Caroline Stokes: Bold Conversations for Future-Ready Leaders

About This Episode

In this episode, global leadership strategist and author Caroline Stokes talks about what it takes to lead through AI acceleration, climate risk, and constant societal change. We explore psychological safety, neuroplasticity, AI experimentation, and why resistance is so costly for leaders and organizations. Caroline challenges outdated leadership models and offers a practical, future-focused view of how leaders can build strategic agility, listen more deeply, adapt faster, and create operating models where mission leads before hierarchy. Tune in for a bold conversation about what it really takes to lead, adapt, and stay human in a world that keeps changing.

About Caroline Stokes

Caroline Stokes is a global leadership strategist, founder and author of AfterShock to 2030: A CEO’s Guide to Reinvention in the Age of AI, Climate, and Societal Collapse, a radical roadmap for leaders navigating our disruptive new reality. She is a member of the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2026, and was shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Leadership Award in 2025. A Sony alum who contributed to the launch of PlayStation, and a PCC-level, EQ 2.0–certified coach, Caroline has evolved from executive headhunter to one of the few global authorities on psychological and strategic leadership reinvention.

Additional Resources

Website: theforward.co
LinkedIn: @CarolineStokes
Instagram: @OCarolineStokes
Facebook: @TheForwardCo

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:07

Welcome to the Bold Lounge Podcast. My name is Lee Burgist and I will be your host. If you're anything like me, you love hearing inspiring stories of people who have gone on bold journeys and made a positive impact in the world. This podcast is all about those kinds of stories. Every week we'll hear from someone who has taken the leap or embarked on an extraordinary journey. In addition to hearing their stories, we'll also learn about their bold growth mindset that they use to make things happen. Whether they faced challenges or doubts along the way, they persisted and ultimately achieved their goals. These impactful stories will leave you feeling motivated and inspired to pursue your own bold journey. I believe everyone has a bold story waiting to be free. Tune in and get ready to be inspired.

Meet Caroline Stokes And Her Work

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Welcome to the Bold Lounge. Today we have Caroline Stokes. She is a global leadership strategist, founder, and author of Aftershock to 2030, a CEO's guide to reinvention in the age of AI, climate, and societal collapse. It is a radical roadmap for leaders navigating our disruptive new reality. She is a member of the Thinkers50 Radar class of 2026 and was shortlisted for the Thinkers 50 Leadership Award in 2025. She is a Sony alum who contributed to the launch of PlayStation and a PCC level EQ 2.0 certified coach. Caroline has evolved from executive headhunter to one of the few global authorities on psychological and strategic leadership reinvention. Welcome to the Bold Lounge, Caroline. Thank you so much for having me.

What Bold Means Now

SPEAKER_01 1:44

I'm so excited to dig in to your new book, but first I'd like to talk about what being bold means to you? How would you define bold?

SPEAKER_00 1:52

I'll try and make this really short. Being bold in 2026 is about realizing that the world has changed so much, and being bold requires the mindset to change, despite the fact that it will feel very, very uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

Okay. So change, feeling the uncomfort, and doing it anyway.

SPEAKER_00 2:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:16

Okay. So when's a time in your life, and it may be recent, that you remember being bold, the world is changing, which it continues to do, but you had a bold mindset of like I'm doing it anyway, even though I'm really uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_00 2:28

Yeah. Well, I'll use the fact that today we're dealing with a lot of external factors that are influencing the way that we need to be. I had these external forcing factors that has made me do whatever I'm doing. And to be honest, everybody in the world right now. So I'll just use that analogy or use that example as something that happened to me when I was very young. So when I was super, super young, I would have been around about five or six years of age. My parents decided to move us to Singapore. Now I'm English, I live in Vancouver, British Columbia, I've lived in Ireland, I've lived in Australia, and but when I was very, very young, I was living in Singapore. And that was a forced environment that was put upon me. And guess what? I thrived in it. It was new, it was different, and I adopted that mindset of, oh, I'm just going to experiment with what's happening here. And there was one time we went to Thailand of all places, went to Thailand, which sounds very exotic, but it's a bit like, I don't know, living in Miami and going to Cuba on a regular basis or the you know the Bahamas. It's just it's on your doorstep. Went to Thailand and you know, my family said, We're gonna go see an alligator farm, we're gonna go and do this. And I said, I don't want to go. Can you imagine a six, seven-year-old, six-year-old saying, I don't want to go, I'm just gonna be by the pool. Anyway, typical six-year-old. I was bored out of my mind after, I don't know, 10 minutes, and went up to the gardener, the gardener, and said, Hey, what are you doing? But you know, can we do anything? I have no idea if he could understand what I was saying. But he took me on the back of his bike around Bangkok for hours, came home, parents were frantic, going, What the heck have you? Oh my gosh. And that's where you give me a heart attack. Like, yeah, right. I was bold. It was like, well, this is the environment that I'm in. And you know, I've been given this agency and freedom to be in a different environment, thrive, and then experiment and yeah, freak people out. Yeah, and freak your parents out, sure.

