This week, Bob Johansen, Futurist from Institute of the Future, outlines action steps leaders can take to prepare for the technologically augmented workplace of tomorrow and stay competitive in a rapidly evolving digital marketplace. Johansen advocates for a “future-back approach” to leadership vision, positioning leaders to identify patterns of change and navigate the chaotic, evolving business landscape with clarity, intent, and flexibility.
This week, Bob Johansen, Futurist from Institute of the Future, outlines action steps leaders can take to prepare for the technologically augmented workplace of tomorrow and stay competitive in a rapidly evolving digital marketplace. Johansen advocates for a “future-back approach” to leadership vision, positioning leaders to identify patterns of change and navigate the chaotic, evolving business landscape with clarity, intent, and flexibility.
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Justin Brady:
Business leaders know the future is already here. Distraction threatens productivity, technocrats are taking over, civility is sliding, memes control the stock market, and non-humans are entering the workforce. I'm Justin Brady, equipped with 12 workplace trends derived from SHRM, analyzing 7,000 pages of reports, you and I are going to hear from psychologists, off-the-beaten-path experts, CEOs, scientists, entrepreneurs and analysts to make sense of it all. You don't need to be a futurist. You need actionable insights now. You need to be a Tomorrowist.
We're all familiar with the story of John Henry, right? He raced to build the railroad against the machine. And of course he won temporarily, but then he died. So I think that gives us a good idea of what the future looks like with AI and augmentation. That may not make sense to you, it will here in a second, but what that future looks like. If you embrace it, I think most leaders generally agree, I'm sure some don't, but if you embrace it, you're going to be fine. You're going to be in the future. If you don't, your company's going to die. Here today to talk about that is Bob Johansen, a futurist at the Institute of the Future. Bob, thank you so much for coming on Tomorrowist.
Bob Johansen:
Great to be with you.
Justin Brady:
Does that story apply in this scenario? Let's just get your broad take on that really quick. But you're the professional futurist and author of 12 books including Office Shock, and this is coming out very soon, you've already shared it with me, Leaders Make the Future, third edition. So is this a good metaphor for where we're at currently or are there some problems with it?
Bob Johansen:
There's definitely problems with it. It's one metaphor and a lot of people are using it, and I think it tracks back to the term artificial intelligence. And I've been doing this for a long time, studying new media from Silicon Valley, and artificial intelligence is the worst term to describe an emerging technology that I've ever studied because it does lead you down the path of Terminator scenarios and computers replacing humans and all that, which is okay to look at. I mean, I'm not against exploring those scenarios, but it's not a good framing. And that's one of the challenges. We don't yet have a language to describe this phenomenon, particularly the notion of generative AI where you're both retrieving and then generating new text or new images or new video or new music. It's just a phenomenon that is going to be profoundly important, and it's quite troublesome that we don't have the language to talk about it, so we fall back into old stories and old mythic frameworks that can be problematic.
Justin Brady:
Let's talk about what the future looks like with all these technologies that are coming into play. We're going to talk about what leadership looks like in this emerging era. And I want to back up a little bit because there's some important context here. We're entering a chaos era. You have a name for this. You call it a VUCA or BANI world that we're basically, I don't want to say heading into, we're already there, is this going to end soon? Can we all get off this train soon or is it here to stay?
Bob Johansen:
It's here to stay and it's going to get worse. So we've actually gone to a shift. And the term VUCA, for volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, that term was coined at the Army War College where I now teach and work with the new three-star Generals, and they read my books and we talk about the future and about the future of leadership. But we've actually stopped using VUCA now because the present and the future, the term VUCA isn't VUCA enough to describe these futures.
So we're now using the term coined by Jamais Cascio, BANI, for brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible. So it's really a different frame we're moving into. It isn't just complicated anymore. It's really chaotic. And we've got to, first of all, set our expectations about what we can do and what we can't do and then develop a leadership style that works in that.
And some of what we've learned from the military is still very, very relevant. For example, they say if you're in this highly uncertain chaotic world, you want to be very clear where you're going, they call it commander's intent, very clear where you're going, very flexible how you get there. I call it clarity or strategic intent. But there are ways to go through this, but we can't be expecting it's going to go back to being more predictable. But what's happening now is it's much more global and it's much less comprehensible.
Justin Brady:
So it's almost a matter of, and correct me if I'm wrong because that's why you're on this show, but it's almost a matter of triaging new information and living comfortably in chaos. Is that what the future will be, at least for the interim?
Bob Johansen:
I think that's a good summary, and that's why you want to think future-back about this. Because even in a BANI world or a VUCA world, even in a BANI world, you can usually sense the direction of change even if you can't sense the outcome of change. And if you look, we like to look at least 10 years ahead, sometimes more, you look future-back, you get a more clear view, and it's really interesting because it's counterintuitive. A lot of people say to me, "How can you do ten-year forecasting, Bob? I can't even look one or two years ahead." Well, the reason is because it's easier. It's actually easier if you go 10 or more years out, depending on the topic. You can see the patterns of change even in a chaotic world and then you can sense the directions. And then those directions become, in your mind, in the mind leaders, waves of change, these giant waves of change and you can choose which waves you want to ride, and I hope then you also choose which waves you want to avoid getting hit by.
