“Strategy really must focus on those purely human capabilities of synthesis, and judgment, and sense-making.”

– Ross Dawson

About Ross Dawson

Ross Dawson is a futurist, keynote speaker, strategy advisor, author, and host of Amplifying Cognition podcast. He is Chairman of the Advanced Human Technologies group of companies and Founder of Humans + AI startup Informivity. He has delivered keynote speeches and strategy workshops in 33 countries and is the bestselling author of 5 books, most recently Thriving on Overload.

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Ross Dawson

Advanced Human Technologies

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Ross Dawson

Books

Thriving on Overload

Living Networks 20th Anniversary Edition

Implementing Enterprise 2.0

Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships

What you will learn

• How AI is reshaping strategic decision-making


• The accelerating need for flexible leadership


• Why trust is the new competitive advantage


• The balance between human insight and machine analysis


• Storytelling as the heart of effective strategy


• Building learning-driven, adaptive organizations


• The evolving role of leaders in an AI-first world

Episode Resources

Transcript

Ross Dawson: This is a little bit of a different episode. Instead of an interview, I will be sharing a few thoughts in the context of now doubling down on the Humans Plus AI theme. Our community is kicking off the next level. As you may have noticed, the podcast has been rebranded Humans Plus AI, and really just fully focused on this theme of how AI can augment humans—individually, organizations, and society.

So what I want to share today is some of the thoughts which came out of Human Tech Week. I was fortunate to be at Human Tech Week in San Francisco a few weeks ago. I did the opening keynote on Infinite Potential: Humans Plus AI, and I’ll share some more thoughts on that another time.

But what I also did was run a lunch event, a panel with myself, John Hagel, and Charlene Lee, talking about AI and the future of strategy. So it was an amazing conversation, and I can’t do it justice now, but what I want to do is just share some of the high-level themes that came out of that conversation, and I suppose, obviously, bringing my own particular slant on those.

So we started off by thinking around how is change generally, including AI, impacting strategy and the strategy process. So fairly obviously we have accelerating change. That means that decision cycles are getting shorter, and strategy needs to move faster.

It also means that there is the ability for creation of all kinds to be democratized within, across, and beyond organizations, allowing them to innovate, to act without necessarily being centralized. And this idea of this abundance of knowledge, coupled with the scarcity of insight, means that strategy really must focus on those purely human capabilities of synthesis, and judgment, and sense-making.

There’s also a theme where we have institutional trust is eroding. So this means that more and more, strategy shifts to relationships-based models, ecosystem-based models.

And this overlying theme, which John Hagel in particular brought out, is this idea that there is greater fear amongst leaders. There’s greater emotional pressure, and these basically shrink the timeline of our thinking. It forces us to shorter-term thinking. We are based on fear—of a whole variety of pressures from shareholders, stakeholders, politicians, and more.

We need to allow ourselves to move beyond the fear, as John’s latest book The Journey Beyond Fear lays out—highly recommended—which t