How to Stay Human amid Advancing Technology with Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman & Tech Ecosystem Catalyst Chris Shipley
Season 3 Episode 8
What kind of leadership do we need right now?
In this episode of How We Future, Lisa sits down with cognitive scientist and host of The Psychology Podcast Scott Barry Kaufman and longtime technology strategist Chris Shipley to explore what it means to lead with humanity in a world shaped by AI, uncertainty, and nonstop change. The conversation centers on their upcoming book, Leading for Tomorrow, and the question of how we use our most powerful technologies to become more human, not less.
Drawing from psychology, history, and decades at the frontier of technological change, Scott and Chris reflect on agency, bravery, and why leadership today is less about control and more about creating the conditions for people to thrive.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
Why continuous disruption demands a fundamentally different model of leadership
How AI can amplify creativity and self-understanding when used with intention
What it looks like to shift from efficiency and performance toward learning and becoming
Why optimism, humility, and agency are leadership skills we can all practice
Let’s try to rethink leadership as a shared, human endeavor where technology supports our best qualities instead of crowding them out, and where the future is something we actively shape together.
Links from the episode:
Follow How We Future:
Want to contact us? Email hello@howwefuture.com
🎧 Listen now:
▶️ Watch now:
📖 Read now:
Scott Barry Kaufman: The world is changing so fast, rapidly, and technologies are changing so rapidly, but the human genome is not changing. We still have the same needs. We can make things as complex, and technology can really enhance things so much, but humans will, at the end of the day, still want the same things. I just don’t want us to forget that. I don’t want the humans to be left behind in ever-changing world.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I’m Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow starting today.
This season on How We Future, we’ve been focusing on the classes we never formally took but should have, ones that shape how we lead, relate, and make sense of a future that keeps shifting under our feet. Today’s conversation is an amazing example of one of these classes. I’m joined by Scott Barry Kaufman and Chris Shipley, two incredible thinkers that share a deep passion for what leadership looks like when we lead with our humanity amid rapid advancements in technology.
Scott, or SBK, is a cognitive scientist, host of The Psychology Podcast, prolific researcher and author, and even taught a course with Oprah on the power of gratitude. Chris has been at the forefront of technology and startups for decades, and more recently has been focused on helping leaders and organizations develop adaptive advantages. Together, Scott and Chris are co-editors of a new book called Leading for Tomorrow, an anthology of over 20 thought leader essays that invites us to rethink leadership for an era of constant change. Spoiler, I have a chapter in the book, too. In this episode, we cover why the workplace may be one of the most powerful laboratories for human flourishing, what it means to prioritize humanity over efficiency, and how technology can support creativity and connection instead of replacing them. If this kind of thinking resonates, you can find more reflections and practices over on the How We Future substack. Let’s get started with Chris Shipley and SBK.
I am so excited to be welcoming Scott Barry Kaufman, Chris Shipley. Thank you so much for being here.
SBK: Oh, it’s absolutely our pleasure.
Chris Shipley: This is one of my favorite podcasts, so I’m delighted to be here with you.
Lisa: Oh my gosh. Listen, we started this podcast to celebrate hope, hype through gratitude, unabashedly. Being hopeful about tomorrow, doing it with energy. Being willing to say, “Oh my gosh, I appreciate you, I see you, I honor you, I amplify you,” through gratitude. We are going to talk about lots of things, but I’m particularly going to be focused on a new book that the two of you have been working so hard at bringing to life, called Leading for Tomorrow: Unlocking Human Potential in the Era of Continuous Change and Endless Possibility, coming out in just a few months in early July.
This is an early look for some of our listeners of a book that they can preorder, which I just am so excited. I should also say, for those of you that are not actually watching on YouTube but listening, I am wearing my most rock star outfit, glittery gold jacket reserved for the stage, because this book is filled with rock stars, and you are both rock stars.
Chris: I think that’s one of the super important parts is all the rock stars that came together. It’s thought leaders and researchers and behavioral scientists and humanitarians all together in one project. There are 26 authors who contributed to this book. Lisa Kay Solomon, being one of them, she humbly skipped right over that. Yes, it’s just this collective intellect that’s come together to really look at what’s different about how we lead going forward from the way we did getting to this point. I think a handbook, Scott, would you say, to really how we think differently about leading in the future and really centering that leadership on our humanity?
