Why Reframing Management for a Post-AI World is The Answer
by Terence Mauri

At the close of the 15th Annual Global Drucker Forum in Vienna, last November, Forum President Richard Straub announced the launch of “The Next Management,”  emphasizing the new mindsets and practices required for improved performance in a fast-changing world, and why today’s leaders demand courage and humility to ask “What’s emerging, enduring and eroding for leadership in a post-AI world?”

Drucker once said: “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” This could be the headline news for leaders today as they grapple with multiplying disruptions in AI, geopolitical risk, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, talent shortages, and industry convergence. It’s shocks upon shocks: disruption everywhere and all at once. 

In such volatile circumstances, leaders should not waste one of the most significant reframing moments – because the future isn’t just about technology and trends. It’s about mindsets and choices, too. When we crave the comfort of certainty, zombie leadership, where dead management ideas live, is a tempting but dangerous fallback, leaving us at grave risk from the baseline fallacy: the assumption that the current leadership model is a low-risk bet until it isn’t, at which time it is too late to do anything.

“Knowing” serves us well in a linear, predictable, and stable world. It is radically different today: the compounding effect of extreme disruption, difficult-to-predict challenges, and ever-changing contexts can’t be resolved with 20^th century mindsets and assumptions. Filtering through AI-driven hype cycles for business relevance matters, too. Absent conscious measures to confront these difficulties, we suffer from collective future blindness, held captive to strategies of similarity and leadership behaviors that, at best, can be described as “over-managed’ and “under-led.”

Leadership on the ballot

• 93% of leaders expect significant AI-driven disruption over the next five years, but only 27% have the right mindsets and capabilities to respond
• 81% of leaders agree that they feel overwhelmed by the speed and scale of business disruption  
• 77% of leaders believe their organizations suffer from talent-crushing bureaucracy
• 64% of leaders agree that their future-readiness muscle is an obstacle to boldly seizing the future
• 59% of leaders agree their organizations prioritize control and efficiency instead of agility and intelligence.

Source: Hack Future Lab 

Leadership is on the ballot, and the data tells the story. As reported by Gallup, six in 10 employees worldwide aren’t engaged at work, and only 20% of US workers say “they have a best friend at work,” resulting in lost productivity totalling $8.8 trillion worldwide. Agility is a problem, too. Every organization aspires to be “agile”, and the word “agility” is mentioned thousands of times a day in meetings, earning calls, and board rooms. Yet there’s a big gap between rhetoric and reality. Most organizations are too slow, siloed, and complicated. Hack Future Lab’s findings reveal that while most organizations recognize agility as a top strategic priority, only 18% describe themselves as having widespread agile behaviors. The agility and productivity gaps in our organizations highlight Richard Straub’s urgent call for the reframing of management for the 21^st century, asking questions that are not about making us feel good but making us think hard.

• What are our billion-dollar beliefs about the future of leadership, culture, talent, and growth?
• Is our leadership approach best described as “preserving” or “challenging” of the status quo? 
• What future success headlines do we want to see written about us?

A blind spot leaders must overcome to unlock the Next Management practices is not being trained in leadership. Leadership is seen as more of an art and instinct than a repeatable set of mindsets, skills, and practices. That’s a problem, because it leaves leaders stuck in conformity behaviors that reject ideas that challenge the status quo when what they need is curiosity behaviors that embrace them. A spirit of discovery to ask, “What are the emerging, enduring, and eroding management skills and behaviors?” is the ultimate form of proactive resilience for staying ahead of disruption in the Intelligence Age. 

In the 20th century, organizations focused on control, efficiency, and economies of scale. Today, in a post-industrial world, the emphasis shifts to economies of learning, ecosystems of trust, and social capital. The hidden potential of reframing management is waiting to be discovered. Yet many leaders suffer the equivalent of “cognitive shock” as they grapple with the twin demands of leading for today while managing for tomorrow, all the while suspended between the comforts of the past and the possibilities of the future. Hack Future Lab’s research shows this isn’t very surprising, considering most leaders (91%) expect AI to continue as a primary business disruptor, followed by rising customer expectations (83%) and talent scarcity (74%). 

As disruption accelerates and business models decay faster, leaders are tested in terms of future readiness and organizational resilience: They must stop, flip the switch, turn on the lights, strive to perceive what’s up ahead without fear, and ask, “How do I reimagine for new levels of value creation, innovation, and knowledge work?” The stakes couldn’t be higher, or the opportunity more significant. Think of the Next Management as a wake-up call from the future, knowing that we always overestimate the risk of trying something new and underestimate the risk of standing still. When the world changes, we must dare to evolve. Let’s be ready to get started. 

About the author:

Terence Mauri is founder of the management think tank Hack Future Lab. His latest book, The Upside of Disruption: The Path to Leading and Thriving in the Unknown, published with Thinkers50, is due out on September 4, 2024.