Terence Mauri
Appearances
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
The worst thing we can do is actually not take any risk because being addicted to certainty can make us feel comfortable. But if that certainty is also causing a stagnation, we're not learning anymore, we're not moving anymore, well, that's not a good place to be. You know, life is short. If we're lucky, we get about 960 months to live. It's not to make people feel scared.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
I love that question because disruption is about humility. And what I mean by humility is the ability to the capacity, the awareness to know your blind spots, to be aware of the blind spots that you're blind to, but also understanding that failure and setback and obstacle is one half of success. And as Ryan Holiday says so eloquently, the obstacle is the way, disruption is the way.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
The philosopher Kierkegaard said that life is best lived forwards, but is best understood backwards. And I can really relate to that. I had my whole life and career mapped out in a very linear way. But as another famous philosopher, Mike Tyson, once said, you can have the best laid plans until somebody punches you in the mouth. And this is what happened to me.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
And I'm a self-confessed failure pioneer. I failed multiple times in order to get where I am today. Multiple setbacks, multiple rejections, book rejections, client rejections. 30% of what I do is keynotes, conferences around the world. Well, often when you're chosen, you've been chosen out of like maybe five or six or eight other great speakers. So you get rejected a lot.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
90% of the time, it's a rejection. Now, I could choose two ways to respond to that. I could say, one, I'm going to give up because my ratio of rejection is so high. So I'm just not going to do that. Or two, recognize that actually anything worthwhile in life requires resilience, requires persistence, requires grit. And that's been the big lesson for me.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
I'm here because I've overcome probably more failures than the average person. And that's been painful, but I've made pain part of the process and understand that if I'm not hurting, I'm not growing.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
Yes. Yeah.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
I think it goes back to that life disruption, life or death moment, life flashing past you, which you realize you can have your whole life mapped out that linear way, become obsessed with success or avoidance of failure. And that's not real life. Being stripped down and being made very vulnerable, nearly losing my life. Actually, with the wake-up call to me, life is risk.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
And actually, the biggest regret, one of the things to help our listeners and viewers today is when you get to the end of your life, and I hope it's a long life, 90 years of age or 100, the number one regret is according to research, is a lack of courage.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
When you look back, the biggest regret you'll have in your lives when you look back at your 90 years will be the amount of times that you didn't step up, the lack of courage, the courage to think a bit bolder, the courage to say no, the courage to walk away from something that wasn't working for you, the courage to start over. This is our number one regret at the end of our lives.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
And we can use this knowledge in advance of getting to 90 years of age to our advantage and do what Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos used to do very well, which is regret minimization. So imagine that you're 70 years old and say, what would I regret most not doing when I look back? Is it not having kids? Is it not starting that business? Is it not hitting that C-level in my company?
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
Whatever it is, success is very personal. But just remember, at the end of our lives, the number one regret is a lack of courage. And actually, one half of courage is the ability to embrace failure. And I recognize that that is a stepping stone to where you want to be. It's not necessarily... And of course, there are different types of failures as well, by the way.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
So I had a successful career management consultancy. Things were going well. I was making good progress. One day I walked into a store. I was in the middle of the day and a car driver lost control and drove a car into the store. He mounted the curb. It was actually a terrible accident. Nobody lost their lives that day, but many people were injured, including myself.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
Productive failures, intelligent failures, stupid failures. So we have to be careful here as well and understand the nuances. But the one thing to take away is we need to reframe our relationship with productive failure. and recognize that it's also an important part of success.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
What I love about Generation Alpha is this incredible vision, aspirational, and I think it's very nuanced. The culturally context and culture demographics whether it's Africa or North America or Europe, there's a different risk appetite out there depending on geography. And so that's a big deal. But the good news is it can be unlearned and relearned as well, for sure.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
And what I love about my work at MIT is every year we host MIT Solve. And the purpose of MIT Solve is to create a generation of solvers We post grand challenges, global challenges that the world faces. For example, climate change, lack of literacy, healthcare challenges. And we give people anywhere in the world the opportunity to pitch tech-based solutions to those global challenges.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
And one of those examples recently was for people with Alzheimer's. There was a young student called Emma Yang. Her grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's or dementia. It's a terrible disease. One in seven people will get it in their lifetime. And being an introvert and a mathematician, she framed this as a hypothesis, and she created an app called Timeless.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
The purpose of the app Timeless is to help people with dementia stay reconnected to their memories, reconnected to their families through geotagging, facial recognition, gamification. Received over a million dollars of wealth of investment since inception. This is a great example of generations solved.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
