Why AI Transformation Requires Better Leadership, Not Just Better Technology

Organisations that combine AI with futures thinking and human insight are better equipped to innovate, adapt, and create lasting value.

As AI reshapes how organizations operate, leaders face a critical question: Are they using technology to create lasting value, or simply automating existing ways of working? Futurist and Hope Engineer™ Nikolas Badminton explores why true transformation requires more than AI adoption, offering insights on strategic foresight, human capabilities, organizational resilience, and building better futures. 

Having advised organizations such as NASA, Google, Microsoft, and the United Nations on AI and strategic foresight, what common patterns have you observed that distinguish organizations creating lasting business value from AI from those that remain stuck in pilots and experimentation?

Many of these organizations – and those similar in size and scale – feel that the pressing tasks at hand are more important than slowing down and considering what will unfold in the futures ahead of them, and us all. This means that they are in constant reactionary mode with little thinking of what comes next. That means reduced resiliency with respect to unforeseen risks, missed opportunities for innovation and investment, and stifled growth. What comes eventually is stasis and a slow decline headed towards obsolescence.

Real leaders that embrace the ideas of hopeful futures implement a layer of futures thinking to complement the strategic and delivery work. That’s where The Hope Engineer’s Playbook comes in by encouraging increased adaption and at the intersection of futures work and hope with imagination, anticipation and empathy: 

• By igniting imagination—and asking “what if …” to stimulate scenarios exploration—we push ourselves outside our boundaries of what is expected and expected into a creative territory of unlimited possibilities.
  
• Through building anticipation, we start to see what might come next and that builds a preparatory sense in the organization. Considering the signals of change, the emerging trends, and the scenarios that might play out uncovers opportunities and challenges ahead of competition and gives us resiliency and an ability to wonder “what if …” when considering what might happen.
  
• Then by deepening empathy – our deeply human ability to communicate, listen, and understand the feelings of others – we can start to truly feel the futures ahead of us. When our moral senses, sensibilities, and beliefs meet with the hope for a better world and the hope to make an impact today.

Business leaders are under pressure to deliver quick results from AI investments. How can they balance short-term productivity gains with the longer-term innovation and transformation that AI promises?

Here’s the thing – it’s not about productivity. It’s about rethinking how we can best undertake the work we do and applying AI tools just enough to boost our inherent human capabilities driven by futures thinking, hope and guided by wisdom. In fact, it’s been found that employees who spend 7–10% of their total work hours in AI tools have the highest productivity rates.

AI, in fact, reminds leaders that their organizations are wildly inefficient and there’s work to be done to rethink people + process + information + technology + governance at all levels of the organization. AI ROI really is a misnomer when we consider this. But, without implementing AI organizations will be left under the foundational ceiling of capabilities that every other competitor is building. It’s almost worth noting it as ‘survival technology’ and through that urgency gains are likely to be seen in some smaller ways.

Organizations often treat AI as a technology initiative rather than a business strategy. How should leaders rethink AI’s role in driving long-term transformation?

AI is not the strategy.

It’s a tool in the stack of methods, frameworks, tech tools and processes. AI, in fact, must be less of an emotional play and one framed as tech – albeit great and transformational tech – that people can use to augment their capabilities.

There is a business hangover though. With new tech there comes new ways of thinking and working and new work in the mix i.e. checking information, editing, applying our knowledge and wisdom. 

As AI takes on more analytical and routine work, what uniquely human capabilities will become more valuable, and how should organizations cultivate them across their workforce?

Next level creativity – unique thinking and ideas – will be key and the moat between us and AI as will the futures work, we undertake with hope for better futures and the imagination, anticipation and empathy we nurture.

Honesty up and down the organization – We should not continue to find application for AI everywhere. Yes, test. Then quickly qualify value and move along to find deeper work. In my hopeful futures work I use methods like ChatGPT optimizing prompts for Gemini Deep Research to go to town on new futures exploration and strategies. Then it’s human work where we discuss thoughts, discount, embellish and take to the next level to create useful artifacts to be used in the organization.

Many companies are adopting AI, but few are transforming how they operate. What separates true business transformation from technology adoption?

Technology adoption is more closely related to a transaction. You buy the licenses, deploy the models, automate a workflow, and report a change (better, worse, different and hopefully better). The trap is that some sense of efficiency (or investment in the face of pressure in the organization and/or industry) can feel like progress. There is much to look out for as we can easily automate our way deeper into a faltering strategy and that is a real risk.

Impactful transformation starts from the opposite end. It begins with a vision of better futures and the conviction that we can build it together. That’s hope engineering, and we must have three things: an audacious goal, considered pathways to reach that, and an individual and collective agency that created a renewable energy for change. AI can be great at widening those possible pathways forward by surfacing new options and reducing the distance between idea and action and it lets more people contribute and be recognized as part of the progress being made. We have a reminder here – AI cannot supply the goal or create the agency. Those are deeply human, and leadership has to be ready to nurture them. 

As technological change accelerates, how can leaders build organizations that embrace uncertainty without losing strategic focus?

Leaders need to stop trying to predict the future and start preparing for several by exploring scenarios and creating stories of the futures ahead of us to see the possible unknown dynamics – wins, losses, changes, risks, and likely behaviours. This allows for us to stress-test our strategy by asking ‘what would we do if…’ before we’re forced to. Then futures-ready leaders stop seeing uncertainty as a threat to manage and it’s reframed as a source of intelligence: we see change coming while your competitors are still reacting to it. That can mean more opportunity, resiliency, revenue and even market capitalization.

None of this work holds without the agency applied to projects and programs. If every change must travel up and back down the hierarchy or an organization, you’ll be coherent yet too slow. Organizations that achieve change towards better and more hopeful futures give their people a clear sense of the destination and real authority over the route. They can move more fluidly and quickly at the edges without losing the intention at the heart of the change needed.

This is the discipline of hope engineering: a fixed point on the future horizon, many pathways to reach it, and people with the energy and agency to keep moving forward in the face of hard times.

Looking ahead, what AI-driven shifts do you believe business leaders are underestimating, and how should they prepare for them?

The cost of transformation is being wildly underestimated. This comes from two sides: the infrastructure and the wisdom side of things.

Infrastructure may become more affordable over time however it will lead to complexity being introduced to the business architecture – even with the same or potentially fewer people.

With wisdom we need to remind ourselves that we build and maintain this day-by-day. There’s intellectual effort in this and those leaders that consider the need to build a ‘wisdom economy’ as imperative will see huge change in attitude and ability across their organizations.

If you could change one assumption executives have about AI, what would it be, and why does it matter? 

That AI is ‘magical technology’ that delivers on exponential capabilities and change without a deeper and more considered transformation across the organization. The hard work is truly starting now – the tests and pilots have been run, then tech has been tried, and now someone must be responsible to usher in organizational transformation across people + process + information + technology + governance.

About Nikolas Badminton

Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer at futurist.com. He’s a world-renowned futurist speaker, consultant, author, media producer, and executive advisor that has worked with over 600 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments.

‘The Hope Engineer’s Playbook, How Leaders Build Vision, Pathways and Energy for Better Futures’ – offers leaders a next-level layer of futures thinking, guided by hope, energy for change and wisdom. It provides the day-by-day practices and tools that help teams sustain momentum, expand agency, and deliver real change for better futures. A game changer for executives and the organizations they steer towards our futures.

