Being Future Ready is the first of the leadership qualities of the future leader. It is about having foresight, having an innovation mindset and being tech-savvy.

To learn more about developing this Leadership Quality, read How Coaching Exercises Can Help You Develop into a Successful Future Leader

In a recent post, we looked at the leadership qualities of the future leader: being Future Ready, having a Purpose, having People Skills and being obsessed with Personal Growth. Today we will go deeper into the first of those qualities and look at what it means to be Future Ready.

The world is changing ever faster, and it is no longer VUCA, but it’s also VULCAN or even BANI. So I’m sure someone will create another brand-new acronym next year to tell us how complicated and fast-changing the world is. Whatever. The fact is that it is indeed changing faster and faster, so nobody knows what the world will look like next year, let alone in 5 or 10 years. 

Still, the future leader must get to an approximation of what that future may look like. They should understand the drivers shaping the future, workplace trends and the different possible futures that might happen to then help build the best of those possible futures through their actions. 

The future leader understands that the future doesn’t happen to us and that we build it with our actions today. They want to play an active role in that building exercise and contribute to shaping a better world for all of us to live in. This is what being Future Ready means. 

Being Future Ready can be divided into three parts:

– Having Foresight

– Having an Innovation Mindset

– Being Tech-savvy

Foresight

Foresight is all about using the right tools and resources to understand the future better. Futures thinking is a science in itself, with its own discipline and methodology. The future leader doesn’t need to be an expert on it, but they need to understand the basics and have some notions in order to understand and shape the future. 

If we look at the foresight methodologies of the Institute For The Future, one of the leading organisations dedicated to futures thinking, the future cannot be predicted, but it can be understood and explored and then acted upon. The objective of futures thinking is to understand the possible futures in front of us to make the most desirable one happen. It is an action-oriented approach. 

The IFTF describes four phases in their Strategic Foresight cycle: in the Preparation phase, the futurist collects the signals and other data; in the Foresight, they develop narratives via scenarios or forecasts; in the Insight, they generate new ideas; and in the Action phase they prioritise and execute actions.

The Future Ready leader should follow the same approach.

Some tools

The futures thinking practitioner has many tools in their toolkit (read more about one here: Ride the Two Curves of the Future of Work). Of course, the future leader doesn’t need to master all of them, but at least they should be familiar with some and use them regularly. 

As the science fiction writer William Gibson said, “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed”. This means we can today already see signals of what the future will be like in a few years. We can do that by looking for signals of change and evaluating them.

Signals of change are those pieces of the future that are already here. They are the political, cultural, technological or sociological changes that tell us about the future we are going into. A good futurist collects signals of change and reflects on what those signals tell them. 

When you find several or many signals that go in the same direction, you have a driver for change, which, if big enough, will form a trend. Drivers and trends are big swifts or changes that are happening on a big scale. For example, automation caused by AI and robotics is a trend, as is the recent push towards working remotely or the demographic shifts we see worldwide. 

A leader with foresight will look at signals of change and trends and will produce forecasts of the future (like these about 2050 and 2100) or scenarios that will imagine different possible futures (like these about a possible day in 2040, a dystopian world in 2050, or life in the Age of Abundance). A forecast is based on a projection of a current trend, whereas a scenario requires more creativity and imagination, it is more open-ended. One projects into the future, and the other tries to imagine possible futures. 

Both are useful, as they help us better understand the future and prepare for it. 

To build a better future, we first need to understand what options we have and what shape the future can take. There are always different options, but you need to know what they are.

Innovation Mindset

Being Future Ready also means having an innovation mindset, as we don’t want a leader who passively accepts the future but one who actively shapes and models it. For that, you need innovation.

No one is born an innovator, but we all can become one. It’s all about having the right mindset. It’s about understanding the world is constantly changing, being open to that change, and learning from it. 

An innovator takes risks, tries new things, experiments constantly until finding the right solution, and accepts failure as an essential part of learning and growth.