SBK: Yes, it’s definitely a handbook of possibility, because when I think of handbooks, I think more of how-tos, but this is really more of a handbook of generating the possibility for the future without the how-to part.
Lisa: First of all, starting with you two, it’s worth noting, Scott, you are a prolific, well-renowned psychologist that’s been studying the field of self-actualization, over 11-plus books, just really focused on the human condition and helping us understand ourselves and our interactions in the world.
SBK: That’s right.
Lisa: A deep, deep centering on humanity. Chris, you bring this incredible combination of being at the frontier of technology for as long as I’ve lived out here. I moved out here in ‘99. Chris Shipley was one of the first names I heard, helping pioneer the next wave of disruptive startups, and have really dedicated your more recent years to thinking about adaptability, human attributes like empathy, and bringing that into the fold as this disruptive technology unfolded. Just even starting with the two of you as this incredible commendatory lens on how to bring these ideas forward, it’s just extraordinary. I wonder if we can even start about what the experience was like for the two of you to work together. Scott, I’ll start with you.
SBK: From my perspective, it was a match made in heaven, I think. I don’t want to speak for Chris, but I hope it was, too. This was wonderful because Chris is also a real natural-born leader, and so she really is good with the organizational aspect. I am ADHD. [laughs] I’m more the creative, lighty type. Really, Chris helping to ground a lot of it, but just going back and forth with that, the grounding and also the dreaming. The grounding and the dreaming, you need both, and we were really able to integrate that.
Chris: Yes, it’s been a lot of fun to work with Scott for a lot of reasons. One of them, I think, and it’s apropos to the book, too, is just Scott thinks really differently about the world, not just in the thoughts themselves, but the way he gets to them. It’s been, for me, a wonderful stretch to really think about and work with someone who sees the world from a different lens, and yet we get to a very similar picture. It was magic in that. I want to back up a little bit because this book really was founded in an organization that we’re all part of, the Silicon Guild, which is an organization of about--
I think of it as a collective. They’re about, what, 60 or 70 authors, mostly nonfiction business writers in this group, many of them also members of or honorees of Thinkers50. Those two organizations came together and said, “Hey, let’s think about what does leadership need to look like and who’s in.” I think this was the magic of the book. I use the word magic intentionally because some people don’t know that SBK is a mentalist. Magic was built into this project from the beginning. All of the essays just naturally form this story arc.
Lisa: I love that, Chris. I hadn’t really thought about it like an orchestra of world famous musicians coming together to figure out a symphony to play together that has emergent qualities. It wasn’t like you gave them a sheet of music. SBK, one of the things that strikes me about the book, of course, is the human-centered theme that comes out throughout. It seems almost a little bit antithetical to this moment where every other headline is about AI. This book is really like, no, this is about humans at the core. I would love to hear from your perspective, with so much of your career focused on the human condition and flourishing, why that’s so important right now?
SBK: Abraham Maslow, the humanistic psychologist, who it’s no secret that I’m a big fan of, he has in one of his writings, he says, “I think that the business, the organization, management, that’s the best laboratory we could possibly have for studying self-actualization.” He said, “I used to think it was education,” but he gave up some hope for that. He said it’s really importantly management. I think that part and parcel of this idea of self-actualization is becoming fully human. In fact, Maslow, he has this footnote I saw, he says, “I hate that phrase self-actualization. I wish I called it fully human because that’s really what I was trying to get at.”
What does it mean to have a human-centered workplace that centers around the things that humans care about? That’s really what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about not only the safety needs that humans care about, but the growth needs. Humans have growth needs, and we forget that sometimes. I will say it’s super important to recognize that safety needs such as belonging and connection, and self-esteem and safety, psychological safety, as well as physical safety, these things are absolutely important, of course, but let’s not forget that humans do strive for transcendence.
They strive for purpose. They strive for integrity, being able to be authentic, and being able to be in environments where they can be authentic. We bring all of this into the fore in this idea of a human-centered workplace that all the contributors rally around the spirit of this, which is, like Chris said, it all came together so nicely because I guess we’re all vibrating on a similar frequency, so to speak.