Nikolas Badminton’s previous book ‘Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth’ was selected for J.P. Morgan’s Summer Reading List, and featured as the ‘Next Gen Pick’ to inform the next generation of thinkers that lead us into our futures.

Please contact futurist speaker Nikolas Badminton to discuss your engagement.

The post Why AI Transformation Requires Better Leadership, Not Just Better Technology appeared first on Futurist Keynote Speaker | Hope Engineer - Nikolas Badminton.

Mastering Flooding with Delta Works (The Netherlands)

More than two billion people around the world live under threat from floods. Each year—through the effects of global warming—storms intensify, and seas rise. This risk will be especially felt across Western Asia, Oceania, and Eastern Africa, with ripple e$ects in Europe, North and South America, and other parts of the world.

The Netherlands understands this tension deeply: Over a quarter of their land is below sea level. The Dutch have wrestled with water as both adversary and ally for centuries,

shaping a culture that refuses to surrender to geography and leans into innovative approaches in water management.

The Delta Works project—constructed between 1954 and 1997)—represents one of humanity’s most audacious and hopeful responses to climate risk. A vast system of

dams, sluices, storm-surge barriers, and levees fortified the country’s southwestern delta. At its heart stands the Oosterscheldekering, nine kilometers of concrete and steel that can open and close with the tides, designed to withstand a storm expected only once every four thousand years. It is both infrastructure and metaphor—proof that hope can be designed into the landscape.

The Netherlands channeled the energy of hope by setting out a clear goal to live with water, not against it. They delivered resiliency through collaboration, transparent

communication, continuous innovation, and adaptive governance. They applied collective hope, clear pathways forward, and agency to engineers, citizens, and policymakers working together in long-term partnership. The Dutch have had an overall cultural transformation from seeing floods as disasters to be avoided to conditions

to be anticipated and prepared for. In doing so, they developed globally relevant expertise, climate-resilient design principles, and new forms of coastal governance.

Learn more about Delta Works and its history here:

Article image by Vladimír Šiman CC BY 3.0

About Nikolas Badminton

Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer at futurist.com. He’s a world-renowned futurist speaker, consultant, author, media producer, and executive advisor that has worked with over 600 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments.

‘The Hope Engineer’s Playbook, How Leaders Build Vision, Pathways and Energy for Better Futures’ – offers leaders a next-level layer of futures thinking, guided by hope, energy for change and wisdom. It provides the day-by-day practices and tools that help teams sustain momentum, expand agency, and deliver real change for better futures. A game changer for executives and the organizations they steer towards our futures.

Nikolas Badminton’s previous book ‘Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth’ was selected for J.P. Morgan’s Summer Reading List, and featured as the ‘Next Gen Pick’ to inform the next generation of thinkers that lead us into our futures.

Please contact futurist speaker Nikolas Badminton to discuss your engagement.

The post Hopeful Stories: Mastering Flooding with Delta Works appeared first on Futurist Keynote Speaker | Hope Engineer - Nikolas Badminton.

A lot of companies now call three years a strategy. Five years feels ambitious. Ten years sounds unrealistic.

And that shrinking horizon changes everything.

Nikolas Badminton joins The Keynote Curators Podcast with Seth Dechtman to make the case for looking further ahead. Not as a thought exercise. As a leadership discipline. Because when teams stop imagining what’s coming, they don’t become more efficient. They become easier to surprise.

For event pros, leaders, and high performers: if your audience is thinking about the future, technology, teamwork, or how to plan with more imagination in a fast-changing world, this conversation lands.

Inside this episode:

• Why short-term thinking leaves companies vulnerable

• What future-focused organizations do differently

• Why AI is a slow transformation, not a quick fix

• What gets lost when technology replaces human connection

• How one team used a seven-year plan to improve results now

• The simple five-minute habit that builds stronger futures thinking

Watch the full episode here:

Full podcast transcription

Nikolas Badminton – We’re kind of at this point where there’s a lot of tension in organizations, and with the world feeling so calamitous and challenging, and so many unknowns, it’s causing some kind of paralysis. And what we do as futurists, and I’m a hope engineer, so I use hope as an energy for change. In addition to building, you know, vision through futures work, we really have to build that capability for stamina, attention to what might come next, so that strategy can be really supercharged and can make a real difference to what people are doing today.

Seth Dechtman – Well, hello and welcome to today’s episode of the Keynote Curators Podcast. I’m Seth Deckman, your keynote curator and our guest today is Nikolas Badminton. Nikolas works with organizations that say they’re ready for what’s coming and helps them figure out whether that’s actually true. He spent years looking at where things are heading and what it really takes for companies not just to survive change, but to get ahead of the curve. Nikolas, welcome to our podcast.

Nikolas Badminton – It’s really great to be here, Seth. It’s long overdue, so I’m glad we’re sitting down for this chat.

Seth Dechtman – Yes, it’s happening at the perfect time. Let’s just get right into the heart of the matter here. What’s something that leaders, from your perspective, are spending a lot of time and money preparing for that you think is not as helpful and can actually become a distraction.

Nikolas Badminton – It’s really interesting where the world is right now. Last week I did a keynote for 700 corporate directors. So so people that are doing board governance, people that are really steering the ship of companies, not only from a governance perspective, from a strategic perspective. And at the beginning, I said, “Hey, I want to see a show of hands. Who does long-range planning for their own, you know, their pensions, their retirement, their kids’ school, their kids’ graduation? Everyone. Then I said, “Who’s got a 10-year plan in your organization? Everyone put their hands down, so we’re kind of at this point where everyone has kind of quietly given up on the long term. They’ve stopped developing a longer view. So your question is about what are they preparing for?

A lot of these people are preparing just to survive the next sort of three, maybe five years, and and this is a big problem because what you end up with is is a deficit of imagination, a deficit of anticipation, and a lack of empathy for for what’s coming. You know, understanding the dynamics and the stories that are going to play out, and how that organization is going to be part of creating that future. Whereas when they’re sat that far back from it, they’re going to be victims of what’s coming for them. You know, vulnerable to disruption. You know, finding that people aren’t really, you know, stepping up is is a real disappointment because I mean, research has shown us the companies that are more vigilant, that do the work of looking at signals and trends, that are really exploring dynamics through scenarios and asking what if they’re more profitable? They’ve got higher rates of growth. They’ve got higher market capitalization, and it seems to be such a few companies that are stepping forward. But at the same time, sir, it’s so busy because the leadership, you know, the C level, you know, the CEOs. I I speak to CEOs in 99% of my engagements because they’re the people that really know that you know just operating day to day and just working out you know the next 18 months to three years to even five years isn’t good enough right so we’re kind of at this point where there’s a lot of tension in organizations and with the world feeling so calamitous and challenging and so many unknowns is causing some kind of paralysis, and what we do as futurists, and I’m a hope engineer, so I use hope as an energy for change. In addition to building, you know, vision through futures work, we really have to build that capability for stamina, attention to what might come next, so that strategy can be really supercharged and can make a real difference to what people are doing today.

