Over the next decade, today's connected world will be explosively more connected. Anything that can be distributed will be distributed: workforces, organizations, supply webs, and more. The tired practices of centralized organizations will become brittle in a future where authority is radically decentralized. Rigid hierarchies will give way to liquid structures. Most leaders—and most organizations—aren't ready for this future. Are you?

It's too late to catch up, but it's a great time to leapfrog. Noted futurist Bob Johansen goes beyond skills and competencies to propose five new leadership literacies—combinations of disciplines, practices, and worldviews—that will be needed to thrive in a VUCA world of increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. This book shows how to (1) forecast likely futures so you can “look back” and make sure you're prepared now for the changes to come, (2) use low-risk gaming spaces to work through your concerns about the future and hone your leadership skills, (3) lead shape-shifting organizations where you can't just tell people what to do, (4) be a dynamic presence even when you're not there in person, and (5) keep your personal energy high and transmit that energy throughout your organization.

This visionary book provides a vivid description of the ideal talent profile for future leaders. It is written for current, rising star, and aspiring leaders; talent scouts searching for leaders; and executive coaches seeking a fresh view of how leaders will need to prepare. To get ready for this future, we will all need new leadership literacies.

Leading futurist Bob Johansen shows how a new way of thinking, enhanced by new technologies, will help leaders break free of limiting labels and see new gradients of possibility in a chaotic world.

The future will get even more perplexing over the next decade, and we are not ready. The dilemma is that we're restricted by rigid categorical thinking that freezes people and organizations in neatly defined boxes that often are inaccurate or obsolete. Categories lead us toward certainty but away from clarity, and categorical thinking moves us away from understanding the bigger picture. Sticking with this old way of thinking and seeing isn't just foolish, it's dangerous.

Full-spectrum thinking is the ability to seek patterns and clarity outside, across, beyond, or maybe even without any boxes or categories while resisting false certainty and simplistic binary choices. It reveals our commonalities that are hidden in plain view. Bob Johansen lays out the core concepts of full-spectrum thinking and reveals the role that digital media—including gameful engagement, big-data analytics, visualization, blockchain, and machine learning—will play in facilitating and enhancing it. He offers examples of broader spectrums and new applications in a wide range of areas that will become possible first, then mandatory. This visionary book provides powerful ways to make sense of new opportunities and see the world as it really is.

GET THERE EARLY explains how leaders can anticipate future challenges and opportunities in order to optimally compete in the present. Using numerous examples and applying a revolutionary Foresight to Insight to Action model, Bob Johansen, former president and CEO of the Institute for the future, explains how to get a head start on your competition.These days, every leader struggles with a paradox: you can’t predict the future, but you have to be able to make sense of it to thrive. In the age of the Internet, everyone knows what’s new, but to succeed you have to be able to sort out what’s important, devise strategies based on your own point of view, and get there ahead of the crowd. Bob Johansen shares techniques the Institute for the Future has been refining for nearly forty years to help leaders navigate what, borrowing a term from the Army War College, he calls the VUCA world: a world characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. As the institute’s ten-year forecast makes clear, leaders now face fewer problems with neat solutions and more dilemmas: recurring, complex, messy, and puzzling situations. Get There Early lays out the institute’s three-step Foresight to Insight to Action Cycle that will allow readers to sense, make sense of, and win with dilemmas. Johansen offers specific techniques, ranging from storytelling to simulation gaming, as well as real-world examples to help readers turn the VUCA world on its head through creative use of vision, understanding, clarity, and agility. This book offers hope for leaders facing the constant tension—a dilemma in itself—between judging too soon and deciding too late.

PRODUCT INFORMATION

This self-assessment asks you to do a candid evaluation of where you stand with regard to each of the five future literacies introduced in The New Leadership Literacies , as well as the ten future leadership skills introduced in Leaders Make the Future .

Format: Online Subscription

Price: $14.95 for one-year subscription, or five tests, whichever comes first

Description: This instrument consists of 30 questions, 15 pertaining to the now and 15 relating to one year from now. For each section, statements will be rated from 1 to 5 as to how true they are. The assessment will produce two graphics of your results and interpretation from the author. You can take the test up to five times within a 12-month period and compare your results.

From Self-Assessment - Author's Welcome

The challenge I hope you will take away from reading this book is how to apply this foresight to provoke your own insights and actions—to make yourself a better leader.

I am suggesting a process you can use to develop yourself as a leader and improve your readiness for the future.

The Future Readiness Self-Assessment is designed so you can use it on your own, but it is also a great conversation starter for workshops and team-building efforts. For a team in workshop settings, you can use this online self-assessment as advance preparation for an in-person or online workshop—or as a follow-up. I often use it with groups before my talks or workshops.