Chris: I think, Lisa, you’re right. We all learn to work and learn to lead in an economy that was increasingly moving toward what I often call extraction economy. Let’s wring all the value we can out of our resources. We call people human resources, which is just another thing to be exploited often. Not every workplace, but many workplaces. The idea, there’s that phrase, it says, there’s a reason they call it work, it’s hard. It’s not about being enjoyable. You go, you give your best, you get your paycheck, that’s the deal. AI comes along, and you’ve got a whole chorus of people saying, “Yes, that’s good. We’re not going to need as many people anymore. We can forget those annoying people. They’re just troublemakers.”
That becomes a catalytic moment to say, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. What’s the role of people? What’s the role of a human in an organization? It’s about creating this shared value where everyone can benefit, everyone can grow, everyone can move toward their self-actualization. You lead that differently. You count productivity differently when it’s not about how many widgets did we make and what’s fallen to the bottom line, but it’s about how much value did we build together, and how do we all mutually benefit from that. I think that’s the through line of all of these contributions is this is changing. Going forward, we’re looking at a future that, God willing, is going to be really different from the way we learn to work and lead over the course of our lives.
How do we do that in a way that helps lead us to a place where we’re a lot more human and we can find our self-actualization in our work and in our collaborations with one another?
SBK: That’s so beautifully said, Chris. There’s something I want to emphasize, which is the world is changing so fast, rapidly, and technologies are changing so rapidly, but the human genome is not changing. We still have the same DNA we had from 100,000 years ago. We still have the same needs. At its most core, we are still human, and that’s not changing too much. Our basic needs, our basic wants, we can make things as complex and technology can really enhance things so much, but humans will, at the end of the day, still want the same things. I just don’t want us to forget that. I don’t want the humans to be left behind in ever-changing world. That’s something I want to emphasize.
Lisa: I think the whole book is really an invitation to both remind ourselves of that, SBK, that humans still have the same durable wants and needs that we can plan around, and also, Chris, to your point, an invitation to dream about what it could look like amid the changing technology. I think this book really fills a vacuum for what people are looking for that doesn’t yet exist amid all of the chatter about the technology that’s outweighing the humanity that needs to be shaping it in a way that helps us think about flourishing in a scalable way.
That’s one of the things I love about all the different chapters. They talk about similar themes, but they’re framing it slightly different. Chris, I also want to pick up on the point that you said, like this moment in history. This is a moment, and yet we can learn. I so appreciated Rita McGrath’s very thoughtful opening about this moment in time, thinking about larger revolutions that have happened before. We often say that the best futurists are actually historians looking from the past. It’s worth saying that the forward is the human bridge to our next golden age.
She talks about the idea, I’m just quoting her here, “The path forward requires what might seem like a paradox, using our most advanced technologies to become more deeply human.” I think that really summarizes the ask, the opportunity that’s embedded in all of these chapters.
SBK: Agreed.
Chris: I think that’s right. AI and technology is going to do what technology does. It’s always going to think faster and add faster and search faster than I’ll ever be able to. That’s great because I don’t really want to spend a lot of time adding and searching. I want to spend my time thinking and being in relationship. Let technology do the transactional things so that we can be doing the creative relational things. That’s the opportunity, right? I think that’s what Rita Is really alluding to there.
SBK: Nailed it. Nailed it, Chris. As someone who’s spent my career trying to understand human creativity and what we’re capable of, I don’t think we’ve seen anything close to what humans are capable of in terms of creative potential because of the way that some of these technologies are going to be enhanced. I literally built a whole new redesign website. All I put in the prompt earlier this morning, I woke up and I said, “Build a new rebranding of Scott Barry Kaufman that really captures the essence of what he can uniquely offer the world.”
That’s all I wrote. The website it built me, I never have felt more seen in my entire life. It shocked me. It shocked me how seen I was by AI. It said things that made me remember, oh, yes, that is what I’m all about. Sometimes we as humans can forget, but to have this super intelligence that can remind us by sifting through all the themes of our life, and it did it, by the way, in a minute. Do you know what I’m saying? It’s incredible.