Justin Brady:
So I love, by the way, the idea, the contrast of present-future thinking, which is what you said, don't do that, and future-back thinking. So just a really quick note, is futurism, is looking into the future something everyone can do or are there varying degrees and you should probably get insights from someone who's more naturally skilled at that?
Bob Johansen:
I think anyone can do it, and to some extent with kids, they're better at it than with adults, imagining the future and imagining. But I do think there's tools of studying the future systematically. And this movement began after World War II, or actually during, and the Institute for the Future was started in 1968. We're now the longest-running futures think tank in the world, and we were a spin-off of RAND Corporation, which was doing that work mostly for the military. So we still work for the military, but we don't do any classified research. Mostly we work for companies now and large nonprofits, and we help them learn how to be futurists because I think all leaders have the potential to be futurists. But in some fields you may want to go deeper and go with a professional or a content expert in that particular future.
Justin Brady:
I want to talk about everyone having the ability to be futurists. We're going to talk about leaders and augmented leadership. But briefly, if we're really thinking future-back, is there a future... I'll give you an example. AI has really made data analysis and understanding complex data sets and things that used to take me a long time, what I would call VUCA things, I'm probably using that terminology incorrectly, I've been reading the book trying to use it properly, but some of that stuff almost seems easier now. It seems very heavy lift to low lift. So is there maybe a future where the added volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity reset? Maybe AI, maybe generative AI, new technology makes things simpler. Is that a potential future in the next 10 years?
Bob Johansen:
I think you're right. I think it does make things simpler if you play it right. And the downside of that simplicity, if you want it to be simple but not simplistic.
Justin Brady:
Oh.
Bob Johansen:
And if you forget what the data analytics or the model is doing, if you forget that or you never knew it in the first place, that's really dangerous because you're pretending you know something that you really don't. And it's like the early days of statistical packages. When I did my PhD program at Northwestern, I took a statistics course just in the days the [inaudible 00:08:55] was getting going. And the way you learned statistics is you had to do it by hand, and then you did it with an old-fashioned Friden calculator, and then you did it with a statistical package for the social sciences. But you had to understand what a standard deviation was before you put it in. So yes, it's easier, but it's dangerous if you don't know what a standard deviation is, so you still need the concepts.
Justin Brady:
So potentially complex for some, things get worse, things get more complicated. But if you move into the next generation of work correctly, there is a [inaudible 00:09:29] where it may simplify for you and things may get more clear.
Bob Johansen:
Definitely.
Justin Brady:
You brought up kids, and I'm glad you did because the former president of IFTF, Roy Amara, he had this, as you write about in the new book coming out, a jump to the end method or tactic, you might call it. Will leaders be forced to move? We're moving into this creative era, kids, makers, communication, clarity, I have these things written down, immersive learning, commons gathering, are we moving into a different era of work? Will tomorrow's companies resemble more of a creative agency, like an IDO? You talk about IDO in the book as well. Is that what they're going to resemble in the whole era of cubicles and knowledge work comes to a close?
Bob Johansen:
I think generally that's the direction of change. We're moving toward more shape-shifting, more orchestrated ways of working together and less structured, less fixed. Carol Dweck at Stanford talks about the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. The same thing applies to an organization. And Mary Murphy's new book, Carol's student, talks about how there's also a growth organizational mindset where you're constantly imagining the future. Microsoft is the poster for that movement in the latest books.
So I think that is definitely a direction of change we're moving, and the question is how does leadership work in that? And I think it goes back to the notion leaders have to be extremely clear but also extremely flexible in how we get to that future, and inevitably they will be augmented. So our new book is really looking at the next decade. So the next decade is a moment of truth.
The term AI was coined in 1956, a long, long time ago. And they actually thought about the term, as I understand it, augmented intelligence. They chose artificial intelligence, and I think they made a bad choice. If they would've chosen augmented intelligence, I think we'd be in a much better place now, but we have to live with where we are. So there is this piece of AI that is referred to as artificial general intelligence, AGI. What I'm talking about here with you is more generative AI. It's more augmentation. And Tom Malone at MIT, the guy who leads the collaborative AI lab at MIT, what he says is the big story of the next decade is not computers replacing people. It's not the John Henry story. It's not the Terminator story. The big story is people and computers doing things together in partnership that have never been done before, never been done before, and that's startling.
And it also comes with a do this or else, I'm afraid. So what it means is if you're not augmented 10 years from now, as a leader, you're out of the game. You're out of the game because we have to be augmented, all of us do. If I'm going to be writing serious books 10 years from now, I'm going to have to be augmented. So I've got my own GenAI program dedicated to a screen. I've nicknamed it Stretch to help stretch my mind, and it's to my left side here all the time now, always on, and I'm writing with Stretch all the time.
