SuperShifts That Will Shape The Future With Ja-Naé Duane And Steve Fisher

Are you ready for a seismic shift? Forget everything you thought you knew about the future of work and life, because today, we’re tearing down old assumptions with Ja-Naé Duane and Steve Fisher, co-authors of the provocative new book, SuperShifts. They argue that we’re leaving behind a 200-year centralized industrial age and hurtling towards a new “Age of Intelligence.” Join us as we uncover how their insights will not only redefine the future of the world but fundamentally reshape your career path in ways you might not have imagined.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/ja-nae-duane-and-steve-fisher/.

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SuperShifts That Will Shape The Future With Ja-Naé Duane And Steve Fisher

Co-Authors Of SuperShifts: Transforming How We Live, Learn And Work In The Age Of Intelligence

I’m J.R. Lowry, and this is Career Sessions, Career Lessons, which is brought to you by PathWise.io. If you want to take control of your career, join the PathWise community. Basic membership is free. My guests for this episode are Ja-Naé Duane and Steve Fisher, who are the co-authors of a new book called SuperShifts, which is their second book together, following their best-selling book, The Startup Equation. They are also the co-founders of the Revolution Factory. We’re going to be talking about this new book, SuperShifts, what it foretells for the world’s future, and what it means for your career. Let’s get going.

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Ja-Naé, Steve, welcome. Thank you for joining me. It’s great to have you both on the show.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you. Great to be on.

We’re going to dive right into SuperShifts, your new book. What inspired you to write it? What’s its central theme?

The Catalyst For “SuperShifts” & The “Age Of Intelligence”

When we were in the middle of COVID, I got a call from Deloitte over in Europe saying that they needed to restart Europe. They were convening a number of CEOs, and they wanted to help support them in trying to rethink ways in which we can get back and get going. What was great about that conversation and that exercise is that it showed me that this was our time to imagine what the future could look like.

As we zoom out a little bit, we are coming out of a 200-year period that is very centralized and built on the Industrial Revolution. The way that we work 9:00 to 5:00, butt in seat, doing the same thing day in, day out, and the way that we educate. As an educator myself, I see it. Also, the way in which we structure our lives. All of that got thrown on its head during COVID.

As Steve and I had conversations, we saw that as a big catalyst for where we’re heading, which is into this whole new age of what we call the Age of Intelligence. It was rethinking or even re-imagining what our systems of the future could be, now that we’re heading into a completely new age. That was the catalyst for me. I know Steve comes to it from a different angle. Steve, do you want to add on to that?

There are two things. Work-wise, during the same period of time, I was at McKinsey. I had started the Futures Practice with a few others. That was a bit rough and tumble because a lot of people were very short-term, and then COVID happened. We were very popular. We were working in a lot of industries. A lot of large-scale changes were happening rapidly. There was early AI work, early Web3, and all the systemic technological changes, but more so what Ja-Naé had talked about organizationally, leadership, and things that were not just in the last 50 or 70 years, when we think about other generational cycles or changes. This was larger.

For us, it is the first time in recorded history. Ja-Naé mentioned ages and eras. I’m a macro-historian as part of my futurist work. I look at large-scale timeframes, hundreds and thousands of years of large-scale change. In recorded history, a couple of things have been the case. We’ve been the smartest on the planet. We’ve also been in a place where everything was scarce. There was also always a fight for resources.

That’s about to change. What does that mean? We saw this across the environment, how energy is distributed, found, and used, technological interaction, and networked human and artificial intelligence together. The second thing is our son. Max is eight years old. He’s going to grow up in this age. It’s what it means to work, what it means to contribute to society, and what it means to be human. He is the class of 2035. We’re recording this in 2025, so ten years from now. What will college look like with artificial intelligence, six months of it being a lifetime, and a year or two, like a whole generation? What is it going to do? What are the careers we haven’t even thought of yet?

Let’s talk a little bit more about the Age of Intelligence and what you mean by that, and link it back to your eras and ages concept, the idea of cyclical change, and all of that that you talked about in the book.