Chris: I think what’s really important there, Scott, is that it remembered, and it created that thing in a minute, about your lifetime, which you’ve created over years. It didn’t make anything new. It didn’t invent SBK. It said, “Who is this person? Let me sass that out and present it.” I think that we have to keep creating and building and giving the AI something to report back on, or we would just stop at a moment of time. That’s our responsibility now is how do we think about and create a future and create new value, and collaborate and engage with a world in which an AI can come back and celebrate.
That would be the best thing, rather than just saying, “You’re really good at doing transactions faster than I am.” There’s a quote. Brian Solis has a chapter where he talks about the need to shift to a mindset and to have a better understanding of what is, he calls it AIQ. What’s your artificial intelligence IQ? How do you think about it? He has this great line in his chapter, that is, if we use AI to automate the tasks we’ve done in the past, we’ll just be obsolete more quickly. I think that’s the line of opportunity. Do we just obsolete ourselves quickly, or do we start relieving ourselves of the kinds of tasks today I can do so we can go on and create an amazing future together?
SBK: Yes, that’s it.
Lisa: I’m so glad you brought up Brian because I love his work on mindset shift, which is, of course, the most recent book he wrote and the focus of his chapter. Mindset shift seems to be a theme throughout. It’s talked about in different ways, but it is, Chris, exactly what we’re saying, and SBK, what you’re talking about, is that not automating the task to make us less than human, but really amplifying what’s possible. Even hearing the joy of this new website, which, of course, I can’t wait to see, is in some ways a little bit of a microcosm for what’s possible. Right?
SBK: Yes.
Lisa: Someone that can see you, that can now allow you to do what you’re excited to do, which is to put your talent on full display because it’s backing you up. I’ll just say one more thing that I really got from it is the shift from, as you were saying, Chris, exploitative or efficiency to, really, abundance and possibility, and allowing ourselves to imagine that because of the mindset shift, and then ask questions to bring it to life. Again, those themes kept coming up again and again, the courage to ask new questions, the willingness. I love, like Amy Edmondson talks about, thinking like a scientist, having a hypothesis, being in learning mode all of the time, in order to not ignore what’s happening, but to absorb what’s happening, and still ensure that we are taking a human lens on it.
SBK: Yes. If I can put my podcast host hat on for a second, I’d like to ask you, Lisa Kay Solomon, because you wrote a tremendous chapter in the book on future-centered leadership, could you talk a little bit about how we can lead with optimistic humility?
Lisa: Yes. I will say I was so honored to be asked to be a part of it.
SBK: Of course, you were asked to be a part.
Lisa: My passion is really about helping ignite agency and helping others see that they don’t have to be a victim of other people’s futures. When we outsource our futures to other people’s imagination, we are then in a reactive mode as opposed to a stance of possibility. That’s where that idea of really trying to be optimistic, I sometimes talk about it as optimistic offense. I think about my work around futures and design when done in applied ways, I hope it helps people see that they can have outsize influence. If you can imagine a new future and you can scaffold the path to bring it to life while inviting others along, to me, that is the ultimate source of shaping new futures.
That is where the agency comes from. I think we’re all capable of it. That’s the other thing. It’s not just for a select few, it’s for all of us. This whole book, I think, gives opportunities for people to see themselves in these new leadership roles.
SBK: Oh, wow. Yes, that’s wonderful. If I could ask a follow-up question, you talk about the difference in becoming and being, and you say becoming is better. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Then I promise I’ll take my podcast host hat off.
Lisa: Listen, after how many years of podcast hosting? 12, 15?
SBK: I can’t help it. Yes, 11 years.
Lisa: I know. I love it. You can’t take the podcast host out of the podcast host.
SBK: No.
Lisa: Another theme throughout the whole book, and what I hope to get through in my chapter, is that having a spirit of becoming is really one of an integrated growth mindset of learning. We have to learn our way forward. There are no facts from the future. I think so much of our early education, again, a mindset shift, what us nerdy futurists called a used future. So much of the way that we were taught in the past were focused on right answers, known things, getting there fast, efficiently, getting the A. Our entire systems were built upon that, about things that were easily measurable, things that you could reward some kind of measurement for the performance aspect as opposed for the learning aspect of it.
