How to Befriend Uncertainty with Terence Mauri
Terence Mauri
Terence is a global authority on the Future of Leadership who inspires leadership teams to thrive in ever-changing worlds. As a founder, advisor, and Thinkers50 author, Terence has firsthand experience of staying ahead of disruption, from advising billion-dollar startups to coaching Fortune 500 CEOs.
Terence is the winner of the USA TODAY Top Speaker Award and Thinkers50 has described him as "an influential and outspoken thinker on the Future of Leadership.”
In the latest episode of the We Are Human Leaders podcast, we explore a topic that's inescapable right now: disruption.
In this dense-with-wisdom conversation, Sally Clarke and Alexis Zahner sit down with Terence Mauri, a global authority on leadership and disruption. They explore the concept of disruption, emphasizing its role in learning and growth rather than just technology.
Terence introduces and unpacks the DARE framework, which stands for Data, Agility, Risk, and Evolution, as a guide for leaders to navigate the complexities of modern organizations. Our wide-ranging discussion highlights the importance of human connection, the risks of over-reliance on technology, and the need for leaders to foster a culture of curiosity and adaptability.
Plus, Terence also shares some brilliant, actionable insights for leaders to embrace a radically human approach to disruption and organizational change.
This is a powerful conversation that will stay with you!
Join this powerful conversation with Terence Mauri
In our engaging, insight-packed conversation, you'll learn:
Why disruption is not just a technology story; it's a learning journey.
How the half-life of skills is decreasing, necessitating continuous learning.
Why organizations are often trapped in bureaucracy, hindering productivity.
The key reasons leaders must embrace a mindset of agility and evolution.
Unpacking how the DARE framework helps leaders navigate change effectively.
Why human connection is crucial in a technology-driven world.
The reason future readiness requires a balance between present and future focus.
How disruption can be an opportunity for growth and innovation.
Where leaders should prioritize well-being to enhance productivity.
The importance of starting before you're ready to lead to meaningful change.
Learn more about Terence
Learn more about Terence and his work at his website.
Order his incredible book, the Upside of Disruption.
Prefer to watch the conversation? See it on YouTube here:
Key Chapters in How to Befriend Uncertainty
00:00 Defining Disruption: A New Perspective
06:08 The Half-Life of Skills and Complacency
09:12 Risk vs. Opportunity: Embracing Uncertainty
12:01 The Radically Human Approach to Disruption
14:57 The DARE Framework: A Roadmap for Leaders
17:51 Future Readiness: Balancing Today and Tomorrow
21:00 Organizational Rewilding: Embracing Human Values
23:56 Practical Steps for Leaders: Start Before You're Ready
Full Episode Transcript
Alexis Zahner (00:02.572)
Welcome to the We Are Human Leaders podcast, Terrence. It's such a pleasure to have you here with us today. Now we want to dive straight into a big word here and that is the term disruption. This is something we hear a lot to the point I think of dilution. Can you tell us how do you define disruption?
Terence Mauri (00:23.49)
Thank you, Alexis. It's great to be on the show. Disruption is a word that's lost its specificity. It's like a buzzword. in terms of framing disruption, disruption means learning. It means humility over hubris. It means courage over conformity. Disruption is not just a technology story. It's a complacency story. And what I mean by that is, it's very easy to become complacent.
Alexis Zahner (00:29.401)
Hmm
Alexis Zahner (00:45.708)
Hmm.
Terence Mauri (00:51.106)
with the world that we're in right now and feel that we don't need to change or transform. Or indeed, many companies are trapped between the panic zone as well, where we're sort of overreacting. So just for clarity, disruption means really this spirit of embracing perpetual beta. It's learning, unlearning, and relearning at the speed of the customer.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (01:01.629)
Mmm.
Alexis Zahner (01:14.541)
Hmm. And it sounds a little bit Terrence like there's this idea of continually breaking that status quo and not resting on what we already know about looking for how we can change.
Terence Mauri (01:23.662)
Exactly. think one of the biggest risks right now is thinking too small. And we have this convergence of AI and talent and geopolitical super cycles that's creating tremendous risk, but also tremendous opportunity. And one of the big challenges for a successful leader or a successful team or a successful company is to stick to what you know longer than its expiry date.