Seth Dechtman – At the risk of reducing it down to just something simplistic, you know, it’s a way of thinking. You know, people use the word mindset. You know, we can know all about the current technology, all these performance measurements, optimizing teams and leadership, and you can even have a 10 year plan. But if you’re if you’re not in the right mindset, the way of thinking, the right context, none none of that other stuff matters. Do you think that because and it’s I just don’t want to point all the finger at artificial intelligence because I don’t need to tell you it’s been around longer than everybody kind of thinks it has been. But the difference might be. I mean, what’s different between now and 50 years ago? 50 years ago, people were talking about change and change, and it’s moving so fast. Has is it just because the. The pace, the velocity, so much, coupled with the amplification, the visibility of it, the the saturationness of it, is so new, and that’s kind of put us in less of that tenure viewpoint and more in a survival kind of mode.

Nikolas Badminton – You know, if we go back to the late late 1960s early 70s, you had incredible inventors and thinkers about personal computing, like Douglas Engelbart, the people at Xerox Parc that create the world’s first personal computer. But the Xerox executive thought that the future was going to be better copiers. And then Steve Jobs rolls into a demonstration, licenses the the software, and then develops that and releases the Macintosh in 1984 and he does that with a big story about Big Brother being crushed and that story was published and and broadcast during the Super Bowl some 41 years ago right but that last 40 years or so and I’m I’m 54 this year so I’ve sort of lived through a lot of this. It’s been really interesting. We’ve seen a lot of hype cycles and new technologies. The paperless office that didn’t quite play out the way that we needed it to.

Then mobile tech, then the internet came just ahead of that, and then suddenly all the different machinations and versions of of what was happening with with the internet and Web three and cryptocurrency and a whole bunch of different things and here we are we’re in a world where there’s so much change happening it’s complex it’s difficult to wrap our arms around we call that a hyper object in the futures world and it’s difficult because we can’t really define it it’s like a movement of of in so many different directions, and what we’ve got is we’ve got so much pace and so many developments. But really, what’s really distracting for us, and what’s difficult to to work out, you know, what’s really valuable in the mix is that the noise is is deafening. You know how how we can really cut through to find out what’s important. This is with hope as an energy for change. Hope is actually something that cuts through that because with hope you set a goal and you find pathways. You give agency to people. Those people really qualify what’s going to be valuable. This directly links to governance and why governance is so like valuable in an organization, because you know, without that, got no trust, and trust has to be deep and wide in an organization. So we’re sort of at this point of complexity and difficulty in understanding, and you’ve got you know all of these tech CEOs shouting from the treetops and and from X or from from whatever media channel, just saying, hey, get on board. If you’re not on board, everything’s over. We’ve seen this in AI the last three to four years. People have just been desperately trying to get their arms around what what’s the truth, and it’s starting to really play out. And it’s it’s great that right now the the conversations that I’m having and the conversations that that that leaders want is what’s going to work, what’s going to move the dial on my business, and what’s going to be really valuable going forward. Because I can’t work it.

Seth Dechtman – You know, AI governance is a is a is a word that can be applied to so much. It’s very it’s very broad, and it and it means a lot of a lot of different things. Why leaders need to have their eyes on it.

Nikolas Badminton – So the first thing it’s about. Okay, if we make this investment and we go through this transformation, what value is going to be released in the business? And obviously, the big narrative in in AI has been productivity, productivity, productivity. And what’s what’s being found is that you know productivity metrics aren’t actually changing at all. You know we’re not we’re not reducing employment in an organization, and we’re not increasing productivity suddenly with the use of all these tools. There’s there’s an interesting study that came out, and the study said that people that applied some of these AI tools, and when I say AI tools, I’m talking about these LLMs that are out there. This particular flavor of AI, you know, the ChatGPTs, Cord, and the searchlight. The people that apply that seven to 10% of the time in their work, you know, just that little shine and that little that little augmentation of our capability are gaining the most productivity. But there’s only 3% of the workforce that does that because everyone else is gung ho, like throwing every single piece of work through the sausage machine, and then everyone’s burning out. The CEO is cranking up the pressure to like release that value, and really, there’s a big question now, and this is difficult. It’s like, what does doing things better look like in terms of value at the other end? Because sometimes that transformation can take it could take five years or 10 years if you do it right.

Seth Dechtman – so, is a question which human contributions are still inside of the production boundary? An enterprise and which aren’t.

Nikolas Badminton – It’s not that simple. There’s no delineation because you know you you might have in in a certain day we under undertake say between seven and 10 different tasks. Within each task there’s a number of different actions and activities. With those activities, some things might be you know augmented through the use of templates, or they might be augmented through the use of some of these LLMs, or they might be augmented through the use of a phone call to someone to tap into the wisdom that they have. You can’t really do that. It’s all part of a system, and that’s why a systematic approach and an architectural approach to an organization. I’m, I’m secretly a fully qualified technical architect as well. In a previous, what you have to do is you really have to work out the the holistic functional mechanisms in your organization. And I always say to leaders, you know, here’s a spoiler. You know, there’s no magic dust. It’s a transformation project, and how much do we love that? We’ve all we’ve all gone through, you know, the ERP solution or the CRM solution or the upgrade to email or whatever in our organizations. It’s been painful. It’s been slow. It’s been expensive, and here we are. You know, people are you know waving the flags and saying, “Here come the robots to suddenly revolutionize everything, and it’s still a transformation project.

Seth Dechtman – the technical attributes, the technical elements, the deployments are important to dominate, understand, be able to execute. But before that, it’s whoever makes the argument most persuasively is what’s going to shape, you know, an organization or even the economy, and you know how that argument’s understood. It seems

Nikolas Badminton – It’s true. Organizations have sort of they they’ve discounted the value of imagination and design. In futures work, we tap into both.

Seth Dechtman – They underestimate because that that one just you just kind of slyly let that one slip right in there. Say it again.

Nikolas Badminton – They underestimate the value of imagination and design. And let’s break it down. So imagination helps us, you know, really explore possibilities and possibilities around what could happen in 10 plus years. We we tell the stories. We look at the signals and trends. We look at the dynamics. You know, what if in 2036 we see these people, these places, these systems? We see different dynamics of change. What if you do that scenario planning? And it’s cognitive. So it’s all on paper, and this is the design element of it. So we can design something on a whiteboard or in software or whatever before we actually do any work of thinking about deployment or impact and the such like. But we can start to model this, and then it’s a cognitive exercise. So really, there’s no risk to an organization. There’s more of a risk of not doing it because you’re always in reactivity mode. Building that proactivity in terms of exploring possible futures, reigniting imagination in the executive toolkit is is an absolute revelation for so many people because it it’s been discounted for so long, we’ve seen all of the biggest tech companies, you know, decimate their design functions. It’s always the thing because, hey, we just got to get on with deployment, deployment. Let’s do the stuff, and oftentimes it goes horribly wrong because we haven’t really plumbed the depths of what potentially could happen, the positives, the risks, you know, all the good stuff in between.