A leader with an innovation mindset doesn’t accept the status quo, and constantly challenges others and themselves to look at things from new perspectives and do things differently. 

Often when we think about an innovator, we imagine someone like Steve Jobs, but to tell the truth, an innovator should be more like a small child discovering the world around them: everything surprises them, but nothing surprises them too much, as they discover the laws and rules governing the world. Having an innovation mindset means having, above everything else, an open mind.

Innovation is not only about technology. A leader with an innovation mindset will try to apply this mindset to everything: to their business model, to the way they lead their teams, their client relationships, products and services… They will constantly test new ways of doing things and learn and grow as they do so. 

Human beings are not wired to think exponentially. We are more comfortable thinking linearly. However, we are now in the Exponential Age, where almost everything is possible, and the future leader knows this and is comfortable in this environment. They know that with an innovation mindset, they are ideally suited to take maximum advantage of this environment.

Tech-savvy

We are living in the Exponential Age thanks in significant part to technology. We have seen more technological advances in the last few decades than in all previous history. 

Some people believe that technological progress is slowing down, but I think it is still accelerating. The future leader is tech-savvy and knows how to make the most of this technological progress.

That doesn’t mean that the future leader is a technologist, an inventor or an engineer. They don’t need to be, they have teams for that, but they need to understand the possibilities new technology opens for them and leverage those possibilities to the maximum.

Artificial Intelligence

Let’s start with Artificial Intelligence. AI is evolving very quickly, and it will be one of the most important technologies of this decade (and probably the next ones). As we have seen this year with ChatGPT for writing and Dall-E for creating visual art, AI can automate not only repetitive tasks that require low qualifications, but also creative tasks requiring expertise and deep thought.

Even if AI becoming conscious is still a distant possibility, it brings a new type of intelligence into organisations, an intelligence that hitherto did not exist. Artificial Intelligence is capable of analysing vast troves of data very quickly to find patterns we wouldn’t be able to find and make predictions that would escape us. 

As some of the funniest episodes of ChatGPT have shown us, AI is also capable of making silly mistakes and often lacks the most basic common sense that a five-year-old child is endowed with. 

This means that in the future we will have mixed teams with human and artificial intelligence, and the future leader will have to know how to manage those teams to the best of their abilities. They will know how to maximise those mixed intelligence teams to be as effective as possible. They will leverage artificial intelligence to make the most of it and also to empower human thinking further. 

But AI isn’t the only technology worth talking about out there. 

Tech trends

AI deserves its unique place as it will continue revolutionising the tech and business worlds and impacting all our processes and business models. Still, other technological trends will affect the world this decade and beyond. The Future Ready leader will be aware of those trends and will know how to leverage them for the success of their organisations and teams.

The metaverse and web 3.0 were a damp squib in 2022, but they will come back stronger and take more space in our lives. 

Quantum computing, fusion energy, Virtual Reality, the Internet of Things, or technologies enabling a more sustainable world will be increasingly important in the years and decades to come. 

How will they affect the way we carry out our work? What new business models will they enable? How can they be leveraged to better manage and motivate our teams and satisfy our clients?

The future leader will ask themselves these and similar questions and (hopefully) will find the correct answers. 

Being Future Ready to build a better future

Great leaders do many things. They help people grow, drive success, create and communicate an inspiring vision of the future, manage and allocate resources effectively, make the right decision more often than the wrong one, and many other things. 

In an ever-changing environment, the leader who wants to be successful in the future will also have to understand the coming future, be prepared for it and shape it in a way that benefits them, their organisation and society at large. 

This is why being Future Ready will be one of the main qualities of the future leader. Those who aren’t ready for the future won’t be able to bear all its fruits.

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The Future of Work will not happen in a vacuum; it will happen in a political, social, and economic environment. The geopolitics of the future will have an enormous impact on all our lives, so it is a topic worth studying.

