to rush to YouTube to fix that leaking toilet!

This has implications that go far beyond home improvement, and is one factor helping to tear our social fabric apart. We only have to browse the internet to find people with passionate, but often opposing views on a wide variety of often controversial topics. It could be interest rates, Federal budgets, immigration, vaccine policy, healthcare strategy, or a dozen others. But all too often, the passion is not matched by deep causal knowledge. In reality, these are all extremely complex topics with multiple competing and interdependent variables. And at risk of triggering hate mail, few if any of them have easy, conclusive answers. This is not physics, where we can plug numbers into an equation and it spits out a single, unambiguous solution. The reality is that complex, multi-dimensional problems often have multiple, often competing partial solutions, and optimum outcomes usually require trade offs. Unfortunately few of us really have the time to assimilate the expertise and causal knowledge to have truly informed and unambiguous answers to most, if not all of these difficult problems.

And worse, AI also helps the ‘bad guys’. It enables unscrupulous parties to manipulate us for their own benefit, via memes, selective information and misinformation that are often designed to make us think we understand complex problems far better than we really do. As we increasingly rely on input from AI, this will inevitable get worse. The internet and social media has already contributed to unprecedented social division and nefarious financial rimes. Will AI amplify this further?

This problem is not limited to complex social challenges. The danger is that for ALL problems, the internet, and now AI, allows us to create the illusion for ourselves that we understand complex systems far more deeply than we really do. That in turn risks us becoming less effective problem solvers and innovators. Deep causal knowledge is often critical for innovating or solving difficult problems. But in a world where we can access answers to questions so quickly and easily, the risk is that we don’t penetrate topics as deeply. I personally recall doing literature searches before starting a project. It was often tedious, time consuming and boring. Exactly the types of task AI is perfect for. But that tedious process inevitably built my knowledge of the space I was moving into, and often proved valuable when we hit problems later in the project. If we now defer this task to AI, even in part, this reduces depth of understanding. And in in complex systems or theoretic problem solving, will often lack the unambiguous signal that usually tells us our skills and knowledge are lacking when doing something relatively simple like fixing a toilet. The more we use AI, the more we risk lacking necessary depth of understanding, but often without realizing it.

Will AI become increasingly unreliable?

We are seeing AI develop the capability to lie, together with a growing propensity to cover it’s tracks when it does so. The AI community call it ’scheming’, but in reality it’s fundamentally lying. https://openai.com/index/detecting-and-reducing-scheming-in-ai-models/?_bhlid=6a932f218e6ebc041edc62ebbff4f40bb73e9b14. We know from the beginning we’ve faced situations where AI makes mistakes. And as I discussed recently, the risks associated with that are amplified because of it’s increasingly (super)human or oracle-like interface creating an illusion of omnipotence.

But now it appears to be increasingly developing properties that mirror self preservation. A few weeks ago there were reports of difficulties in getting AI’s to shut themselves down, and even of AI’s using defensive blackmail when so threatened. Now we are seeing reports of AI’s deliberately trying to hide their mistakes. And perhaps worse, concerns that attempts to fix this may simply “teach the model to become better at hiding its deceptive behavior”, or in other words, become a better liar.

If we are already in an arms race with an entity to keep it honest, and put our interests above its own, given it’s vastly superior processing power and speed, it may be a race we’ve already lost. That may sound ‘doomsday-like’, but that doesn’t make it any less possible. And keep in mind, much of the Doomsday projections around AI focus on a ’singularity event’ when AI suddenly becomes self aware. That assumes AI awareness and consciousness will be similar to human, and forces a ‘birth’ analogy onto the technology. However, recent examples of self preservation and dishonesty maybe hint at a longer, more complex transition, some of which may have already started.

How big will the impact of AI be?

I think we all assume that AI’s impact will be profound. After all, it’s still in its infancy, and is already finding it’s way into all walks of life. But what if we are wrong, or at least overestimating its impact? Just to play Devils Advocate, we humans do have a history of over-estimating both the speed and impact of technology driven change.

Remember the unfounded (in hindsight) panic around Y2K? Or when I was growing up, we all thought 2025 would be full of people whizzing around using personal jet-packs. In the 60’s and 70’s we were all pretty convinced we were facing nuclear Armageddon. One of the greatest movies of all time, 2001, co-written by inventor and futurist Arthur C. Clark, had us voyaging to Jupiter 24 years ago! Then there is the great horse manure crisis of 1894. At that time, London was growing rapidly, and literally becoming buried in horse manure. The London Times predicted that in 50 years all of London would be buried under 9 feet of poop. In 1898 the first global urban planning conference could find no solution, concluding that civilization was doomed. But London, and many other cities received salvation from an unexpected quarter. Henry Ford invented the motor car, which surreptitiously saved the day. It was not a designed solution for the manure problem, and nobody saw it coming as a solution to that problem. But nonetheless, it’s yet another example of our inability to see the future in all of it’s glorious complexity, and for our predictions to screw towards worse case scenarios and/or hyperbole.

Change Aversion:

That doesn’t of course mean that AI will not have a profound impact. But lot’s of factors could potentially slow down, or reduce its effects. Not least of these is human nature. Humans possess a profound resistance to change. For sure, we are curious, and the new and innovative holds great appeal. That curiosity is a key reason as to why humans now dominate virtually every ecological niche on our planet. But we are also a bit schizophrenic, in that we love both change and stability and consistency at the same time. Our brains have limited capacity, especially for thinking about and learning new stuff. For a majority of our daily activities, we therefore rely on habits, rituals, and automatic behaviors to get us through without using that limited higher cognitive capacity. We can drive, or type, or do parts of our job without really thinking about it. This ‘implicit’ mental processing frees up our conscious brain to manage the new or unexpected. But as technology like AI accelerates, a couple of things could happen. One is that as our cognitive capacity gets overloaded, and we unconsciously resist it. Instead of using the source of all human knowledge for deep self improvement, we instead immerse ourselves in less cognitively challenging content such as social media.

Or, as mentioned earlier, we increasingly lose causal understanding of our world, and do so without realizing it. Why use our limited thinking capacity for tasks when it is quicker, easier, and arguably more accurate to defer to an AI. But lack of causal understanding seriously inhibits critical thinking and problem solving. As AI gets smarter, there is a real risk that we as a society become dumber, or at least less innovative and creative.

Our Predictions are Wrong.

If history teaches us anything, most, if not all of the sage and learned predictions about AI will be mostly wrong. There is no denying that it is already assimilating into virtually every area of human society. Finance, healthcare, medicine, science, economics, logistics, education etc. And it’s a snooze and you lose scenario, and in many fields of human endeavor, we have little choice. Fail to embrace the upside of AI and we get left behind.

That much power in things that can think so much faster than us, that may be developing self-interest, if not self awareness, that has no apparent moral framework, and is in danger of becoming an expert liar, is certainly quite sobering.

The Doomsday Mindset.

As suggested above, loss aversion and other biases drive us to focus on the downside of change. It’s a bias that makes evolutionary sense, and helped keep our ancestors alive long enough to breed and become our ancestors. But remember, that bias is implicitly built into most, if not all of our predictions. So there’s at least chance that it’s impact wont be quite as good or bad as our predictions suggest

But I’m not sure we want to rely on that. Maybe this time a Henry Ford won’t serendipitously rescue us from a giant pile of poop of our own making. But whatever happens, I think it’s a very good bet that we are in for some surprises, both good and bad. Probably the best way to deal with that is to not cling too tightly to our projections or our theories, remain agile, and follow the surprises as much, if not more than met expectations.