The Future Readiness Self-Assessment is a chance to reflect on yourself and your leadership—given the external future forces of the next decade.

In a world where everything that can be distributed will be distributed, are you ready to lead shape-shifting organizations?

Are you ready to thrive in a future of extreme disruption?

This is your chance to assess your own leadership literacies and skills—and test them against the future that I describe in The New Leadership Literacies and Leaders Make the Future . You don’t have to agree with my forecast to find this exercise provocative and useful. In fact, the most useful forecasts are often the ones you don’t like, the forecasts that make you feel uncomfortable and queasy.

There are no right answers, but every leadership team should have a mix of these future leadership skills if it is to engage successfully with the external future forces of the next decade. Ideally, all members of the team will share all five of the future leadership literacies.

As you consider the ten-year forecast inside the book jacket (and described in narrative form in the Introduction) of Leaders Make the Future , ask yourself which waves of change you will choose to ride—but at least consider which waves of change you should avoid being hit by. In The New Leadership Literacies , Chapters 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 explore the future of each of the five new leadership literacies. Re-reading those chapters will refresh your thinking about the future world in which you will be leading.

From Book - The New Leadership Literacies

Over the next decade, today's connected world will be explosively more connected. Anything that can be distributed will be distributed: workforces, organizations, supply webs, and more. The tired practices of centralized organizations will become brittle in a future where authority is radically decentralized. Rigid hierarchies will give way to liquid structures. Most leaders—and most organizations—aren't ready for this future. Are you?

It's too late to catch up, but it's a great time to leapfrog. Noted futurist Bob Johansen goes beyond skills and competencies to propose five new leadership literacies—combinations of disciplines, practices, and worldviews—that will be needed to thrive in a VUCA world of increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. This book shows how to (1) forecast likely futures so you can “look back” and make sure you're prepared now for the changes to come, (2) use low-risk gaming spaces to work through your concerns about the future and hone your leadership skills, (3) lead shape-shifting organizations where you can't just tell people what to do, (4) be a dynamic presence even when you're not there in person, and (5) keep your personal energy high and transmit that energy throughout your organization.

This visionary book provides a vivid description of the ideal talent profile for future leaders. It is written for current, rising star, and aspiring leaders; talent scouts searching for leaders; and executive coaches seeking a fresh view of how leaders will need to prepare. To get ready for this future, we will all need new leadership literacies.

In a world of chaos, how can generative AI help leaders lead?

Over the next decade, all leaders will be augmented with some form of generative artificial intelligence, or GenAI. For the best leaders, this will mean dramatic improvement. For mediocre leaders, this will mean persistent confusion, distraction, and pretense. With futureback thinking—looking ten years ahead, then planning backward from future to next to now—this third edition of Leaders Make the Future shows how people can improve their leadership skills while expanding their human perspective.

Now 75 percent revised and expanded with resources from the Institute for the Future, this new edition is organized around ten future leadership skills:
Augmented futureback curiosity
Augmented clarity
Augmented dilemma flipping
Augmented bio-engaging
Augmented immersive learning
Augmented depolarizing
Augmented commons creating
Augmented smart mob swarming
Augmented strength with humility
Human calming

AI-augmented leadership will be key for any organization to tackle the uncertainty of the future. And by incorporating practical methodologies, ethical guidelines, and innovative leadership practices, this book will help leaders develop their clarity and moderate their certainty.

A powerful new kind of competitive advantage is now possible thanks to technological and social disruptions that are already occurring. These disruptions revolutionize how companies can partner to create new growth. The Reciprocity Advantage shares a model for creating that growth: define your right-of-way (the underutilized resources you already own that you can share with others), partner to do what you can't do alone, experiment to learn, and scale the new business at low risk.

Reciprocity and advantage are words that are not normally seen together, but reciprocity—giving now to get later—will become a normal part of winning in the future. The Reciprocity Advantage shows you how to leverage new forces like digital natives and cloud-served supercomputing now into massively scalable, profitable, incremental growth for your business.

Provocative and pragmatic, leading ten-year forecaster Bob Johansen and experienced business developer Karl Ronn describe how to lean in to disruptions to create new growth for your business. They include actual cases showing early successes for a range of companies and nonprofits like IBM, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and TED. They then provide key exercises to define your promising new ideas and nurture them into healthy new businesses.

Their recommendations are based on practical experience in managing the problems of new business creation and many years of helping others see the future more clearly. Distilled from hands-on work, this book gets you started today on creating your own reciprocity advantage.