The Age of Intelligence is more than AI. We see it as a fusion of human, artificial, and networked intelligence. It’s not just about the smarter machines. It’s we as a smarter civilization. It’s where intelligence becomes decentralized, amplified, and embedded in the fabric of how we live, work, and think, which is part of the subtitle of the book. It lets us re-explore and re-imagine what it means to be human and to work.

We’re exiting an age called the Age of Machines. You could call it the Industrial Revolution or the Industrial Age. That was based on a certain way of work, like 9:00 to 5:00, and factories. All of our institutions, our school, everything is modeled for that. A lot are fighting to keep it that way, but it’s not going to last. We have an opportunity to use these new forms of intelligence to connect ourselves together, to even give us the space to do the harder and more challenging work of solving big problems like cancer and climate. It’s exciting. We can get into the guardrails and make sure they’re in place so that we don’t have Skynet in the future. Ja-Naé, do you have any thoughts?

Human-AI Fusion & The Redefinition Of Being Human

Steve touched upon so much of this. As we are thinking about the future of intelligence, it isn’t about just us. If you think about it, we’re already cyborgs. My cell phone is an extension of myself. The cell phone has more computational power than we had when we were trying to get to the moon in the 1970s. As we are thinking about how we coexist, particularly with AI, and as we fuse with AI in different ways, it does start to shift how we define intelligence, what intelligence looks like collectively, and how we define what it means to be human.

As we look at emotional intelligence and different forms of empathy, will there be specific forms of empathy that are specific to humans? If we look at cognitive empathy versus the presence of empathy within sociology or psychology, AI, in some ways, has been argued to have a bit of cognitive empathy already. What is that going to look like?

I’ll give you one more example. When we think about amputees and their prosthetics, the fact that AI is now embedded into those prosthetics so that the amputee is able to feel what it’s like to pick something up, this is totally going to change what we know as augmentation of being human. At least from my perspective, it’s an interesting topic to think about and to explore, and one we love talking about.

Coincidentally, I have a friend, a co-worker, who sadly, but also heroically, lost two limbs in an accident in a tube here in London. She has an artificial intelligence-powered bionic arm. She describes herself as 80% human, 20% robot, goes out and speaks about her experience, and just wows people everywhere she goes. It’s a pretty incredible piece of technology that she wears on her arm every day that allows her to do things that she wouldn’t have otherwise been able to do.

These are circumstances nobody wants to be in. For people who are in those circumstances, these things will make huge differences relative to the old days of having a Captain Hook for a hand and a peg leg. If you go back 150 years, that’s what you would get. We’ve come a long way since then, but there’s clearly so much more room for that man-machine integration. The question is, “Where does it stop?” In your book, you talk about implants in their brains and waking up to their work schedule. You lost me right there, waking up to your work schedule and having it thrust right in front of you while you’re still in bed. I was out at that point.

This is interesting. For you, J.R., though, how is that different from as soon as you wake up, having your iPhone? Steve uses this, and I think it’s right on. The iPhone, in many ways, has replaced a pack of cigarettes. As soon as they wake up, people pick up their iPhones. For you, how does having an AI wake you up with news or with the work schedule differ from just picking up the iPhone as soon as you wake up?

For me, there are some guardrails that I’ve put on it. I use my phone as my alarm clock. I’ve got it pretty much in my hand right from the get-go because I’m turning it off. Until I’m up, I usually workout in the morning. Until I’ve worked out and I’m sitting having breakfast, usually I won’t even look at my work email until I’m literally out the door, walking to the tube. That’s the way that I protect a little bit of time for myself in the morning. I’ll read the news because I like reading the news. That’s something that is part of my morning routine. I purposefully refrain from cracking open my work email until I’m on the way to the office.

I’m with you. I know Steve is not, though.

Where I came up with that is I was watching Mad Men years ago. Don gets up, and the first thing he reaches for is his pack of smokes. He’s sitting on the side of the bed, having a cigarette. I was like, “That’s a cell phone.” For those who haven’t read the book, hopefully, you’ll check out the SuperShifts book, where we introduce a family. It’s a design fiction piece. The family is named the Sinclairs. It’s set in 2040. The idea is that these SuperShifts are not all happening at once. It’s also a little bit like what happens after the singularity. We don’t call it that. It’s a rapid amount of change that they’re experiencing. We want people not to have this “It’s far away, I don’t have to deal with it.” It brings the pathos and the ethos to what people are living in this possible future.

