Three-year strategic plans are structurally incompatible with highly volatile systems. In a rapidly shifting operating environment, relying on linear forecasting does not reduce uncertainty—it simply masks systemic risk.
In this episode of Engines of Creation, we explore the dynamics of innovation and applied foresight with Roger Dennis, an expert who has spent twenty-five years advising senior leadership teams across the globe. We unpack why traditional corporate planning is unhinged in the face of exponential change, and how organizations frequently compromise their own resilience by "discounting the future"—delaying difficult conversations until a crisis forces their hand.
Using Stewart Brand’s Pace Layers framework, we analyze the structural deployment of Artificial Intelligence. Rather than viewing AI as a fast-moving commercial product, Roger frames it as a foundational infrastructure layer. Because we are now engineering machines capable of building faster machines without human intervention, the friction of this deployment is ricocheting downward into natural systems (evidenced by massive data center energy and water demands) and reverberating back up through governance and commerce. We also conduct an ergodic autopsy of a New Zealand healthcare system that used an immersive foresight experience to not only absorb the shock of a devastating earthquake but actively adapt and outperform its peers.
The Complexity Framework
The Cost of Discounting the Future: The asymmetrical risk incurred when leadership teams avoid complex, long-term conversations in favor of comfortable, short-term operational goals.
Getting "Above Strategy": The practice of stepping back from immediate quarterly reactions to identify macro-scale drivers of change. It is far better to have an approximate answer to the right systemic question than an exact answer to the wrong one.
Pace Layer Destabilization: Understanding society as a stack of sedimentary layers (fashion, commerce, infrastructure, governance, culture, and natural systems). Shifts in deep infrastructure, like AI, destabilize all the commercial layers resting above them.
Experiential Futures: Overcoming executive "attention scarcity" by using tangible, physical models (like the wooden "Layer Player" blocks) or immersive environments to make abstract systemic risks visceral and undeniable.
Pre-Conditioning for Anti-Fragility: Resilience cannot be engineered during a crisis. You cannot build the fire station once the fire has started.
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