Justin Brady:
And you mentioned that generative AI... See, I don't think we can even talk about future work with at least mentioning it. I tried.
Bob Johansen:
Sure.
Justin Brady:
I did my best, Bob. But you talk about generative AI augmentation of leadership, and you say this can actually, I think we all focus on how it'll amplify our skills and our abilities, but you mentioned it can also degrade our abilities if we're not careful. What do you mean by that?
Bob Johansen:
Well, the early applications of generative AI have been very present-forward, very present-forward. So for example, many of the early applications have been about efficiency and speed. And the famous management guru, Peter Drucker, said, efficiency is important, but that's doing things right. What's more important is doing the right things, what he calls effectiveness.
So if you take a future-back view, what we're going to see with leaders is you're going to be thinking about effectiveness, not just efficiency. And you're going to be thinking about calming, calming, not just speed. That notion of calm technology and calm computing, that goes way back too to Xerox PARC and Mark Weiser. And the notion is that kind of computing that happens in the background, as you were saying earlier, Justin, that helps things be easier because it's happening out there and allows you to be more yourself, and things will be simpler if you can trust what's happening on the periphery in your behalf.
Justin Brady:
I'm glad you brought up calm technology. I want you to maybe give us a proper definition of it first before answering this question. But is technology like, and again there will be a race I would imagine in this field, but is technology like Neuralink, those type of technologies going to replace the keyboard and mouse? Is this where we're going? Are we going to be that augmented and technology will be that tightly interwoven with our leadership?
Bob Johansen:
That's a belief question now. Nobody knows it for sure. And you start to get into conversations about the singularity, for example, where humans and computers come together. I think in the short run augmentation is the way to go and that's the way to think about it. That's the right frame. In the present-forward view, hallucination is a common term, and people like you are worried about do you trust it? If you think future-back, it's going to be all about meaning making, meaning making and how do you make meaning out of this.
So if you're brainstorming, hallucination is actually a good thing. But if you're looking for a fixed answer, it's dangerous and it's untrustworthy, but that's probably not what you should be using GenAI for. It's not a very good question and answer machine. It's not even very good at math, but it's really good at poetry. It's really good at storytelling, and it's really good at mind stretching. It's just really different.
So if we think future-back, we're going to have that ability to rehumanize, and I think this gets back to what you were saying, to simplify the core tasks of leadership, to rehumanize them because you've got these calm technologies that are working in the periphery taking care of the stuff that we're not as good at. And basically what they're doing is re-enchanting our world instead of automating our world. That's the really interesting surprise if you think future-back about this. That term enchanted computers was coined by David Rose. And what he said was, if you think about internet of things, what you really want is things that are magical. So a pill bottle that remind you to take your pill or a umbrella that tells you when it's going to rain and stuff like that, so you want smart technologies.
So we have that ability I think brewing now where it isn't just about efficiency, it isn't just about speed, it isn't just about automation. It's about augmenting, it's re-enchanting, it's re-humanizing what leadership is all about.
Justin Brady:
This will probably be our last question here with the last 30 seconds. We have so much data around us, will AI and will the future workplace actually allow us to finally see turnover cost and the stuff that right now is unseen? And when that's true, what are leaders going to do about it, if anything?
Bob Johansen:
Yeah, so we're at a threshold now and we're moving from old-fashioned definitions of computing to newer concepts of generative AI to newer yet concepts of spatial computing. I've got the Apple Vision Pro hanging on my wall back there, and I'm experimenting with using the Vision Pro now with GenAI with the senior executives that I do foresight coaching with. And normally it's a new CEO and it's a immersive environment, and the immersive audio is just important as the immersion video. So we've got all these new tools just beginning to be born.
And the Apple Vision Pro isn't really ready for prime time yet. It's probably going to fail, but it'll fail in an interesting way, and that's what's happening over the next decade. There's all this experimentation, all this brewing. And the advice that I think your listeners should be taking is you got to get in this game and you got to try it out, but don't commit. Don't commit. So do a rapid prototyping mindset, but keep active in it and try it out and figure it out and don't prejudge it. The most dangerous people out there now are people who think they understand GenAI. Nobody understands GenAI yet.
Justin Brady:
And I think, Bob, that's probably the best place to leave it. Bob Johansen, futurist at the Institute for the Future. Can you briefly give out the website so people can find you?
Bob Johansen:
Sure, it's www.IFTF.org.
Justin Brady:
Excellent. Bob, thank you so much for coming on Tomorrowist. Before we say goodbye, I encourage you to subscribe to Tomorrowist wherever you get your podcasts. You can find Tomorrowist weekly newsletter and all episodes at SHRM.org/Tomorrowist. Thanks for listening and remember, the decisions you make today shape tomorrow, be a Tomorrowist.