SPEAKER_01 4:29

Yeah, which you you do probably do throughout your life, even no matter what your age, you might freak your parents out. Honestly, Lisa, you know, I'm 54, so I feel like I could like surprise my parents on any given day something new. Like, hey, mom, I quit my job and I don't have a plan. That's what I did in 2020 when I was in just complete burnout and couldn't figure out how to fix it the way that I normally fixed it and said something major has to happen. So like I shook it up pretty hard there.

SPEAKER_00 4:57

Well done.

SPEAKER_01 4:57

Yeah, yeah. So I love that. So open to really experimenting and thinking about, I think in there maybe is, you know, what are the rules, but do I have to abide by them or are there any rules? Or am I just like creating a path that maybe no one's ever even gone down, right? Yeah, yeah. We often don't think about that when we're making bold moves, though. We just do it. At least for me, would you say the same?

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Yeah. I mean, I just have to remind myself of that six-year-old where I didn't think of the consequences, I didn't think of the rules, I didn't know the rules, I didn't know I needed to ask for permission. Yeah, I didn't think about the potential challenges, I didn't have any fear associated with it. I was just bored.

SPEAKER_01 5:38

Yeah, I bet some people in their roles can feel like that right now, right? You know, their roles may not be advancing, or maybe some pieces or parts of their life feel too contained. There's a lot of disruption. It's definitely a disruption of a pattern or a cycle or a habit, you know, or like you said, I think you were especially younger, really led by your curiosity, which I think as adults, I don't know, it just gets muted in us. I don't think it gets taken away. I I guess it could, but I like to think of it as maybe it's just not as expressed as it should be as we expressed it as a child. So a lot of talk about that, I think recently, certainly seeing it in lots of places that clarity, curiosity, lots of buzzwords out there. But to me, it means like doing what you want to do and moving forward even when it's uncomfortable, like you said, but also when you don't know how it's gonna end up. But you know you'll learn something, right?

SPEAKER_00 6:29

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 6:29

Yeah. So your newest book, you know, when you think about all of the books that you've written, is there something you learned about yourself from your most recent book, which we're gonna jump into?

Why Old Leadership Models Fail

SPEAKER_00 6:40

Uh, what did I learn about myself? I think what I learned about myself is that we just talked about burnout and boredom and frustration, disengagement, you know, and what I noticed between the gap of my first book coming out in 2019 and then this book coming out in 2025 is that there was really like an inner being inside of me, which sounds very woo-woo. I don't mean it to, but you know, we all have a facade of, you know, getting on in life, you know, going to the grocery stores and accepting the fact that, you know, something's gone up in price, or that there are these different environments or differ different things happening in the world that impact your ability to feel at peace. So I just got really tired of it, and I realized that there was the in-between stage where I could see that people were working towards an old paradigm, or still working on the old paradigm of, you know, everything is normal. We're not going to find the solutions, we're just waiting for the next quarter to pick up, or we're waiting for, I don't know, something to settle down so we can get back to selling what whatever we were selling, or oh, there is this new um technology that we need to adopt. Let's just put that in there without actually realizing the second and third order consequences. So I had come to the realization that leadership language, leadership behaviors, leadership training wasn't doing what it needed to do anymore. It was really for an old paradigm before 2020, where you know organizations were able to cope on that uh to continue down that particular trajectory. But that was really, it was a mirage. When you know you you see the climate warnings, you see the the geopolitical winds and the shifts and the economic winds, etc. It's a mirage. And and it sounds a bit negative, and maybe people will switch off at this particular time, but it's all about now our mindset to accept that you know things aren't quite how they should be, the reality, and then what are you gonna do about it? So it was in 2023. I was at uh TED in Vancouver, which uh for the past 10 years it's been held in Vancouver, which is where I live, and I was there, and Nadia Tolekonikova, who um was the created the anti-Putin movement in Russia, had been imprisoned because of she had been pretty uh anarchic in her activities in Russia, and the language that she used, I remember being quite scared by it. And I thought, you know what, if she can get up on Ted and talk about this without fear of being assassinated, being poisoned, you know, obviously same thing as assassinated. Um, good gracious me, I can speak up and encourage CEOs to adapt in this world that people are pretending doesn't exist.

SPEAKER_01 9:36

Yeah. Do you think people have their blinders on because they feel more control? You know, because I think that's a sense of and I I I smiled while you were talking about this because I I actually wrote down in the notes preparing, you know, I feel like the world learned things in 2020 and then they've forgotten them all.

