An interview with Terence Mauri, Founder of Hack Future Lab and the author of the upcoming Thinkers50/Wiley book, The Upside of Disruption: The Path to Leading and Thriving in the Unknown.
Your book is titled The Upside of Disruption. Can you explain what you mean by ‘the upside of disruption’ and why it’s essential for leaders today?
Change used to happen as a breeze. Now, it feels like a category 5 typhoon. Industry convergence, talent scarcity, AI everywhere. When the world evolves, leaders must adapt, too. Yet, according to Hack Future Lab’s research:
I wrote The Upside of Disruption because the future isn’t just about tech and trends. It’s about mindsets and choices, too. According to Gallup, we are facing a global productivity and engagement crisis, with $8.8 trillion lost in productivity due to disengaged and ‘quit but stay’ employees. Leadership is on the ballot. One of the challenges for leaders is that they crave the comfort of certainty; they too often miss the ‘upside’ of disruption – learning, growth, and reimagining the ‘always-done’ ways that have become obsolete. The Upside of Disruption is rooted in the belief that the best is yet to come and that risk and reward travel together. It creates possibility in the unknown and is a hedge against a risk-averse mindset because we always overestimate the risk of trying something new and underestimate the risk of standing still.
In a recent interview with the FT, you spoke about how to deal with uncertainty and the power of ‘future-ready mindsets.’ What are these mindsets, and how can leaders cultivate them?
The Upside of Disruption is a radically human approach to eliminating outdated mindsets and assumptions about the basic building blocks of leadership. It answers, ‘Do we continue to lead with Industrial Age mindsets or adapt to the Intelligence Age?’ Stephen Hawking famously observed that ‘intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.’ In the twentieth century, organisations focused on being preservers of the status quo. Today, leaders must become challengers of the status quo. A helpful starting point for organisations is to evolve from leaders of conformity, who reject ideas that challenge the status quo, to leaders of curiosity, who embrace ideas that challenge the status quo. Curiosity helps us evolve, while conformity is a shortcut to inertia and stasis.
In your book, you mention that questions are the answer. Can you elaborate on why asking the right questions is crucial for navigating disruption?
The late Professor Richard Feynman said, ‘Knowledge is having the right answers. Intelligence is asking the right questions. Wisdom is knowing when to ask the right questions.’ Questions sharpen two vastly underutilized skill sets: courage and humility. To find the upside in disruption, we must be willing to step out from a world of familiarity to a world of possibility, where the reward is unknown, but we find new opportunities for breakthrough growth and game-changing ideas. Questions are central to finding the upside in disruption and are the key to shifting from a ‘yes, but’ mindset to a ‘yes, and?’ one.
What are the boldest questions you will ask this year that won’t just make you feel good but will also challenge your thinking? Here are two examples.
The concept of ‘The Nutritional Value of Leadership’ is fascinating. Can you explain this and how it applies to today’s leaders?
Not long ago, I attended a talk by English designer Thomas Heatherwick to discuss his new book, Humanise: A Maker’s Guide to Buildings Around Our World. Heatherwick’s studio is dedicated ‘to making the physical world around us better for everyone.’ Some of his most famous designs include the ‘Vessel,’ a futuristic staircase, and the ‘Little Island,’ a place to escape from Manhattan. Next time you’re in New York, they are must-see designs. Hetherwick observed, ‘Do our buildings give us nutritional value and leave us feeling more alive and empowered?’
As Heatherwick passionately argued for humanizing our buildings and starting a national conversation about it, it occurred to me that we should also have a national conversation about humanizing our leadership because, despite this age of disruptive AI and algorithms, leaders must still operate at the human scale: connection, belonging, and trust.
The question for leaders is, ‘Does our leadership deliver nutritional value through how we honour the past, define the present, and champion the future?’ Or, ‘Does our leadership make others feel powerless and scared of leaning into the future?’ Leaders are not being trained in leadership. It’s seen as more of an art and instinct than a repeatable set of mindsets, skills, and practices. That’s a problem because it leaves employees and their managers stuck in fear, doubt, and uncertainty; they’re not trained in courage and human skills (seeing, feeling, being, and listening to learn). They’re only trained in ‘knowing.’
You discuss the importance of ‘unlearning’ in your book. Can you share an example of how leaders can effectively unlearn outdated practices?
Hack Future Lab’s findings reveal that while most organisations recognize agility as a top strategic priority, only 15% describe themselves as having widespread agile behaviours. The agility paradox highlights the crucial role of unlearning, pushing the business outside its comfort zone, transforming risks into rewards, and driving change at the speed of the customer. When managers fail to unlearn, they become overwhelmed with obsolete working and leadership styles that slow decision-making and erode value. They should let go of outdated ‘best practices’ that no longer serve their purpose and are now considered ‘broken practices.’
Unlearning is the highest form of learning in a busy, distracted world and the ultimate insurance policy against ‘Zombie Leadership’ (dead leadership that fails to adapt to changing circumstances) or ‘enshittification’ – a term coined by Cory Doctorow to describe the slow decay in everything we do. It is at the heart of every future-focused organisation, allowing managers to focus on accelerated growth and rethink outdated mindsets. At its core, unlearning is a deliberate leadership activity that helps us move from reactive to proactive resilience; managers update their assumptions and behaviours to make space for new learning and keep pace with change.
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