Seth Dechtman – There’s a lot there. When, when you, when you come from an architectural background, like you said you do, you know, there, there are just established axioms of you know stresses and design elements that are basic and foundational that really can’t be avoided to hold a structure in place, but then there are those areas where there is unbound freedom to be creative and to you know let the imagination run wild. If we’re looking at that in application of you know AI governance or the use of AI or you know what a leader needs to look to the future. How do how do you take into account or measure for or design for these outliers? So I’ll give you an example and help me land the plane. Being not only the better hairdo of the two, but you know, the smarter of the two. I ran across a, you know, there was some documented experience of like an equivalent of a 700 customer service agents that were, you know, couldn’t handle volume that they they were they were replaced by AI. But customer satisfaction dropped whenever complexity and emotional charge and these edge cases were kind of overwhelmed. This architectural trained system savings were real; they they were they were palpable, they were calculable. But what what kind of was the invisible cost was, you know, satisfaction dropped and trust dropped and you know that connective tissue, pardon the pun, that the human brought through, and then ultimately brand. I don’t want to sound like a doomsayer, but brand resilience that kind of absorbs when there’s a dispute or a failure or something like that doesn’t fit into that kind of architecture decision tree. So what what do you say to that? How is that? You know, I don’t want to sound like negative Nancy, but you know how how do you how do you address that?

Nikolas Badminton – It’s really interesting. I I’ve worked with a lot of service centres over the years, and CRM, and beyond, and ostensibly, what you do is you give them a number of systems so they can access customer information, and you give them a set of scripts. They’re not allowed to deviate away from those scripts. They’re not allowed to move beyond that. But what I found, and the systems I used to put in place for these people were recommendation systems. Next best action, next best recommendation, and just a little bit of insight about that person, what they last bought, the last interaction you had with them, how they’re feeling today, completely changed the conversation. Now, sure, you could, in theory, replace that entire chain by removing the human and putting one of these LLMs in the mix. It’s going to be expensive to implement. You’re not going to be in control. It could make mistakes. It could ultimately feel to the person on the other end of the of the chat box or on the other end of the phone. Even more importantly, especially if you’re using voice simulations, they just feel creepy.

They just feel like something.

It’s like chatting to a zombie. The uncanny valley, and so so there’s something to do there. And what people are doing is short-term gain and a massive impact to long-term trust, long-term relationships. I mean, if you look at this, the S and p5 100. The average age of a company in the S and p5 100 is less than 15 years old. If you look at companies in in places like Asia, they’re planning decades ahead. You look at SoftBank. Massayoshi Song has got a he’s got a 300 year strategy, and it that’s underpinned by a 30-year strategy to to to really you know not only like plan for investments, release value, but the operations and the holding companies and the way that they look after their workforce. And here in the West, we’re sort of we’re desperately running quarter to quarter.

Seth Dechtman – You were reading my mind. I was going to say quarter to quarter. I was waiting for you to say year to year.

Nikolas Badminton – Desperate to say something good, you know, and it takes time to build. I worked with one of the most incredible CEOs a couple of years back in in San Diego. He brought his team together, the people, and all these operational capabilities in a large dairy product, dairy food production facility. They made cheese. In fact, they made they make literally billions of pounds of cheese. They’re growing exponentially. He makes all of the the production area heads write a seven year plan, and I was absolutely floored when I was chatting to him, and what happens there is that they look on beyond the boundaries of what’s in their control, to what’s potentially going to be forced upon them in terms of not only regulation but you know wider megatrends, you know supply chain and a number of different things. The foresight that they built in that organization was incredible. It’s not that they didn’t focus on you know growing their business today and building the partnerships. They just had a wider, broader perspective on possibility that they went even further. And I took them into whole new realms of thinking in a number of different areas, like you know fermentation and whatever. In the specifics, but like when we actually did the work together, we had a room of like 20-five people that were fluent in talking about the future.

Do you know what? An organization, I think they, I think they added another 30% out output in a year. That’s what I’m talking about in terms of gaining a huge amount of capability by by taking advantage of this, and yes, there’s technology in the mix, and yes, there’s process and governance. In fact, the governance piece is right there in that room. With and each person in the 25 person team has got elements of the governance evident. You know, they’ve got elements of the intelligence. And the ability to execute, make good decisions, and directly influence what’s happening at the top of the company.

Seth Dechtman – I can’t help myself but indulge in a sports analogy every now and then. I think it’s a pacification for me. But you know, in the West, we’re so in a hurry.

Nikolas Badminton – In the West we think of decades, and in in in the East they think of millennia. I think there was a it was it was very succinctly put to me that way, the oldest company in the world is a construction company out of Japan. It’s nearly 1500 years old. If you look at what we’re doing, like you can barely find a company that’s yeah. I’ve actually worked with a number of companies that are over 100 120 years old, and I’m always amazed. But they’re not the same today as they were 120 years ago.

Seth Dechtman – Nordstrom’s is an example. They’re 125 years old, and that’s a that’s a really tough industry among many other industries in the retail. You know, I often, as you’re saying that about the millennia and a 1,500 year old construction company, think about you know the Shark Tank, and there are people that present on that show, and there could be Shark Tank Brazil, Shark Tank UK.

Nikolas Badminton – You you know what? It’s like all the what what’s happening in AI right now. You know, some of the founders of OpenAI did off, they run their business. Jan LeCun is probably one of the smartest people that you can follow in the artificial intelligence world. One of the godfathers of AI. He’s been around for a long time. You know, incredibly smart Frenchmen. Frenchmen are French folks are incredibly strategic in the way they think. You know, he exits out of Meta where he’s actually steered the ship very, very well. Raises a billion dollars for his staff. You know, on what on the fact that his shoulders are big and wide, and he’s got the best you know brain in the world. Is that resiliency? Well, if Yann Lecun disappears, there’s nothing. You know, this this cult of celebrity or faith in people, which I don’t mind, Seth, because because I still think that we need people to cling on to like you know high hope leadership to lead us into these new challenges and whatever. But like again, there’s a desperation around you know we we have to do something or or we’re going to miss out. And and I think you know there is slow and steady. There is experimental thinking. There is imagination that needs to come into the mix. Organizations can move quickly, and they can have slow, long-term plans that really ground us what is going to matter. Like intended.

Seth Dechtman – Let it simmer. Let it percolate. We don’t have to boil. We don’t have to go at a high burn. But keep it steady and with you know, and infusing it with you know volume or velocity when we need to. Nikolas, what is what what is there a belief or a thought that about the future that you maybe held like five years ago that you’ve completely changed your mind about?

Nikolas Badminton – Five years ago, we were we were deep, still deep in the pandemic. So it’s it’s kind of interesting when I think about that. It’s I was I was always really skeptical. I was really I held two I held two parts of the story at any one point in time. So I wrote a book called Facing Our Futures, and I had a positive dystopia framework in it. You explore how bad it could be with all the bad decisions and guidance and guidelines that we and principles that we apply, and how good it could be. And what you would do is you plug the two together. You’d have this holistic picture, and you try and be able to avoid the the pitfalls of making bad mistakes and really embrace all the good good choices. Now I’ve just written a new book called The Hope Engineers Playbook, which is wildly optimistic. There’s no darkness in the thinking. In fact, the work that I do does it. Whilst it entertains the idea that there are challenges, it frames in a way that you know we we’ve got a hopeful energy to make the right decisions to change them. That’s what’s really changed in my mindset, and I think it’s because there’s a lot of people making decisions on our behalf that we don’t necessarily agree on, and sometimes we do, and that’s okay. But ultimately, we’re we’re struggling in in a lot of different. Economic and geopolitical terms, and even sort of you know keeping our households and communities safe and running, and and looking at our business and building you know resiliency and abundance there, that the the only way out is through, and for that you need stamina, and whilst you can you know focus a little bit on how challenging it is. The risks, a high hope mindset creates a huge amount of resiliency. It creates an ability to follow leadership through the most difficult times. It’s about recognition about what every member of the team has contributed daily, what they’re doing together, what that big picture is that we’re aiming towards.