SPEAKER_00 9:55

Totally.

SPEAKER_01 9:55

It feels like it. I don't know, that sounds very negative too, and usually I'm not negative, but it it is reality in the sense of the things that we learned about independence and agility, and felt like we could make decisions faster. And I feel like we've gone back to maybe moving slower, and then we now have AI coming in. It's been coming in, if anyone's been paying attention since 2020 and before. But 2020 is probably when I first started using it and thinking about how it could impact or how it can make life more efficient, those types of things. So, you know, your book is called Aftershock to 2030, a CEO's guide to reinvention in the age of AI, climate, and societal collapse. So when you think about that, like just the titles probably bring us into reality, right? Of like what we think. And in 2030 is not that far off, it's four years from now. So it feels like it's this, you know, age that we're never going to get to. And I certainly hope to be here. So when you think about our mindset, where do we need to go? Like when we think of taking our mindset from A to B, when you think about this book and the things that you've brought forward, what do we need to have ready so that we can receive your message in our mindset?

CEOs Facing The 2030 Reality

SPEAKER_00 11:08

I think being really open-minded is the the way forward. It's very easy for and you just have to turn on the news or you just have to look on social media. And it's very easy for us to become distracted and to become outraged on various things that are happening in the world instead of stopping and pausing and thinking, okay, well, how do I actually want to make a difference? How do I want to change these terrible things that are happening? And but what is my role? And I'm not necessarily talking about, you know, changing your consumer buying habits, you know, and uh or feeling guilty about that, that may be one part of change, but really, you know, I'm I'm talking to CEOs in particular because the majority of CEOs, there's a very high number of CEOs, uh, quarter and quarter for the past two years that have resigned from their roles, particularly either due to AI or climate challenges that have impacted them, or they're just not ready for or wanting to be ready for this new shift. And boards are going to be looking for people that are able to take the organization to this next level. So they're looking for that level of insurance to have the right CEOs. So for this book is really designed for CEOs that are ready to sit down and work their way through and become the polymathic CEOs that they need to become. And they could be CFOs that need to evolve into this role, or they could be CROs, or they could be, you know, a brand new AI era uh CEO that's only 16 year right now that is going to be evolving into this, and to look at all the different systems that are present to be able to understand that every single decision that is made has a climate and societal impact, and what are you going to do about it, or how are you going to move forward in a way that, you know, is going to make sense.

SPEAKER_01 13:01

Yeah. I think what's interesting is, you know, I think you're bringing forth a subject first, honestly, because I don't think a lot of people have been talking about the way that we have been brought up or trained, or, you know, here are the key resources. I think what I've been saying, probably for a good solid year, but certainly a louder, I think, in the last six months, is like we don't have the things we need to actually learn the way we want to learn or need to learn now. So I even go, I and I love bookstores, and I go into a bookstore and I'm like, these are the same books that I've seen in the leadership section, you know, as the key ones, the solid ones, the ones, you know, I could rail off 10 of them right now.

SPEAKER_00 13:43

The best sellers, that's what's going to make money for the book for the company.

SPEAKER_01 13:46

Yeah. And I'm just not sure those are the things that we need in the forefront of our world right now. And so when I think of your book and even, you know, even the things that you're bringing forward that I haven't heard before, like polymathic leadership, which I'd like you to define for us, I think we need a new set. It doesn't mean we get rid of the other ones. I'm not saying they're not valuable or shouldn't not be read. I'm saying that they may not be the one that you need, right? In our age. So, real quick, what is polymathic leadership?

Polymathic Leadership Explained

SPEAKER_01 14:16

What does that mean for those that may have not heard of it? And I hadn't heard of it or said it before.

SPEAKER_00 14:20

Yeah, I mean, a polymath is someone that really has a good handle and understanding and learning mindset to understand all of the different systems at play. So I'll give you some examples of a great polymath. And you know, when I give you a little list, you'll immediately say, Well, I don't like that person. And it's like, yeah, but look at what they do. Obviously, uh, Steve Jobs was a polymath, uh, Elon Musk is a polymath. Most most inventors uh or people that can see systems ahead of the curve, they're typically polymath because they can hold a vision and they're able to adapt to that vision and they're able to see the technology argument, the organizational argument, the talent argument, the um environmental, you know, all of the different systems at play and have an opinion that enables the rest of the organization to follow through with that. You just have to look at the leadership at NVIDIA and various other companies. The type of organizations that don't have that kind of polymathic leadership are usually in manufacturing. I think manufacturing needs to go through a major change due to the fact that manufacturing requires a lot of planetary resources. In biotech, you've got a lot of polymaths, um, but you're looking at a different type of CEO, not the type of hero CEO that we would have seen on a being commonplace on one particular product or whatever. The bottom line is they will have a wide variety of experiences, knowledge, and be able to bring forth a whole new vision.