Image credits: Unsplash

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The Secret to Endless Customers

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The Secret to Endless Customers

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Marcus Sheridan owns a pool and spa manufacturing company in Virginia — not a very sexy business, unless you consider the final product, which is often surrounded by beautiful people. What he did to stand out in a marketplace filled with competition is a masterclass in how to get noticed and, more importantly, get business. His most recent book, Endless Customers, is a follow-up to his bestselling book They Ask, You Answer, with updated information and new ideas that will help you build a business that has, as the title implies, endless customers.

Sheridan’s journey began in 2001 when he started a pool company with two friends. When the 2008 market collapse hit, they were on the verge of losing everything. This crisis forced them to think differently about how to reach customers. Sheridan realized that potential buyers were searching for answers to their questions, so he decided his company would become “the Wikipedia of fiberglass swimming pools.”

By brainstorming every question he’d ever received as a pool salesperson and addressing them through content online, his company’s website became the most trafficked swimming pool website in the world within just a couple of years. This approach transformed his business and became the foundation for his business philosophy.

In our interview on Amazing Business Radio, Sheridan shared what he believes is the most important strategy that businesses can use to get and keep customers, and that is to become a known and trusted brand. They must immerse themselves in what he calls the Four Pillars of a Known and Trusted Brand.

Say What Others Aren’t Willing to Say: The No. 1 reason people leave websites is because they can’t find what they’re looking for — and the top information they seek is pricing. Sheridan emphasizes that businesses should openly discuss costs and pricing on their websites. While you don’t need to list exact prices, you should educate consumers about what drives costs up or down in your industry. Sheridan suggests creating a comprehensive pricing page that teaches potential customers how to buy in your industry. According to him, 90% of industries still avoid this conversation, even though it’s what customers want most.
Show What Others Aren’t Willing to Show: When Sheridan’s company was manufacturing fiberglass swimming pools, it became the first to show its entire manufacturing process from start to finish through a series of videos. They were so complete that someone could literally learn how to start their own manufacturing company by watching these videos. Sheridan recognized that sharing the “secret sauce” was a level of transparency that built trust, helping to make his company the obvious choice for many customers.
Sell in Ways Others Aren’t Willing to Sell: According to Sheridan, 75% of today’s buyers prefer a “seller-free sales experience.” He says, “That doesn’t mean we hate salespeople. We just don’t want to talk to them until we’re very, very, ready.” Sheridan suggests meeting customers where they are by offering self-service options on your website. For his pool and spa business, that included a price estimator solution that helped potential customers determine how much they could afford — without the pressure of talking to a salesperson.
Be More Human than Others Are Willing to Be: In a world that is becoming dominated by AI and technology, showing the human side of a business is critical to a trusting business relationship. Sheridan suggests putting leaders and employees on camera. They are truly the “face of the brand.” It’s okay to use AI, just find the balance that helps you stay human in a technology-dominated world.

As we wrapped up the interview, I asked Sheridan to share his most powerful idea, and the answer goes back to a word he used several times throughout the interview: Trust. “In a time of change, we need, as businesses, constants that won’t change,” Sheridan explained. “One thing I can assure you is that in 10 years, you’re going to be in a battle for trust. It’s the one thing that binds all of us. It’s the great currency that is not going to go away. So, become that voice of trust. If you do, your organization is going to be built to last.”

And that, according to Sheridan, is how you create “endless customers.”

Image Credits: Shep Hyken

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com

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Don’t Fall for the Design Squiggle Lie

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Don't Fall for the Design Squiggle Lie

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Last night, I lied to a room full of MBA students. I showed them the Design Squiggle, and explained that innovation starts with (what feels like) chaos and ends with certainty.

The chaos part? Absolutely true.

The certainty part? A complete lie.

Nothing is Ever Certain (including death and taxes)

Last week I wrote about the different between risk and uncertainty. Uncertainty occurs when we cannot predict what will happen when acting or not acting. It can also be broken down into Unknown uncertainty (resolved with more data) and Unknowable uncertainty (which persists despite more data).

But no matter how we slice, dice, and define uncertainty, it never goes away.

It may be higher or lower at different times,

More importantly, it changes focus.

Four Dimensions of Uncertainty

Something new that creates value (i.e. an innovation) is multi-faceted and dynamic. Treating uncertainty as a single “thing” therefore clouds our understanding and ability to find and addresses root causes.

That’s why we need to look at different dimensions of uncertainty.

Thankfully, the ivory tower gives us a starting point.

WHAT: Content uncertainty relates to the outcome or goal of the innovation process. To minimize it, we must address what we want to make, what we want the results to be, and what our goals are for the endeavor.

WHO: Participation uncertainty relates to the people, partners, and relationships active at various points in the process. It requires constant re-assessment of expertise and capabilities required and the people who need to be involved.

HOW: Procedure uncertainty focuses on the process, methods, and tools required to make progress. Again, it requires constant re-assessment of how we progress towards our goals.

WHERE: Time-space uncertainty focuses on the fact that the work may need to occur in different locations and on different timelines, requiring us to figure out when to start and where to work.

It’s tempting to think each of these are resolved in an orderly fashion, by clear decisions made at the start of a project, but when has a decision made on Day 1 ever held to launch day?

Uncertainty in Pharmaceutical Development

Let’s take the case of NatureComp, a mid-sized company pharmaceutical company and the uncertainties they navigated while working to replicate, develop, and commercialize a natural substance to target and treat heart disease.

What molecule should the biochemists research?
How should the molecule be produced?
Who has the expertise and capability to synthetically poduce the selected molecule because NatureComp doesn’t have the experience required internally?
Where to produce that meets the synthesization criteria and could produce cost-effectively at low volume?
What target disease specifically should the molecule target so that initial clincial trials can be developed and run?
Who will finance the initial trials and, hopefully, become a commercialization partner?
Where would the final commercial entity exist (e.g. stay in NatureComp, move to partner, stand-alone startup) and the molecule produced?

And those are just the highlights.

It’s all a bit squiggly

The knotty, scribbly mess at the start of the Design Squiggle is true. The line at the end is a lie because uncertainty never goes away. Instead, we learn and adapt until it feels manageable.

Next week, you’ll learn how.

Image credit: The Process of Design Squiggle by Damien Newman, thedesignsquiggle.com

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Is All Publicity Good Publicity?

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Some Insights from Cracker Barrel

Is All Publicity Good Publicity?

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

The Cracker Barrel rebrand has certainly created a lot of media and social media attention. Everything happened so fast that I have had to rewrite this introduction twice in as many days. Originally written when the new logo was in place, it has subsequently been withdrawn and replaced with the original one.

It’s probably been a expensive, somewhat embarrassing and sleepless week for the Cracker Barrel management team. But also one that generated a great deal of ‘free’ publicity for them. You could argue that despite the cost of a major rebranding and de-branding, this episode was priceless from a marketing penetration perspective. There is no way they could have spent enough to generate the level of media and social media they have achieved, if not necessarily enjoyed.

But of course, it raises the perennial question ‘is all publicity good publicity?’ With brands, I’d argue not always. For certain, both good and bad publicity adds to ‘brand fluency’ and mental availability. But whether that is positively or negatively valanced, or triggers implicit or explicit approach or avoid responses is less straightforward. A case in point is of course Budweiser, who generated a lot of free media, but are still trying to drag themselves out of the Bud Light controversy.

