Recently, we published Part One of our white paper focusing on AI and disruption. We are still working on Part Two - we’ve ended up delaying it because honestly, it’s a bit too big and we have more work to do to figure out how best to present it to you. In the meantime, we will continue to prepare you to lead through disruption, because that isn’t a future state - it’s happening now, and in increasingly rapid fashion, and it’s going to impact all of us. So, for the next few weeks, our Sunday Stories are going to focus on translating our insight on this disruptive future into useful primers and tangible takeaways for leaders who must contend with how this "Era of Disruption" at the dawn of the Anthropocene is going to impact your role and responsibilities.
First up, one of the questions we’ve received is “What makes you folks the expert on AI Technology?”, and we wanted to clear that up. We are not experts in the software/coding side of Artificial intelligence, but we are experts at how individuals and communities respond to change, leadership, and conflict - and what is disruption but a conflict between the old and the new. Our professional background has been two decades of leadership and community development, with extensive expertise in Risk Management which informs and underpins everything else we do - from where we live to what we eat to how we advise our clients.
As we explained in our Adventure Mindset series, we are adventurers at heart, and that activity comes with risk every step of the journey. We’re personally hard-wired to analyze, assess, and plan so that these adventures are a success. Professionally and Academically, this hard-wiring bleeds through too; Craig has an MSc. in Risk, Crisis, and Disaster Management, and through this training he has extensively researched risks ranging from climate change to targeted violence to the impact of celestial phenomenon on modern electronics (As an example of that last one, The Carrington Event is interesting enough to be featured in its own stand-alone Sunday story as part of this series, so stay tuned on that one. As a teaser, this was an incident where celestial solar activity destroyed electronics all over the world, including making wires on power poles spontaneously catch fire. Since it occurred 1859, "electronics" were limited and not integrated fully into society. That is a different story in 2024, which makes this well worth knowing about!).
Digressions about solar flares aside, our work of understanding and assessing risk is not unique. There are a lot of people who study risk, and can provide facts and figures that will show you exactly what kinds of risks you are most likely to run into. One of the best examples of this work are the Actuaries employed by insurance companies the world over (at least, they are employed as of today, but probably not for long - another Sunday Story will be about how this disruption is going to change jobs, and actuaries are high on the list of “first up” for disruption). Actuaries take data about risk and decide how likely a loss is to occur, which determines how likely an insurance payout is, which determines how much you have to pay in premiums. Put another way, these folks are the reason it costs more to insure your red car than it does your blue one, all other things being equal. The point is, there’s no shortage of information out there that can inform you of what risks you are likely to face. It's freely available, and its often put in front of us on a shockingly regular basis - no doubt you already know about things like microplastics, forever chemicals, the risk of texting and driving, and how lifestyle impacts your risks of heart disease and cancer, because all of these facts and figures and truths are thrown at us day in, day out.
And as humans, we ignore that information almost all the time. We’re not motivated to change behaviour because of facts and figures - in fact, we aren’t really wired to understand them at all. Something that has a 1 in a million chance of happening is no more “real” to us than something with a 1 in a billion chance; we understand that the 1 in a million is more likely, but we don’t instinctively understand what that means in terms of our lives. Does that difference of million to billion mean that something is likely a daily occurrence versus a weekly one? Or a yearly occurrence versus a once-in-a-lifetime one? We don’t know, because big numbers are hard for our brains to understand. The best illustration of this is if we translate something we aren’t wired to understand well (numbers) into something we have an innate and instinctual understanding of - time. Everyone has an internal clock, a sense of seconds passing. If you tap out 10 seconds right now on your desk, odds are your tapping tempo will be the same as most humans on earth, give or take a bit.
So let’s take a look at a thousand, a million, and a billion seconds, and let’s assume you are reading this at the time of publishing, Sunday afternoon. One thousand seconds after reading this sentence, you’ll probably be finished your cup of coffee. That’s about 16 minutes from now.
Holding that assumption true, where you are reading this on the date of publishing (February 25, 2024), one million seconds from now will put you about mid-day of Thursday, March 7th - 11.5 days away.
One billion seconds from now, the 38 year old author of this piece will be just passing his 70th birthday.
A thousand seconds is 16 minutes. A million seconds is 11.5 days. A billion seconds is 31 years.
Your mind is probably a little bit blown right now, and that’s the point - this exercise illustrates how bad we are at converting big numbers into real-world context that informs our decisions.
This is what the White Paper and the Disruption Sunday Story series is all about. We’ve spent a fair bit of time doing extensive analysis of data and intelligence from a wide range of sources on a broad range of topics, and we translate that into tangible, real-world examples and stories that illustrate actionable steps that you can take as a leader to help those you serve not just weather this disruption, but take advantage of the opportunity it represents.
Importantly, we’ve got a track record of being correct with our analyses on topics as disparate as banking sector collapses to changes in international student legislation.
As an example, we published our AI White Paper just a few short months ago, and one of the sections in that paper speaks to how fast the AI technology would develop and how that would accelerate disruption. Lets use a quick story to illustrate how our analysis has already proven to be true: In January of this year, AI video was seen as the next frontier for AI, but one that was not without significant barriers. In February, OpenAI announced Sora, an AI with the ability to create photorealistic videos based on simple text prompts (and it’s insanely good - see below).
Above: A video generated by OpenAI's Sora based on the text prompt: "A close up view of a glass sphere that has a zen garden within it. There is a small dwarf in the sphere who is raking the zen garden and creating patterns in the sand." See more at https://openai.com/sora
Above: A video generated by OpenAI's Sora based on the text prompt: "Historical footage of California during the gold rush". See more at https://openai.com/sora
And just days after Sora was announced, Tyler Perry halted a nearly $1 billion dollar expansion to his film studio, stating "Jobs are going to be lost".
This disruption is already happening right now. The technology is progressing incredibly quickly, and each leap forward is changing massive decisions by leaders in industry who are being forced to react to this rapidly changing context. And remember, we’re still working on Part Two of our paper -- AI isn’t even the most significant disruptive force on the horizon. It’s firmly in second place of our "Predicted Disruptors", but as our research into Part Two will show, it’s becoming more and more of a distant second every day. This series is about helping you proactively prepare for disruption. The disruption is not in question - but what we do about it is up to us, and reacting from a place of reactivity will never be as good as anticipating the problems, and proactively planning for how we will lead through them.
When we talk about this era of disruption and cite job losses as an example that it’s already happening, it would be easy to dismiss us as “Chicken Littles” ranting about how the sky is falling. But that’s not our position at all. We firmly believe that times of great disruption are times of great opportunity, and the greater the disruption the greater the leap forward that comes afterwards. It doesn't mean it's a pleasant process - the caterpillar must first become goo in the cocoon before it emerges as a butterfly - but the end is worth it. We are quite optimistic about what this disruption might mean for humanity - but the difference will be made by the difficult choices that leaders must make in the months and years ahead. To modify a quote from Alexis Carrell, leading through transformation is not possible without difficulty; we are the both the marble and the sculptor. That is to say, for leaders to embrace this coming opportunity in change, we must be willing and able to change ourselves and how we lead.
That’s where we come in - we can help you do that.
We are not “Chicken Littles”. We don’t believe the sky is falling. We believe humanity is raising to meet it - and your leadership can be the wings on which we'll fly. If that sounds like the kind of leader you want to be, stay tuned. See you next Sunday.
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