In the post entitled What will the world be like in 2100? I hinted at the creation of a new world order, with globalisation continuing its march towards more integration, although with its ups and downs, and two superpowers, China and the US, dominating the world scene. 

Is this forecast correct? Nobody knows yet, but it does seem likely.

In this post, we will focus mainly on the rivalry between China and the US.

Avoiding the Thucydides trap

The Thucydides trap establishes that there is a tendency towards war when one superpower is declining and another one is rising.

War seems to be almost inevitable in those cases.

The term is modern and is mainly used to refer to the US and China, but it is based on the commentary of the historian and general Thucydides on the Peloponnesian Wars, when the established hegemon, Sparta, and the rising power, Athens, clashed in several wars. 

It is a process that we have seen happen many times in history after that, for example, between the same Greeks/Macedonians and Persians, Greeks and Romans, Romans and Germanic peoples, the Mongols and the Chinese, the Japanese and the Chinese, all the innumerable wars between European powers from the Middle Ages to the Second World War, and a long list of other conflicts in history.

The rise of China in the last decades is undeniable. The progress their society has seen in a generation is astonishing, raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and becoming one of the most modern and digitally savvy countries in the world. China has become an economic and technological powerhouse that might pass the US in real GDP terms in the 2030s. 

The US still has the most powerful army in the world, but for how long? As the power of the US wanes and that of China rises, is war inevitable, or can we escape the Thucydides Trap? 

A two-horse race?

A war between the two world superpowers would be disastrous for them and the rest of the world, as the world economies are more interconnected than ever.

Still, it is not entirely out of the question. A top US admiral warned that China could invade Taiwan before 2027. This could be the catalyst of a war between the two giants.  

Taiwan isn’t officially an American ally, as the US has been committed to the One China policy since the ’70s. Still, in practice, they have supported Taiwan by selling weapons and providing them with military support for decades. 

As The Economist argues, if China attacked Taiwan and America didn’t go to their aid, all the American allies in Asia (Japan, South Korea, and all the rest) would realise that the US was no longer able to guarantee their safety. The Pax Americana would crumble, causing the end of the world order as we know it.

The US still has the mightiest and the most technologically advanced army in the world, but it is not clear they would win a war in China’s backyard.

The result would be uncertain, so it would be a risky move. Nobody in the Chinese or US government wants a war against the other power, but this alone hasn’t avoided wars in the past. Often wars that nobody wants end up happening anyway. 

The US and Western powers feel that China has been increasingly assertive in its foreign policy, and Xi Jinping is leaning towards a more authoritarian grip on the country internally. On the other hand, China feels its deserved rise into world power is being curtailed by a paranoid and declining power like the US.

It is Thucydides’ trap once again.

The consequence is an escalation of disputes between both countries via a trade war, sanctions on each other, the limitations against Huawei, etc. The last two years of the Trump administration saw a rise in this escalation, which Biden is bent on continuing, but with the support of the Western allies Trump so much spurned.

The world is watching nervously while the two superpowers escalate and harden their stances, but for the sake of all of us, let us hope we don’t end up in Cold War II.

It would be catastrophic. There are many global challenges we need to face as a species. After all, we are all people, and we all have the same problems: global warming, the risk of nuclear annihilation, technological disruption… to name just a few.

AI supremacy

Many people believe that Artificial Intelligence is the future. I would argue that it is already the present, as it impacts almost everything we do, and it is upending numerous industries.

In his book about China, the US, and AI entitled AI Super-Powers, Kai-Fu Lee argues that China has all the elements to dominate the AI world in the future and thus become the leading global super-power. 

He argues that the US dominated the initial stage of AI innovation, as it attracts the main researchers in the field, but China will dominate the phase that we are now entering, the phase of implementation. Creating an AI super-power in this era requires four main building blocks: abundant and quality data, the right kind of entrepreneurs, well-trained AI scientists, and a supportive policy environment.