Alexis Zahner (01:28.036)
Mm.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (01:38.674)
Mm-hmm.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (01:49.511)
Mm.
Alexis Zahner (01:50.116)
and
Terence Mauri (01:50.25)
And we have what I call this half life of everything. So half life of skills, used to be seven years, now it's five years, going to two years, half life of a CEO role from six years to three years. We also have half life of assumptions, half life of attitudes, half life of operating mindsets. It's something that we don't talk about enough. It's a collective blind spot in most organizations.
Alexis Zahner (01:56.985)
Mmm. Mmm.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (02:16.039)
Can you tell us a little bit more about this? Because I think it's a really important point, Terrence, that we're sort of trying to put or apply these old frameworks that we have to thinking about duration of terms and how long things should last and how things should look absolutely to our detriment. How can leaders sort of start to change the lens on that and lean into that sort of half-life mentality?
Terence Mauri (02:37.912)
I love your question because everywhere I go in the world, companies are drowning in bureaucracy, drowning in hierarchy, drowning in transactional work rather than intelligent work. And the data supports this at HatfutureLab, one in three meetings is considered a complete waste of time. That's costing a company with over a thousand people over $20 million a year in lost productivity, lost energy, lost opportunity and lost talent.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (03:03.389)
Mm.
Terence Mauri (03:06.786)
Out of 2,100 hours a year, the average number of hours we work, 700 hours is wasted on excess bureaucracy or bad bureaucracy. And there's a difference between bad bureaucracy and good bureaucracy. Bad bureaucracy means lots of manual processes that should be automated. Bad bureaucracy means a best practice has become a broken practice. Bad bureaucracy means, know, duplicative structures.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (03:24.925)
Mm.
Terence Mauri (03:35.41)
or ways of working that have gone off like yogurt in the fridge, but we still do them. And most organizations, around 30, 40 % of what they're doing is still holding on to old ways of thinking, old ways of working. And there's some financial impact on this as well. Bad bureaucracy, old ways of working, old ways of thinking is costing global enterprises over $17 trillion in lost productivity over the next five years.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (03:39.997)
Mm.
Terence Mauri (04:03.672)
So this is a, it's a massive existential challenge for many organizations. And the simple truth is a simple kind of takeaway for everyone to think about. So it's very visceral and personal is to take stock of your month, take stock of your week and go Marie Kondo. Look back at your month and say, okay, what do need to detox? What do I need to delete? What do need to declutter? I think subtraction, elimination and learning are some of the finest forms of leadership right now.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (04:20.658)
Mm.
Terence Mauri (04:33.154)
but we don't do them. We're addicted to complexity. We're addicted to bureaucracy. We're addicted to adding, making things more difficult.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (04:41.469)
I love it so much and I think we will unpack some of that unlearning very shortly. What I'd love to explore is you referred to earlier this kind of like fine line between risk and opportunity almost. It's sort of a matter of perspective, if you will, as to how we view these sort of big significant changes and what they represent for us as individuals as well as organisations.
So how is the fact that nobody knows what's going to happen a good thing?
Terence Mauri (05:13.71)
I would have the great question because we've never known what's gonna happen. And sometimes that becomes a barrier or an obstacle to taking a trust leap or a courage leap into the future. One of the best ways to reduce uncertainty, to reduce unknown is taking risks, is testing hypotheses, is running experiments. For example, a simple call to action for everybody watching today would be over the next 30 days,
What's one simple experiment we could do to start using AI in a very intentional and deliberate and contextual way for our teams? And so I think risk and reward always come wrapped together. They always travel in the elevator together, risk and reward. And I think one of the truisms of our times is that we always overestimate the risk of doing something new or trying something new.
And we always underestimate the risk of standing still. And right now, even for you to stand still, everything must change just because of the laws of atrophy, the laws of physics. So I think it's an exciting time. Is it a scary time? Yes, it is. Is it an exciting time? Yes, it is. Now it's a full time, sort of full contact. Leadership is a full contact sport right now. And I would say to everybody out there, do faster than doubt.
Alexis Zahner (06:33.817)
Yeah.
Alexis Zahner (06:39.618)
Terrence, something you also mentioned earlier is that disruptions often linked to technology and technological change. Now in your new book, The Upside of Disruption, which is incredible by the way, you say that disruption is a radically human human approach. You said in your book, the more digital we become, the more human we need to be. What makes it radically human and why is the radically human approach so necessary?