SPEAKER_01 15:45

Yeah. Do you think it's only CEOs? I mean, as you're speaking, I mean, I I'm obviously a CEO now of my own company, but I was a COO. What you were describing was like, I see the big picture, I can look down and look up at the same time, I can tell you in like 10 steps where we're gonna hit a pothole. I think those types of things got me in trouble in my career, honestly, because it seemed as if I was being negative or if I I wasn't thinking we could accomplish something. I was like, no, it's the opposite. I'm saying here's what we need to look out for. And I think I figured out mostly how to take what I was hearing, seeing in my job, and then be able to say it the right way where it could be received more gently, I think.

SPEAKER_00 16:26

Isn't that difficult?

SPEAKER_01 16:27

Oh, yeah, it takes a lot of energy, and I'm not so good at it, right? You know, so yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:32

And I think that the challenge with that is that, and um, a good friend of mine, Ludmela Preslova, she wrote a book called uh the Canary Code. And if you think about the canary in the coal mine, you've got people that are able to think ahead, they can look around corners, they can see through walls, they can see all of the diff different systems at play that may impact success. And the issue is that if you've got a top-down leader that is explaining to somebody, you know, what needs to be delivered, but you've got the polymathic canary that can see all of the different systems, and they want to be able to say, Well, actually, we can see all of these things happening, so we're gonna take this particular path forward in this way uh to create success. And the leader says, No, I just want you to do it this way, it can really impact, uh which is why you know you talked about burnouts, why people become burned out is why the people become disengaged because they can just see that it's wasting time and it's creating damage, and uh that kind of moral injury burns people out.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

Yeah, lots of friction, right? So you're you're using your energy and yeah, you're using your energy in a way that actually is just to almost survive, I guess, uh, in a way that's like a little dramatic. But I think on certain days I certainly felt like that, you know. I I knew what I needed to do, but I couldn't do it the way that I felt was the most agile. I think one of the things that when it comes to change, that you've probably heard this a lot, is some people, oh, I I don't mind change, but just don't take anybody off.

The Harmony Trap At Work

SPEAKER_01 18:01

Make sure everyone's happy during it, make sure there's harmony. Is it possible to have change and everyone be happy and harmonious? No.

SPEAKER_00 18:10

So I well, everybody has to understand there are outcomes that need to be achieved, which is business success, client, customer satisfaction, revenue. And if the only KPI is harmony, you're not gonna reach your business outcomes. Uh you know, and so I think it's an upside-down perspective and why DEI got the bad rap that it got during, you know, in the past few years, because people looking at we're looking at harmony, we're looking, and it's like, no, we have to learn how to communicate more effectively together to reach the desired outcomes. So it sounds like there was conflict within the organizations. When a company will say we're looking for harmony, it's because people are concerned or they haven't learned to communicate critical thinking in a way where people feel safe doing it. And as we all know, Amy and Budson coined the phrase psychological safety. Kim Scott has a similar concept, which is radical candor. And all of us have great fears about whatever we might say, whatever we might present, that is going to be knocked down. So when we come in with that fear, and if it is knocked down, oh, you're not creating harmony all of a sudden, you know, you're not respecting somebody, and then you just get into this really negative loop. And I've got the different scenarios in my book, which is that when you've got that kind of environment, you're not getting results. You're not able to create the results that you need. So everybody focuses on the communication style, and somebody is being disruptive instead of going, well, hold on a second. What if we could all try and agree what the problem is, agree what the outcome needs to be, and then all of us decide how we're gonna get there.

SPEAKER_01 20:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:06

And it sounds so uncomplicated when it's said in that way. And it sounds so optimistic.

SPEAKER_01 20:12

Why do we make it so hard? You know, I think I think sometimes we make it way harder than we need to with regard to what needs to be

Neuroplasticity And Learning On Purpose

SPEAKER_01 20:21

done. And I think it does come back to one of the things that you start off your book with is talking about neuroplasticity and why it matters. And it's literally the rewiring of your brain of like what and how and where I need to go now based on the world I live in now. Like if I was trying to live in the 80s, you know, I like the 80s. I really did like the 80s. Like I was little, but I mean, I just it was simpler, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 20:46

It was more simple for sure, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:48

And then I think, well, how am I making my life more complex? Like, what do I own in that? And I do own several pieces. I mean, I have two phones, I have three laptops, or whatever it may be, like whatever people do these days in in that sense, and I never get off my email, whatever. Like that's choice, right? But even though we have choice and we're, you know, rewiring our brain to what is here, I'm not sure everyone's understanding that it's not happening to them. Like they can be the one leading and be the one taking those steps and have agency in this world. Yeah, you know, when you think about the concepts in your book and the ways that we can take more agency around things that impact our world, our society, our climate. Where do you see that we should either start or that people can begin? If they've never thought about it that way as a CEO. Yeah. Cause I do think there's leadership out there that doesn't even I mean, they've they're really honed in on what they're doing. And I think it feels like a lot of them are in a protective mode right now. Like I have to get ahead, or if we don't do this, then this.