Listening to the Customer: But when the dust settles, I suspect that Cracker Barrel will come out of this quite well. They enjoyed massive media and social media exposure, elevating the ‘mindshare’ of their brand. And to their credit, they’ve also, albeit a little reluctantly, listened to their customers. The quick change back to their legacy branding must ave been painful, but from a customer perspective, it screams ‘I hear you, and I value you’.

The Political Minefield. But there is some lingering complexity. Somehow the logo change became associated with politics. That is not exactly unusual these days, and when it happens, it inevitably triggers passion, polarization and outrage. I find it a quite depressing commentary on the current state of society that a restaurant logo can trigger ‘outrage. But like it or not, as change agents, these emotions, polarization and dubious political framing are a reality we all have to deal with. In this case, I personally suspect that any politically driven market effects will be short-lived. To my eye, any political position was unintentional, generated by social media rather than the company, and the connection between logo design and political affiliation is at best tenuous, and lacks the depth of meaning typically required for persistent outrage. The mobs should move on.

The Man on the Moon: But it does illustrate a broader problem for innovation derived from our current polarized society. If a logo simplification can somehow take on political overtones, pretty much any change or innovation can. Change nearly always comes with supporters and detractors, reflecting the somewhat contradictory nature of human behavior and cognition – we are change agents who also operate largely from habits. Our response to innovation is therefore inherently polarized, both as individuals and as a society, with elements of both behavioral inertia and change affinity. But with society deeply polarized and divided, it is perhaps inevitable that we will see connections between two different polarizations, whether they are logical or causal or not. We humans are pattern creators, evolved to see connections where they may or may not exist. This ability to see patterns using partial data protected us, and helped us see predators, food or even potential mates using limited information. Spotting a predator from a few glimpses through the trees obviously has huge advantages over waiting until it ambushes us. So we see animals in clouds, patterns in the stars, faces on the moon, and on some occasions, political intent where none probably exists.

My original intent with this article was to look at the design change for the logo from a fundamental visual science perspective. From that perspective, I thought it was quite flawed. But as the story quickly evolved, I couldn’t ignore the societal, social media and political element. Context really does matter. But if we step back from that, there are stillo some really interesting technical design insights we can glean.

1. Simplicity is deceptively complex. The current trend towards reducing complexity and even color in a brands visual language superficially makes sense. After all, the reduced amount of information and complexity should be easier for our brains to visually process. And low cognitive processing costs come with all sorts of benefits. But unfortunately it’s not quite that simple. With familiar objects, our brain doesn’t construct images from scratch, but instead takes the less intuitive, but more cognitively efficient route of unconsciously matching what we see to our existing memory. This allows us to recognize familiar objects with a minimum of cognitive effort, and without needing to process all of the visual details they contain. Our memory, as opposed to our vision, fills in much of the details. But this process means that dramatic simplification of a well established visual language or brand, if not done very carefully, can inhibit that matching process. So counterintuitively, if we remove the wrong visual cues, it can make a simplified visual language or brand more difficult to process than it’s original, and thus harder to find, at least for established customers. Put another way, the way our visual system operates, it automatically and very quickly (faster than we can consciously think) reduces images down to their visual essence. If we try to do that ourselves, we need to very clearly understand what the key visual elements are, and make sure we keep the right ones. Cracker Barrel has lost some basic shapes, and removed several visual elements completely, meaning it has likely not done a great job in that respect.

2. Managing the Distinctive-Simple Trade Off. Our brains have evolved to be very efficient, so as noted above, we only do the ‘heavy lifting’ of encoding complex designs into memory once. We then use a shortcut of matching what we see to what we already know, and so can recognize relatively complex but familiar objects with relatively little effort. This matching process means a familiar visual scene like the old Cracker Barrel logo is quickly processed as a ‘whole’, as opposed to a complex, detailed image. But unfortunately, this means the devil is in the details, and a dramatic simplification like Cracker Barrels can unintentionally remove many of the cues or signals that allowed us to unconsciously recognize it with minimal cognitive effort.

And the process of minimizing visual complexity can also remove much of what made the brand both familiar and distinctive in parallel. And it’s the relatively low resolution elements of the design that make it distinctive. To get a feel for this, try squinting at the old and new brand. With the old design, squinting loses the details of the barrel, or the old man, But the rough shape of them, and of the logo, and their relative positions remain. That gives a rough approximation of what our visual system feeds into our brain when looking for a match with our memory. Do the same with the new logo, and it has little or no consistency or distinctivity. This means the new logo is unintentionally making it harder for customers to either find it (in memory or elsewhere) or recognize it.

As a side effect, oversimplification also risks looking ‘generic’, and falling into the noise created by a growing sea of increasingly simplified logos. Now, to be fair, historical context matters. If information is not encoded into memory, the matching process fails, and a visual memory needs to be built from scratch. So if we were a new brand, Cracker Barrels new brand visual language might lack distinctivity, but it would certainly carry ease of processing benefits for new customers, whereas the legacy label would likely be too complex, and would quite likely be broadly deselected. But because the old design already owns ‘mindspace’ with existing customers, the dramatic change risks and removal of basic visual cues asks repeat customers to ’think’ at a more conscious level, and so potentially challenges long established habits. A major risk for any established brand

3. Distinctivity Matters. All visual branding represents a trade off. We need signal to noise characteristics that stand out from the crowd, or we are unlikely to be noticed. But we also need to look like we belong to a category, or we risk being deselected. It’s a balancing act. Look too much like category archetypes, and lack distinctivity, and we fade into the background noise, and appear generic. But look too different, and we stand out, but in a potentially bad way, by asking potential customers to put in too much work to understand us. This will often lead a customer to quickly de-select us. It’s a trade off where controlled complexity can curate distinctive cues to stand out, while also incorporating enough category prototype cues to make it feel right. Combine this with sufficient simplicity to ease processing fluency, and we likely have a winning design, especially for new customers. But it’s a delicate balancing act between competing variables

4. People don’t like change. As mentioned earlier, we have a complex relationship with change. We like some, but not too much. Change asks their brains to work harder, so it needs to provide value. I’m skeptical the in this case, it added commensurate value to the customer. And change also breaks habits. So any major rebrand comes with risk for a well established brand. But it’s a balancing act, and we should remain locked into aging designs forever. As the context we operate in changes, we need to ‘move with the times’, and remain consistent in our relationship with our context, at least as much as we remain consistent with our history.

And of course, there is also a trade off between a visual language that resonates with existing customers and one designed to attract new ones, as ultimately, virtually every brand needs both trial and repeat. But for established brands evolutionary change is usually the way to achieve reach and trial without alienating existing customers. Coke are the masters of this. Look at how their brand has evolved over time, staying contemporary, but without creating the kind of ‘cognitive jolts’ the Cracker Barrel rebrand has created. If you look at an old Coke advertisement, you intuitively know both that it’s old, but also that it is Coke.

Brands and Politics. I generally advise brands to stay out of politics. With a few exceptions, entering this minefield risks alienating 50% of our customers. And any subsequent ‘course corrections’ risk alienating those that are left. For a vast majorities of companies, the cost-benefit equation simply doesn’t work!

But in this case, we are seeing consumers interpreting change through a political lens, even when that was not the intent. But just because it’s not there doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter, as Cracker barrel is discovered. So I’m changing my advice from ‘don’t be political’ to ‘try and anticipate if you’re initiative could be misunderstood as political’. It’s a subtle, but important difference.

