Dealing with a “decade of disruption”

Technological progress is speeding up

Leaders will feel less solid ground underneath their feet. More is contestable, more is uncertain. You will need to think anew, in a fresh way, who your partners may need to be, what contribution you might need to make.
Professor Mark Scott, University of Sydney Vice-Chancellor

The rate of change is so fast. It impacts resilience because it’s hard to keep a team motivated and performing when things are constantly changing. The team needs resilience, individual team members need resilience and leaders need resilience. Building resilience around this pace of change is difficult.
Mel Silva, VP & MD, Google Australia & New Zealand

You’ve got to ask yourself every day, whether the way we’re doing things today is still the best, most effective, creative, interesting way to do it. The best way to keep yourself interested and relevant and productive is to always be prepared to look at the new way of doing something.
Malcolm Turnbull, former Australian PM

Move slowly and fix things.
Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal

Sydney University is Australia’s oldest and most prestigious university. So, when it releases a report, people pay attention. Earlier this week, it released The 2026 Skills Horizon: What leaders need to know next, which contained all of the above quotes and warned of a looming “decade of disruption”.

As a man of the people, I believe the hoi polloi also deserve fair warning of what’s coming. So, let me tell you about the “five shifts” and “four clashes” we will soon have to navigate, if we aren’t already doing so.

The Five Shifts
It’s often observed, not least by me, that Anglosphere societies are going through a profound political realignment. In diplomatic terms suitable for leaders of a certain age and social standing, the report sketches out five wellsprings of the realignment.

1) The values shift
Though the coy term ‘values’ is deployed, this relates to both generational and gender polarisation.

The young ’uns don’t appear to be much interested in working a typical job, especially now that a typical job can no longer provide a middle-class lifestyle.

The fault lines in your workforce aren’t just about preferred communication styles. They’re about fundamentally different views of what work is for and how it gets done… Almost three-quarters of the youngest generation of workers would rather freelance than become middle managers. Young people across the world are now reporting the highest levels of misery of any age group.

The report also notes that the War of the Sexes is particularly pronounced with Gen Z.

There’s a growing divergence in attitudes towards feminism, masculinity, and gender equality between young men and young women, and between young men and older generations.

2) The technology shift
No surprises here. The report’s authors aver that technology, especially AI, is going to change everything. But like most forecasters, the report’s authors decline to specify exactly when that will happen.

Technology is also more undefined than ever. While all the building blocks have emerged—vast amounts of data, AI and Gen AI, robotics, digital platforms—the way they fit together isn’t quite clear yet. All of us are in R&D now.

3) The accountability shift
The gist seems to be that, after decades of being pandered to, corporations are facing increasing scrutiny and, most likely, tighter regulation.

You’ll need awareness of the full scope of your supply chain to track the origins of materials, the scope and volume of your carbon emissions, and the impact of your products on the natural, social, and economic worlds. New requirements, and opportunities, emerge for partnerships with government, suppliers, and competitors across the value chain.

4) The trust shift
While the professional-managerial class in Anglosphere societies believe institutions are doing a bang-up job – at least for members of the professional-managerial class – the commoners are less satisfied.

We fear that our leaders lie to us. The belief that government and business leaders, journalists, and media figures say things they know are false or gross exaggerations is at an all-time high… We worry our roles are threatened by globalisation, a looming recession, automation, and a lack of training. Combined, this could prove extremely destabilising for our organisations.

Lord knows why the enlisted men and women might believe the officer class has regularly misled them and isn’t particularly concerned about their jobs being automated away.

I can only imagine it’s because they are low-information cynics.

5) The energy shift
It seems the much-heralded decarbonisation of the global economy may not be proceeding as initially planned.

We’re in for a rather inelegant transition. The energy transition will likely be slower, more fragmented, and more complex than we thought.

The Four Clashes

1) Policy vs People
The people, especially the younger ones, appear to have tired of policies dictating they organise their lives around the needs of their employer.

Today’s talent expects work to match life circumstances and values. Work-life balance is now the most important motivator for workers at 83%, overtaking pay at 82%.

More dramatically, 44% would quit if they disagreed with leadership values, an 11-point jump from 2024. Young people are particularly uncompromising: 43% have already quit jobs that didn’t fit their personal life, compared to 28% of older workers…

Leaders who want to attract broad talent are increasingly asked to accommodate diverse individual needs—or risk talent walking away.

2) Efficiency vs Expertise
This is about workers automating away their own jobs, thereby demonstrating efficiency but not developing expertise.