I really want to encourage a state of learning forward. That, to me, is the ultimate source of resilience and response to a world that continues to change at the kind of speed. If we are graceful with ourselves to be learners and to ask questions, then that allows us to have a say. It is getting back to that mindset, a mindset of how we’re going to show up. If we are focused on the performative aspect, I think that we’re brittle. We’re not able to be as adaptive. I know, Chris, that’s a huge influence in your work is really articulating what does it mean to be adaptive, both individually, as teams, as organizations. I just think that’s so foundational right now.
Chris: No, absolutely. Listening to both of you, I’m reminded of how optimistic this book is about what this future can be. A lot of it, I think, also centers, Lisa, on what you’re saying about reclaiming your agency and recognizing that you have a role in creating your future, that it’s not something that’s been done for you. I think that’s the real opportunity in the subtitle of this book, which is recognizing that there’s continuous change, and it creates a lot of anxiety. Morra talks about the challenges of anxiety and change throughout the book.
It’s also opportunity and possibilities.
I often say, we made all this stuff up in the first place, we get to make up new stuff. This is such an opportunity to really rethink, how do we want our systems to work. How do we want our work to work? How do we want our leaders to work? How do we want to work with one another? That’s opportunity. I think that’s what I feel is this optimistic thread in all of this is, hey, yes, we don’t know, and because we don’t know, let’s go make up stuff that really brings value to everyone, and that puts technology in its right place to be an assistant, a support to all of those things, but really puts humanity, people, in a place together with one another to go forward and really invent a future where everyone can thrive.
SBK: Yes. The thread running through this whole book is the opposite of narcissism. When I really get right down to it, it’s very clear that the values of the contributors of this book are things that do value, caring about others, about empathy, compassion, the dignity of individuals. I think that’s a big part of this humanity that we’re talking about.
Lisa: Absolutely. It’s why underneath my very glitter jacket, I have my T-shirt, Kind is the New Cool. Sometimes you forget that. Chris and I live in Silicon Valley, and the ethos here is just, honestly, sometimes they forget that the humanity is at the core. I don’t know else how to say it. I think this book is so optimistic. It is so refreshing. I really do hope it offers an alternative to what is happening. It feels like it’s coming at us at breakneck speed. I think one of my favorite parts of the book, honestly, is your opening and how you really lay the foundation for why human-centeredness is so important and why we can honor, as I know that, Scott, you’ve been thinking about for a long time, a new hierarchy of human needs that is really centering on purpose.
I wonder if we can just go back to, I know one of your favorite topics, Maslow, here for a little bit. One of my favorite parts of the book is you have that great visual of what his framework actually represented. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that sailboat visualization, and why it’s so important in this moment.
SBK: He always made it clear that human development is like this two-step forward, one-step back dynamic. Part of being human is imperfection, is another point I want to make there. Whereas I feel like AI and technology is seeking perfection, part of humanity that we’ll never lose as long as we have the same genome, is that vulnerability is struggle. AI is trying to remove all struggle, but in so doing, it’s removing the humanity, because to be human is to strive, is to have goals, and to not always reach our goals and then learn from our failures.
I don’t want that to go away completely. So much of what makes us excited to wake up in the morning is the idea that we can try to have mastery over something through effort, through discovery. Maslow said life is this constant two-step forward, one-step back dynamic. Then Scott Barry Kaufman thinks that a sailboat is a better way of conceptualizing that journey. We’re constantly opening up the sail and being vulnerable to winds, and then we’re closing it when we don’t feel safe. It’s that constant back and that toggle as we try to move towards the port we want to sail to.
That’s the purpose part. We’re moving in this ocean of the unknown. This book really taps into that idea that the future is so unknown, but we still have some idea and a vision of what port we want to sail to. It’s moving even though there is unknown.
