Living in a Post-AI World, with Terence Mauri – Episode 479 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Continuing the discussion from Episode 478, Terence Mauri, acclaimed author and founder of Hack Future Lab, talks about having sweet AND sour in your life, teaching wisdom & judgement, tearing down information silos, the 3 forms of curiosity, deliberate reductionism, and other important topics.

About Terence:

Terence Mauri, one of the world’s leading experts and keynote speakers on Leadership, AI and Disruption, inspires and motivates teams to thrive in ever-changing contexts. Thinkers50 has described Terence as “an influential and outspoken thinker on the future of leadership.”

Terence is a MIT Entrepreneur Mentor, a visiting Professor at IE Business School, the Founder of Hack Future Lab, and a 5X Bestselling Author that has been seen in Inc., Forbes, Business Insider, and more.

Prior to his current role, he was a managing director for one of the world’s largest advertising agencies working with clients such as American Express, JP Morgan and Apple, and emerged as a battle tested director who understands the challenges of turning volatility into value creation.

Learn more at TerenceMauri.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Adam Outland
One of the things that occurred to me, how valuable it must be as a leader to stay tuned in to the rapid innovations that are occurring, otherwise you can’t leverage them. What do you encourage people to do, to stay plugged in to what’s going on? How are people in your orbit receiving their information and staying tuned in to the future?

Terence Mauri
Brilliant question, it’s a little dividend here, which is the science. The science shows, the research shows, we feel it at a heart a level as well. Is that when you part of a community, virtual or face to face, three things. Number one, discovery, the ratio of new ideas, new perspectives, counter intuitive perspectives. It goes up, and that’s important. So discovery. Another one is energy. You know, actually, it’s a great source of inspiration and action. And number three is cross pollination, that actually, you know, ideas need to connect together to create, to create breakthroughs. And so discovery, energy, cross pollination, all of this together, you need to be thinking about these three dividends and how you activate them in your in your life. And that can be done through reading, listening to great podcasts, watching Tiktok videos, attending lectures, speaking yourself, writing yourself as well, going to events, conferences, dinner events, you know, do the basics brilliantly. But also, once a quarter, do something that scares yourself. It scares you or excites you or throws you out of your comfort zone. And yeah, for example, I did an event with Google where they had a kind of dinner. Leaders came together, and it was called the sweet and sour dinner. And the idea of the sweet and sour dinner is that let’s talk about the good stuff, but let’s also talk about the bad stuff. Let’s talk about the stuff that should be said that’s not being said. Let’s ask the questions that should be asked that are not being asked. You know, because of fear or politics or whatever. Sweet and sour is a really important point. So these sorts of conversations, conversations that don’t just make us feel good, but make us think hard, gives you so much vitality.

Adam Outland
I love that. Given that this is your whole world and work, so you’re very plugged in. What would you say are your favorite either conferences or maybe it’s podcasts, or where are your best channels for staying informed right now?

Terence Mauri
I love, for example, masters of scale, a great podcast. Reid Hoffman, that’s a great one. I was on disrupt TV with Vela Ashe, and that was an amazing conversation. So disrupt TV, Web Summit in Lisbon is a great one as well. Slush in the Nordics, that’s another great one, which looks at the future of work, the future of leadership, the future of AI. These would be some examples of what I’m excited about right now that I’m constantly engaging with.

Adam Outland
Coming back to the academics of things which probably could use even more disruption. What do you think, from your perspective, is the class that’s not taught but should be?

Terence Mauri
I think it’s this idea of what happens in a post AI world. So this intersection of psychology, anthropology, humanity, sociology, that I think the olog is the future is about the origins. It’s not just about AI and technology. That’s one half of the narrative, but it’s dominating every conversation. The other half of the narrative is the origins, because technology changes fast. But humans don’t you know, we have Paleolithic brains, God like technology, medieval institutions, the complexities of the world are going like this. Our Paleolithic brains, capacity to respond to the complexities is like this. If you think about the processing power of a chip, it’s increased over a trillion times since the 1950s our Paleolithic brains have stayed the same. That creates a wisdom gap, and we’re not talking enough about that right now in academia, academia as well, is still very linear. It’s kind of very, you know, siloed, and silos can blind us to new perspectives. So I think the future is horizontal. It’s silo busting, its cross pollination. Collective intelligence. It’s the ologies.

Adam Outland
Yeah, you said wisdom. And I thought to myself, how does one teach wisdom? And maybe part of wisdom is judgment, right? And how do you help people have better judgment, or more effective judgment? And that is a challenging question probably worth solving.