And as a build, marketers often try to incorporate secondary messages into their communication. But in todays charged political climate, I think we need to be careful about being too ‘clever’ in this respect. Consumer’s sensitivity to socio-political cues is very high at present, as the Cracker Barrel example shows. So if they can see political content where none was intended, they are quite likely to spot any secondary or ‘implicit’ messaging. So for example, an advertisement that features a lot of flags and patriotic displays, or one that predominately features members of the LBGTQ community both run a risk of being perceived as ‘making a political statement’, whether it is intended to or not. There is absolutely nothing wrong with either patriotism or the LBGT community, and to be fair, as society becomes increasingly polarized, it’s increasingly hard to create content that doesn’t somehow offend someone. At least without becoming so ‘vanilla’ that the content is largely pointless, and doesn’t cut through the noise. But from a business perspective, in today’s socially and politically fractured world, any perceived political bias or message in either direction comes with business risks. Proceed with caution.

And keep in mind we’ve evolved to respond more intensely to negatives than positives – Caution kept our ancestors alive. If we half see a coiled object in the grass that could be a garden hose or a snake, our instinct is to back off. If we mistake a garden hose for a snake to cost is small. But if we mistake a venomous snake for a garden hose, the cost could be high.

As I implied earlier, when consumers look at our content though specific and increasingly intense partisan lens, it’s really difficult for us to not be perceived as being either ‘for’ or ‘against’ them. And keep in mind, the cost of undoing even an unintended political statement is inevitably higher than the cost of making it. So it’s at very least worth trying to avoid being dragged into a political space whenever possible, especially as a negative. So be careful out there, and embrace some devils advocate thinking. Even if we are not trying to make a point, implicitly or explicitly, we need to step back and look at how those who see the world from deeply polarized position could interpret us. The ‘no such thing as bad publicity’ concept sits on very thin ice at this moment in time, where social media often seeks to punish more than communicate

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Fearless Fashionistas Are Staying Ahead of Change

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Why Aren’t You?

Fearless Fashionistas Are Staying Ahead of Change

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

As a fashion and lifestyle conceptualist and analyst for a major Australian department store group during the pre-Internet era, I co-created, with the GM of Marketing and GM of Women’s, Men’s, Children’s Apparel and Accessories, a completely new role. I took on the responsibility of forecasting and predicting customer, lifestyle, and fashion trends two to three years ahead of the present. While forecasting involves estimating future events or trends based on historical and statistical data, making predictions involves forming educated guesses or projections that do not necessarily rely on such data. Both forecasting and predictive skills are vital for developing strategic foresight—an organized and systematic approach to exploring plausible futures and anticipating, better preparing for, and staying ahead of change.

In this exciting new role, I had to ensure that my forecasts and predictions did not cause people to become anxious and tense, leading to poor or conflicting decisions involving millions of dollars. Instead, I needed to make sure that my forecasts convinced people that the well-researched information had been collected, captured, analyzed, and synthesized effectively. To ensure that the discovery of new marketing concepts is prompted by the development of strategic foresight, which enables people to make informed, million-dollar investment decisions by staying ahead of change.

This was before the revolutions in Design Thinking and Strategic Foresight. It taught me the fundamentals of agile and adaptive thinking processes, as well as the importance of creating and capturing value by viewing it from the customer’s perspective. It was initiated through rigorous research that involved framing the domain and scanning for trends by mentally moving back and forth among many scenarios, making links, connections, and unlikely associations. The information could then be actualized, analyzed, and synthesized to focus on evaluating a range of plausible futures as forecast scenarios. To envision the future by identifying the most promising or commercially viable trends in Australian marketing and merchandising, thereby supporting better policy-making across the organization, which consisted of forty-two department stores.

At the time, Australian fashion and lifestyle trends were considered six months behind those in Europe and the USA. This allowed me to utilize current and historical sales data, along with statistical methods, to create a solid foundation for the sales and marketing situation across various merchandise segments. Having completed a marketing degree as an adult learner, I applied and integrated marketing concepts and principles from product and fashion lifecycle management. Through being inventive, I built a fashion and lifestyle information system that had not previously existed, enabling the whole organization to stay ahead of change.

I conducted backcasting research and built relationships with top Australian manufacturers that supplied our customers, gathering evidence and feedback that supported or challenged my approach to developing trend-tracking processes over a three-year period. I traveled widely four times a year to Europe and the USA to research the fashion and lifestyle value chain, visiting yarn, textile, couture, and ready-to-wear shows to explore, discover, identify, and validate emerging and diverging trends, providing context and evidence of their evolution and convergence. This was further tested and validated by analyzing and synthesizing the most critical and commercially successful fashion and lifestyle ranges marketed and merchandised at that time in major global department stores and leading retail outlets.

Formal research was also carried out through various channels, including desktop research, fashion and lifestyle forecasting services, as well as USA and European media, to gather customer insights that could then be identified, analyzed, synthesized, and developed and implemented into key fashion marketing and merchandising trends across the entire group of forty-two department stores. This enabled them to present a coordinated marketing and merchandising approach across all apparel to customers and stay ahead of change.

This was my journey into what is now known as strategic foresight, laying the vital foundations for developing my brain’s neuroplasticity and neuroelasticity, and becoming an agility shifter, with a prospective mind and adaptive thinking strategy that enables me to stay ahead of change.

Staying ahead of change

It took me many years to realize that I was chosen for this enviable role, not because of my deep knowledge and extensive experience, but for my intuitive and unconventional way of thinking. In Tomorrowmind, Dr Martin Seligman calls this ‘prospection’, an ability to metabolize the past with the present to envisage the future. He states that a prospective mind extracts the nutrients from the past and the present, then excretes the toxins and ballast to prepare for tomorrow. He defines prospection as “the mental process of projecting and evaluating future possibilities and then using these projections to guide thought and action.”

This develops the ability to stay ahead of change by anticipating and adapting to it, and includes many elements, such as:

Being able to adopt both a systemic and tactical approach, as well as a structured and detailed perspective alongside an agile and flexible view of the current reality or present state, simultaneously.
Sensing, connecting, perceiving, and linking operational patterns, and analyzing and synthesizing them within their context.
Generating, exploring, and unifying possibilities and options for selecting the most valuable commercial applications that match customers’ lifestyle needs and wants.
Unlearning and viewing the world with fresh eyes through sensing and perceiving it through a paradoxical lens, and cultivating a ‘both/and’ bird’s-eye perspective.
Opening your heart, mind, and will to relearning and learning, letting go of what may have worked in the past, focusing your emotional energy, towards learning new mindsets and mental models and relearning how to perceive the world differently.
Wondering and wandering into fresh and multiple perspectives underlie the development of a strategic foresight capability.

This approach helps shift your focus across the polarities of thought, from a fixed, binary, or linear and competitive approach to one that is neuro-scientifically grounded. It aims to foster your neuroplasticity and neuroelasticity within your brain, enabling the development of new and diverse perspectives that support prospective, strategic, critical, conceptual, complementary, and creative thinking processes necessary for staying ahead of change.

Improves strategic thinking

Strategic foresight aims to anticipate, analyze, synthesize, adapt to, and shape the factors relevant to a person, team, or company’s business, enabling it to perform and grow better than its competitors and stay ahead of change. It requires confidence, capacity, and competence to partner effectively and to think and act differently, using cutting-edge analytics, proven creative tools, and artificial intelligence (AI). This approach empowers, enables, and equips individuals with better, more risk-informed strategic thinking. It also provides a foundation for creative thinking by helping people better understand the options and alternatives available to them. Additionally, it identifies potential developments that could lead to building a competitive advantage at the individual, team, or organizational level, enabling them to stay ahead of change, innovate, and succeed in an uncertain business environment.