SPEAKER_00 21:53

Well of course, everyone's in survival mode right now.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:55

Everyone. And many CEOs are just wanting to get to the next quarter.

SPEAKER_01 22:00

Or get to retirement.

SPEAKER_00 22:01

Or get to retirement 100%. Yeah, that that is another point as well. And for people that are in that situation, it's very clear. And I I, you know, everybody has their own survival plan. And that's just how it is. But I believe there are CEOs out there, and I've seen them, I've met them, I've met enough people to know that there are leaders out there that are just looking for that spark to help them realize actually I can do this differently. I just need to wake up from this paradigm, this sleepwalking that we've been doing for a number of years, to then wake up and decide to do things differently and to be curious about that and to start learning. Now, years ago, Satchina Dala was talking about the learn it all mindset, and I loved it. I put it in my first book, and it's like, yep, we need to learn it all. And I decided that I would take that mindset myself because I'm addicted to learning, because it's addictive. And I decided that I would do three different MIT courses. I would do a hat-trick. And it's odd because it's not like I told everybody I was going to do this. I would tell select people. The first one I did an MIT course on business sustainability, which is all about environmental, societal, and governance behaviors and how organizations need to adapt. I came out from that going, you know what? Every CEO should go on this because if they knew what is happening with the planet, they would just stop everything because it's going to impact their children and their children's children. Every single CEO. I felt so strongly about that. And then I did AI for business strategy, same thing again. I could see that I'd actually created a model at it was in 2024, just after ChatGPT came out. And this model was specifically designed to be integrated within an organization's operating system that would reflect the external operating, all the externalities, and a bit like, and I'll explain it in a second, but then you'd have all the internal aspects as well with human behavior, or OKRs and what have you, so everything could be in sync. And today, two years later, we're talking about agentic AI and how that's going to operate. So I was kind of ahead of the curve. And at that time, somebody from Microsoft had evaluated my paper because you're doing assignments every week, and they said, This is really disruptive. And I said, Yeah, I just need 20 million to get this started. I'm a bit cash poor. I just don't have a girl. So but that's the thing, it's like it didn't matter. I was stretching my brain. So we're talking about neuroplasticity there. And then the last one that I've just finished was um MIT New Space Economy. So that to me is an example of the environment that we're in, knowing what those three different environments are like. And I knew those, I knew that that new space economy course, I should have done it in 2024, but I was too busy, you know, writing my book. And um, knowing that I needed all of these different aspects to understand how we are going to need to evolve from a leadership and from an organizational perspective, because you and I are going to be going, why is it that we now have these different facilities? Where are the opportunities there? And the opportunities are that thanks to more satellites being put up into near space, we're now able to have better communications all around the world. We're able to focus on uh Earth observation at a level we've never had before for security and food security and for agriculture and for observation to see where there may be incidents, accidents, and uh emergencies around the world. So we're able to operate a lot faster than even three years ago. This is what the fascinating thing. So, how does that impact businesses? How does that now impact ourselves? Because people and the media, for example, complaining about certain things being closed down. Nobody is telling the media, well, actually, just because that's closed down, the budget is now here because we can now be faster, but the news isn't there. Right. So we have to be really, really curious about what is actually happening in the world beyond the doom scrolling, yeah, so we can see where the potential opportunities are, so we can feel wonder, we can feel really engaged with a future that right now isn't really communicated, and that's what we need.

SPEAKER_01 26:32

Correct. Yeah, I think at times, if you're really not taking the agency, and even if you are, I think on on days it feels really heavy, right?

SPEAKER_00 26:40

Oh, every two minutes is heavy.

SPEAKER_01 26:41

Yeah, so like thinking about how you navigate that is important, but I think one of the things that you talk about again in a chaotic world, which is you know, I don't know, I believe it's gotten more chaotic. Totally. You know, if we just use the 80s to now, yeah. Every two days, every two days, yeah. And and I believe it's just gonna keep going that way because I feel like even if everything is all positive and something that feels negative right now, I think we're going to have new things, we're going to have AI, which I think is really challenging us in a lot of ways.

SPEAKER_00 27:14

And I think some of it feels so new that people are just ignoring it, which is why it's really important for people to just take a beat, take a deep breath, and go, okay, there are all of these things happening. It's like being on the side of a highway and just standing there and watching race cars go past and going, I don't know how I'm gonna catch up with that race car. You don't need to. You just got to work out what you're most curious about next and start learning about that and then go on the next thing that you might be curious about.

