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Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

Book by Roger Spitz · 31 quotes · Disruption, Foresight, Futures Thinking

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Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World Quotes

“In contrast to advice, our UN-VICE is not a suggestion of behavior or a mandate. Instead, our UN-VICE is a way to decipher changing circumstances imaginatively. All advice should be carefully considered, combined with an emphasis on developing and trusting our own capabilities. In our increasingly UN-VICE world, the value of recommendations is rapidly decreasing. Systemic disruption has devalued ad-vice; instead, we offer our best UN-VICE. Inspired by Richard Feynman, we must explore unanswered questions, rather than adhering to unquestionable answers. Zen Master Suzuki Roshi said “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” Our UN-VICE draws from the three stages of the Japanese martial arts concept shuhari. In the first stage, shu, the student masters the established fundamentals. In the second stage, ha, the learner practices and experiments with novel approaches, guided by their own unique perspectives. In the third stage, ri, they break loose from confining rulebooks to adapt freely to any situation. Shuhari is a journey, a continuous process of learning, experimenting, and letting go.”

“Our world is facing new tensions, contradictions, complexities, and uncertainties. This new reality is the basis for our own version of VUCA, updated with two additional features: Intersecting and Exponential. In an UN-VICE world, these concepts are as important as UNknown, Volatile, and Complex. We must go beyond automatically relying on advice and start forming our own UN-VICE to survive. Proposing yet another acronym is risky - we hope the acronym police will be merciful.”

“UN-VICE as a constant environment of the world: The UN-VICE environment is an inherent constant. It is easier to imagine the world as predictable, but this world does not exist. Reality will continue to display UN-VICE features: UNknown, Volatile, Intersecting, Complex, Exponential.”

“Many organizations and militaries use VUCA as an acronym to describe the disruptive state of the world, given its Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. UN-VICE is an updated way of capturing the state and velocity of the world, with our acronym for UNknown, Volatile, Intersecting, Complex, and Exponential: - UNknown: Recognizing that you can’t know anything perfectly, and that many of our decisions are based on assumptions. Increased uncertainty lowers the value of ad-vice and requires increased self-reliance. - Volatile: Our world, and change itself, is evolving faster than ever before. Volatility is not inherently good or bad; it is simply impactful. In volatility we see shifting speed, texture, and magnitude of the changing environment. - Intersecting: The broader our filters, the more we realize that what we observe overlaps with other things. Boundaries are disappearing, connecting new areas through combinations. - Complex: These more-than-complicated systems have unreliable input-output relationships and cannot be summarized or modeled without losing their essence. Unpredictable situations with unknown unknowns. - Exponential: A nonlinear type of change that increases in its growth rate. To an observer, this change may happen gradually, then suddenly. Rapid acceleration of seemingly-small shifts.”

“As we face inseparable technological and existential conditions, we enter an era of Techistentialism. AI will increasingly provide insights that enable more-informed predictive decision-making, humans should remain wary of an inadvertent reliance on prescriptive algorithms dictating specific decisions. Complex and uncertain environments inherently involve unknown unknowns; these are situations where we need to be agile despite the lack of immediate answers.”

“Maybe the existential risk is not machines taking over the world, but rather the opposite, where humans start responding like idle machines - unable to connect the emerging dots of our UN-VICE world.”

“To ensure superstupidity is not our future, updating our education system should become an existential priority. Education’s effectiveness should be evaluated on whether it can help humanity become future-ready for our complex 21st century. We should inspire passion, nurture curiosity, emphasize uncertainty, develop range, and use critical thinking to examine assumptions. Most importantly, we need to form new relationships with inquiry, experimentation, and failure (which goes hand in hand with creativity). These features can help us problem-solve out of the most existential risks. Today’s standard knowledge will never solve tomorrow’s surprises.”