Increases adaptability

In a recent article, ‘Navigating the Future with Strategic Foresight, the Boston Consulting Group stated:

“It’s not about gathering more data than everyone else but about being able to detect forward-looking signals, stretch perspectives, and interpret the data with fresh eyes. Uncertainty does not dissipate; rather, strategic foresight offers the clarity of direction that comes from greater confidence in data, assumptions, and analysis”.

The information gathered through strategic foresight enhances people’s ability and willingness to adapt their responses to uncertainty and unexpected situations and embrace change. It provides concrete evidence, in the form of data, assumptions, and analysis, to support people in being adaptive. This requires being open to unlearning, relearning, and learning, protecting you against anxiety, stress, and burnout, and helping you stay ahead of change and become resilient to create, invent, and innovate through chaos, uncertainty and disruption.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, “Anyone Can Learn to Innovate,” scheduled for publication in early 2026.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack . It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

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Three Executive Decisions for Strategic Foresight Success or Failure

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Three Executive Decisions for Strategic Foresight Success or Failure

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

You stand on the brink of an exciting new adventure. Turmoil and uncertainty have convinced you that future success requires more than the short-term strategic and business planning tools you’ve used. You’ve cut through the hype surrounding Strategic Foresight and studied success. You are ready to lead your company into its bold future.

So, where do you start?

Most executives get caught up in all the things that need to happen and are distracted by all the tools, jargon, and pretty pictures that get thrown at them. But you are smarter than that. You know that there are three things you must do at the beginning to ensure ultimate success.

Give Foresight Executive Authority and Access

Foresight without responsibility is intellectual daydreaming.

While the practice of research and scenario design can be delegated to planning offices, the responsibility for debating, deciding, and using Strategic Foresight must rest with P&L owners.

Amy Webb’s research at NYU shows that when a C-Suite executive with the authority to force strategic reviews oversaw foresight activities, the results were more likely to be acted on and integrated into strategic and operational plans. Shell serves as a specific example of this, as its foresight team reported directly to the executive committee, so that when scenarios explored dramatic oil price volatility, Shell executives personally reviewed strategic portfolios and authorized immediate capability building.

Start by asking:

Who can force strategic reviews outside of the traditional planning process?
What triggers a review of Strategic Foresight scenarios?
How do we hold people accountable for acting on insights?

Demand Inputs That Challenge Your Assumptions

If your Strategic Foresight conversations don’t make you uncomfortable, you’re doing them wrong.

Webb’s research also shows that successful foresight systematically explores fundamental changes that could render the existing business obsolete.

Shell’s scenarios went beyond assumptions about oil price stability to explore supply disruptions, geopolitical shifts, and demand transformation. Disney’s foresight set aside traditional assumptions about media consumption and explored how technology could completely reshape content creation, distribution, and consumption.

Start by asking these questions:

Is the team going beyond trend analysis and exploring technology, regulations, social changes, and economic developments that could restructure entire markets?
Who are we talking to in other industries? What unusual, unexpected, and maybe crazy sources are we using to inform our scenarios?
Does at least one scenario feel possible and terrifying?

Integrate Foresight into Existing Planning Processes

Strategic Foresight that doesn’t connect to resource allocation decisions is expensive research.

Your planning processes must connect Strategic Foresight’s long-term scenarios to Strategic Planning’s 3–5-year plans and to your annual budget and resource decisions. No separate foresight exercises. No parallel planning tracks. The cascade from 20-year scenarios to this year’s investments must be explicit and ruthless.

When Shell’s scenarios explored dramatic oil price volatility over decades, Shell didn’t file them away and wait for them to come true. They immediately reviewed their strategic portfolio and developed a 3–5-year plan to build capabilities for multiple oil futures. This was then translated into immediate capital allocation changes.

Disney’s foresight about changing media consumption in the next 20 years informed strategic planning for Disney+ and, ultimately, its operational launch.

Start by asking these questions:

How is Strategic Foresight linked to our strategic and business planning processes?
How do scenarios flow from 20-year insights through 5-year strategy to this year’s budget decisions?
How is the integration of Strategic Foresight into annual business planning measured and rewarded?

Three Steps. One Outcome.

Strategic foresight efforts succeed when they have the executive authority, provocative inputs, and integrated processes to drive resource allocation decisions. Taking these three steps at the very start sets you, your team, and your organization up for success. But they’re still not a guarantee.

Ready to avoid the predictable pitfalls? Next week, we’ll consider why strategic foresight fails and how to prevent your efforts from joining them.

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Making it Safe to Innovate

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Building Emotional Safety

Making it Safe to Innovate - Building Emotional Safety

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

When my husband and I became accredited as foster parents for children in need, I thought my skills as a trainer and facilitator would help me navigate the challenges we faced. I quickly discovered that when children arrived at our home late at night, often physically injured and emotionally distraught due to a tragic accident or being separated from their families, their primary need was for emotional safety. This began my long and enlightening quest into what it truly means for someone to develop both emotional and psychological safety. To discover and explore why both emotional and psychological safety are crucial for people to survive, innovate and thrive in the post-pandemic, unstable, and uncertain world.

The whole issue of “safety” is a crucial one. Causing many people, especially those in the change, learning and coaching space, to stop, pause, retreat, and reflect upon how to personalize and contextualize it for ourselves and others we care about and interact with. Yet so few people understand the importance of creating safe environments, especially today when there is so much hatred and violence happening on many of our streets.

We all deserve to, and are entitled to, feel emotionally safe and secure in all aspects of our lives.

What does it mean to be safe?

Because safety: the condition of being protected from or unlikely to cause danger, risk, or injury, impacts everyone and everything in our entire world system. It is an essential element required for our survival, growth, and ability to navigate and innovate in the post-pandemic era. Safety is critical in enhancing people’s capacity to connect, belong, and engage in purposeful relationships, build happy families and secure communities, as well as produce creative, inventive, and innovative work that helps make the world a better place.

What is emotional safety?

Emotional safety exists in an environment where individuals feel valued, respected, and heard, regardless of their values, beliefs, or religious or cultural origins. It involves allowing people to feel safe and secure, nurturing vulnerability, and sharing personal thoughts and feelings without fear of having their words judged as “bad” or “wrong.” Without facing punishment, discrimination, persecution, diminishment, blame, shame, hatred, or violence by others.

It’s a space where it’s safe to say “I don’t know” or “I made a mistake” without being labelled as incompetent or “lacking” in some vital way.

Improving well-being, engagement and productivity

Emotional safety is a vital element of an emotionally and mentally healthy environment that fosters well-being, boosts engagement, and enhances productivity. In such an environment, individuals feel secure enough to express, explore, and share their thoughts and feelings about themselves, their colleagues, managers, leaders, and even their organization as a whole. People feel respected and trusted to share ideas, establish boundaries, and be accepted for who they are, what they believe in, flaws and all.

Building mutuality

The intention is to build mutuality, defined by the American Psychological Association as:

“The tendency of relationship partners to think of themselves as members of a dyadic relationship rather than as distinct individuals. As close relationships, particularly romantic ones, develop over time, partners display increasing levels of mutuality, which may influence their affect, cognition, and behavior. In interdependence theory, the tendency of partners to depend equally on each other’s behavior for the attainment of desirable outcomes”.