It humanizes each of the SuperShifts. I grew up without computers. Only as a teenager that I started to use one. My half-brother is sixteen years younger than me. He was a digital native. It’s amazing to watch our son with tablets. He’s been coding since four and a half. He’s been doing Scratch. There’s a certain kind of adoption or normalcy in that. Some people can also have it where they’re not connected in that way. Emma is an AI ethicist. She’s got this connected passion that she needs to talk to her. A lot of people have that companionship. Literally, you’ll be talking to someone in your head. It’s going to be different.

On a positive note, though, one of the things we talk about in the book is the different subspecies of humans. You talked about your friend. There are people who will purposely augment themselves with bionics or other things to improve their performance, such as athletes. Some people will hack the genetic code. Some will transfer their consciousness. Others will be the purest, the people who won’t want anything. They want to be the way they were born, and that’s the way that they are.

There’s one that I thought was interesting. If people have brain computing interfaces, there’s a way to connect to a consciousness, and you truly can understand how people walk in their shoes. Imagine if you could wear that during a peace negotiation and understand the emotions of your opposing party. I’m very protopian. There’s amazing potential if we use this all right, and we have the right ethics and the approach to it. I hear you. You can be like, “I’m tapping out. I’m good,” but fifteen years from now, those might be more natural for them.

The Impact Of Generational Drift On Society & Work

You talk about these things playing out over 200 years. We should talk about some of the nine SuperShifts. To me, they’re all starting to play out or are already playing out now.

It’s not like there’s a super convergence of all nine of these. There are shifts within the SuperShift. There are 3 or 4 things, and they happen in different ways. It was about recognizing this accelerated convergence, the awareness of the things happening. Right now, we’re feeling everything happening in real time. It’s so accelerated and so visceral versus before, we would just read the news. You know it’s coming. You prepare yourself.

Now, a week later, there’s something new. It triggers mental health issues. There’s a lot to that. You thought before that people don’t have 40-year careers anymore. What happens when you’re changing jobs every couple of months, or the rapidity of having to learn, be a lifelong learner? That’s jarring for a lot of people. It’s trying to help them have clarity that they’re not alone feeling this, that this is a thing. It’s happening around you.

One of your SuperShifts relates to polarization that’s going on in the world. You could argue that one of the reasons this polarization is going on is because people feel left behind. They aren’t ready to adapt in whatever way, socially, economically, in whatever way that they need to, or that society collectively is pressuring them to, and they’re pushing back. This is part of what drove Brexit here in the UK. It’s part of what drove the first Trump administration. It’s certainly factored into the second Trump administration that people feel like things have moved a little bit too quickly for them. You have this whole AI thing come in that has the potential to be massively disruptive and quickly.

Earlier, you made a passing mention of how quickly some of these things are happening. I have a hard time believing that we’re twenty years away from the moment at which the machines pass humanity in terms of their intellectual capacity. It feels like we’re going to get there sooner. To me, you can be a protopian. I’m scared about that. I’m scared about what it means because I have a hard time imagining how society collectively can keep up with that pace of change.

I’m protopian because I’ve read so much dystopian fiction that to leave a place better for my son, to give him a place that he can thrive in, is my job as a dad. I have to think positively. I have to show him and other young people. We need to teach two things to high schoolers. We need to teach them personal finance and futures thinking. Teaching the future does. We need to have people thinking that.

We need to teach other things or get back to teaching other things as well. I would agree with those two. The rate of technological growth will never be slower than it is. We are only going to see that rapid change continue to be rapid, and we will never keep up. The big shift for many people is that they’re trying to play catch-up instead of identifying the fact that “I can’t ever catch up. However, what can I do instead?” As we work with executives and leaders, one of the things that we focus on is a shift in mindset. That includes several different things.

