Reader,

We are currently worrying about AI, tariffs, global insecurity, the rise of Gen-Z, and the general wickedness of business and its ecosystem.

What about the future? We should assume that change will get even more intense and that the next decade will punish default thinking.

Default thinking

Default thinking is a form of autopilot. It’s the instinct to trust what has worked before, to assume trends will extend, and to believe that experience guarantees wisdom. It often assumes that:

• Tomorrow will look like today.
• “Best” practices will continue to work.
• Efficiency matters more than adaptability.
• Data from the past is a reliable map of the future.

Simply put, it’s found in the comfort of precedent. And because precedent is comfortable, we succumb to it.

Business cycles were relatively predictable, technology advanced incrementally, and geopolitical conditions—though sometimes turbulent—didn’t rewrite the rules every year.

That mindset pretty much worked for the last hundred years. We were advised to think like Steve Jobs, become lean and mean, outsource to China, benchmark best practices, and more.

The big worry. Will you remain relevant?

Let me get right to the point. Relevance is no longer just about experience or technical expertise; it’s about mental adaptability — the ability to interpret complexity, connect patterns, challenge assumptions, and inspire confidence in uncertain times.

“Staying relevant” has quietly become one of the deepest and most personal anxieties among managers in 2025.

Some advice from 30 years ago

Way back in 1995, Dorothy Leonade-Barton wrote a wonderful book about innovation, The Wellsprings of Knowledge. In this book she expanded on earlier work about the need to develop “T-shaped skills.”

• The vertical leg of the T represents depth — deep domain expertise, technical mastery, and accumulated tacit knowledge (“deep smarts”).
• The horizontal bar represents breadth — the ability to collaborate across disciplines, integrate perspectives, and adapt knowledge to new contexts.

What if this concept was used to help you be better prepared for your futures?

The Prepared Mind “T”

As mentioned in the last issue, Julie, Jim and I are embarking on The Prepared Mind Project. A major aspect of this project is developing consulting and workshop materials that will help leaders build and refine the crossbar of their T-shaped competency with some needed thinking disciplines.

Here are seven thinking disciplines that you need to understand and employ. You don't need to be an expert, but you should know the basics and how to use them in everyday life.

1. Systems Thinking - Equips you to see the whole, not just the parts.

2. Critical Thinking - Sharpens your ability to evaluate claims, arguments, and data objectively.

3. Structured Skepticism - Provides a disciplined way for you to question “certainty” without becoming cynical.

4. Emotional Intelligence (EQ) - Fosters self-awareness, empathy, and relationship management.

5. Visual-Spatial Thinking - Enables you to see relationships, flows, and structures that are invisible in linear text or spreadsheets.

6. Foresight (Future Thinking) – Helps you to imagine multiple plausible futures, not predict one certain outcome.

7. Design Thinking - Combines empathy, ideation, and prototyping to help you create innovative solutions that actually work for people.

Bottom Line

All of us need to modify our thinking skills and disciplines as we move into the future. ChatGPT and its brethren have access to all the knowledge in the world but that does not mean they’re wise. That’s a human trait that we don’t want to surrender.

Next Time

Given all the AI hype and flood of fake, phony, lying “news,” I’m going to provide a primer on structured skepticism.

Cheers,

Bill