We live in an interdependent, globalized world where developing emotionally safe, positive, and interactive mutual relationships across geographies, technologies, demographics, and functions is more important than ever. Mutuality lays the groundwork for creating a shared understanding that fosters a safe and open space for learning and effective interactions, based on cooperative, co-petitive, and collaborative relationships in the workplace.

Becoming attuned

Emotional intelligence, empathy, trust, and effective communication are vital for fostering emotional safety and form the basis for developing effective emotional regulation and management strategies. This enables us to attune to and connect with others with whom we wish to build relationships.

According to Dr. Dan Seigal:

“When we attune with others, we allow our internal state to shift, to come to resonate with the inner world of another. This resonance is at the heart of the important sense of “feeling felt” that emerges in close relationships. Children need attunement to feel secure and to develop well, and throughout our lives we need attunement to feel close and connected.”

As a foster carer, my ability and willingness to attune with them represented the most important gift I could offer the children. It allowed them to feel close and connected to someone who genuinely cared for them by simply providing the most basic essentials. With no judgement or strings attached, and with both detachment and empathy, it also provided them with crucial evidence that this could indeed continue to be possible for them in their future lives.

As a trainer, facilitator, and coach, these are the key ingredients for establishing an emotionally safe and effective learning intervention, particularly about the people side of innovation and in building an organization that fosters a culture of failure.

Developing a psychologically safe culture

Emotional safety is closely linked to psychological safety, which is the belief that individuals can be themselves at work and share their opinions and ideas without fear of negative repercussions. According to Dr Timothy Clarke at the Leaderfactor, psychological safety empowers individuals and teams to reach new levels of creativity, collaboration, and innovation by nurturing a culture of inclusion and vulnerability. It is a social condition where people feel accepted and secure enough to learn, contribute, and question the status quo, free from fear of embarrassment, marginalization, or punishment, by creating an environment founded on permission, safety, and trust.

Embodying a way of being

Creating this emotional state or culture is much harder than most people think. Most organizations believe it’s something they must achieve through process and system changes, rather than by embodying it as a way of being a manager, leader, trainer, or coach who creates:

Sanctuaries of inclusion—a space where individuals feel safe and are encouraged to express their feelings, thoughts, opinions, and ideas, fostering a profound sense of inclusion, connection, and belonging.
Safe containers – a space where individuals confidently disrupt conventional or habitual ways of doing things, step outside their comfort zones, and challenge the status quo, allowing dissonance, contradiction, paradox, and conflict as sources of creative tension to disrupt, differ, and deviate from the norm.
Collective holding spaces—where individuals accept responsibility, take ownership, and are trusted to contribute to the entire system. By fostering co-creative, interdependent relationships both internally and externally, we work towards achieving the team’s and organization’s vision, mission, purpose, and collective goals.
Incubators and accelerators of innovation—where team members are free to emerge, diverge, and converge possibilities. They are empowered, enabled, and equipped to transform these into creative ideas and opportunities. Individuals and teams feel safe in unlearning, learning, and relearning new ways of being, thinking, and acting. This environment challenges the status quo by encouraging disruptive questions, taking calculated risks, and experimenting with new ideas within an authentic, fail-fast culture that promotes quick learning.

Benefits of emotional and psychological safety

Enhances individual, team, and collective engagement, connection, and belonging. It establishes a foundation for harnessing and mobilizing people’s collective intelligence in line with the organization’s vision, mission, and purpose.
Promotes effective team collaboration, where individuals feel at ease sharing their ideas, opinions, and concerns. It cultivates an environment where diverse perspectives can be openly discussed alongside differing views:
Inspires people to be emotionally energetic, agile, and adaptable in the face of uncertainty and chaos, as well as in a rapidly changing business landscape.

AI will continue to disrupt job stability and security.

Developing emotional and psychological safety is a key success factor that underpins a culture of innovation, as it creates the essential space for individuals to think and act differently. This is achieved through experimentation, learning from failures, and exploring new methods that lead to breakthrough ideas and innovative solutions, enabling individuals to survive and thrive in the age of AI.

Both job losses and opportunities

Fast Company shares that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has a stark warning for the developed world about job losses resulting from AI. The CEO told Axios that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. This could result in a 10% to 20% rise in the unemployment rate over the next one to five years, Amodei says. The losses could come from tech, finance, law, consulting, and other white-collar professions, with entry-level jobs being hit the hardest.

Just as the children we fostered needed emotional safety, we all require emotional safety when walking our city streets. Similarly, while at work, we all need a psychologically safe working environment rooted in mutuality and trust. This is what allows individuals to attune to each other, feel secure, bonded, and connected, fostering a sense of belonging and unity. This requires investing in the co-creation of emotionally and psychologically safe spaces that attract and retain top talent, enabling individuals to feel valued, as they truly matter, and helping them adapt, innovate, grow, perform and thrive in a post-pandemic, unstable, and uncertain world.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, “Anyone Can Learn to Innovate,” scheduled for publication in late 2025.

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Making People Matter in AI Era

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Making People Matter in AI Era

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

People matter more than ever as we witness one of the most significant technological advancements reshaping humanity. Regardless of size, every industry and organization can adopt AI to enhance operations, innovate, stay competitive, and grow by partnering AI with people. Our research highlights three workplace trends and four global, strategic, and systemic human crises that affect the successful execution of all organizational transformation initiatives, posing potential barriers to implementing AI strategies. This makes the importance of people mattering in the age of AI greater than ever.

Three Key Global Trends

According to Udemy’s 2024 Global Learning and Skills Trends Report, three key trends are core to the future of work, stating that organizations and their leaders must:

Understand how to navigate the skills landscape and why it is essential to assess, identify, develop, and validate the skills their teams possess, lack, and require to remain innovative and competitive.
Adapt to the rise of AI, focusing on how generative AI and automation disrupt our work processes and their role in supporting a shift to a skills-based approach.
Develop strong leaders who can guide their teams through change and foster resilience within them.

Five Key Global Crises

1. Organizational engagement is in crisis.

Recently, Gallup reported that Global employee engagement fell by two percentage points in 2024, only the second time it has fallen in the past 12 years. Managers (particularly young managers and female managers) experienced the sharpest decline. Employee engagement significantly influences economic output; Gallup estimates that a two-point drop in engagement costs the world $438 billion in lost productivity in 2024.

2. People are burning out, causing a crisis in well-being.

In 2019, the World Health Organization included burnout in its International Classification of Diseases, describing “Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. Three dimensions characterize it:

Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and
Reduced professional efficacy.

Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.”

They estimate that globally, an estimated 12 billion working days are lost every year to depression and anxiety, costing US$ 1 trillion per year in lost productivity.

Burnout is more than just an employee problem; it’s an organizational issue that requires a comprehensive solution. People’s mental and emotional health and well-being are still not prioritized or managed effectively. Well-being in the workplace is a complex systemic issue that must be addressed. Making people matter in the age of AI involves empowering, enabling, and equipping them to focus on developing their self-regulation and self-management skills, shifting them from languishing in a constant state of emotional overwhelm and cognitive overload that leads to burnout.

3. The attention economy is putting people into crisis.

According to Johann Hari, in his best-selling book, “Stolen Focus,” people’s focus and attention have been stolen; our ability to pay attention is collapsing, and we must intentionally reclaim it. His book describes the wide range of consequences that losing focus and attention has on our lives. These issues are further impacted by the pervasive and addictive technology we are compelled to use in our virtual world, exacerbated by the legacy of the global pandemic and the ongoing necessity for many people to work virtually from home. He reveals how our dwindling attention spans predate the internet and how its decline is accelerating at an alarming rate. He suggests that to regain your ability to focus, you should stop multitasking and practice paying attention. Yet, in the Thesaurus, there are 286 synonyms, antonyms, and words related to paying attention, such as listen and give heed.