Terence Mauri
And I mean, imagine, you know, if university there was a subject to University on wisdom. And actually, when you go to university, you just don’t, you don’t go for just three years, very transactional. But our relationships with universities are stretched out over, you know, maybe a lifetime. I think it’s time, you know, this age of AI, Age of convergence, Age of disruption, Age of possibility means that we need to radically rethink, reset, reimagine these outdated structures, institutions that we’ve been holding on to. And this would be one example of how do we reimagine our relationship with academia over a 50 year to high horizon where we get mentoring, we mentor, and we’re mentored. We’re part of a long term community. For me, we need to rather get stuck in these silos at such an early age and become very transactional. I’d love to see societies and communities where we’re tapping onto this collective spirit, collective generosity, generosity, reciprocity, and growing because of that, for the benefit of society, the planet, relationships, institutions.

Adam Outland
Yeah, well said, and you’re right. I think about the silos in particular, you know, in medicine, you see it, it’s siloed in the brain or the spine, and then, you know, someone goes into someone’s else’s lab, and they find a tool or a resource that they could have been using over the last five years.

Terence Mauri
Some of the most pioneering innovations have happened at the Cleveland Clinic, for example, to do with heart disease. And one of the reasons why they’ve done that their ratio of innovation is so high at the Cleveland Clinic is because they got rid of silos that, you know, they made it easier for happy accidents to happen. And what I mean by that is doctors, surgeons from different parts of the hospital coming together to talk, to share different perspectives on the same challenge. And they found that by doing that in an engineered way, engineering cross pollination, the ratio of IDEA, the ratio of innovation, that’s now saving more lives, went up in a significant way, in a very measurable way, we can learn from these sorts of courage leap examples.

Adam Outland
And that’s a great example of disruption that doesn’t involve, sometimes people, I think, collate disruption with a software and that’s a great example of disruption being in almost a human, organic meeting, where it’s it’s simply, like you said, cross pollinating and breaking down the silos to solve problems.

Terence Mauri
Exactly.

Adam Outland
You know, what actionable steps can a leader take to sharpen their organization’s readiness for the future?

Terence Mauri
I think, start with this idea of future readiness muscle and, you know, we have muscle memory. So what I mean by that is some mindset shifts the the future. And the reality right now is that the future is not just about technology or trends that’s important, but even more important than that, it’s about mindset shifts and choices and voices and so this future readiness muscle we need to sharpen in meaningful, intentional ways. For example, the curiosity to learn, relearn and unlearn, the clarity to focus, because our attention spans now are one of the rarest and purest forms of leadership, capital, the conviction to make decisions, decision velocity, under pressure, despite volatility, despite uncertainty, these would be some muscles to sharpen, individually and collectively within the organization. A practical example that of that would be at Novartis, the pharma company. They have a 30 day curiosity hackathon, where they sharpen three types of curiosity over the course of 30 days, 100,000 employees. They focus on inner curiosity, so know yourself, know your blind spots, know your strengths other curiosity. Know, the people around you build bridges and outer curiosity, which is, what’s a point of view you have about your industry? What’s a point of view you have about weak signals or big trends that are impacting your industry? And what are you going to do about them? They call it triple curiosity, inner, other and outer. That’s one example of how a company is bringing this future readiness muscle to life in a really human way. So inner is yourself out. Other is other people, and outer is really curiosity outside of the business. So looking at external trends, inflection points, competition. And even other industries, because with industry convergence happening as well, we also can learn a lot, not just from our own industries, but again, that you get trapped in silo thinking, but also breaking into other industries.

Adam Outland
Love that. And just a little speed dating questions that we love to end with, with a lot of our guests, I wanted to ask you a few of these too, because I think you have a different perspective. We heard a little bit of what you’re listening to. What are you reading?