We usually start by having them do an audit of their assumptions and biases. That could be around their thinking, the skills that they have, how they even view their teams, how they view their organization, and the assumptions that they’re bringing to the table about the future of their organization or even the future of their industry. We are starting there so that they can understand and have a level playing field of, “I need to then identify. What do I need to unlearn?”

When I say unlearn, and I try to emphasize this, we will not get the type of leadership that we need by looking at the past because we have no models from the past to build upon. How can we, in many ways, remove those heuristics that we have been accustomed to leaning on and allow our imaginations to reshape and reimagine what leadership could look like as we’re thinking about the future of business and as we’re thinking about the future of work?

The other thing that I have people start to work on is this. It takes time. This is not something you do overnight. It’s about creating an anti-fragile mindset, not only for yourself, but also for your team members and your organization. The way to do that is through controlled stress. It is identifying scenarios in which you can add stress. You can do this in your home life, at work, or all of the above. Why it’s important is that we have gotten used to having that reactive mode of thinking and just being nudged by technology. We’re used to not critically thinking through the choices that we make. If you’re going to be fearful about anything, that’s what I would continue to be fearful about if we don’t start to make that shift.

How do we then allow ourselves to embrace a bit of that stress so that we’re not reacting to it and we’re not railing against it when it is there, but we’re thriving with it, adapting, and being more dynamic in our team? Our teams across the organization are being more dynamic when these stressors are introduced. I tell people to get started. Make a journal. We will have more Black Swans, and that is something I highlight very strongly to folks. If we’re not working with a team to build out simulations around upcoming Black Swans, what are small ways for yourself that you can push where your edge is? We all have to figure out a way to push that edge in order to be more comfortable with the constant disruption that will continue to occur.

If you think about it as an athlete, you have to push yourself out of your comfort zone. Pushing yourself out of your comfort zone a little bit is a good thing. You get into that zone of manageable stress. The question is, do you get pushed too far? That’s where people start to rebel against the degree of change.

I love the fact that you brought up athletes, imagining yourself as an athlete or a peak performer, and how you can be in control of that process. If you find that you have been pushed too far, how do you pull yourself back a little bit? Regroup, and then try again. This isn’t solved or changed overnight. These are new ways of existing.

Let’s talk about some of the nine. There are nine SuperShifts in your book. Maybe start with generational drift because that’s one that we’re seeing, in a way, play out right now. We’ve got four generations in the workforce.

Generational drift is one of my favorite ones. I spend a lot of time working on the generational theory of Strauss and Howe. I’ve studied a lot of different cyclical patterns, which informed ages and eras. With generational theory, in general, the saeculum day is about 80 to 90 years. There are usually four generations or four archetypes. We’re in a winter period, which usually ends with a war, a large conflict, and it’s the end of a cycle, the beginning of a new one. It relies on, since recorded history, from time immemorial, that people live a regular lifespan of 80, 90, or 100 years, and it cycles through. What happens when that starts to drift, when people live 150 or 200 years? Maybe we just don’t die at all.

What happens to the concept of work, career, and retirement? Imagine having your in-laws live forever and having to move in with them. It is probably not the best thing you want to do. That’s not protopian. Grandma lives in the house, and she’s a hoot. Think about that on a broad spectrum. What does that do for the generations that want to contribute? People expect people to retire, and they move up in their careers. It’s happening, and we see it now. There are people who don’t want to retire. They want to work. They’re very healthy and active. There are people who are 14 or 15 on YouTube. They’re hiring teams. They build their own YouTube stream. We’re already seeing this happen. When everyone lives, it’s a big one. That’s the drift.

You’ve got these conflicting forces, Steve. With this idea that people live 150 or 200 years, my first thought is that we already have a population problem on the planet. That’s just going to make it worse. It’s offset somewhat by the fact that people are having fewer children, and the population is probably starting to peak out. It changes this dynamic of you going to work when you’re 18 to 22. You work for 40 years, you retire, and you live somewhere between another 20 to 30 years. That’s how the math works. There’s a lot of math that goes into how society works and how economics works. Nobody has an economic model for a shrinking population.