4. Organizational performance is in crisis.

Research at BetterUp Labs analyzed behavioral data from 410,000 employees (2019-2025), linking real-world performance with organizational outcomes and psychological drivers. It reveals that performance isn’t just about efficiency, it’s about shifting fluidity between three performance modes – basic: the legacy from the industrial age, collaborative: the imperative of knowledge work, and adaptive: the core requirement to perform effectively in the face of technological disruption, by being agile, creative, and connected. The right human fuel powers these: motivation, optimism and agency, which our research has found to be in short supply and BetterUp states is running dry.

Data scientists at BetterUp uncovered that performance has declined by 2-6% across industries since 2019. In business terms, half of today’s workforce would land in a lower performance tier, across all three modes, by 2019 standards.

GenAI relies on activating all three performance gears, and the rise of AI-powered agents is reshaping the way teams work together. Research reveals that companies that invest in adaptive performance see up to 37% higher innovation.

5. Innovation is in crisis.

According to the Boston Consulting Group’s “Most Innovative Companies 2024 Report,” Innovation Systems Need a Reboot:

“Companies have never placed a higher priority on innovation—yet they have never been as unready to deliver on their innovation aspirations”

Their annual survey of global innovators finds that the pandemic, a shifting macroeconomic climate, and rising geopolitical tensions have all taken a toll on the innovation discipline. With high uncertainty, leaders shifted from medium-term advantage and value creation to short-term agility. In that environment, the systems guiding innovation activities and channeling innovation investments suffered, leaving organizations less equipped for the race to come. In particular, as measured by BCG’s proprietary innovation maturity score, innovation readiness is down across the elements of the innovation system that align with the corporate value creation agenda.

You can overcome these crises by transforming them into opportunities through a continuous learning platform that empowers, enables, and equips people to innovate today, making people matter in the age of AI. This will help develop new ways of shaping tomorrow while serving natural, social, and human capital, as well as humanity.

Current constraints of AI mean developing crucial human skills

While AI can perform many tasks, it cannot yet understand and respond to human emotions, build meaningful relationships, exhibit curiosity, or solve problems creatively.

This is why making people matter in the age of AI is crucial, as their human skills are essential.

Some of the most critical human skills are illustrated below.

Some of the Most Critical Human Skills

These essential human skills are challenging to learn and require time, repetition, and practice to develop; however, they are fundamental for creating practical solutions to address the three trends and four crises mentioned above.

Making people matter in the age of AI involves:

Providing individuals with the ‘chance to’ self-regulate their reactive responses by fostering self and systemic awareness and agility to flow with change and disruption in an increasingly uncertain, volatile, ambiguous, and complex world.
Inspiring and motivating people to ‘want to’ self-manage and develop their authentic presence and learning processes to be visionary and purposeful in adapting, innovating, and growing through disruption.
Teaching people ‘how to’ develop the states, traits, mindsets, behaviors, and skills that foster discomfort resilience, adaptive and creative thinking, problem-solving, purpose and vision, conflict negotiation, and innovation.

Human Skills Matter More Than Ever

The human element is critical to shaping the future of work, collaboration, and growth. The most effective AI outcomes will likely come from human-AI partnership, not from automation alone. Making people matter in the age of AI is crucial as part of the adoption journey, and partnering them with AI can turn their fears into curiosity, re-engage them purposefully and meaningfully, and enable them to contribute more to a team or organization. This, in turn, allows them to improve their well-being, maintain attention, innovate, and enhance their performance. Still, it cannot do this for them.

Making people matter in the age of AI by investing in continuous learning tools that develop their human skills will empower them to adapt, learn, grow, and take initiative. External support from a coach or mentor can enhance support, alleviate stress, boost performance, and improve work-life balance and satisfaction.

Human problems require human solutions.

Our human skills are irreplaceable in making real-world decisions and solving complex problems. AI cannot align fragmented and dysfunctional teams, repair broken processes, or address outdated governance. These are human problems requiring human solutions. That’s where human curiosity and inspiration define what AI can never achieve. It is not yet possible to connect people, through AI, to what wants to emerge in the future.

Making people matter in the age of AI can ignite our human inspiration, empowering, engaging, and enabling individuals to unleash their potential at the intersection of human possibility and technological innovation. We can then harness people’s collective intelligence and technological expertise to create, adapt, grow, and innovate in ways that enhance people’s lives, which are deeply appreciated and cherished.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, “Anyone Can Learn to Innovate,” scheduled for publication in late 2025.

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

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Why Business Transformations Fail

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(and What Data Centers Can Teach Us About Getting Them Right)

Why Business Transformations Fail - Pexels

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

On May 6, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott joined CNBC’s “Power Lunch” to discuss the companies’ partnership. But something that Huang said about large-scale cloud service providers (i.e., hyperscalers) at the end of the interview stopped me in my tracks:

It’s not a data center that stores information. It’s a factory that produces intelligence. And these intelligence tokens could be reformulated into music, images, words, avatars, recommendations of music, movies, or, you know, supply chain optimization techniques.

What struck me wasn’t the claim about what data centers and AI could create — we’ve seen evidence of that already. It was the re-framing of data centers from storage solutions to “intelligence factories.”

When leaders fail to lead, or even recognize that the business they’re in is different, even the best efforts at business transformation are doomed.

Because re-framing is how Disruption begins.

Data Centers Are No Longer in the Data Business

Repositioning your company to serve a new job requires rethinking, redesigning, and rebuilding everything.

Consider the old adage that railroads failed because they thought they were in the railroad business. By defining themselves by their offering (railroad transportation) rather than the Jobs to be Done they solve (move people and cargo from A to B), railroads struggled to adapt as automobiles became common and infrastructure investments shifted from railroads to highways.

Data centers have similarly defined themselves by their offering (data storage). However, Huang’s reframing signals a critical shift in thinking about the Jobs that data centers solve: “provide intelligence when I need it” and “create X using this intelligence.”

Intelligence Factories Require a New Business Model

This shift—from providing infrastructure for storing data to producing intelligence, strategic analysis, and creative output—will impact business models dramatically.

Current pricing models based on power consumption or physical space will fail to capture the full value created. Capabilities mustexpand beyond building infrastructure to include machine learning and AI partnerships.

But Intelligence Factories are Just the Beginning

While Intelligence Factories will require data centers to rethink their business models and may even introduce a new basis of competition (a requirement for Disruption), they’re only a stepping-stone to something far more disruptive: Dream Factories.

While the term “Dream Factory” was coined to describe movie studios during Golden Era, the phrase is starting to be used to describe the next iteration of data centers and AI. Today’s AI is limited to existing data and machine learning capabilities, but we’re approaching the day when it can create wholly new music, images, words, avatars, recommendations, and optimization techniques.

This Is Happening to Your Business, Too

This progression will transform industries far beyond technology. Here’s what the evolution from data storage to Intelligence Factory to Dream Factory could look like for you:

Healthcare: From storing medical records to diagnosing conditions to creating novel treatments
Financial Services: From tracking transactions to predicting market movements to designing new financial instruments
Manufacturing: From inventory management to process optimization to inventing new materials
Retail: From cataloging products to personalizing recommendations to generating products that don’t yet exist

How to prepare for your Dream Factory Era

Ask yourself and your team these three questions:

Is my company defining itself by what it produces today or by the evolving needs it serves?
What is our industry’s version of the shift from data storage to dream factory?
What happens to our competitive advantage if someone else creates our industry’s dream factory before we do?