Lee believes China has an advantage in most of these.

To begin with, China has more mobile and internet users than the US and Europe combined, which gives Chinese companies an advantage in the quantity of data they manage and analyse.

Not only that. In China, the digital world combines with the real world for everyday online and offline services, so the quality of the data these companies have about their consumers’ behaviours is much richer than that of their Silicon Valley peers, which consists mainly of the number of likes, follows, and thumbs-up.

Thus, China edges the US in both the quantity and quality of its data.

Lee also argues that Chinese entrepreneurs are like gladiators hardened in the cut-throat arena of the hypercompetitive Chinese market. Western entrepreneurs seem to be more gentlemanly and are not used to the methods and toughness of the China market. This is another point in their favour.

Regarding AI scientists, this is where the US still has the edge over China, especially in the quality of top researchers. However, Lee believes that the main breakthroughs in the AI and Machine Learning fields have already been achieved. In the implementation era, the quantity of solid engineers will be more important than the quality of elite researchers. Here China wins once again.

Last but definitely not least, the Chinese government has focused all its efforts on promoting and enabling the development of AI industries.

Westerners can complain as much as they want about the authoritarian inclinations of the Chinese Communist Party, but it is undeniable that when they put their minds to achieving something, they get the right amount of focus and resource allocation at all levels of government. The vast investments and facilities given to AI companies are a clear example of this.

Kai-Fu Lee cites a study from PwC, that estimates that AI deployment will add $ 15.5 trillion to global GDP by 2030, of which China would get $7 trillion, almost double the US take of “only” $3.7 trillion. 

Proponents of capitalist liberal democracies based on a market economy traditionally argued that their model was the best to allocate resources and promote innovation, as innovation cannot be centrally planned or fostered. China is not centrally innovating, but it has created the right incentives and environment to create an economy where innovation is fostered and encouraged. 

AI is one of the most significant technological innovations of the last few decades, with an impact everywhere, from new business models to military strategy and intelligent weapons.

If one power gets AI supremacy over all the rest, it may well end up dominating the world. 

Geopolitics money: Petrodollar vs. e-Yuan

Since the Bretton Woods conference just after the Second World War, the US Dollar has been the world currency reserve.

First, it was backed by gold, but by the late 60s, the US Government could not maintain this backing due to the escalating costs of the Vietnam war and the social reforms of the time. In 1971 the Nixon administration decided to dismantle the Bretton Woods standard and stop the gold backing of the USD.

A couple of years later, the US government made a deal with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf powers, establishing that they would sell oil products denominated only in dollars and buy US Treasuries and bonds. In return, the US would provide military protection and sell them weapons. All countries needed to have US dollars in their reserves to buy oil.

Thus it was created the petrodollar system that made the US dollar the de facto global currency.

Being the global currency brings some advantages to the US Government, not only economic but also geopolitical.

The US Government can print all the money they want, and the cost will be transferred to all citizens of the world, not only to their own. They can also sanction other countries and individuals and take them out of the SWIFT payment system altogether or freeze their assets in allied banking systems. They have been using the dollar as a political weapon with increased frequency in the last few years, which irks its rivals and pushes them to look for alternatives.

The EU tried to rival the USD with the creation of the Euro, but it wasn’t a match. Even if it became the second most used currency in the world from inception, more than 80% of global trade is still carried out in USD. 

Saddam Hussein didn’t want to sell Iraqi oil in “the currency of the enemy,” so he announced they would be selling it in Euro denominations in 2000. Some people believe that the actual cause of the Iraq War was not to find WMDs or to fight Islamic terrorism but to bring the considerable Iraqi oil reserves back to the petrodollar system and set an example for the rest of the oil-exporting countries so none of them thought about leaving the dollar system again.