Terence Mauri (06:51.214)
Thank you.
Alexis Zahner (07:09.542)
right now.
Terence Mauri (07:11.49)
What concerns me right now, and I'm pro technology by the way, I'm pro technology, pro future, and there's some incredible upsides to technology, there always has been, but we don't talk enough about the risks and the downsides. And some of the emerging research coming out, there was an MIT study released a couple of weeks ago, for example, looking at brain scans of those who are using chat bots extensively.
Terence Mauri (07:37.976)
And there's a risk that they were outsourcing some of the risks that we are in the experiment. We are in the Petri dish, by the way. I think one of the risks that needs further investigation is this idea that are we outsourcing our thinking? I I see it myself that it's very tempting when I'm writing a chapter or an article, I can just go to deep search and say, okay, can you do that? It's very tempting to start doing that, but I've always held back.
Terence Mauri (08:03.726)
And I think using it as a co-thinker is more tricky than we claim. It's very tempting just to start outsourcing everything. And then that's one risk. Another risk is that, I call it the sea of saneness. The sea of saneness. If we've all got access to AI, we've all got access to the same subscriptions, the same data, the same tools. Well, how do you differentiate yourself? How are you going to stand out in a meeting, stand out in a presentation?
Terence Mauri (08:32.398)
When everybody, I mean, you're seeing it on LinkedIn. I'm using LinkedIn less and less. Everyone's using, you know, you can see it's all scripted now. It's all scripted, the uniqueness, the personality, it's become very diluted where you're losing that humanness. And so, see of sameness, curse of sameness is a real challenge at an enterprise level, by the way, at individual level. I think outsourcing our thinking, atrophy, the psychotherapist, Esther Perel.
Terence Mauri (09:00.6)
talks about the risk of artificial idiocy or artificial ignorance. So I think these are some of the risks that we have to be cautious of and to really start testing this. And so my point is, this is a moment, this is not just a technology story. Ironically, paradoxically, get to harness the full potential of AI, it's also a human story. And that's the blind spot for most organizations right now that they're just using AI to...
It's like corporate Ozenpick. You know, we take Ozenpick or Wegevy to lose weight. Companies and CEOs are really attracted to AI to lose corporate weight, as in shedding labor force. That's very small thinking. And actually, most of the problems, culture, process, politics, people, are not going to go away.
It's an interesting point Terrence and just to your point on sort of AI and the chat GPT side of things. I had this experience myself lately where I sort of had this realization that I was becoming overly reliant on simply asking chat GPT for the answer. And it didn't even, know, where we once would even ask Google and have to filter through search results and be exposed to different information. We'd use the sorting mechanisms in our brain to process that and then come to a conclusion. Now we don't even have to synthesize information.
ourselves. We can get it to literally do the thinking for us. And it got me to thinking that, you know, information isn't something we like anymore in this day and age. It's something that is readily available to all of us where we once spent years at university to learn certain skills through digesting and metabolizing information and learning how to apply that. We don't need to do that anymore.
But where I think human beings are so critical is how we synthesize that information and make sense of it for the ever-changing world, because we're the only ones who know how to apply that in a humanistic way.
Terence Mauri (10:57.386)
Exactly. think Adam Grant writes about this elegantly that he said, you know, we used to be defined by how much we know information is power was the saying. And now it's about, you know, it's about synergies, it's about cross pollination, it's about innovation edges. And I think one of the missing narratives in this whole argument and the whole AI movement is slowing down. mean, humans are innately, you know, we have ancient brains, paleolithic brains.
Terence Mauri (11:26.446)
and we need to sleep, we're subject to circadian rhythms for now. And guess what? We need to slow down. Some of our most counterintuitive moments, innovative moments are when we're actually defocused, unfocused, when we're walking through a forest. one of the, obviously the narrative of AI is everything's faster, everything's more efficient. Well, great, but that might, if that comes at the cost of wellbeing, at the cost of actually feed, at the cost of health.
