Tools & Resources
The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption is designed to be practical, filled to the brim with accessible toolkits, checklists, case studies, examples, and principles. We have designed hundreds of proprietary visuals throughout the Guide to translate the ideas and illustrate frameworks in a more relatable format.
Below, you’ll find a sample of a few of these visuals and toolkits on selected topics for you to download. This small selection is drawn from a total of over 500 unique illustrations, toolkits, and infographics throughout our Guidebook.
Reframing Disruption
Disruption is generally neither new nor bad; it is simply accelerating. The world’s fundamental paradigms are increasingly changing. Systemic disruption needs to be assessed holistically. Technological disruption that drives rapid changes and the reinvention of companies and products is just one narrow manifestation. But the diffuse nature of the radical changes that are taking place in the world is more fundamental, deeper, and broader than the discrete disruptions caused by specific innovations or technologies. Learn why we decided to update other acronyms such as VUCA, BANI, TUNA or PNT (Postnormal Times) for our UNknown, Volatile, Intersecting, Complex, and Exponential (UN-VICE) world. Our best “UN-VICE” (as opposed to ad-vice) is to consider the features of “Intersecting” - because cross-impacts determine outcomes - and “Exponential” - to reflect the velocity and shape of change - which also need to be integrated and updated.
Navigating Disruption
Navigating disruption allows us to better anticipate changes we may experience and drive the futures we want to create. Evaluating signals helps us anticipate potential new innovations, technologies, or ideas that could evolve into significant developments. Inflection points are moments when major shifts from one stage to another take place. The challenge with inflection points is identifying them in advance, rather than in hindsight. Our Guide provides extensive tools to investigate and contextualize possible future disruptions, and to identify inflection points before they flex.
Inspiration, Imagination, Ideation
We offer our 6 i’s to thriving on disruption - Intuition, Inspiration, Imagination, Improvisation, Invention, and Impossible. When nothing is written in stone, the futures are wide open to possibility. With “failovation,” even failure can generate innovation. Inspiration can be unleashed when taking the time and space to imagine “What If?” and explore “How Might We?”.
Driving Systemic Change & Assumptions
Transformational change needs to be addressed systemically, acknowledging the varying degrees of impact and interconnections. Changing mindsets is the strongest lever for change, as mental models sustain our beliefs, values, and assumptions.
Relying on arbitrary assumptions does not help quantify the unquantifiable, nor make the unknowable known. Fixed assumptions are like making a singular bet on a specific future, often to the exclusion of all else. It is not new that we all make wrong assumptions about the world. The issue today is that the cost of relying on those incorrect assumptions is increasing.
AAA Framework for Uncertainty
“AAA” represents our “Antifragile, Anticipatory, and Agility” framework that defines what humans should be developing to improve our abilities as the world becomes more complex and unpredictable. Any predictions about the future should be carefully evaluated, as no one knows how the future will unfold.
Building antifragile foundations is like building an immune system for our lives and projects. By exercising anticipatory thinking, we seek to imagine next-order implications, including unexpected consequences. The capacity to be anticipatory helps us better prepare for any futures ahead while creating our preferred future at the same time.
Agility allows us to simultaneously bridge our longer-term strategy with the present. Reconciling different time horizons with decisions and actions today requires leveraging uncertainty through curiosity, creativity, and experimentation.
Artificial Intelligence, Decision-Making & Techistentialism
What is the future of decision-making? Is decision-making exclusively human? We are now seeking to embody or replicate human abilities in machines as opposed to relying on expanding or extending our natural human powers. This is an existential question with deep philosophical underpinnings on what it means to be human in the 21st century. We are entering an era of “Techistentialism,” a term we use to describe the nature of human existence in our technology-driven world, as we face inseparable technological and existential conditions.
Eastern Philosophy & Zen Buddhism
Disruption is simply mujō: constant change all the time. Nothing is permanent - except impermanence. To improve our comfort with impermanence, systemic transformation, and change, we can learn from Eastern Philosophy, with a set of tactics developed and refined over millennia. Practical learnings from Zen Buddhism, with a particular focus on how to adopt shoshin (a beginner’s mind), are developed throughout the Guidebook.
Climate Intelligence Is Futures Intelligence
Climate intelligence means understanding, anticipating, measuring, and monitoring climate-related risk. Climate intelligence is a key feature of futures intelligence.
Given the existential nature of climate change, this represents the ultimate disruptive risk and opportunity. To build sustainable futures, we need responsible climate governance and resilient climate-aligned actions, with time horizons and approaches that go beyond the formulaic strategic plans. This can then unlock a new era of “Greenaissance” (opportunities for green technology breakthroughs, innovative environmental solutions, and ClimateTech investment).
Beta Your Life
What do constant change and uncertainty mean to you as an individual? We offer tactics and relatable examples to address this question, including the relationship between innovation and failure, work and money, achieving economic relevance, as well as learning, unlearning, and relearning. Our practical tools take a cue from the software industry in thinking about your life, work, and career. By “beta testing your life,” you can anticipate and act on early signals with speed and agility to upgrade yourself and make the most of our uncertain and disruptive world.
Recommended Resources
We’ve curated a list of Recommended Resources for each chapter to help you evaluate what to watch, read, listen, and follow next for new discoveries and continued experiential learning. These carefully curated resources will support a deeper dive into the topics raised throughout the Guidebook, organized by chapter. You will find recommendations by theme for books, organizations, media, podcasts, videos, movies, series, documentaries, thought leaders, software, and more.
You can sample here our Recommended Resources for one of our chapters, “Anticipatory Governance: Multistakeholder Strategy for Leadership & Boards”.
Checklists
Throughout our Guidebook, you will find hundreds of open questions organized to foster critical thinking and evaluate your perspectives on the topics reviewed. You can benefit from these checklists as a refresher to the most important concepts (e.g. when beginning a new project or venture to provide reflection, preparation, and guidance).
Check out two of our sample checklists: “Bridging the Future Readiness Gap” and “Your UN-VICE Checklist”.