China doesn’t like or want to rely on the US Dollar either, so they are trying to uplift their currency, the yuan, from another angle. They are one of the first countries in the world to launch a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), a centralized cryptocurrency owned and managed by the Chinese Central Bank. 

Couple the digital e-yuan with their Belt and Road Initiative, whereby they are investing massive amounts of money in infrastructure projects around the ancient silk road, and their bet for an increasing number of countries in their vicinity to conduct more trade in the new e-yuan is clear.

This will give them, as the global USD does to the US, more economic and political clout.

The others

There are currently around 200 countries in the world, but when talking about future geopolitics, we have only spoken about the US and China so far. What happens with all the others? Aren’t they important?

Of course, they are.

Billions of people live there, me included.

Many things will happen in India, Africa, Latin America, Europe, South-East Asia, the Middle East…. Still, everything will circle around what happens between China and the US, be it a Cold War, a Trade War, or just some gentle discrepancies. For the sake of all of us, let’s hope it is the last one.

Whichever it is, the tensions and rivalry between China and the US will be the main geopolitical battle for the next years and decades. Let’s keep an eye on it. 

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Japan has a problem.

Well, it has many, like most countries, but there is an acute one, and that is the ageing of its population. Currently, a quarter of Japan’s population is over 65 years old, and by 2050 that segment of the population is estimated to reach a third.

Europe and other regions worldwide are also ageing rapidly, but Japan is ahead of the rest. Add to that historically low levels of immigration, and the problem is compounded. 

Who will take care of the elderly? Who will do the work to sustain the economy? 

Enter the robots…

Yes, you read it well. Robots may be the solution or part of it.

We have discussed automation extensively already here, but today I would like to focus on another area of robots and AI that we haven’t discussed so much in this blog (except maybe in Love in the Age of Machines).

Can robots really take care of human beings? Can they understand our emotions and, be caring, and show empathy?

Can they be our friends?

AI friends in fiction

In the aforementioned “Love in the Age of Machines,” we mentioned the film Her, where Joachim Phoenix falls in love with an AI which understands him better than any human being possibly could.

The film is at the same time funny and sad. Phoenix’s character is naïve and melancholic, but we all kind of feel for him and understand how he falls for the AI. At the same time, it’s quietly horrifying because he is falling for a machine, and we find that naturally repulsive. It feels wrong.

Her may sound like science fiction, but it’s closer to reality than you think.

Some existing AI friends

There are already similar solutions out there, like, for example, Replika, your AI friend. The idea of Replika is that you build your own AI friend to your liking, and you talk to him or her, building a relationship with an AI that is there to support you and help you and who understands you better than anybody else. 

The problem is it doesn’t seem to work. Some of the responses seem to be clunky or awkward, and the AI friend doesn’t seem to be good at listening and understanding you. That doesn’t mean that the technology won’t improve and eventually get there one day, but it isn’t ready yet.

Another AI company, Affectiva, is developing AI that understands human emotional states based on facial expressions, voice, and other physical cues. Again, this is still far from being fully developed. They cannot yet compete with human beings, who have an advantage of millions of years of evolution, in understanding human emotional states. They might get there eventually. 

Yuval Harari, the author of Sapiens, believes AI will know our desires and understand our emotional states not only better than other human beings but even better than ourselves.

When that happens (if ever), what is to stop AI and robots from becoming our best friends? At the end of the day, what do you want from a friend but understanding, shared values, and forgiveness? Can’t a machine provide those?

I don’t think it can, at least not for the time being or the foreseeable future, but I’m known to be often wrong.

Caring is for humans

In AI Super-Powers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order, Kai-Fu Lee believes that AI will replace human beings in most jobs as we improve technology and everything gets automated. The only jobs that will escape this lurch towards “the automation of everything” will be those requiring human care and love.  

As he says:

“For all of AI’s astounding capabilities, the one thing that only humans can provide turns out to be exactly what is most needed in our lives: love.”