Shifting that mindset from what is to what if at least once a day, so you create that ability. I mean, that’s the hope engineer’s mindset, and and and what is to what

Seth Dechtman – I love that. I’m sorry to interrupt, but I love that because you throw these nuggets out, Nick, and you know you just kind of keep moving on. And it’s my job to intervene and spotlight what is to what if, because that’s why our subscribers and viewers come to this podcast, and it’s expanding, and we’re getting the message out there. Because really, if you have the conduct to stop and just be a doomsayer and say, oh, this is how it is. What is? What is? What is? Just stating the facts, which are facts and they’re undeniable. But now, how do we use our creativity, our imagination, our focus, our clarity, our values, our direction, and say, what if? And that’s that’s beautiful. It’s simple and beautiful.

Nikolas Badminton – ‘What if…’ is an immutable question, so you can come to me and and I present a wild idea, and that wild idea could be far-reaching, based on imagination, maybe not realistic today, but maybe realistic in five years or 10 years’ time. And you come in and and you want to kill the idea. So you come in, I’m the devil’s advocate, blah blah blah, but I come in and say, “Yeah, but what if? What if it changes? And I actually present something called five minutes to future. So at the end of my keynotes, is like five minutes every single day. Take a signal, something you find is interesting, something that indicates that tomorrow is going to be different. What are the positives? What are the negatives? Then what does it do for my job, my organization, for my community, my country, the play, the world that I live in, just spend that little bit of time, and then like build out that that breadth of acceptance that there could be a lot of different options out there. What you have is you slowly destroy the small thinking in an organization. The best way to kill a dream and a big idea is to introduce it to a small mind.

Five minutes to future is about freeing your mindset. It goes beyond a woo woo idea. And I was on a pre call with a with a client, and we never worked together because they were like, “You write science fiction to help companies”. I’m like, yes, I do, and I took them through the process. They just didn’t get it, but they were a company that was very much focused on the quarter, the six month, half year, or year. They’re a huge investment company, you know, managing billions of dollars, and it’s like there are companies out there that apply this that are like 10x what you’re doing, and it’s because they’ve they’ve just they’ve just opened their minds, right? What we can do, we don’t need any any fancy breath work or things like that.

Nikolas Badminton – We can do more, be more, and think more broadly about possibilities. No matter.

Seth Dechtman – I’m gonna I’m gonna borrow that one. Five minutes to the future. I feel like conceptually I glom onto that kind of happenstancely, but if I bring a slight structure to it. I could even maybe reduce it down to four minutes if I have to. But if there’s an intentionality around it, because I do glom onto an idea and I dream a little bit and I go, “Ooh, how does this relate to the keynote curators? How does it relate to my family? How does it relate to I live on this island? How does it relate to that? But if I structure it in, it kind of amplifies a little bit of the intention behind it, and we’re going to borrow it. We’re going to take it and run with it, Nikolas.

Nikolas Badminton – What’s interesting is the way that I I sort of remind people of how powerful it can be is say you’re in an organization of 200 and so so say you’re in an organization of 500 people. Five minutes to the future for two for 500 people five times a week. 2500 thoughts times by times by a year times it by three years, five years, 10 years. You’re changing how an organization. Thinks and operates is cognitively aware, is present in the world, is is driving towards the futures that we need. You know, and this, you know, we’re seeing companies that are that are really starting to embrace this and to really to really bring this into the mix to to fundamentally change how the world thinks about how it should operate.

Seth Dechtman – It’s subtle and potent at the same time. It’s pretty cool. Well, listen, Nikolas, we are at the end of the road today. I so appreciate you really taking the time out and just speaking expansively on all topics and dancing in the conversation with us. It’s been a real joy to have you, and long overdue. But I’m so glad we did it, and we did it at the perfect time. So thank you.

Nikolas Badminton – I welcome these conversations. The more that we can talk about, you know, a different way of thinking and a different way of really harnessing the gifts that we’re given to think about the futures and to think with hope and to drive and real change in the world together as a team, you know it’s it’s what’s needed. This podcast is needed, Seth. So thank you.

Lightly edited by a real human person for grammar and clarity.

About Nikolas Badminton

Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer at futurist.com. He’s a world-renowned futurist speaker, consultant, author, media producer, and executive advisor that has spoken to, and worked with, over 600 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments.

He helps shape the visions that shape impactful organizations, trillion-dollar companies, progressive governments, and 200+ billion dollar investment funds.

Nikolas Badminton’s book Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth has been selected for 2023 J.P. Morgan Summer Reading List, and featured as the ‘Next Gen Pick’ to inform the next generation of thinkers that lead us into our futures.

Nikolas’ is next book – The Hope Engineer’s Playbook, due out in September 2026.

Please contact futurist speaker and consultant Nikolas Badminton to discuss your engagement.

The post Why Leaders Need to Plan for the Future with Nikolas Badminton appeared first on Futurist Keynote Speaker | Hope Engineer - Nikolas Badminton.

It was amazing to meet you all to present my thoughts on how we can shift our mindsets to embrace new thinking, hope and wisdom as incredible energies for change as we face accelerating changes with accelerating global megatrends, technology and Artificial Intelligence, and more. Nikolas looks forward to connecting with you.

Email Nikolas to get a copy of the post-keynote report >>> click here

Reach out to arrange a meeting with Nikolas >>> click here.

Please watch and read on to learn more. Feel free to share this resource with your peers and colleagues.

Remember that hopeful futures work starts by questioning everything – and there’s zero risk in doing so. It’s a deeply creative and cognitive exercise for board members, executives and the teams shaping your organization’s future.

Foundational reading for the Modern Leader

Here is some reading that every progressive leader in 2026 and beyond needs to be aware of:

Corporate foresight and its impact on firm performance: A longitudinal analysis (Rohrbeck and Kim)

2026, The Hope Revolution (Nikolas Badminton)

It is recommended that you consider buying Nikolas Badminton’s award-winning book Facing Our Futures: How foresight, futures design and strategy creates prosperity and growth. It primes the modern executives ability to supercharge strategic thinking.

Read ‘The CEO’s Guide to AI…’

Read some of Nikolas’ most read ‘CEO’s guide to AI…’ articles:

The CEO’s guide to AI: The Cycle Didn’t Get Faster. Everything Else Changed

The CEO’s guide to AI: What to do when the software is the worker

The CEO’s guide to AI: What Canada’s New Agentic AI Guidance Means for the C-Suite

The CEO’s guide to AI: The Pope Has an AI Strategy Memo for Your Boardroom

The CEO’s guide to AI: State Media Control Influences Large Language Models

The CEO’s guide to AI: Social engineering is turbocharged by AI

The CEO’s guide to AI: Black-hat LLMs and Cyber-threats

The CEO’s guide to AI: We’re nowhere near AGI

The CEO’s guide to AI: Young workers as the canaries in the coalmine

The CEO’s guide to AI: The risk of vibe coding complacency

The CEO’s guide to AI: The Case for Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence (SAI)

Build a futurist mindset with ‘5 Minutes to Future‘

Now is the time to step up and lean into futures thinking with 5 Minutes to Future.