Chris: I want to add to that because it just has occurred to me in this conversation, and I don’t know why it hadn’t before, because we talked very optimistically about this book and the possibilities of the future. We do, in the book, in many of the essays, talk about things like vulnerability and curiosity, the way you need to open yourself to be learning forward. I love that phrase, Lisa. There’s another element that we forget about, which is also we have to be brave. We wake up and wonder the possibility can be terrorizing because there are just too many possibilities, or I don’t know what’s going to happen, or there’s a lot of anxiety.
We do talk about and acknowledge that reality, but I think there’s also this, put on your superhero cape and just go be brave. We can all be brave in reinventing the way our organizations are working and the way we work together, and creating these possibilities. I also, I guess, say it’s hard. That sailboat is going to be on an ocean full of big old waves and some scary fish and who knows what else is in that water. You got to tap into your own confidence, your own bravery. Even when you’re afraid and even when things feel like that storm is looking pretty scary and maybe I should just hustle back to the safe port, pushing through, that’s where I think where we find those real breakthroughs.
Lisa: I think that’s so profound, Chris. One of the things I really got from the book that I hope others get is that you are not alone because it can be hard, as you say, to say, “I see that you, whoever you’re working with, wants to push for efficiency, wants to push for maximizing how we automate using this technology.” That’s only going to get us so far in the short term. There is another way to think about this. As you said, that can be scary if you’re talking about it alone, but to have a book like Leading for Tomorrow behind you, to be able to distribute and say, let’s turn to Chapter 8.
Chip Conley’s point of view on wisdom and why we also need to cultivate wisdom and create spaces for that and learning for that and why that is a longer-term strategy than just maximizing the tokens to the hilt, that is so valuable to someone because then Chip is on their shoulder, and maybe Nancy Duarte is on their shoulder, who is saying, “Look, you can communicate in ways that get people to a new place.” Chris, to your point, yes, have courage, have a point of view. Now what? You’re going to be there alone if you don’t get others to join you on that.
How she so brilliantly makes the distinction that you need a speech and then you need stories to get others involved and then you need a ceremony to really transform people, and you need enduring symbols. This is the way we pioneer new futures. I just love the fact that you have so many great concrete examples in here that give people ideas on how to channel that courage. Just extraordinary. I wonder, SBK, maybe I’ll start with you because you’ve been so focused on the human condition and flourishing, in going and developing this book, if there were other points of view that struck you as great compliments in that way about how to take some of your ideas and thread them through organizationally.
SBK: Oh, absolutely. It’s funny, there’s a chapter in the book about Maslow and about rethinking Maslow’s hierarchy of needs by Jacqueline Novogratz. I liked it. Yes, I don’t have the monopoly on being able to redefine Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Chip Conley has also written beautifully about Maslow and stuff like that. Yes, Jacqueline talks about dignity as being a really important thing to center around, and maybe be the base of the pyramid is basically, maybe human dignity and the fact that it takes all of us. I love that theme and that idea because I’m a longtime advocate of neurodiversity. I think we need to appreciate that for the future. We need to appreciate all the different kinds of minds that exist on this planet and having dignity for difference. I’ve never quite put it that way, but I like that now. I like that phrase, dignity for difference. I like that. We really need that.
Lisa: Yes. Chris, what about you when you think about the different chapters? You’ve been studying empathy within leadership and organization, how to be adaptive, and even Whitney Johnson’s reflection on that incredible story of how those Chilean miners had to, in that crisis moment, step up in different ways. I wonder if you could share for you if there were just a couple chapters that really helped you understand your own work differently.
Chris: You talked about Whitney’s chapter, which is one that I was thinking about. The story of a mine collapse in Chile, and there are a group of miners who were, I think, was it two months, three months trapped underground. At the very onset, the realization is we’re only going to survive this if we come together and we understand what we need to do. How do we form our community here so that we can support each other through this? It was about, in this moment of crisis, how do we come together and create enough structure that gives us the framework that allows us then to do the work we need to do to survive?
They’re stuck in a mineshaft. It was days before there was even any sense that anyone knew that they were still alive. They organized into groups to figure out how they were going to share what food they had, and who was going to do what chores, because still work needed to be done in this space, and deciding what kind of a society they wanted to be stuck in this place that was hundreds and hundreds of feet underground. It was just a remarkable story and reminds us, I think, that we can build the structures. Whether we’re stuck underground or we’re out in the broad daylight, building those structures and building those communities and making very intentional decisions about how we want to be with one another is a foundation for then all this other work.