You’ve met them. Colleagues who present flawlessly articulated ideas they can’t defend. Managers who present complex ideas with confidence until challenged. People who are productive but can’t explain what they’re doing (or why). We call them ‘vibers’, and they perform expertise without genuinely developing it…

Yet in a market where everyone has the same AI tools, human expertise becomes the differentiator. Domain experts can craft better prompts, recognise AI’s limitations, and integrate outputs meaningfully. For those with deep expertise, AI becomes an amplifier.

3) Capability vs Control
If businesses have already outsourced many functions that were once completed in-house, and will soon outsource many tasks to AI, where does that leave businesses?

The AI models transforming your industry exist only on hyperscaler platforms. The specialised talent you need works freelance, not full-time. Your increasingly complex products require components from global suppliers with expertise you’ll never match. Even your basic business software now comes with cloud dependencies and regular updates beyond your control…

The fundamental tension is inescapable: the more you tap external capabilities, the less control you retain. Yet increasing complexity requires greater capability, while regulators and stakeholders demand more control and visibility.

4) Abundance vs Attention
Now that machines can churn it out in vast quantities, we’re all drowning in “an ocean of information, a desert of insight”.

Meanwhile, content explodes exponentially across multiplying channels. News cycles compress from daily to hourly to instantaneously – leaving no time for reflection or synthesis. You’re managing LinkedIn, Threads, TikTok, Substacks, podcasts – each with distinct benefits and noise patterns. The signal you desperately need gets lost in a sea that grows deeper and murkier by the minute.

Then there’s synthetic pollution. AI-generated content floods every channel, leaving you exhausted and exasperated after constantly questioning: Is this true? Can I use this?

The skills horizon
The report’s money graph is this ‘skills horizon’ one. The closer to the x and y axes the skill is, the more urgently important it is. While some of the skills are ‘leader-specific’, many of them – AI fluency, data fluency and, yes, “career recasting” – will be important for those at all levels of the org chart.

As the report notes, “As a general-purpose technology, AI will soon touch everything. AI fluency as a skill interacts with and amplifies many other skills. Speaking the language of AI is now a critical skill.”

The Sydney University report, like many others before it, predicts is that the typical ‘job’, as conceived of today, will shapeshift. The general assumption is that the relationship between employers and employees (or, increasingly, contractors and freelancers) will become more fluid.

How will you craft effective teams, enabled by AI and digital tools? How will you craft effective information practices? What will the future shape of your workforce look like when entry-level jobs will be absorbed by AI use? What will careers, KPIs, and work roles look like? Work redesign means balancing automation with human expertise.

What is to be done?
Given all of the above, how is a wise leader meant to proceed?

The report argues leaders need to develop four skills. Two of those skills – ‘Solving problems of scale’ and ‘Working across difference’ – won’t necessarily be relevant to those of a humbler station.

But the other two – ‘Speaking the language of tech’ and ‘Thinking through complexity’ are likely to be ever more important for anybody who hopes to remain gainfully employed.

Speaking the language of tech is essentially about adapting quickly and effectively to an ever-changing business environment. Thinking through complexity involves recognising that while information is now vastly abundant, human attention spans remain limited.

The report suggests cultivating the following attributes to fluently speak the language of tech and to effectively think through complexity.

SELF-LEADERSHIP: The ability to manage your attention in the face of hyper-connectivity and information abundance

HUMANITIES THINKING: The ability to engage techniques such as interpretation, sense-making, and imagination to navigate uncertainty

MANAGING THROUGH COMPLEXITY: Learn to unpack complex phenomena without resorting to reductionism

UNLEARNING: Develop a willingness and ability to change your mind and let go of established concepts that no longer serve you

FUTURES THINKING: The ability to craft and envision multiple possible futures, considering emerging trends, potential disruptions, and long-term consequences of present-day actions

Get oriented to being disoriented
Perhaps the most persuasive part of the report is an abundance of quotes from the great and the good – CEOs, prominent politicians, Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicists, chief justices, high-profile entrepreneurs – about the radical transformations that have already commenced or soon will do.

Granted, it’s a self-selecting sample. However, none of those quoted argue that AI is being massively overhyped. Or that the world of 2035 will be much the same as that of 2025.

Demonstrating some AI fluency, I just asked ChatGPT to reference reputable sources and create a timeline of the “disruptive decade”.

If half of what’s predicted comes to pass, we should all prepare to be in a permanent state of discombobulation.

Source synthesis: McKinsey, ITU/3GPP, IEA, IDTechEx, NASA/ESA, NIST.