Terence Mauri (11:55.08)
So I talk in my book about the difference between warm AI and cold AI, and a warm future and a cold future. A warm AI future is where it's human first, elevated by AI. It's an elevation story, not just an automation story, warm AI. Cold AI is the opposite. It's a machine first future. It's an efficiency first future, but it probably comes at the cost of loneliness, well-being, democracy, truth, trust and transparency.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (11:59.063)
Mm. Mm.
Terence Mauri (12:24.268)
Right now, if I look at the earnings calls of most CEOs, whether they do it with realizing it or not, it's a cold AI future, most. And I think these are reflections that, you know, that's why it's great to be on your show today to start discussing these issues that aren't being discussed enough. There's just this kind of blind faith that AI is gonna solve every challenge and every problem. But we've also seen, you know, social media was act one, Yuva Harari, the historian talks about that.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (12:32.625)
Yep.
Terence Mauri (12:54.062)
social media was act one, first contact with AI, and we failed miserably with that. 300 million people report having no friends. 60 % of leaders say they're at risk of burnout or even bore out. Because here's another thing I wrote about recently in Fast Company, look out for the rise of bore out. Bore out is cognitive under load. It's boredom. Because as you said, Alexis, we're outsourcing more and more to AI. We've got more time in a day just to be bored.
Terence Mauri (13:22.626)
That's gonna have a massive impact on society and business as well. So not just burnout anymore, it's bore out.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (13:27.965)
There's so much to it, I completely agree that I think there's a real, a lot of risk that we are going to encounter if we do sort of shift towards that sort of cold impact of AI as you so beautifully describe in the book. And I think, you know, the warm AI, there's still that heartbeat there. And I think one of the issues that we see all too often in organisations, I think is really characterising humans too excessively as capital.
and sort of seeing it in this very simplistic term of like humans as resources comparable to other resources, including AI. And I think we really, know, wise leaders really need to shift that narrative in a very fundamental way to understand that there is a complexity and multifaceted importance and intelligence to humans that can be augmented and elevated ideally by AI, but is absolutely not replaceable.
Terence Mauri (14:16.686)
think one of the ways forward here is to focus on the ologies, not just technology, but sociology, psychology, agnotology, which is a study of culture blind spots, anthropology, because they are the missing link here. And like you say, there's this sort of like peanut butter approach to in companies where they just want to apply the AI and spread it across everything. We saw a Microsoft index study a few weeks ago as well.
Terence Mauri (14:44.29)
where some of the headline figures were incredible, but not surprising. We're interrupted or self-interrupted over a hundred times a day, every two minutes. And that's gonna be every one minute next year and then every 15 seconds. So you can think about the cognitive tax, the distract, the levels of overload, the levels of distraction. And then we're asked to be more strategic, more innovative. Well, it's not gonna happen. This is an ultra-processed future where as AI gets better and better,
Terence Mauri (15:13.676)
So will the level of ultra-processed information and content. I'm not dismissing this incredible upsides to AI and technology, but I think we're just not putting a spotlight enough on some of these nuances, Sally, that you mentioned.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (15:29.533)
Amazing Terrence, I'm just loving this conversation so much and like your book, it is so dense and rich with ideas and concepts that I think you synthesise so beautifully and are doing right now for us. Now I'd love to shift our lens right now to the framework that you've developed in the book in which you unpack in detail, which I think is just so profound for leaders right now to really give them a map to understand, okay, well, I'm getting these concepts. What does that mean for me as a leader in practice?
Alexis Zahner (15:47.16)
Mm.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (15:59.399)
Can you walk us through the DARE framework, data, agility, risk and evolution and share with us what those look like in practice?
Terence Mauri (16:08.366)
The Dare framework comes from a sort of place where I've spent the last 10 years speaking and connecting and working and coaching across different organizations, different geographies around the world. I've just got back from Manila and Hong Kong, for example. So I've had the privilege of having this sort of cultural lens, leadership lens, high performing lens on different organizations all around the world.
And so the DARE framework, like you say, it stands for data, lead with AI, agility, learning, unlearning, risk, which is all about courage over conformity, and then evolution, which is this sort of embracing perpetual state of evolution. And I wrote, I created this simple framework, like a compass, like a roadmap, and the future is not just about technology or trends or AI.
It's about mindset and voices and choices as well. Einstein wrote that you can't explore a new world with an old map. And many of us are still using old maps. I remember one of my old bosses, his nickname was the Silent Assassin. Terrifying. I'd be working and he'd creep into the room. There was like a sort of shadow, shiver go down my spine. And then he would whisper in my ear, what are you doing?