If you’re serious about transformation, take a cue from the data centers: redefine what business you’re in—before someone else does.

After all, the key to success isn’t trying to stay a data center. It’s recognizing you’ve become an intelligence factory, and your long-term success depends on becoming a dream factory.

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Diverge and Disrupt Your Way to Success

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Diverge and Disrupt Your Way to Success

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

I have earned my stripes as a rebellious maverick and serial misfit, who, until today, seldom feels content with complying with the status quo, especially when confronted by illogical, rules-bound, conventional, and conforming behaviors. My constant and disruptive search for new horizons has enabled me to make many professional changes and reinventions – from graphic to fashion designer, retail executive, design management consultant, culture and change management consultant, corporate trainer, group facilitator, executive, leadership and team coach, start-up entrepreneur, innovation coach, and award-winning blogger and author who has thrived by being different and disruptive. We need to reframe disruption to increase the possibilities for game-changing inventions and innovations to succeed in an uncertain and unstable future.

Through real-life experiences and by teaching, training, mentoring, and coaching others to learn, adapt, and grow by conquering high peaks and engaging in stimulating adventures, I have come to understand that being open to continuous disruption and constant reinvention is essential for survival and success in our chaotic and uncertain world.

This sense of restlessness continues to spark disruptive and creative changes in my life; as a result, it has taught me several key distinctions —being braver, daring, courageous, responsible, and accountable — throughout my forty-year professional career, which has spanned a period of being different and disruptive.

Being different and disruptive has allowed me to reach new inflection points, absorb new information, build new relationships, establish new systems and modalities, and elevate my confidence, capacity, and competence as an innovator through consulting, training, and coaching in innovation.

How does this link to being innovative?

This relates to innovation because when people impose barriers and roadblocks to innovation, they unconsciously inhibit and resist efforts to learn new ways of enacting constructive and creative change while being different and disruptive.

The crucial first step in managing this is to accept responsibility for recognizing and disrupting your internal structures, mental models, mindsets, and habitual behaviors.
The next step involves leveraging your cognitive dissonance to create cracks, positive openings, doorways, and thresholds, thus making space for profound changes that enable you to challenge accepted norms.
Finally, safely exit your comfort zone, unlearn, learn, and relearn variations in how you feel, think, and act to remain agile, adaptive, and innovative during uncertain and unstable times.

These three elements help you stand out and be disruptive, maximizing differences and diversity by fostering inquisitiveness and curiosity, and developing self-regulation strategies to manage your unconscious automatic reactions or reactive behaviors when faced with change imperatives, including digital transformation, cultural change programs, and innovation initiatives.

Being brave and different

Some of you come from learning environments that label students who challenge teachers or their learning processes as different, disruptive, and rebellious. These students are often punished, threatened, or ignored until they comply with the accepted norms and conform. This diminishes the possibilities and opportunities of maximizing diversity, difference, and disruption as catalysts for change and creativity in the classroom.

As a result, some individuals develop “negative anchors” due to being labelled as different or disruptive and learn how to act or speak to avoid their teacher’s displeasure and disapproval. This leads many to either rebel or adopt more compliant behaviors that keep them out of trouble. Those who choose to rebel miss the chance to benefit from the diversity and inclusion offered in the classroom and traditional education processes.

Only exceptional teachers and educators are curious and question why some individuals think or behave differently. Often labelled as “troublemakers,” these individuals tend to be alienated from the more compliant students, leading many “disruptive” students to fall by the wayside, unable to progress and achieve their full potential. Many of these “deviants” seek alternative ways of becoming socialized and educated. In contrast, others experience exclusion and social and intellectual alienation rather than maximizing the possibilities of being different and disruptive to the world.

Finding the courage to rebel.

Alternatively, many found the courage and resilience to persist in our rebellion and challenge the status quo. By being different, disruptive, and diverging from the norm, many of us changed our game and, ultimately, the world! People achieved this by thinking thoughts no one else considered and taking actions no one else pursued, flipping conventions on their heads and making the ordinary unexpected through difference and disruption.

The outdated labels and negative associations tied to being different and disruptive have become ingrained in the organizational mindset through schools and educational institutions. These continue to create paralyzing, fear-driven responses to embracing change and adopting innovation. This often hinders organizations from fully embracing people’s collective intelligence, developing the skills and maximizing the possibilities and creativity that disruption, diversity, inclusion, and difference present:

Diversity, inclusion, difference, and disruption are essential tools for thinking differently in ways that change the business landscape!
Disruptive, deviant and diverse teams that differ significantly and challenge the status quo can think the unthinkable, surprising the world with new inventions and unexpected solutions through their disruptive, collaborative, and creative thinking strategies, which are crucial for innovation success.

Being the disruptive change

Choosing the self-disruption path forces you to climb steep foothills of new information, relationships, and systems to take the first steps toward becoming the change you wish to see in the world.

Reframing Disruption

For many, even the word ” disruption ” is perceived as unfavorable and intimidating. When we were confronted at school by disruptive students, we would duck for cover to avoid the teacher’s wrath. Similarly, in group and team projects where one person opposes, argues, dominates the conversation, and doesn’t pay attention to or listen to anyone else’s opinions, we tend to stay silent and disengage from the discussion.

Many situations and problems require changes, upgrades, or removal of systems or processes, which disrupt the norm. The global pandemic significantly disrupted the traditional 9:00 am to 5:00 pm office workday, leading to the advantages of more flexible work environments where people have adapted to numerous challenges and forged a new working world.

This prompts us to reconsider how we might reframe disruption from its typical definition.

Original Definition of Disruption (Oxford Dictionary): “Disturbance or problems which interrupt an event, activity, or process.”“Radical change to an existing industry or market due to technological innovation” Reframing Disruption“An opening, doorway and threshold for intentionally disturbing or interrupting an event, activity, or process positively, constructively to effect radical changes that contribute towards the common good (people, profit and planet) differently.

Yet complacent, inwardly focused, conventional business methods result only in continuous or incremental disturbances or changes. In contrast, being different and safely disruptive to activate profound interruptions to business as usual is required to transform the business game.

Disruption without a positive, constructive, value-adding intent and relevant context makes people fearful and anxious. Many individuals have blind spots regarding how their fear-driven learning or survival anxieties negatively affect their effectiveness and productivity. They may even attempt to mask their fears and learning shortcomings by pretending to know things they don’t.

It starts with disrupting yourself.

Personal or self-disruption opens pathways for self-discovery, self-transformation, and innovation in a volatile and chaotic world where disruptive change is constant and inevitable.

This involves becoming emotionally energized and mentally stimulated by engaging in a journey of continuous discovery that maximizes the value and benefits of being different and disruptive. It includes a commitment to ongoing learning and a willingness to identify and take smart risks, reframe, and embrace constraints as catalysts for creative thinking. This approach involves failing fast to learn by doing, generating ground-breaking ideas, and taking unexpected and surprising right turns that lead to new ways forward. Particularly as we explore what AI can do and what it should do, we need to ensure that our courageous and rebellious traits support its development and applications to help build a brighter future for all.

Being different and disruptive shifts the needle, increasing the possibilities for game-changing reinventions and innovations. Co-creative relationships with AI can support us in restructuring and reimagining how we approach customers, markets, communities, and the world in unprecedented ways.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, Anyone Can Learn to Innovate, which is due for publication in late 2025.

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also up-skill people and teams and develop their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

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