Creative Transformation Amid Rapid Change: Embracing the Unexpected

The pace of technological advancement—driven by AI, automation, and digital transformation—is accelerating and compounding at an unprecedented rate. How do leaders not only keep up but also turn this uncertainty into a competitive advantage? 

Guided by innovation expert Hal Gregersen (and based on a research project with Ed Catmull, co-founder Pixar and Turing Award winner), this course helps participants develop the mindset and skillset required to embrace the unexpected while engaging in creative transformation. 

Our future is not a straight-line extension of the past. Compounding technologies are radically reshaping industries in nonlinear, often irreversible ways. Leaders who use the power of AI to detect the implications of these shifts early—and act decisively—build teams and organizations that thrive. Such leaders discern the deep structures of AI-driven change, anticipate the consequences of compounding and combining forces, and make better strategic decisions today that will define their industries tomorrow. 

The ability to navigate rapid, unpredictable, and exponential changes, drawn from the lessons of those who saw the future and acted wisely and those who did not, is crucial for success. But embracing the implications of rapid compound growth is more than just a survival strategy—it's a conduit to innovation and growth. This course offers a transformative learning experience that empowers individuals and organizations to keep human agency and creativity first when crafting solutions to significant challenges in the face of uncertainty.

Through a combination of theoretical frameworks, practical case studies, interactive exercises, and hands-on applications, you will gain valuable insights into the mindset and strategies required to navigate exponential change, leverage short-term wins to drive long-term success, build effective truth-seeking mechanisms, and harness creativity as a catalyst for organizational transformation.

In this immersive learning experience, you will gain the tools to consistently anticipate, adapt to, and leverage the forces of rapid change. Using insights from successful companies like DeepMind, Intrinsic Robotics, NVIDIA, Patagonia, and Pixar, we will learn how to translate long-term intent systematically and broadly across the organization to make consistent, compounding, short-term progress. 

Key topics covered in the course include:

• Seeing the hidden dynamics of rapid exponential change, understanding their implications, and leveraging the opportunities
• Developing an AI-enhanced mindset and a skillset for embracing uncertainty—including the duality and paradox that accompany organizational transformation
• Building truth-seeking mechanisms to ensure that your organization sees reality clearly, avoids value inversions, and acts before it’s forced to react
• Kickstarting virtuous cycles—where collective short-term actions compound into enduring strategic advantage—and avoiding death cycles—where short-term optimization blinds leaders to irreversible industry shifts
• Harnessing humans and AI technologies to make progress on creative transformation

Upon completing the course, you will have examined and experimented with the mindsets, frameworks, and tools necessary to embrace the unexpected more effectively, unlock your organization’s creative potential more successfully, and position your team for long-term success in an era of compounding complexity.

You will leave with course with a deeper understanding of how to:

• Become a challenge-driven leader and organization, using rapid compound change as a strategic advantage rather than a threat
• Craft—and recraft—believable frameworks for the future, balancing short-term needs with long-term impact
• Identify key exponential processes and understand how they will influence your progress on this framework
• Shift from a reactive exponential thinking bias to a proactive compound growth strategy and action plan—ensuring that decisions contribute to long-term success
• Interpret compounding contributions of past infrastructure, exponential technologies, power cycles, and ecosystems
• See more deeply the dynamic tensions within complex systems—and how to manage them as forces for making progress on your biggest challenges
• Develop and sustain truth-seeking mechanisms that challenge core assumptions and prevent strategic myopia

“In a rapidly evolving AI-driven landscape, executives grapple with pursuing large-scale changes to stay ahead of the curve. In this course we leverage insight from dozens of interviews and case studies across the world to master the mindset and skillset required for embracing the unexpected —including the duality and paradox that accompany transformation. We explore how to make a courageous shift in strategic gears and processes by building a believable framework for the future, leveraging exponential technologies to co-create that future, unlocking deeper elements of an organization’s creative potential, and crafting short term results that compound into extraordinary long term gains.” - Hal Gregersen

Through a combination of research-backed frameworks, hands-on case studies, and interactive exercises, participants will:

• Navigate uncertainty by crafting a believable framework for the future, with AI-assisted human judgment.
• Explore exponential technologies like generative AI, digital twins, robotics, and automation to identify opportunities for creative transformation.
• See sustained compounding growth in technologies and processes with clarity and understand the strategic implications–even when they might be vague
• Master the art of long-term transformation by using short-term experiments as steppingstones toward sustainable strategic shifts   
• Build and sustain a truth-seeking culture, ensuring that leadership decisions are informed by a full-spectrum view of reality and avoiding value inversions.
• Leverage AI as a creative collaborator, using it to enhance strategic insight and decision-making while avoiding common pitfalls of over-reliance and anchoring bias.

Participants will leave with practical strategies to guide their organizations through unpredictable rapid change, not just reacting to disruption, but shaping the future.