He told him was coaching me. We could all relate to these sorts of experiences. So the research behind the DARE framework is that we need to move from preservers of the status quo to challenges of the status quo, from bureaucratic work to intelligent work, from command and control leadership to care and co-creation, from data silos to collective intelligence. So that's why I created this model and leaders can use it to...
Alexis Zahner (17:57.573)
Mm.
Terence Mauri (18:01.39)
benchmark their strengths, highlight their blind spots, and use it as a tool for conversation. In the end, I'm really passionate about asking questions that haven't been asked, saying what's not being said. And that's not happening enough in most organizations, despite all the different movements that we're experiencing. In fact, there's a relapse right now.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (18:26.247)
Can you share with us, I'd love to hear an example, Terrence, of sort of where you're seeing leaders already starting to apply there and what sort of impact this has sort of in the short term.
Terence Mauri (18:37.198)
I worked with an amazing organization recently, they're called Lidl, they're a sort of retailer, got high, over a hundred year history. So very conservative, very successful, they have their niche and they can keep repeating that. But of course the world that we're in, you can go from hero to zero faster than ever before. The competitive life advantage of a company has dropped from like five years to less than 12 months.
And we're seeing that around the world. Nike, its share price is down 35%. Intel had a market cap of over 500 billion. It was one of the top three most valuable companies in the world in 2000. Today, its market share, its stock price is down 80%. And its stock price, its market value is $80 billion. So for Lidl, they had this conversation about how do we sustain long-term vitality? Instead of asking, how do we plan ahead?
Alexis Zahner (19:21.805)
Hmm.
Terence Mauri (19:34.658)
they asked, how do we adapt no matter what? And out of these conversations that happened at many levels, peer-driven, bottom-up, not top-down, they identified digital sovereignty as a new growth engine. Nothing to do with retailing, by the way. And the idea behind this was that with all the geo-economics and geopolitics happening around the world, from Europe, they may not want a US or China
Alexis Zahner (19:50.082)
Hmm.
Terence Mauri (20:04.184)
cloud provider. And so this kind of role of digital sovereignty, it seems to be a secular, structural trend that's here to stay. And so what they'll have done is launched a new business on digital sovereignty. And it's called DigiSwart. They launched it three years ago, nothing to do with retailing, but they've renewed their lease on the future. They're already, the revenue is already over $3.8 billion a year.
They recruited over 3000 people from zero and this has happened within 36 months. This is an example of a company that has the spirit of humility. Remember, disruption is not just about hubris or technology or Silicon Valley. It's about the humility to look at blind spots and then act upon them. It's blind spotting and that's what little have done. And I think this is a great example of sort of sustainable, constructive.
Terence Mauri (21:01.324)
responsible disruption. It's better to disrupt from the inside than be disrupted from the outside.
Alexis Zahner (21:08.3)
I think that's a great example, Terrence, and I'd love to double click on this a little bit further and just dive in maybe to the individual level a little bit more to make it a little practical for a leader listening. Now, Sally and I did the quiz within your book to assess ourselves on this as well. But there is one question that really stood out to me and I struggled to answer it. And it was because I didn't quite understand fully what the question was asking for me. So I think maybe potentially
there's other leaders thinking the same. Now the question is I have a strong future readiness muscle. Can you help us understand what a strong future readiness muscle might look like and how perhaps that might help leaders in an organization drive some of the change like you've just discussed a little?
Terence Mauri (21:56.6)
Future readiness, it's not a buzzword. It really is a mindset and it's a spirit of curiosity. The curiosity to learn, the courage to unlearn and relearn, the clarity to focus and the conviction to decide, to make things happen. It's not a wait and see attitude. It's a learn and explore attitude. Future readiness muscle in most companies and most leaders and most managers and most humans
Terence Mauri (22:26.782)
is not as strong as it could be. And, you know, life is busy distractions, health worries, bills to pay. But also, you know, we want to get on with enjoying life as well. Life is not that long. It's if we're lucky 960 months, it's 80 years of age, 300 months of sleep. My goal here is Sally and Alexis not to make us feel depressed. But it's never been easier to waste time. You know, I find myself
Alexis Zahner (22:30.02)
Mm.