SPEAKER_01 27:48

If you're not open to learning, I think you're in trouble, honestly. Or you could just retire and go do you know what you want to do and not have to worry about the world, and that's good for you.

SPEAKER_00 27:57

100%. Here's the thing: you can be bold and make that decision to stay on the golf course, yeah, and that's fine. Or you can be bold and go, you know what? I'm gonna learn something and I'm gonna see what it's about, and then I'm gonna go to the next thing, and then I'm gonna go to the next thing. Yeah. So when I had made that decision for myself, I think it was in 2021, no, 2020, I decided I was gonna move to campus at Simon Fraser University, and that I was going to do three MIT courses and become qualified in various other tools. It enabled me to go, okay, now I feel I'm ready. And that's why I wrote this book. So 75,000 words, this is the shortcut version.

SPEAKER_01 28:36

Love it. You talk about like there's three things that CEOs need to be able to do challenge stagnant systems, be able to understand how to create transformative strategic agility within your organization. So moving without all certainty in place, I think is is key there. And then innovate at breakneck speed, which is also probably having an you know an openness to uncertainty. And I think I've heard so many people speak about this, but those that can move forward or take action when things are still uncertain are the people that actually create and change and innovate in our world more than anyone else. Yeah. Why do you think there's such a challenge with saying that system doesn't work or this is something new that we should do, or we need to go faster? Why do people push back or not know how to do that or want to because it can seem so overwhelming, just taking that first step?

SPEAKER_00 29:32

It's a bit, as I said, you know, it's it's like being on the side of a highway and seeing Ferraris going at 200 miles an hour and just not knowing how to it's like, well, how do I catch up? The gap is so big. So rather than thinking about that, you just think have to think about your own journey. What is it you want to do that will best serve you at this moment in time?

AI Experimentation And Brain Fry

SPEAKER_00 29:53

And AI will accelerate that for you if you experiment. So a couple of years ago, it was 2023 when ChatGPT came out. I had people have me on their podcast saying, This is terrible, Caroline. What do you have to say about it? And I think they were expecting me to say the same. And I was like, no, you've got to learn, gotta go and learn, you've got to try, you've got to experiment. And even in the past year, I was doing the same thing with CEOs, and I was saying to them, you need to experiment, you just need to play. Just play, just play with it. And once I got them from being AI avoidant to AI curious, they're now AI super users, and now they're creating systems within their organizations that is accelerating them beyond beyond compared to how they were a year ago. The issue now is burnout.

SPEAKER_01 30:39

Because you can work so much or you can learn so much. Like everyone has access to the information now. So it feels like as a creator myself, and I don't know, you could describe yourself as so many things. Like, I just think I'm a creative, innovative person. And so for me, it's like I this intake of so much information. I have to manage myself. Totally. I actually have a prompt that I use when I don't want the 10 other things you could do. I just want you to answer my question so I don't go anywhere. I have to manage myself because I always say yes, all, yes, all, like, you know.

SPEAKER_00 31:17

And you get brain fry from that.

SPEAKER_01 31:19

Yeah. So that's probably going to be we, you know, someone should coin that if you haven't already and start, you know, like talking about it, whatever burnout with AI is.

SPEAKER_00 31:27

Yeah, it's brain frying. It it happens a lot. And and psychosis and uh the psychosis that comes from it. I know, I'm not, I wish I was kidding. Yeah, I know you're not, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:37

I mean, there are some negative things that can happen for sure, right? But one of the things that we shouldn't do is resist.

Resistance Is Expensive To Companies

SPEAKER_01 31:43

You talk about it being expensive, resistance is expensive. How is it expensive to an organization if they resist on what is the opportunity here in the reality that we have in our very chaotic world?

