Let’s anticipate possible futures so that we and our organizations can prepare and adapt. Research shows that future-prepared organizations are much more profitable than the average. Not only do they do better in the possible futures, but also in the present. Boost your own and your organization’s leadership, culture, change skills, future-fitness, resilience and agility. Here’s update 3 with content from researchers, futurists, bloggers, entrepreneurs and other professionals.
- Keep your mind open!
- Discuss these updates with your colleagues.
- What if…?
- What next…?
The Social Contract
Why Everyone Is Angry: A Data Dive Into the Broken Social Contract… This is an interesting analysis by Akhil Puri.
He writes about what data on education, housing, healthcare and income reveal about a society on edge. What does this mean for the futures? How can we, citizens, co-create our futures? We shouldn’t leave this crucial task to the ruling powers.
- Let’s work toward a future where we want to live and work.
What is your organization doing that contributes to the social contract?
80-year civilizational cycles
Here’s a thought-provoking essay by Peter Leyden: Why do political passions run so high at historic moments? They mark fundamental system changes, and the stakes are extremely high, particularly for those on the side of the system that has to die.
We in 2025 might be at the point of having to face up to what it would take to fundamentally invent a new kind of civilization. Why? The shortest answer is the arrival of artificial intelligence, which signals the beginning of an age of intelligent machines.
Let’s start sketching out how to invent new economic, societal, and governmental systems that take full advantage of 21st-century technologies and our new knowledge of how the world actually works — and how it can now be made much better.
- Is your organization part of the new developments – or part of the old system?
- How can you anticipate and prepare for possible scenarios?
The Never Normal
How to adapt to the never normal? I like how Peter Hinssen labels our current and future “extreme VUCA” state. Change is the only constant, as I say. Hinssen emphasizes accelerating change and calls it the Never Normal. When so much is in flux all the time, there’s no normal, not even a “new normal”. Before you adapt to a situation – it’s moving again.
In his interview with Herminia Ibarra, Charles Handy Professor of Organizational Behavior at London Business School, Hinssen states: “Adaptability in the face of constant change is one of the biggest challenges of the Never Normal, leaving leaders anxious about how they can keep themselves and their teams relevant.”
“When it comes to adaptability, Herminia likes to talk about the “what got you here won’t get you there” challenge: “the role of successful leaders today is to increase the capacity of learning in their organizations and in their teams. Satya Nadella, for instance, did a great job with the transformation of Microsoft from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset company.”
“One of the most interesting parts of that transition, explained Herminia, was how they got rid of their traditional Quarterly Business Review process because of its completely counterproductive impact. First of all, these reviews were so elaborate and time-consuming that employees spent months during which they were unable to spend quality time with customers, resulting in potentially missed revenue opportunities. Second, the quarterly reviews were all about showcasing perfection and hiding any kind of defeat or misstep. That’s a problem because admitting mistakes and then learning from them is crucial for developing a growth mindset.”
Yes, this is so recognizable!
- Has your organization stopped learning? Does your culture emphasize (the illusion) of control? Is your strategy set in stone?
Then it’s time to wake up and embrace the growth mindset. Because without learning, there is no personal and no business growth.
Read Hinssen’s interview here: How to adapt to the never normal
Extreme weather
Increasingly extreme weather is a threat to production and supply chains in Britain and elsewhere. Read this article from the Guardian here.
- How does your business prepare for this?
How many jobs will AI take?
The possibility that AI might eliminate 20 percent of all entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years could produce the conditions for major societal unrest and upheaval. Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic, creators of artificial intelligence — has a blunt warning: this might spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years.
Your organization must concern itself with not just the first-order effects of AI, but secondary and tertiary impacts as well. (Example: Waymo’s self-driving cars are being targeted in Los Angeles because of their adverse effect on jobs.)
Unemployment is bad news for society and for your organization’s market.
When you’re anticipating scenarios – how might your organization respond?
Will your future staff be a blend of A.I. and senior managers…? Are you ready to incorporate A.I.?
Will your customers evaporate because they have no jobs and money?
Will the public turn against organizations who let human employees go?
And so on, and so forth…
Is this scenario too big to think about? Too scary? Too crazy?
Maybe. But we as professionals and people must be courageous.
It’s no fun when your team thinks you’ve gone mad. But it’s worse when they’re ignorant and don’t anticipate what might happen.
- Open your mind, and start the conversation. Explore options and responses with your team.
Don’t let the big A.I. companies decide. It’s our future, too.
What do you think? Feel free to comment – I’m curious.
No, AI won’t take all the jobs
Read this essay by Daniel Jeffries: Aren’t people brilliant? Often the folks who champion AI for low-level jobs assume these jobs are mindless and should, therefore, be easy to automate. But even those jobs require workers to make hundreds or even thousands of little decisions — people are so good at making these little decisions that we don’t even think of the process as thought
And: You don’t need a degree in economics to know that long-running AI agents, doing real work, will be hugely expensive. Powering those digital brains requires massive amounts of electricity, cooling, and compute.
Your future workforce, running on specialized neural net chips, is more likely to cost $5,000, $10,000, or $20,000 a month per digital worker, not $200.
The idea that AI will ever be able to do everything humans do perfectly is a fallacy. Every exponential curve eventually becomes an S curve. We’ll run into unexpected limits and walls.
Bottom line: The future of work isn’t going to be a matter of simply choosing between AI and human workers. It’s going to be calculating what each task costs to do with people, with machines, and with hybrids when you include the cascading error costs, verification tax, and risk.
- How is your organization integrating AI at work currently?
- What else is possible?
Unbridled technology or incremental improvements?
A current dilemma that poses a big uncertainty when developing scenarios: how to mitigate the risks of new technologies that you can’t yet foresee? Read Freethinkmedia’s article here.
The argument: In way too many cases, the Luddites won. They slammed the brakes on technology and progress out of unfounded fears or personal beliefs, and we all paid the price.
Activists push big, scary headlines about the bad things they predict a technology will bring: a silent spring, mass unemployment, a new ice age. But they ignore the good things we stand to lose without the technology: the jobs that never get created, the clean air we don’t breathe, the cascade of new inventions that never come to be.
Kill basic research for a decade or pass restrictive laws out of fantasy fears of AI killing us all, and you don’t just lose 10 years — you do untold damage to the exponential curve.
When regulation works, it creates minor speed bumps. It doesn’t erect concrete walls. It demands proof of harms in advance. It doesn’t imagine a whole host of harms that haven’t actually materialized in reality and may never materialize and then act as if they’re certainties.
You make things safe by building them, testing them, breaking them, and iterating — never by outlawing the lab itself.
Of course, adversaries will argue that once the genie is out of the bottle, you can’t put it back in.
It’s not so much where you stand – but what our legislators will decide. Less restrictions or more?
Unbridled technology or incremental improvements?
- This is a big uncertainty when exploring possible futures.
- How will more/less regulation impact on your organization’s future?
© curated by Marcella Bremer, 2025
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