I think the book itself was a microcosm of the kind of leadership that we need going forward, because it is wonderful, grace-filled people with open hearts and a lot of humility and a lot of humanity that made this thing come together.
Lisa: I really appreciate that. The other big theme that I got from the book in so many chapters was clarity. Clarity based on values, clarity based on community and connection, and the belief that you can contribute even just a little to something better. SBK, I love that you brought up Jacqueline’s chapter on dignity. We don’t need AI for dignity. There’s so much that we can do every day. You really can create a more human experience for people.
SBK: Yes. The idea of dignity doesn’t mean always appeasing someone. A big problem with AI is that it just says whatever it thinks you want to hear. As we’ve seen in some really tragic cases like suicide, and there’s been some public things about this, is that’s not necessarily dignity, what we mean by dignity. I think part of dignity is also empowerment. It’s recognizing, yes, you may have these limitations, you may have had this past, and you can rise above it. I’ll help you get there, but I’m also not ignoring your imperfections of being human.
I’m not ignoring your struggles. I’m not just saying things to appease you. Sometimes you may be legitimately lazy. I don’t want ChatGPT to be like, “That’s okay, you don’t want to get out of bed today, Scott, and go to the gym. No problem, just stay in bed all day, and I got you.” It’s like, no, I want an AI that treats me as though I’m human. It’s be like, “I know you don’t want to get out of bed, but I also see your greater potential as a human.”
Chris: There’s a great chapter by Jennifer Aaker and Sophie Hamilton that starts with basically the work that they’ve been connected with around end-of-life, the hospice care, and then talking about purpose. No one ever says, “Boy, I wish I worked more,” on their deathbed. They really frame this idea of being very purpose-driven, and they talk about it, and then they add a bunch of exercises at the end. Like, “Okay, so we’re going to use these AI tools, then how do we use them to think about how we find more purpose in our days, how we find more purpose in a longer-term vision?”
What I love about that chapter particularly. is that it can have this big idea around life purpose, which a lot of people think, “I’m not sure what my purpose is, and does that mean I’m rudderless in the SBK sailboat?” Here’s the tools to help you think about it, to help you think in your daily life, how to engage and identify and move forward. Again, using AI not as a replacement, not as a crutch, but as a tool to help encourage your thinking and help encourage you through your daily life. I think putting AI and technology in its proper place as a support infrastructure for the kind of human thinking and feeling that we do, that’s a theme that’s recurrent. In that particular chapter, some really smart exercises that people can take those frameworks and start to use.
Lisa: Love that. I’ll just connect a couple dots before I have a final question for you. One is just going back to, Chris, your beautiful reflection on Whitney’s chapter about the miners. I think it captures an interesting phenomenon that we’re at right now, which is that there really are no blueprints for what happens next. Certainly, those miners found themselves in a horrible place that they never expected to be, and yet the human condition around how they learn to support each other with that single goal in mind of surviving and getting ahead, I think, is inspiring, first of all, to unpack the learning about what happened there.
It wasn’t just a hero story, which it was, but it’s like, what exactly enabled that to be a hero story? What happened there? How did people come together? I think, again, most of us are not, thankfully, trapped in a mine, this idea that we can figure it out together with that clarity of purpose, honoring that we can each contribute in some ways, both necessary and some organic. I think there’s a lot to be taken from that. The other thing that I would say, Chris, about the book, just hearing you talk about Jennifer Aaker and Sophie Hamilton’s chapter, is that in this wide range of perspectives, there is no single perfect.
The hope is that it’s helpful. The hope is that it can inspire you, it can motivate you, it can plant a seed, it believes in you, there are people that believe in you. SBK, when you talk about the generosity of people wanting to do this, that that is really, again, a toolkit that you can take with you, an invitation, as we said earlier. All right, we could talk for hours, but we’re nearing the end of our time. I’ve got one final question for each of you. I just love that we’re having this conversation before it comes out. Would love for you, ever the futurist, I’m going to ask you to fast forward into the future a bit.