Kai-Fu Lee believes that human beings will be taking all the caring jobs that require emotional connection because robots and AI won’t be able to replicate that connection correctly. Even if they were, we would still prefer to be cared for by a fellow human. Jobs like nursing, taking care of the elderly, the infirm or children, providing social assistance, etc., will be carried out by humans. 

This makes sense, and it’s easy to agree with, but what happens when there aren’t enough humans to take care of the elderly and the sick, like in Japan? There, robots give needed company and solace to some lonely elderly, who seem to appreciate them. It seems to be working.

I agree with Kai-Fu Lee on this one.

Are friendship and emotional bonds the remit of humans only (and some animals)?

I can’t imagine myself creating a meaningful emotional bond with a machine. I think it is an absurd and crazy idea, even abhorrent. How can a piece of metal and silicon chips understand me, and how can I be emotionally attached to it? Aren’t emotions what make us human?

I am probably biased, though, and I’m seeing this from my own personal belief system. I

didn’t grow up with AI and robots next to me, so I’m not used to them, and I don’t think they are very good (yet) at simulating human emotions and striking up pleasant conversations. They are still prone to error (try to have a conversation with Siri and see what you get out of it).

However, if I were old or sick, and I had nobody to talk to, perhaps I would appreciate being listened to by a machine that answers back, gives me company, seems to understand me, and doesn’t judge me.

It is easy to judge this from my current position and think it ridiculous, but I guess I would look at it differently if I were lonely and a robot was my only companion. 

Artificial Intelligence isn’t so intelligent

In her book Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World, Meredith Broussard explains through real-life examples how AI and computer programming work and how it isn’t that intelligent after all. 

It is in our nature to provide some sort of agency, or even attach a personality, to some things depending on how they behave. We are starting to believe robots and computers can be intelligent and think a bit like us, but they aren’t. AI works via statistical inferences based on troves of data. 

DeepBlue can beat Kasparov at chess, and AlphaGo can do the same with the Go world champion, but they don’t know that they have won. They don’t know what winning means. They don’t even know that they exist. They don’t know anything apart from what the best move out of millions is to win a game. 

The same thing happens with GPT-3, the AI that can write almost like a human. It can write something that can pass as something written by a person, but it doesn’t know what is writing or what it means. It just gives an output that is likely to do its job based on the billions of data points it has analysed.

I agree with Broussard. Artificial Intelligence isn’t very intelligent today. That doesn’t mean it won’t be one day.

How far away is that day? Years, decades, centuries? Nobody knows.

If AI today isn’t sufficiently intelligent to do some things that are rather basic for us, it is even less emotionally intelligent to interact successfully with human beings.

A non-sentient AI that doesn’t even know it exists cannot understand all the complex emotional phenomena going through human beings. They can pretend they do, and they can certainly fool us, but that’s enough to build a meaningful emotional connection.

We are social animals

Human beings are social animals.

We crave interacting, connecting, and bonding with other human beings. This can often be extended to other animal species like dogs, cats, and other pets. Can it be extended to robots?

Robots may have their place responding to some basic needs, like providing companionship to lonely elderly or acting as the loving partners of even lonelier young people. 

It is too early to go beyond that and offer anything resembling a human connection to people in normal circumstances. They are too clunky, cold, and mechanical, and they are still prone to many errors in their conversations. Most of us still have difficulties relating to them.

Who knows, in a few years, I might be looking forward to having a chat with my dear friend AI and sharing with it what’s bothering me at work and how I feel, but I think it will still have to pass quite a bit of time and the technology will have to improve considerably. 

Weirder things have happened, and technology is advancing at an accelerating pace, so it might happen earlier than we think. Until that happens, I’ll continue enjoying the company of my dear flesh-and-bone human friends. 

Friends, I love you all. I wouldn’t replace you with a machine for anything in the world, at least not yet.

In the future, who knows…

Read more: The AI Threat – How to Thrive in a World Dominated by Machines

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