A lot of developing countries are going to experience that probably in the next 25 to 30 years. The math has to change in a lot of different ways. That’s the thing that makes this whole people part of this generational drift, population change, or anything that’s in the mix of that. You have a lot of complicated changes starting to happen that shift what have been longstanding historical truths about the way societies continue to grow and thrive.

That’s making the assumption that we are just staying here on Earth and not necessarily transitioning into being an interplanetary species. I am a firm believer that we need different economic models and different models for how we consider even our resources, our population growth, supply, and demand. We will end up almost going through a renaissance of that thinking as we move into this new age. This gets into another SuperShift, intellifusion. As we become an interplanetary species and we integrate with machines and AI, we question, do we necessarily need this host, this organic body?

SuperShifts: We need new economic models and fresh ways of thinking about resources, population growth, and supply and demand. I believe we’re heading into a Renaissance of thought as we enter this new age.

Steve had mentioned essentially checking your conscious up into the collective. What happens when you do that in order to then be able to survive the exploration of a far-off planet? We know that as astronauts go into space, one of the biggest problems that they have is that their muscle mass begins to atrophy immediately. To be able to have more augmentation when it comes to machines and AI, we’re going to need that for extraterrestrial environments as we move into space travel. In some ways, we collectively as humanity are going to rethink what it means to live, exist, or procreate. I think we will shift our thoughts around procreation and survival versus the longevity of our own lives and what that looks like as we start to reach for the stars.

We need the warp drive, though.

Yes, we do.

I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid. If I were ever working in the space business, I would definitely be a propulsion person, where we need an Epstein drive at least to move around the solar system. Looking at the elements of generational drift, we’ve always talked about longevity and augmentation, which Ja-Naé talked about. You’ve got demographic change, which is shifts in the population characteristics. You touched on population flux, which is not just the size of it, but the movement and distribution of the populations themselves.

There are other parts of the world that are very much procreating, and others are not. Where do they move? How do they change in society? There’s the overall population growth of eight developed nations. I don’t think it will be a problem. It’ll bring on the eight nations, especially in the care space, the era of the robot. Generational tides are the waves of shifts and the influences on how generations will impact.

Think about it. We have only 200,000 people left who fought in World War II. That’s one thing to capture their memories or capture their experiences. Imagine what we could learn if they were able to live a lot longer to be there. It is the perspectives of history that we’re going to get that we’re not even thinking about, and the way that they can influence society and guide it. That’s real councils of elders. There are many SuperShifts to cover.

You give me a quick opportunity, Steve, to give a shout out to my father-in-law, who is one of those 200,000. He’s 102. He lives outside of Boston, still going strong, mentally sharp, completely up on things, and loves his sports. Let’s turn now to talking about what this means for organizations. We didn’t cover all of the shifts, but there are nine that you cover in your book. Of all of the shifts, the techceleration, intellifusion, the generational drift, and socialquake, which ones do you think pose the biggest challenges to the legacy way that business organizations operate?

It is the power flow. We are petrol-powered. In the last Age of Machines, the core thing was petrol. It was a fuel, in the way of fossil fuels. The way it’s distributed, the way it’s owned, we’re close to the advent of commercial fusion in the next 10 to 15 years, which is awesome. We have incredibly stable and low-to-no-waste nuclear reactors. We have an energy stack that is going to reform. It’s also a decentralized model. The original vision for Elon Musk with Tesla was with solar. The solar roof thing never really worked well.

If you could turn houses into power plants, they could sell that energy collectively back into the grid, you could power your car and everything that would be there that allowed for distributed power, the way it works affects the US dollar. We’re a petrodollar. We didn’t have the petrol model. What would happen to the US dollar, the good faith and belief in the dollar? It’s also going to power AI systems. People are building nuclear power plants next to their AI data centers.

They are also buying old ones.

This is the quantum era because we went from tubes to transistors to integrated circuits to microprocessors. We’re now in this quantum, which is going to revolutionize across the board. It’s not just about technology driving, but it is going to rethink the things we build and how we look at the world. That means taking out all of the existing power structures. That is the most radical. The challenge is the push against the system.