Step 1: Pick a signal that you think could change the world (this needs an open mind)

Step 2: Write down 3 positives and 3 negatives about its emergence

Step 3: Consider what if… it affects

• the world – people and communities

• our industry – the impact we are trying to have

• the work we do – the tasks we need to do

When you do that regularly then you are building the ability to imagine new worlds, anticipate change and build empathy for the people in our world.

If you want to go one step further after doing this then identify one thing we need to start doing and one thing we need to stop doing because of that.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

Go deeper into signals, trends and scenarios

We can learn to master signals, trends and scenarios by undertaking 3 simple actions – and we’re going to share some simple ways to get going:

1. Scan for signals and trends
2. WHAT IF… scenarios
3. Anticipate horizons

1. Scan for signals and trends

Signal scanning can be simple and a fun way to level up your thinking on a daily basis. We scan academic journals, attend conferences, host podcast interviews, social media posts and discussions, read a lot of media articles and so much more. It’s our lifeblood.

Some simple steps can really level up what you are tracking and there are a number of ways to do so.

a. Set up Google Alerts for key areas of interest for your business – you just need a Google Gmail account to do this and you can enter whatever. Just go to https://www.google.com/alerts and type in the area of exploration as you would do a Google Search:

Set your options – we recommend for you to get emails ‘At most once a day’ and ‘Only the best results’. Over time you can refine using boolean logic in your phrases.

You can find out more at Google Help – link.

b. Spend 15 to 30 minutes each morning for coffee and scanning – just search on Google for areas of interest and read articles under the ‘News’ tab. This is ;ess refined than Google Alerts but allows for free-form discovery. We love jumping down into the rabbit hole.

c. Reddit – The ‘Front Page of the Internet’ has an incredible futures community and they share and discuss amazing developments in the world. It’s a free social media platform and you can find incredible references there and bookmark them for reading and sharing later. The core community for Future(s) Studies is https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/. You can enter search phrases in at the top of the page to focus in on specific areas and then click through to the articles and deeper discussions.

d. Podcasts – it’s so great to work and listen to incredible thinkers discuss our futures. Here are some of our favorites (we are sharing Apple Podcast links and they can be found on most platforms):

• Exponential Minds Podcast with Chief Futurist Nikolas Badminton – link

• Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff – link

• WSJ’s The Future of Everything by The Wall Street Journal – link

• The World Ahead from The Economist – link

• Switched On with Bloomberg Finance Talk – link

Of course there are many more out there and please feel free to share podcasts you love with us here.

2. WHAT IF… Scenarios

We can also take things to the next level by building scenarios of what may happen in our futures using the signals and trends and then really taking a deeper dive into the positive and negative implications of speculative future products.

We can start simply by asking what if is an invitation to be curious and consider all possibilities:

• What if AI supercharges (or burdens) our business function, our competitors, and consumers – cost, time, access, efficiencies?

• What if we invest in new technologies and take bigger risks to advance the thought leadership industry?

• What if we explore 10 or 20+ year future horizons to create bolder visions of our impact in the world, see unknown risks and create more robust organizational thought leadership?

• What if our hopeful futures work informs our innovation programs / R&D, organizational messaging, and excites our customers, investors and shareholders?

Just living with simple statements and exploring your futures more really starts to open up your thinking.

These what if…statements are just some example and we can use a simple scenarios framework to create short scenarios:

What if in the [future horizon] solutions [a, b, and c are implemented], which creates these [opportunities and risks], and impacts [dimensions of change].

The ‘dimensions of change’ are where we start to explore deeper dynamics and effects of change – financial, organizational, regulatory, cultural, experimental, political, technological, and social.

This is a little more nuanced.

You can read about the method in detail in Nikolas’ new book – ‘Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth’ – here’s a link to order – grab a copy today.

3. Anticipate horizons

You can also take things to the next level by collating multiple areas of exploration, signals and trends, WHAT IF.. scenarios and considering the larger contact reflected again the current state of your business. This is deep futures work, a creative task, and needs some funding and definite focus.

Sitting here reading this you may not feel that anticipating horizons may be a simple or quick task as we may need to produce more artifacts to help us understand those futures. The truth is, it can be as involved, or as simple, as you want. We always start by posing 5 simple questions that help us speculate:

• Who are we (the organization and society) at that future horizon – what do we think and believe, where do we live, how do we live, what do our families look like?

• What does that future feel like? How does it look and smell? How easy does it feel?

• What cultural artifacts from today exist in that future – art, media, social media, transportation methods, architecture, historical artifacts and reminders of our past?

• What signals from today – that you’ve been tracking, or seen in a futurist keynote – have accelerated and how have they disrupted your work and industry? Have they been good or bad for business?

• What new organizations, services and products will be needed in that future?

Overall, we hope that you have found this article to be useful as a primer to kickstart your futures thinking. You’re already a futurist by the virtue that you turned up to the discussion and participate in life. You are already an active participant in our futures – either through positive exploration and action towards it, or through inaction – both are contributory.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

About Nikolas Badminton

Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer at futurist.com. He’s a world-renowned futurist speaker, consultant, author, media producer, and executive advisor that has spoken to, and worked with, over 500 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments.

Nikolas Badminton will publish ‘The Hope Engineer’s Playbook: How Leaders Build Vision, Pathways and Energy for Better Futures’ on Page Two in September 2026.

Nikolas Badminton’s previous book ‘Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth’ was selected for J.P. Morgan Summer Reading List as the “Next Gen Pick” to inform the next generation of thinkers that lead us into our futures.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

The post Igniting Hopeful Futures Thinking for Prudential appeared first on Futurist Keynote Speaker | Hope Engineer - Nikolas Badminton.

It was amazing to meet you all to present my thoughts on how we can shift our mindsets to embrace new thinking, hope and wisdom as incredible energies for change as we face accelerating changes in Artificial Intelligence, automotive and more. Nikolas looks forward to connecting with you.

Email Nikolas to get a copy of the post-keynote report >>> click here

Reach out to arrange a meeting with Nikolas >>> click here.

Please watch and read on to learn more. Feel free to share this resource with your peers and colleagues.

Remember that hopeful futures work starts by questioning everything – and there’s zero risk in doing so. It’s a deeply creative and cognitive exercise for board members, executives and the teams shaping your organization’s future.

There are 4 ways to prime this thinking:

1. Move from continuation to transformation – “we’ve always done it this way” and “this is how it’s always going to be” is the beginning of the end of any organization. Beware of nostalgia, it’s the enemy of progress.

2. Decode uncertainty where megatrends collide – look for the opportunities, challenges and risks that exist at future horizons.

3. Embrace anticipatory governance – speculate on how your organization works in the changing world and consider what you need to start doing – and more importantly – stop doing.

4. Shift your mindset from what is to what if… – look up and ahead 5, 10 and 20+ years to explore the possibilities for your organization in our ever-changing world.