SPEAKER_00 31:57

So I'm gonna sound really scary and abrupt. And so I think if we'd worked together, Lee, in an organization, we'd have caused so much trouble. For sure. Yeah, exactly. It's like no, but I believe. Okay, so the reason why it's expensive is that if an organization, if a leadership team do not take risks, calculated risks, and experiment first, and they've got to be curious, they need to experiment. If they fail to do that, and this is where I'm gonna sound really provocative, they're gonna fail. They probably won't have a company within the next two years. In some instances, people are saying in six months, we're entering, and I don't want to be negative, but we're entering a very challenging time where everything is accelerating. Yeah, there's a lot of uncertainty, there's a lot of negativity. So if you're standing still, again, I'm gonna just keep on using the Ferraris on a highway, if you're standing still and you decide to stay still because it's too scary, and I talk about polyvagal theory in the book, which is fight, flight, freeze, fawn. If you're freezing in place and you're not moving forward, first of all, your employees aren't going to be very happy with that because they're going to see the chaos around them and they're not going to trust you as a leader. So you need to change your leadership style to move forward. And then there's the case of okay, well, if I'm a leader, if I just listen and I pease, that's a fawning CEO, and I've got a whole system in the book, which is if you're fawning, you're not actually doing anything. It's like fake listening, and nothing actually happens, and then you kind of move into that harmony trap that you talked about earlier. Fighting means that the fight CEO they will go down a particular path where they're just fighting absolutely everything, and then you there's a lot of fatigue, people may not necessarily feel confident to speak up, and then you create a different dynamic there, and then you've got flight, which is that oh no, everything is fine here, we don't need to worry about it, you know, there'll be there'll be a different scenario in three months' time, and then you know, again, there'll be the collapse. So to have some kind of mental sovereignty right now, which is to understand the different systems around, which is why I talk about polymathic leadership and the polymathic CEO, to understand all of the different systems and how you need to evolve, being bold. Some people will call it courageous, but to be bold and go, okay, we now need to shift the narrative, the paradigm, the operating system so we can move forward because we believe in our product. We actually need to believe in the product that we're going to be creating for the customer, the client, whatever it is that we're doing that is fit for purpose for this new era.

SPEAKER_01 34:35

Yeah. What if the CEO is not doing what we're talking about? But you're someone that works in an organization who is ready to do that, who sees, you know, the snakes in the wood pile or whatever it may be, you know, before anyone else sees them. What can they do right now? Should they just be just impacting their wherever they can, which is usually what I would do, is like, where can I go? Where can I do? What change can I make in my area without creating, you know, a lot of stuff I have to manage? Or should they be doing something differently? Because they, you know, most likely if you're in an organization and you're one of these individuals who is ready, who is doing these things, who is prepared, who is thinking about change, you know, prepared meaning you're learning, but the organization isn't. What would you recommend to them? To the organization that hasn't started yet. You're the CEO that's you know, being safe, taking it slow.

SPEAKER_00 35:28

So safety is is it's a mirage, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 35:32

Most of the time.

SPEAKER_00 35:33

Yeah. There are two sides to safety. So the positive side is that they're safe because they've been making really good decisions. They've worked out what they need to do, they've worked out how to adapt. That's safe. Bad side of the safe approach, which is uh I would probably call the avoidant approach, means that they're not looking at reality in the mirror, they're not understanding where the gaps are, and so on. And in that particular instance, I don't know if safe is the right word. I think they will think they're playing it safe, but I think they're in denial that actually they're in complete fawning or they're in flight mode and totally avoiding it, in which case they're gonna wake up from it. And I encourage anybody that's thinking they might be angry listening to me when I say all of this because they'll be in denial, which is usually they'll go straight to anger, or they'll just think I'm nuts, which is another sign that you know they need to look at what they've got and see whether or not it really is fit for purpose. And it all starts with stopping, looking around, listening. And I talk about radical listening in the book, which is to really get from all of your stakeholders, the entire organization, very, very quick data on, and it's not like a an employee engagement assessment from HR. You would sync up with your tech leader to say, okay, we need to use AI for this. We need to get as much information, anonymous information as possible from the organization. Let's assume over 10 people, anywhere between 10 people and you know thousands, to get an idea anonymously on what these people see, what their employees see, where the opportunity is. That is how you're able to get the reality, so at least from a CEO perspective, you can understand what needs

Radical Listening With AI Feedback

SPEAKER_00 37:25

to happen next. And that's the power of AI in a very fast environment that we're in today.

SPEAKER_01 37:30

Yeah. You talk about so like being ready, obviously, be adaptable, be ready to rewire how your brain works or you know, be open to that, you know, the neuroplasticity piece, but also rewire your organization and how they think. Yes. Yeah, I mean, most recently there's now a new CEO at Apple. So you're seeing change happen that's been planned and been thought about. This isn't like they just decided it yesterday. So when you see innovative companies do that, or you see someone come into a role like you just described and wants to know what's everyone working on, what are the priorities? Let me understand, does this align with what we say our priorities are? Like it's a normal leader thing to do when you come into an organization is listen and learn and collect data. I think there's also the way you do it, realizing there are still humans in the system.

SPEAKER_00 38:20

100%.

SPEAKER_01 38:21

Yeah. So so I think that's one of the challenges there for some leaders for sure.

Chief Coaching Officer And New Operating Models

SPEAKER_01 38:26

When we think about the value of having someone who's going to run as fast as us or understand why we need to go, you talk about a chief coaching officer and you say that every organization needs one. What is that? And how can it be valuable to an organization? And does anybody have one? Does anybody have them?