This is a great example of what can happen when the cost, you imagine the costs of doing this 10 years ago would have been prohibitive. We would cost millions of dollars to set up an app and test it, scale it, Now you can do all of this. You can go from idea to iteration to implementation within hours or days. And obviously that's accelerated even more with AI.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
And so for me, this is not the age of disruption, by the way. This is the age of wonder, the age of possibility. And the only limit is our imagination.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
It's so exciting, isn't it? Ray Kurzweil at Singularity University has written a book recently where he really deep dives into this as well. I was in Doha, big future of tech, future of AI summit, and just some of the facts and insights coming out are so exciting. This idea that we've now got chips that can be scaled to DNA, and they can hold billions of transistors. That's actually happening.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
I woke up under the car in the store with the wheel of the car still going, burning my legs. It was one of those kind of accidents where your life flashes past you. I spent a number of weeks in hospital. And, you know, when you have time to think, when you're out of the building, that's when you get to reflect at a deeper level. And, you know, for me, I really sort of, it was a reawakening.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
It's not science fiction. So science fiction has become science fact. And I think you're right. If we can hold on for at least another 10 years, it's going to be one hell of a ride.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
I connected with, reconnected actually with, my values, legacy, who I was, who I was becoming. And I realized there was a gap. There was a gap between who I wanted to become and what I was doing right now in the world of management consultancy, which is a very transactional world, a very profitable world.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
But I wanted to pivot to a transformational world, a world where actually I could bring my life and my values to life in a visceral way and visible way as well. So that happened about 20 years ago. And since then, I've been on a mission, a higher mission to inspire leaders around the world, ranging from NGO and non-for-profit to S&P 500 to harness the upside of disruption.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
It's this idea that it's never been easier to waste time and waste energy, that not taking a risk is a risk.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
What I mean by that is, turning disruption, it could be career disruption, technology disruption, industry disruption, life disruption, whatever the disruption is, big or small, life-changing or professional. How do we turn that into a tailwind or a platform for laser-light focus and strategic courage and a more sustainable, values-driven life?
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
I think it's such a great question. It's what I call a catalytic question. And it's a question that we should all be thinking about because our relationship with risk is often not a good one. Our appetite for risk-taking is often squeezed out of us like a lemon from an early age. By the age we leave college, we're risk-averse.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
And then we've got this paradox of companies now demanding that we're all courageous risk-takers. And there's a big rhetoric to reality gap there. And for me, I think that accident reconfigured my relationship with risk that life is inherently risky. You can die at any moment, basically.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
The worst thing we can do is actually not take any risk because being addicted to certainty can make us feel comfortable. But if that certainty is also causing a stagnation or inertia, we're not learning anymore, we're not moving anymore, we're accepting a status quo that's not healthy or does not give us happiness, well, that's not a good place to be.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
And we know that if you look at different statistics around the world, whether it's the Gallup engagement survey, I mean, that hasn't changed for decades now. The majority of the global workforce disengaged, still go to work, but have mentally quit the job. Life is short. If we're lucky, we get about 960 months to live, which is just 80 years of age.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
When you think of it that way, when I frame it that way, it's not to make people feel scared. It's this idea that it's never been easier to waste time and waste energy because this is the age of abundance. Also, we have technology that's incredible, but technology can make the trivial seem urgent.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
Think about when you look at your day, reacting to emails all the day, everything seems exciting and urgent. Probably less than 5% is actually important. So I think for me, what it did was a couple of things. Number one, it was a great reawakening and it helped me to reconnect with the idea that not taking a risk is a risk sometimes.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
Number two, that actually the world will always be uncertain, will always be volatile and risk and reward always come together, wrapped together. We forget that risk and reward travel in the same elevator. And sometimes we forget that actually, you know, this idea that we always overestimate the risk of trying something new. It could be a new way of working. It could be taking a career break.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
It could be applying for a new job in a new sector, whatever it is. We always overestimate the risk of doing something new. And we always underestimate the risk of standing still.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
Disruption for me is a secular and structural here to stay inflection point. There's different types of disruptors out there. If we look at mega trends, for example, we've got optimized reality that's moving from doing AI to being AI. That means, for example, we're moving from IT spending as a percentage of global GDP, moving from 5% to 10% over the next seven years.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
To optimize reality, that's a big here-to-stay disruption that will impact and reshape and redefine value creation, but also redefine completely new industries and companies. Another example would be decarbonization, the whole transition to the green economy around the world. So these are big bang disruptions.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
But if we take it down to a more granular level, disruption can also be a family disruption. It could be a divorce, a sudden death, could be a career type disruption. But actually, how we deal with them, I think it's this kind of point of view that asking this question, how do I turn these disruptors into platforms, into tailwinds? How do we turn these into upside?