Foundational reading for the Modern Leader

Here is some reading that every progressive leader in 2026 and beyond needs to be aware of:

Corporate foresight and its impact on firm performance: A longitudinal analysis (Rohrbeck and Kim)

2026, The Hope Revolution (Nikolas Badminton)

It is recommended that you consider buying Nikolas Badminton’s award-winning book Facing Our Futures: How foresight, futures design and strategy creates prosperity and growth. It primes the modern executives ability to supercharge strategic thinking.

Read ‘The CEO’s Guide to AI…’

Read some of Nikolas’ most read ‘CEO’s guide to AI…’ articles:

The CEO’s guide to AI: The Cycle Didn’t Get Faster. Everything Else Changed

The CEO’s guide to AI: What to do when the software is the worker

The CEO’s guide to AI: What Canada’s New Agentic AI Guidance Means for the C-Suite

The CEO’s guide to AI: The Pope Has an AI Strategy Memo for Your Boardroom

The CEO’s guide to AI: State Media Control Influences Large Language Models

The CEO’s guide to AI: Social engineering is turbocharged by AI

The CEO’s guide to AI: Black-hat LLMs and Cyber-threats

The CEO’s guide to AI: We’re nowhere near AGI

The CEO’s guide to AI: Young workers as the canaries in the coalmine

The CEO’s guide to AI: The risk of vibe coding complacency

The CEO’s guide to AI: The Case for Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence (SAI)

Build a futurist mindset with ‘5 Minutes to Future‘

Now is the time to step up and lean into futures thinking with 5 Minutes to Future.

Step 1: Pick a signal that you think could change the world (this needs an open mind)

Step 2: Write down 3 positives and 3 negatives about its emergence

Step 3: Consider what if… it affects

• the world – people and communities

• our industry – the impact we are trying to have

• the work we do – the tasks we need to do

When you do that regularly then you are building the ability to imagine new worlds, anticipate change and build empathy for the people in our world.

If you want to go one step further after doing this then identify one thing we need to start doing and one thing we need to stop doing because of that.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

Go deeper into signals, trends and scenarios

We can learn to master signals, trends and scenarios by undertaking 3 simple actions – and we’re going to share some simple ways to get going:

1. Scan for signals and trends
2. WHAT IF… scenarios
3. Anticipate horizons

1. Scan for signals and trends

Signal scanning can be simple and a fun way to level up your thinking on a daily basis. We scan academic journals, attend conferences, host podcast interviews, social media posts and discussions, read a lot of media articles and so much more. It’s our lifeblood.

Some simple steps can really level up what you are tracking and there are a number of ways to do so.

a. Set up Google Alerts for key areas of interest for your business – you just need a Google Gmail account to do this and you can enter whatever. Just go to https://www.google.com/alerts and type in the area of exploration as you would do a Google Search:

Set your options – we recommend for you to get emails ‘At most once a day’ and ‘Only the best results’. Over time you can refine using boolean logic in your phrases.

You can find out more at Google Help – link.

b. Spend 15 to 30 minutes each morning for coffee and scanning – just search on Google for areas of interest and read articles under the ‘News’ tab. This is ;ess refined than Google Alerts but allows for free-form discovery. We love jumping down into the rabbit hole.

c. Reddit – The ‘Front Page of the Internet’ has an incredible futures community and they share and discuss amazing developments in the world. It’s a free social media platform and you can find incredible references there and bookmark them for reading and sharing later. The core community for Future(s) Studies is https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/. You can enter search phrases in at the top of the page to focus in on specific areas and then click through to the articles and deeper discussions.

d. Podcasts – it’s so great to work and listen to incredible thinkers discuss our futures. Here are some of our favorites (we are sharing Apple Podcast links and they can be found on most platforms):

• Exponential Minds Podcast with Chief Futurist Nikolas Badminton – link

• Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff – link

• WSJ’s The Future of Everything by The Wall Street Journal – link

• The World Ahead from The Economist – link

• Switched On with Bloomberg Finance Talk – link

Of course there are many more out there and please feel free to share podcasts you love with us here.

2. WHAT IF… Scenarios

We can also take things to the next level by building scenarios of what may happen in our futures using the signals and trends and then really taking a deeper dive into the positive and negative implications of speculative future products.

We can start simply by asking what if is an invitation to be curious and consider all possibilities:

• What if AI supercharges (or burdens) our business function, our competitors, and consumers – cost, time, access, efficiencies?

• What if we invest in new technologies and take bigger risks to advance the thought leadership industry?

• What if we explore 10 or 20+ year future horizons to create bolder visions of our impact in the world, see unknown risks and create more robust organizational thought leadership?

• What if our hopeful futures work informs our innovation programs / R&D, organizational messaging, and excites our customers, investors and shareholders?

Just living with simple statements and exploring your futures more really starts to open up your thinking.

These what if…statements are just some example and we can use a simple scenarios framework to create short scenarios:

What if in the [future horizon] solutions [a, b, and c are implemented], which creates these [opportunities and risks], and impacts [dimensions of change].

The ‘dimensions of change’ are where we start to explore deeper dynamics and effects of change – financial, organizational, regulatory, cultural, experimental, political, technological, and social.

This is a little more nuanced.

You can read about the method in detail in Nikolas’ new book – ‘Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth’ – here’s a link to order – grab a copy today.

3. Anticipate horizons

You can also take things to the next level by collating multiple areas of exploration, signals and trends, WHAT IF.. scenarios and considering the larger contact reflected again the current state of your business. This is deep futures work, a creative task, and needs some funding and definite focus.

Sitting here reading this you may not feel that anticipating horizons may be a simple or quick task as we may need to produce more artifacts to help us understand those futures. The truth is, it can be as involved, or as simple, as you want. We always start by posing 5 simple questions that help us speculate:

• Who are we (the organization and society) at that future horizon – what do we think and believe, where do we live, how do we live, what do our families look like?

• What does that future feel like? How does it look and smell? How easy does it feel?

• What cultural artifacts from today exist in that future – art, media, social media, transportation methods, architecture, historical artifacts and reminders of our past?

• What signals from today – that you’ve been tracking, or seen in a futurist keynote – have accelerated and how have they disrupted your work and industry? Have they been good or bad for business?

• What new organizations, services and products will be needed in that future?

Overall, we hope that you have found this article to be useful as a primer to kickstart your futures thinking. You’re already a futurist by the virtue that you turned up to the discussion and participate in life. You are already an active participant in our futures – either through positive exploration and action towards it, or through inaction – both are contributory.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

About Nikolas Badminton

Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer at futurist.com. He’s a world-renowned futurist speaker, consultant, author, media producer, and executive advisor that has spoken to, and worked with, over 500 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments.

Nikolas Badminton will publish ‘The Hope Engineer’s Playbook: How Leaders Build Vision, Pathways and Energy for Better Futures’ on Page Two in September 2026.

Nikolas Badminton’s previous book ‘Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth’ was selected for J.P. Morgan Summer Reading List as the “Next Gen Pick” to inform the next generation of thinkers that lead us into our futures.

Learn more about Nikolas here, and reach out to discuss working together >>> click here.

The post Igniting Hopeful Futures Thinking for CIBC at Friday Harbour appeared first on Futurist Keynote Speaker | Hope Engineer - Nikolas Badminton.

Published in Futures (July 2026), the study by René Rohrbeck (EDHEC Business School), Stephan Szuppa (Siemens Professional Education / SRH Berlin), and Julia Schmidt (Bluemorrow) tracks a single strategic foresight process across two complete cycles: fully human-led in 2023, AI-augmented in 2025. Read the study here.