Terence Mauri (22:55.138)
all of a sudden I've wasted three hours just on the internet or chat GBT or whatever. It's very easy, we're very distractible creatures. So that's what future red-ass muscle means at a very human level. It's this kind of duality or ambidextrous attitude of let's be successful today. So it's a really kind of be a nowist, but also have an eye on the future. It's being a today team.
Terence Mauri (23:25.078)
and a tomorrow team. And you know, it's not easy to do. I mean, obviously the world is hardwired to grab all of our attention for today's reality. And that's why it requires a strategic space, a future ready space to also think about tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and to start acting before it arrives.
Alexis Zahner (23:47.779)
And it's quite paradoxical, Terrence, as you've just described, this capacity to sort of be in the now and hold space for the present while simultaneously looking at what we need to do next and towards the future. And I think that causes a lot of discomfort in of itself for people.
Terence Mauri (24:00.342)
It creates dissonance, it creates conflict. And what's incredible is I had a conversation with a bee scientist recently. And we can learn a lot about disruption cycles and renewal and reinvention and sustainability from nature. So this bee scientist said in bee hives, you have two types of bees, today bees and tomorrow bees. When a bee comes back,
Terence Mauri (24:28.622)
to notify the beehive of the pollen. It does like a waggle, it's called a dance. And it notifies the bees that there's pollen. And around 70 % of the bees will follow that instruction and go and harvest the pollen, today's pollen. But weirdly, incredibly, 30 % of the bees are tomorrow bees. They ignore that, they ignore that instruction. They don't focus on today's pollen. They are hardwired to focus on finding new sources of pollen in new areas.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (24:43.773)
Mm.
Alexis Zahner (24:57.88)
Hmm.
Terence Mauri (24:58.146)
And the thinking behind this, the intelligence behind this, future readiness muscle, is if 100 % of the bees harvest today's pollen, they starve to death. They run out of pollen, because they're just focusing on today's pollen, and one day that will run out and there'll be no new pollen, and then it will be too late. By having 30 % of the bees, around 30%, focusing on new sources of pollen, they guarantee long-term vitality and long-term resilience. So it's...
Alexis Zahner (25:10.124)
Hmm.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (25:12.262)
Mm.
Terence Mauri (25:26.638)
This is not just theory. I think at a very humble level, nature is an incredible teacher when it comes to managing and leading disruption in a positive way.
Alexis Zahner (25:34.168)
Yeah.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (25:39.675)
It's awesome also that you mentioned, Terrence, a few of the really core components of what we consider human leadership, including humility, curiosity and courage. And it kind of, I gave myself a three out of five for my future readiness muscle. I think in part because of this inherent awareness that I, you know, I know I have so much more to learn. There's that growth, my muscles are always, you can always grow more. But I'm sort of curious to know if we...
a leader listening now is thinking, well, I want to be able to sort of grow that muscle. I want to be, you know, inhabiting that space. To my mind, I'm thinking that one really thing that's important to note also is to be really prioritizing our wellbeing, because if we're not, if we're in a state of chronic stress or heading for burnout, then we will not be able to have the objectivity, the perspective required to really ground down into that sense of humility.
the abundance mindset and all of the things that are really so important to driving that future readiness. is that something that you also would see as an important factor for leaders to take into account when they're really looking to be able to embrace the DARE framework in its fullest?
Terence Mauri (26:52.256)
I it really, it's a brilliant framing and it really reconnects again to this core theme of your show, which is, know, humaneness, elevate what makes us more human. And we can't be more human if we're acting more like machines. And one of the challenges right now, and this is not a new challenge, but the risk with all this automation rather than elevation is that we're mimicking the machines. We're trying to go faster and faster. We're actually acting more like machines.
And you see this, you know, since the pandemic, the number of back-to-back Zoom or Teams meetings has increased three X. Over the last five years, the number of emails people are dealing with on a yearly basis is over 30,000, growing at an annual compound rate of over 18%. Is this sustainable for a pale-lithic ancient brain to be trying to mimic the speed of technology? No, it isn't. But that seems to be
a kind of unspoken expectation or narrative that we're either kind of following blindly or not really looking at the alternatives. So I think we're at this big inflection point right now. There's two outcomes here. We go down the corporate ozone pick narrative powered by AI, automation, extraction, cold AI, efficiency first at the expense of wellbeing, at the expense of leadership, or we do a sort of organizational rewilding.