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
I think so. I think constraints are often opportunities in disguise. For example, Hermes, the global luxury company, one of the big constraints facing the fashion industry is the idea that they're not sustainable business models. They waste a lot of money. a lot of money. They've got high carbon dioxide emissions.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
So for Hermes, what they've done is turn that constraint into upside by creating new strategic partnerships with biotech companies. They produce mycelium, which is a non-leather-based form of leather. It's like a mushroom-based type of leather, alternative to leather. And the big audacious goal at Hermes now is that at least half its global revenues will be mycelium-based leather by 2030.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
Now, that wouldn't have happened without turning a disruption into a tailwind.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
I think it's helpful to take a historical perspective, first of all. So if we go back to 1956, Professor Marvin Minsky, for example, he was one of the pioneers of AI. And originally it was going to be called applied statistics, but that wasn't sexy enough. I think there are three kind of time horizons to be aware of. So the first one was excitement phase.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
It took ChatGPT two months to reach 100 million users. It took the cell phone 16 years to reach 100 million users. And so the excitement phase, I think, has happened over the last couple of years, especially we've seen over a trillion dollars of capex go into AI infrastructure, over $250 billion of VC money as well. That's going up exponentially.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
So that excitement phase, we've now moved to the experimental phase. For example, T-Mobile and OpenAI have just formed a partnership for a sort of proactive AI decision-making model that will be able to proactively help solve customers' pain points. You know, three phases. Number one, excitement phase, exuberance, excitement. Number two is the experimental phase that I believe we're in right now.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
The next phase, the next horizon which we'll be entering over the next 18 months is the embedded phase. And that's where actually AI eventually will just become invisible. Every great technology, if it's truly great, should be invisible. It'll be embedded in our cell phones, in our toothbrushes, in our TVs, a trillion sensor economy connected together
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
amplifying intelligence, cross-pollination, helping tackle some of the world's biggest existential challenges from climate change to healthcare. And we're at the embryonic stage of that, but it doesn't take much imagination to think about
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
where we're going with this over the next couple of years, that the sort of cost of production, the cost of knowledge production is going to reach zero in the next 15 years. It would take you a lifetime to read 8 billion words. Now imagine that the fastest AI today can do that in the blink of an eye. And again, we can start to see the exponential opportunity of this platform.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
But I want to say as well that we have to be careful of artificial idiocy. Am I investing in warm AI or cold AI? A room AI is humanity first. AI. It's a humanity-first future enabled by AI. It maximizes, elevates what makes us more human, and it protects wellbeing, loneliness, democracy, truth, and transparency. That's warm AI.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
The bad news is right now, most governments, most organizations are not investing in warm AI. They're investing in cold AI. Cold AI is machine-first future enabled by AI. It elevates division, disinformation, truth decay. It erodes well-being. And so that's the difference. Are we investing in a warm tech future or a cold tech future?
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
What a great question. I think it's a question every leader, every manager should be thinking about right now, which is to use AI in the right way, in an inclusive way, sustainable way, in a way that sharpens the growth and talent agenda. We should be thinking about ROI, which is not just return on investment, but this new human-centric ABI, e-behavior indicator.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
Thank you so much, Adam, for inviting me.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
which is return on intelligence, return on imagination. Imagine a cognitively enabled enterprise where your talent gets to solve the biggest problems, the biggest challenges that it faces. That means 10x productivity, 10x engagement, 10x execution. We know that that's not the reality for most organizations right now.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
I just had an article published a few weeks ago in Fast Company called The Rise of Boreout. which is the opposite of burnout. Bore out is cognitive or emotional under load. It's boredom at work and it's at record levels. And so if AI is just doing parts of the job which we're already doing and what we're left with is other boring parts of the job, that's not return on intelligence.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
And so that's a big question. We should be using AI for speed to insight, speed to innovation, speed to decision velocity, for creating new scenarios, new products, new services, new platforms, testing hypotheses. It's a generative tool. The clue is in the name. But my worry is that many C-suite are just looking at AI to automate
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
to make cost savings, and to just focus on a very narrow metric, which is shareholder return.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
Yes, I think so. I really think so because as I said, when the cost of this technology is coming to zero, when everybody has access to the same tools, the same technologies, it's more difficult to stand out, ironically. Everyone's got access, everyone's set up the great website, the great podcast, the great YouTube channel, but how do you stand out? the value of that goes down.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
This is one of the ironies, and I think a lot of people don't think about that. There's a reason why 0.01% of people make money on Spotify or TikTok or YouTube, and that number's even going down more. We've got to be so careful. I call it the curse of sameness. I write about it a lot in the new book, The Upside of Disruption. So yes, ironically, sharpening your human edge
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
Your in-person edge is going to be the superpower that differentiates you, gives you that distinctive quality in this sea of sameness and sea of commoditization that we're in. And that's why making the effort to go to these in-person events, speaking at them, contributing to them, panels, this is an important part of the human edge. Yes, use the tools around us. You'd be stupid not to.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
But don't think... that it's gonna be easy just doing it that way. Yes, there'll be a percentage that managed to do it, but my fear is that when everything comes to zero cost, everyone has access to the same incredible tools, while actually it's much more difficult to stand out.
The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
And so that in-person human edge, that social skills, emotional intelligence, conversational listening, being fully present, these are gonna be important human skills, human skills, courage skills, These are the skills that we need to nurture and sharpen for the next generation.