Siemens Professional Education’s “Trend Radar” process launched in 2019 and generative AI tools were introduced incrementally from 2024, mapped against the five-phase Scope–Scan–Analyse–Assess–Act model. 

The researchers drew on process documentation, trend profiles, effort logs, interviews, and two focus groups.

The headline: no uniform acceleration, no automation. What AI produced was task-level efficiency, a redistribution of human effort, and improved analytical breadth, structure, and completeness — concentrated in scanning, consolidation, and drafting.

The numbers that matter.

• Drafting time per trend profile: ~3.5 hours → ~1.25 hours
• Routine analytical labour in Scan and Analyse: roughly halved
• External reports analysed: 3 → 16
• Trends on the long-list: 73 → 87
• Prioritised initiatives: 4 → 8
• Overall cycle duration: unchanged

That last line is the one to sit with. The cycle is deliberately synchronised to Siemens’ annual planning rhythm; nobody set out to compress it. Time savings appeared inside tasks, not across the process. Meanwhile, external advisory and tooling costs went up moderately — configuration, governance, and validation are not free.

Where AI was allowed, and where it wasn’t. Source selection happened entirely before any AI touched anything. Reports and databases were curated by humans against three criteria: publisher credibility, coverage triangulation (a trend needed two independent sources to enter the long-list), and topical relevance. AI was never used to expand the source set or to judge source quality. It extracted, summarised, deduplicated, drafted, and proposed relationships.

The Scope phase used no AI at all. Practitioners rated its value there 1.9 out of 5 — the lowest of any phase — against 4.2 for Scan, 3.8 for Assess, 3.7 for Analyse, and 3.4 for Act. Overall: 3.8.

One genuine process change. AI was used to generate preliminary initiative hypotheses early, in the Scan phase, rather than after the interviews. Those hypotheses were then put in front of 57 expert interviewees to be challenged. Option generation moved upstream; authority over interpretation did not move at all.

Discussion Points: The Five Tensions

The paper’s most transferable contribution is not a metric but a taxonomy of trade-offs that participants reported repeatedly. These are not implementation failures. They are structural features of hybrid systems.

Speed versus legitimacy. AI-generated outputs were not accepted as legitimate inputs until experts had debated them. As one participant put it, being faster is worthless if people don’t trust the results or feel involved.

Breadth versus focus. AI reliably lowered omission risk — “the risk of forgetting something important is lower.” But broader coverage made prioritisation harder, not easier. Another interviewee: give people more options and everything starts to look relevant.

Standardisation versus context. Trend profiles became markedly more consistent. They also, in one participant’s words, don’t really know Siemens. Contextual intelligence stayed human.

Structured ideation versus radical novelty. AI helped surface alternative framings and handle “unknown unknowns.” It was described as recombining existing knowledge rather than producing genuinely discontinuous strategic imaginaries. The authors connect this to Doshi and Hauser’s finding that generative AI lifts individual creativity while reducing the collective diversity of output — a real problem for a discipline whose product is plural futures.

Augmentation versus accountability. AI could propose, summarise, and structure. It could not carry responsibility. The authors lean on Carnat’s argument that the mere presence of a human in the loop can shield an AI system from contestability rather than resolve accountability — a rebuke to the standard corporate governance answer.

Why It Matters

Three reasons this study should displace most of what executives currently read about enterprise AI.

It is longitudinal and internally controlled. Same organisation, same unit, same process architecture, same planning rhythm, same business context — run twice, two years apart. The authors are careful not to claim causal isolation, and they say so. That candour is itself a signal of quality.

It refuses the efficiency frame. Prior research, the authors argue, has too often equated AI’s value with speed, scale, or automation. Those metrics are insufficient for foresight. The gains here were indirect: better breadth and structure improved the conditions for good sense-making, rather than producing better strategic insight automatically. AI outputs are not outcomes.

It gives you a map of the jagged edge. The paper invokes Dell’Acqua and colleagues’ field experiment with 758 consultants: inside AI’s capability frontier, users outperformed; outside it, AI use degraded performance. Foresight is not one task but a sequence of analytically heterogeneous activities, and practitioners cannot easily tell which side of the frontier each one sits on. This study locates the frontier empirically for one high-stakes process.

What This Means for CEOs

Stop underwriting AI programmes on cycle-time reduction. The cycle time here did not move — and the deployment was still clearly worth doing. If your business case rests on calendar compression, you have probably mis-specified the benefit and will declare failure at the wrong moment.

Budget for the cost line nobody forecasts. Routine labour fell; advisory and tooling spend rose. Governance, configuration, and validation are the price of admission, not overhead to be optimised away.

Put the human gate before the AI, not after it. Siemens curated every source by hand before any model saw it. Most enterprise deployments do the opposite: let the model gather, then have a human skim the output. That inverts the control point.

Demand output-level traceability — the paper admits Siemens didn’t have it. The authors name this as a limitation: no systematic link from each AI-extracted statement back to the source passage it came from. A reviewer could accept an AI-generated trend statement without knowing what it derived from. Build the traceability log before you scale the volume.

Understand what “human in the loop” does and doesn’t buy you. It can function as a liability shield rather than a control. Specify, in writing, which decisions are non-delegable, who signs, and what evidence must accompany a recommendation. Presence is not accountability.

Protect the front end. Scope was the one phase where AI was deliberately excluded, and practitioners rated it lowest for AI value. Framing, boundaries, and defining what counts as a useful answer are where executive judgment is irreplaceable — and where automation temptation is strongest.

Fund AI literacy, or don’t proceed. The authors are blunt: without skilled practitioners capable of critically engaging with AI outputs, integration may exacerbate epistemic risks rather than mitigate them. Good tools plus mediocre operators produce confident, well-structured, plausible errors.

The paper’s closing insight is the one worth carrying into a board meeting. The boundary between human and machine work in foresight is not set by what the models can currently do. It derives from organisational and epistemic requirements — legitimacy, contestability, responsibility. Better models will move the boundary’s details. They will not dissolve the logic.d about where these systems still break—will be positioned to lead the transition rather than absorb it.

This is an executive brief based on “Artificial intelligence in strategic foresight: Evidence from a longitudinal case at Siemens Professional Education” – read here

Read other articles in the series:

The CEO’s guide to AI: The Pope Has an AI Strategy Memo for Your Boardroom

The CEO’s guide to AI: State Media Control Influences Large Language Models

The CEO’s guide to AI: Social engineering is turbocharged by AI

The CEO’s guide to AI: Black-hat LLMs and Cyber-threats

The CEO’s guide to AI: We’re nowhere near AGI

The CEO’s guide to AI: Young workers as the canaries in the coalmine

The CEO’s guide to AI: The risk of vibe coding complacency

The CEO’s guide to AI: The Case for Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence (SAI)

About Nikolas Badminton

Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer at futurist.com. He’s a world-renowned futurist keynote speaker, consultant, author, media producer, and executive advisor that has spoken to, and worked with, over 500 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments.

Nikolas is an artificial intelligence expert and his 2026 keynote ‘The AI Leader: Create Incredible Productivity, Profit & Growth’ is the level up for the modern CEO and executive leader.

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