The Concept Of “Reality Remix” & Identity In Virtual Worlds

I don’t view that as the big one, but then my initial gut reaction was all of them. The system is thinking for me. It’s the interdependencies between them that I think I have difficulty bifurcating. Reality remix and exploring the question of what is real or how we define reality is going to be one that even my students now at Brown have trouble grappling with. We have these conversations, but the idea there is that we will be moving seamlessly between fully virtual environments, such as VR, and what will be digital overlays of our buildings, a digital twin, or a holographic image of systems within each of these buildings.

It is to be able to then discern what you’re determining is real, as you also think about the different identities that you might have within some of these different environments. We see this now in some of my research. As we’re looking at identity within these virtual worlds, people will buy different skins. You can be a zebra with a purple mohawk and want to exhibit certain attributes, maybe have a different name, but be able to show a different side of yourself in one environment versus how you might show yourself in a different virtual work environment.

What happens when we have our credentialing on a blockchain, and we get to decide on which pieces of that credentialing get shared with different places and maybe different employers? What will get mandated? What will not? Folks will grapple with the question of self-identity, how they want to represent themselves in different environments, and what they consider real. We see that as people are coming, either astronauts are coming back home from space, or we’re even seeing folks in the military as they come back home, as you get integrated environments change, but also perception changes. It’s going to leave us questioning a lot of things. To me, that’s also an interesting way to explore what it means to actually work or create value or even build and grow a business.

Are traditional leadership models even compatible with what you envision coming with these shifts?

The Need For New Leadership Models & An Anti-Fragile Mindset

For me, no. The reason is that we have no model previously to help us move forward. For folks, I like them to start with stripping down. It’s like the onion, really getting to the core of what you think you know or what you get real with what you believe, and face that. Many people, at least in my experience, have not spent the time self-reflecting on what their values are and why they’ve come to the beliefs that they have.

There may even be other beliefs, other ways of work, or other ways to view the same situation. To be able to know, understand, and come to the table with that in mind, you can then be more open to different ways in which leadership can look, particularly as teams become more dynamic and more fluid, also as teams change and maybe become more decentralized versus the centralized models that we’re used to.

I agree in the long run that it has to change. This doesn’t apply to your current work. I’ve been asked a number of times to think about the qualities of leadership, SuperShift leadership. As a futurist, the actionable part in the back is around the spectrum foresight model, the futures operating system, and other cool things that you should check out, but it’s about adaptive foresight. There are five qualities people need to add to their leadership skillset.

It’s not a job. It’s a competency. It’s an ecosystem. It is anticipating multiple futures. What we do as futurists isn’t to predict the future. We look at all the different possible futures and not just the trends. Don’t just read your couple of trend reports at the beginning of the year and some foresight blogs and think you’re magically going to know the future. That combines with system intelligence. It is understanding the effects of these complex systems, which Ja-Naé does a lot of work on. You hear that word resilience a lot. It’s growing stronger through the disruption.

Collaborative agency is the fourth one. That’s leading across the boundaries. This is getting rid of the silos. What happens so much in organizations is they self silo, and you have to force that break. We can do that now with some of the AI tools and getting people to collaborate because it has to force that to happen. The last part is purposeful conviction. You have to put your decisions and anchor them in a future-focused purpose. It allows you to rethink how you are as a leader, how you guide an organization, and also the people you want to hire. You want people to have a lot of these qualities built into themselves. In our first book, The Startup Equation, we called it the X-factors. Those are things in entrepreneurship that you just got built into you. You can’t teach it. It’s just there.

SuperShifts: You have to anchor your decisions in a future-focused purpose—that’s what allows you to rethink your leadership and how you guide your organization.

This is where even Steve and I disagree on the definition of an entrepreneur. What does it mean to define success? That looks different for many folks.

That’s a good point, Ja-Naé. I always thought there were three kinds of entrepreneurs in general. There was a take-your-job-with-you type of entrepreneur. You’re a lawyer at a law firm. You become a lawyer, so you know your space, and you recreate your job. There’s the industry one. You’re in tech, you change jobs, but you generally stay in a field or a space. In that way, you create a business from it, consulting on a product or something that serves that.