Alexis Zahner (28:02.316)
Hmm.
Alexis Zahner (28:11.639)
Yeah.
Terence Mauri (28:20.654)
We talk about rewilding in nature, organizational rewilding and really reconnecting with human centric values, human centricity outcomes and connecting with meaning. Oliver Sachs, a psychiatrist said, in life, humans and leaders, we need three things. We need believing, we need to believe in something. We need belonging, connecting, collaboration. So believing, belonging, and we need to be in a state of becoming, lifelong learning.
Alexis Zahner (28:30.582)
Hmm.
Alexis Zahner (28:48.778)
Mmm. Mmm. Mmm.
Terence Mauri (28:50.626)
So believing, belonging, becoming. And if we lose sight of those three buckets of life source, we're gonna lose our way.
Alexis Zahner (29:01.304)
Terrence, it's a very hopeful message in the face of a period where I think people are feeling a lot of discomfort and a lot of uncertainty about how we do move forward, embracing AI, but in a way that...
is a great enabler to human life. And I think you've so eloquently helped us understand how we can move forward with that. And I would love to finish Terrence with just one final question, as I'm sure there are many leaders listening to this conversation who are inspired by what you said today and are inspired to take this radically human approach to disruption. Where would you recommend they start on this journey?
Terence Mauri (29:44.622)
Well, first of all, start before you're ready or don't start at all. And, you know, we can wait forever to get started. And if you're a perfectionist or a procrastinator, you, you know, the, the start line never, never arrive. So, you know, it's, this is this easy. No, it isn't. You know, I was, I was born in late sixties. I was born in a very linear, predictable, slower world, safer world. I remember my first computer was a ZX81. It was like a calculator.
Terence Mauri (30:14.242)
And then I managed to convince my parents to get me a Commodore 64. I loved it. It took an hour to load a game and it would make a screeching noise. Then around 57 minutes, it would say syntax error and you'd go, remember that. mean, a lot of people won't remember this, but yeah. And then you'd just restart the game because you didn't know any different. It was a slower world. Obviously the world we're in now is a fluid world. It's an unpredictable world. It's a fast accelerating world.
Terence Mauri (30:44.61)
But I would say, start before you're ready, adopt a kind of iterative experimental attitude. I think sandbox experimentation. So at an individual level, do it as a team. So you could say, over the next 30 days, what's a simple experiment we could run to automate a process to remove some of the BMI, not body mass index, bureaucratic mass index. Three letters we should remember for the rest of our lives. Too much BMI, bureaucratic mass index.
Terence Mauri (31:14.414)
is a tax on leadership, a tax on humanity. They're spending 70 % of their time doing routine, soul-sucking, low-value work. You're probably not gonna be a happy person either. So I think if you link what you're doing to a pain point, a challenge, actually you'll have more urgency to get started and then use it. Yeah, experiment with AI. In organizations right now, there are three types of AI personalities. AI-fluence.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (31:24.733)
Mm.
Terence Mauri (31:44.302)
They use it every day. AI familiars, we know about it, but we're not using it every day. And AI avoiders. Also, what's interesting is around a third of organizations are using AI, but they're keeping it a secret. And they're doing that for a ton of reasons. It could be fear, it could be self-interest or a secret advantage. But we've seen, you know, we've seen this happen that when AI, sometimes when people speak about the AI and the productivity gains, the risk then is that they are...
Terence Mauri (32:13.022)
automated or displaced or made redundant. So I think have a clear narrative, start before you're ready, make it experimental, make it fun, make it human-centric.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (32:26.429)
Yeah. I love start before you're ready. I think that's such an important message for all of us right now, particularly given the fear and the sort of uncertainty that we are consciously or otherwise sort of being driven by in terms of our behaviour. And I also loved this notion of rewilding leadership that you referred to as well, Terrence. I think there's so much to that on so many levels. Thank you so much for being with us today on We Are Human Leaders. It's been such a pleasure chatting with you.
Terence Mauri (32:55.032)
Thank you so much, Sally and Alexis for having me. And it's been an absolute pleasure to have this conversation.