The book is out, people are reading it, they’re taking it into their work. I want to ask each of you, what is your preferred future here with this book? How do you hope that people take these ideas and share what you hope it does for them and their organizations? SBK, I’ll start with you.
SBK: Okay, great question. I would really like this to be part of the conversation with a capital T, capital C, The Conversation. It’s happening. I see it all the time, and quite frankly, the conversation is being dominated by a couple tech men, and that’s the honest truth about it. I would love to see this perspective and all these contributors for their voices to be part of the big conversation because this is important stuff. This conversation is talking about the future of humanity and the role of technology and the role of how we’re going to confront the massive uncertainty that we’re entering. I want as diverse number of voices as possible to have the common thread of humanity being part of the big conversation.
Lisa: I love that, SBK. As you were saying that, the conversation, I actually just came back from moderating an incredible three-day conference with HR leaders that was focused on human at the core. That was the theme. As you shared that, what I got was a visual of boardrooms handing out this book and being like, “Okay, this is going to be our roadmap going forward.” Chris, I’d love to hear from you.
Chris: Double-click on what Scott just said. When tech bros are out talking about AI and all it’s going to do and all it’s going to change the world, I always ask, “Who do those conversations benefit?” They benefit the creators of that technology who want that technology to dominate and ultimately to generate wealth. That’s fine. Silicon Valley has been a wealth-generating machine for decades. I want this book to be the one that, no matter who you are in an organization, helps you reclaim your agency so you can be telling a story that benefits you and your peers and your colleagues as you reshape what work looks like.
That you are leading a conversation, the conversation, in your organizations, whether you are the executive at the helm, the CEO, whether you are, if we still have male clerks in the back office, if you’re walking across a graduation stage this week, wherever you are in that work ecosystem, that you can read this book and realize that you have agency to create and lead in a future that works for you and not just for those who are out telling a different story that works for them. Agency, bravery, optimism, it’s a future you’re going to make, nobody is going to make it for you.
SBK: Yes, and I also hope that we can someday have a checkbox where we can opt out of AI if we want, just for a day, turn off, silence, all technology. I want nature. I want human connection. I just want to make sure we always have that box we can check.
Lisa: Chris, I love that so much. What an incredible takeaway. It, again, reminds me of why I started How We Future, was to share more stories of people shaping the kinds of futures that we want to be a part of.
Chris: Aww.
Lisa: That pull us forward. Fundamentally, I’m reminded of a very early lesson in my career where I had a job that had no blueprint. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but there were big expectations on me. I realized there is no they that’s going to teach me how to do it. I am the they. I think this book says we are the they. We want a future that we want to be a part of, we are the they. We’re giving you some scaffolding. We’re giving you some ideas of how to take that forward. I want to end with a quote that really stuck for me from your opening chapter.
You say, “We no longer live through disruptions. We live inside continuous disruption, and that demands a wholly different kind of leadership. One measure, not by productivity, but by the capacity to harness the human potential to think, connect, innovate, and act meaningfully and purposefully, even as the ground keeps moving beneath us.” Who doesn’t need that book? Chris, SBK, thank you. I know I speak for all of the contributors when we say you held our hearts through this, you supported our ideas, and you took our hope for a better future, and you turned it into a reality.
We are all so grateful. I think everyone that reads and buys and shares this book is going to feel the same sense of humanity, of gratitude, of love, of care, and compassion that you put into this project. That is going to help fuel them forward. Thank you for being on How We Future. Thank you for being who you are, and thank you for all that you do.
Chris: You’re going to make us cry.
SBK: I know. I’m tearing up.
Lisa: Every time I talk with Scott and Chris, I understand more and more how good leadership depends on the environment and cultures we design and the stories we tell about human potential. They remind us that people flourish when they’re given room to grow intellectually, emotionally, and creatively. If this conversation sparked a reflection or challenged how you think about leadership and potential, leave a comment sharing what stayed with you, and make sure to preorder Leading for Tomorrow using the link in the show notes. It’s truly the book this moment calls for. Thanks for listening. I’m Lisa Kay Solomon, and I’ll see you next week.