Last week I attended the Lead Where You Stand conference with New York Times columnist David Brooks. As always, Brooks was insightful across a range of topics including providing us with recipes for lifelong growth, speculating where human consciousness may be headed, and revealing how he knew he wanted to be a writer at an early age.
The tone of the conference was hopeful, friendly, and upbeat. One of the speakers got our attention with a remark in response to a question about the rise of Christian nationalism. Dr. Gayle Beebe, president of Westmont College in Montecito, California, and author of The Crucibles That Shape Us: Navigating the Defining Challenges of Leadership, observed that, “we are entering a new dark age.”
Beebe’s observation was much discussed. He may have articulated what many are feeling. Everywhere you go these days, you hear words like “doom,” “existential threat,” “dark days ahead,” and “dystopia.” They seem to spring from people’s intuitive processing that we are at an inflection point moment, and not all bodes well for the future.
In our personal and professional lives, in our politics, and especially in the organizations we lead, over-arching and influential forces – pandemics, geopolitical ruptures, climate-fueled disasters, artificial intelligence, and political polarization – are driving disruptive change. They are bringing out the best and the worst in people. They are creating massive amounts of uncertainty, as the rate of technological, social, political, workplace, climatological, and other types of change rush toward us.
The latest edition of The New Yorker carries an article by Rivka Galchen reporting on a new course at the University of Chicago titled: Are We Doomed? The class features guest lectures by computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton who told the students that, because of generative artificial intelligence “things are going to go terribly wrong real soon.” Eighty-six-year-old Jerry Brown, former California governor, warned, “We’re in a real pickle… you’re young, the odds of a nuclear encounter in your lifetime are high. I don’t want to sugarcoat it.”
I’ve been writing books and speaking about business disruption and innovation for 30 years. I’ve never witnessed anything close to what is occurring today. As a futurist, I predict that there will be more change over the next 10 years than occurred over the past 100. We are simply not ready for massive and highly disruptive changes ahead.
How to prepare? When you’re driving at 90 miles an hour, it’s important to look farther up the road. Similarly, when you’re headed into a firestorm of change it’s important to adopt new skills — what I call Navigational Skills. Here are six of them:
- Learn to spot the signals of change buried beneath the noise and the distraction.
- Focus on broadening your understanding of a variety of types of change: demographic, social, technological, climate, regulatory, economic, and geopolitical.
- Work on improving your information diet. You are what you read, experience and absorb. Informational junk food is rampant and seductive. Be aware of sources. If you’re getting information for free, it may be free of value to you as well.
- Disrupt yourself from time to time. Self-audit your changeability quotient and shake things up. Avoid ruts and challenge your assumptions.
- Focus on building and deepening human relationships. Focus on empathy, integrity, kindness, and projecting optimism in the face of negativity, misinformation, and naked self-dealing.
- Value comes from values. Honor your core values even when offers come along that require loosening them to get in on an “opportunity of a lifetime.” Come what may, you still have to face yourself in the mirror every morning.
- Look back to look ahead. There is some wisdom in Winston Churchill’s quip: “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.”
This list is not complete, but the new era we are entering requires that we approach it with new mindsets, skillsets and toolsets. These new frameworks are just now coming to the fore.
Are we entering a new dark age as some suggest? Quite possibly. The 21st Century is rocky, and November’s election could throw us into chaos.
Or might we be on the cusp of a new age of shared prosperity and problem resolution brought about by a change in human consciousness? Could emerging technologies such as A.I. be harnessed in such a way as to lead 4.5 billion people out of poverty and begin to mitigate the climate crisis in our lifetime?
“Seeing is believing,” as the expression has it. But what about the reverse: Believing is seeing. In other words, if leaders believe that our problems are solvable, what would they do? If we rise and adopt a “we can fix this” mindset versus a “we are doomed” fatalism, we can create an inhabitable world.
I am personally optimistic not because our problems are less serious than we thought because they certainly are not. I am optimistic because of humankind’s proven ability over the centuries to surmount challenges and innovate our way out of situations. I take encouragement from the anthropologist Margaret Mead, who observed: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
The mindsets and belief systems we adopt today will determine the future. The choices we make today will decide if this is the start of a new dark age or the beginning of an age of abundance.
Nothing about the future is written in stone; the future is what we make it.
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