Then, there are the pure ones. These are the people who, in one year, create a tech company and do a hot dog stand the next one. That’s the rarest one. They can create anything because they have certain factors in them that they can build on, and it’s irrespective of the things that they may have learned in school or have comfort with. They see the opportunity, and they go after it no matter what.

Spend a few minutes just talking about what this means more for the individual. You’ve talked a little bit about that already, Steve. You go back to some of the macro changes that have happened since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We went from craftsmen, guilds, and an apprenticeship model to having factories where things were done in a more repeatable fashion, to introducing more machinery that took away certain jobs, which meant you had to learn other jobs.

We took that a step further with robotics that could do even more in terms of the manufacturing space. We had offshoring, not a technology-driven change, but certainly a disruptive change for people who are in the knowledge economy, the service economy in the developed world. We’ve got to compete against super-smart machines. It strikes me in all of this that if you want to be successful as an individual and as a leader in whatever the new kind of organization is, you’ve got to continue to just push the boundaries of what defines humanity.

Going back to the Age of Intelligence construct that your book is based on, we’re competing against these machines that are getting smarter. What differentiates us is our humanity. We’ve got to find ways to bring that out as individuals working and as leaders, harnessing the talents of those people. You are the experts. Let me let you weigh in on that and what you think people ought to be thinking about in terms of what they will need to do in managing their careers and their professions.

Shifting From Scarcity To Symbiosis: A New Definition Of Success

At the end of the day, I don’t view it as us against the machine. If I were to give folks a takeaway, it’s how do we create more of an ecosystem of symbiosis, much like we find in nature, where we need to lean on AI and AI needs to lean on us in order to both collectively thrive. With that in mind, one of the things to highlight is that if we’re shifting our mindset from one that we’ve had historically, which has been scarcity, even looking for food, fighting for food, as we’re thinking about capitalism, industry, and how we have built much of the foundation of what we have now, this means that we have a whole different evolutionary shift in how we are thinking.

I would say to leaders right now, where in your day-to-day can you create positive-sum outcomes? Think about all of the stakeholders involved, and that can include nature. That can include where you’re getting your resources from, even stakeholders in geographical locations where you are getting specific resources, raw materials, or your competition, as you’re moving forward. How do you define success in a completely different way by finding that unique value proposition that doesn’t pit you against someone else, but instead is the tide that raises all boats? Having that mindset shift in many ways is the place to start because that will reframe so many of your decisions moving forward.

What overall takeaways would you want to leave our audience with in terms of how to think about the future?

It’s very easy to think of either everything being pie in the sky and beautiful, and it’s all going to work out, or it’s all going to be horrible, and none of it’s going to work out. One of the things that is a lovely opportunity is to think through any possible futures that you can see on the horizon and identify what those themes are across all of those scenarios. From those threads, how can you almost backcast or reverse engineer a path forward, either for yourself, your team, or your organization, so that you’re moving forward in a way that allows you to plan enough, knowing that you’re going to need a bit of that adaptability?

It’s not whether or not you’re going to be hopeful, or it’s all going down fire and brimstone. It’s about being conscious of the decisions you’re making and knowing that no matter what, you cannot fully plan for the future. You can help future-proof your organization and yourself by being self-reflective and critically thinking through all of the possibilities that are coming through all of the scenarios that could potentially be your future.

I would add that everybody is a futurist now. There are no exclusionary words that it’s reserved for people with certain wild hair, and they’re over in the corner. We wrote this book to help people go from being spectators of the future to being designers of it. We need broad participation. Participatory future is in it, but everybody needs to be involved. You have to co-create things that are hopeful and regenerative.

Don’t fear it. It’s feeling a little scary or feeling just too much sometimes. Start asking the questions. You don’t need to predict this. You want to be prepared for the possibilities and build a resilience muscle. The thing I would leave with somebody as a practical wisdom is that there’s a lot of opportunity in front of you. There are a lot of things coming. It’s just about being prepared for it the right way.