Terence Mauri
I love Cal Newport, uh, slow productivity. That’s a great book. Slow productivity, this idea of do less but do better and practice reductionism, then we have this brain bias, adding complexity to complexity. Again, it’s not a winning strategy. When the world is coming at you at light speed. You need we all need to start thinking intentionally about reductionism, and what I mean by that is doing less, but doing it more intelligently. For example, once a quarter, look at your business. Look at your workload. What do you need to detox? What do you need to declutter? What do you need to delete when you practice the reductionism in a deliberate way? It’s a clarifier, an energizer, a multiplier. Gives you a no strategy as well, which helps you to obviously achieve greater things in shorter time spans. So reductionism. Cal Newport, slow productivity. That’d be one book. Another one would be Paul Oster, Brooklyn Follies. That’s fiction. I think reading fiction is really great for the imagination. We’ve got to be careful about look at this little look down syndrome, constantly looking down and actually reading fiction. The research shows that reading fiction sharpens your imagination muscle, your empathy muscle as well. It also puts you in a slower, beater state of consciousness, which is absolutely a source code for strategic thinking, big picture thinking. The risk that we all take, these are addictive, and what that does is it forces us to become very transactional and very short term, and we get addicted to dopamine hits, short term thinking, reactive thinking, at the expense of longer term, deeper imagination and strategic thinking. So you know, read fiction as well a couple of times a year, at the very least, because that requires discipline. That’s important. But also you’ll really cultivate your reservoirs of imagination, which will make you stand out, by the way, in a world of sameness, you know, when we’ve got access to the same AI, the same chat bots. The biggest risk is this curse of sameness and commoditization is going to be your imagination, your onlyness that makes you stand out.

Adam Outland
I love it. I mean, to some degree, we’re pretty complex computers ourselves, and so that power for creativity one of our biggest strengths that it’s been a trend I’ve seen from a lot of interviews. Thank you for that. You’ve been through, you know, obviously a lot of personal transformation yourself when you think back. And the question I ask all of our guests to the part of your life we probably didn’t talk about as much, which is the pre 21 year old Terence. What’s the message you think you would go back and deliver having lived the life you’ve lived now that that young man would benefit from hearing?

Terence Mauri
I think, don’t, you know, don’t get I mean, it’s easy to say this with hindsight, but we’re forced into boxes. We force ourselves into boxes. You know, I remember everyone asking me questions from from about the age of 10, what, who do you want to be? What do you want to do? And I understand the intention behind these questions, but who the hell knows at that age, I didn’t know, and I think it puts unnecessary pressure. So I know that it’s positive intention behind a long time, but the risk is we put ourselves into boxes. We get stuck with perfectionism. We also get really obsessed with getting everything right first time. And of course, sometimes it’s impossible not to escape that, because that’s the way that college and school work. You know, you pass or you’ll fail. So there are some institutional constraints that we have to deal with. I would say, be easier on yourself. Focus more on experimentation, and don’t get so obsessed with a plan at such an early, early age focus on developing curiosity skills, relationship skills, conversational skills, presentation skills, skills that will define you and make you more distinctive in a world of sameness where everybody’s got access to the same tools, these would be some sort of early reflections and Find yourself mentors. You don’t even have to label it, but surround yourself with people who are different to you and your divergent perspectives, younger, older, different cultures. Go traveling. These are, these are great, you know, great initiatives, great actions, and practice courage. Redefine your relationship with. Failure as well. And ask yourself every year, what have I done this year where I’ve grown, where I’ve had a setback, where I’ve shown courage over comfort?

Adam Outland
I love it. I think one of the words I latched on to, that you just said, was experimentation. I think when I’ve looked back that whenever I’ve even while we’re in academics, it doesn’t prevent us from being able to try things in the real world scenario, especially with our connectivity nowadays, and it’s so valuable every time you go out and you test an idea instead of just reading about it. This has been a phenomenal interview, where can people go to just stay connected to Terence and understand more?

Terence Mauri
Well, first of all, you know, thank you for such an incredible interview. I’ve loved your questions. I’ve loved our connection, and all the themes that we’ve discussed are so close to my heart, and I know they’re close to your heart as well. It’s always great. It’s always an honor to meet a kindred spirit, and you never know what’s going to happen. So thank you. Thank you for that opportunity. And so for me, you know, I’d want to pay it forward. There’s a couple of platforms to stay connected, to reach out part of this community that were constantly part of building and nourishing number one is LinkedIn. Obviously, LinkedIn is a big one. Terrence Maori, LinkedIn. Another one is my website, terencemarry.com check out my podcast show, hack the future. And these would be two or three, and then obviously my new my latest book, The upside of disruption, is another great resource to check out the upside of disruption. And you know, I wish everybody good fortune, health and happiness. I leave everyone with the words of the late chemist Marie Curie. She said, in life, nothing is to be feared, only understood, and the more we understand, the less we will fear. But also Ted Lasso, my favorite coach, he said, stay humble, stay teachable.

Adam Outland
Couldn’t agree with that last one more. Thank you so much, Terence, for your time. This was fantastic. Was a great interview. I learned a lot.

Terence Mauri
Thank you so much, Adam.