SPEAKER_00 38:45

Yes, they have. Some companies have experimented, some large organizations have experimented with it. Okay. And I would say it wasn't the success because they're looking at it being a training situation versus a how do we engage the entire organization to adapt to this new way? And a company that's done it really well is Accenture. They turned it around, whereby they had the entire organization all on the same day, from that day forward, go through AI training. I don't know what the outcome is, but it was just absolutely genius. So they would be an AI forward style organization. So a chief coaching officer would come in and work on all of the different systems that will enable the entire organization to level up to working with AI. The issue is that, you know, and I'm talking about me as well, which is that when you start using AI, you come through it through one particular, let's call it, avatar in our brain. And we have to learn to use AI as if it is a team of five on what it can do. And that requires us using it in a different way, and then how we work with other employees as well. And then you don't realize that actually how we operate within ourselves, and we have a certain amount of baggage that we've had from childhood, and that may prevent us from performing well optimally, and it can backfire or sabotage how we work with others and/or even the company unintentionally, it's just all unintentionally through fears and what have you. So the chief coaching officer will enable with a suite of coaches to create an AI system within the organization, but it would have to be along with either the chief information officer and the chief technology officer, and it has to be a decision by the CEO, and it isn't a DEI initiative. It is explicitly on, because as you probably know, executive coaches are all about outcomes. So this is all about the outcome of is the organization going to be tomorrow ready, future ready? Yeah. And that requires a seismic shift in how people communicate and operate. And I think the poster child for this is actually NVIDIA, because they have a concept that they live daily. We're using AI, which is called mission is the boss. It's not a CEO, it's not, it's like if there's a mission, they bring the right people together for it very quickly, people that they've never even known that known or worked with before, because the AI can actually work out who are the best people for that, and then they bring it the people together to create the outcomes. So, you know, it's just a different operating style. And even with NVIDIA, they find that when people come into the organization and they haven't done it before, they haven't used that kind of model before because NVIDIA is is innovating here. It takes people a very long time because they're used to hierarchical systems, they're used to more political environment, they're not used to working in those little huddles to create those optimal results. So this is why chief coaching officer that really understands the CEO's vision, assuming it's as audacious as Nvidia's, to get to that next level, the next uh trajectory.

SPEAKER_01 41:56

Okay. How do you know if you need one of those as a CEO in your organization? So, like in the sense of if I don't have one of those, does everyone need one? And do I I just think that it's a concept that you and I understand, you of course, more than me, in the sense of your research and expertise and all your experience. But I feel like coaching itself is also something that needs to evolve, I think, with how we're operating in today's world.

SPEAKER_00 42:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:23

Yeah. So like if you had to say to someone, like, are you ready? Like it could be so many things that you could assess or ask. Yeah. But is there one question for like a CEO to realize like he really needs help, he or she really needs help or needs a different way of being? If they don't know it, I just want them to be able to at least see the door that they need to go through next.

SPEAKER_00 42:47

Organizations are now hiring philosophers into their organizations to understand how the organization needs to adapt for this environment that we're in. Chief coaching officers are probably the next best thing, but not all coaching or coaches are, there's no cookie-cutting mold for them. Every single coach has their own blend of communication styles and what have you. So it's it's not that simple. Whether it's a philosopher that's working directly with uh the CEO and the CTO, whether it's a chief coaching officer that works with the CEO and the CTO, they're going to overlap in some way. The difference is that a philosopher is going to be sitting on the shoulder of a CEO and the team to say, you should be thinking about these, you know, second, third order consequences that come through based on these decisions in climate, in the environment, in you know, consumer, in society, and so on and so on. And a chief coaching officer should be able to do exactly the same thing if you hire right.

SPEAKER_01 43:51

Okay. All

Reinvention Starts Now

SPEAKER_01 43:52

right. So as we close out in thinking about your work and this book, what is the thing or the Things that you want people to walk away with when they shut this book after they've read it. Is there like the main thing, a number one thing that you want them to walk away with?

SPEAKER_00 44:09

Reinventing their organization.

SPEAKER_01 44:11

It's now.

SPEAKER_00 44:12

They are ready to reinvent their organization.

SPEAKER_01 44:14

Yeah, so so being able to understand and be open, obviously, and everyone should be picking up Aftershock to 2030, a CEO's guide to reinvention in the age of AI, climate, and societal collapse. Thank you, Caroline, for being here today, sharing your book, sharing your insights, and keep on disrupting in our bold, bold world that is all around us.

SPEAKER_00 44:36

Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure to spend time with you.

SPEAKER_01 44:40

Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Bold Lounge Podcast. Through the continuum of bold stories, vulnerability to taking the leap, you will meet more extraordinary people making a positive impact for others through their unique and important story. By highlighting these stories, we hope to inspire others and share the journey of those with a bold mindset. We hope you've enjoyed this podcast and look forward to sharing the next bold journey with you.