It is also being adaptable. This is the extension you talked earlier, Ja-Naé, about the growth mindset and just being willing to change as things change, because they’re definitely going to change. I feel like we barely scratched the surface, but it was a 350-page book with a lot of content in it, so I guess that was bound to happen. Hopefully, we’ve piqued people’s interest, and they will go out, buy your book, SuperShifts, and give a little bit more thought to the role that they’re going to play in that participatory future.

J.R., thanks for having us. We appreciate it.

Thanks to you as well.

If you all want to check it out, you can go to SuperShiftsBook.com. There’s a lot more stuff on that and where to find it.

I want to thank Ja-Naé and Steve for joining me to discuss their new and very thought-provoking book, SuperShifts: Transforming How We Live, Learn, and Work in the Age of Intelligence. As a reminder, our discussion is brought to you by PathWise.io. If you’re ready to take control of your career, and you should be, join the PathWise community. Basic membership is free. You can also sign up on the website for our newsletter. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Thanks, have a great day.

Important Links

• SuperShifts: Transforming How We Live, Learn, and Work in the Age of Intelligence
• The Startup Equation
• Revolution Factory
• Ja-Naé Duane’s Website
• Steve Fisher’s Website
• Scratch
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About Dr. Ja-Naé Duane

Dr. Ja-Naé Duane is a creator, behavioral scientist, award-winning innovator, and 4x entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience guiding organizations, institutions, governments, and communities toward a new renaissance and a better future for humanity.

For the past two decades, Ja-Naé has dedicated herself to one mission: make life better for one billion people. As an expert on global systems, she focuses on helping corporations, governments, and universities understand and develop systems of the future using emerging technology such as VR/AR, AI, and blockchain by guiding them forward, helping them get out of their own way to create exponential innovation and future forecasting.

She has had the pleasure of working with companies such as PWC, Saudi Aramco, Yum Brands, Samsonite, Natixis, AIG, and Deloitte. A top-rated speaker and co-author of the best-selling The Startup Equation, Ja-Naé excels at helping both startups and multinational firms identify new business models and pathways on a global scale.

Over the years, her work has caught the attention of The Associated Press, NPR, The Boston Globe, and BusinessWeek. Ja-Naé holds degrees from Brown University, I.E. Business School, Northeastern University, Carnegie University, Bentley University, and Boston University. Ja-Naé is a member of the Loomis Council at the Stimson Center, collaborator with the National Institute of Health, and holds appointments at Brown University and MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research. Her next book, SuperShifts, will be released in April 2025.

About Steve Fisher

Steve Fisher is a visionary futurist, innovation leader, and design strategist with over 30 years of experience driving transformational change. Passionate about reimagining business models, he leverages cutting-edge advancements—especially Generative AI—to empower organizations across industries to navigate complexity and seize future opportunities.

As a leader in foresight and innovation, Steve has consistently spearheaded high-impact initiatives at renowned organizations. At McKinsey & Company, he co-founded the Futures Practice, integrating strategic foresight and speculative design to help businesses anticipate and adapt to an uncertain future. At FTI Consulting, he led the adoption of Generative AI for business model transformation, pioneering new AI-driven solutions that delivered measurable impact across industries.

Beyond corporate leadership, Steve is the Managing Partner of Revolution Factory, a global innovation firm that fosters cutting-edge solutions through AI, strategic foresight, and design thinking. He also serves as Chief Futurist at the Human Frontier Institute (HFI), where he explores emerging trends, conducts research on future oriented challenges, and mentors leaders in strategic foresight.

A prolific thought leader and author, Steve co-authored the best-selling The Startup Equation and is releasing his next book, SuperShifts in April 2025 and Designing the Future the following year—which delve into the future of business, technology, and human adaptation. He shares his insights through keynotes, industry publications, and his podcasts—the Think Forward Show and Off World Podcast—which explore the intersection of innovation, AI, and humanity’s expansion beyond Earth.

Committed to democratizing futures thinking, Steve believes that understanding human history and patterns of change are essential to building resilient, future-ready organizations. His expertise in Generative AI, strategic foresight, and design-led innovation enables him to help organizations anticipate challenges and seize opportunities with confidence.