Bestselling Foresight Strategist Roger Spitz Releases the Definitive Manual for Leveraging Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation
San Francisco, April 3rd 2023 — The Disruptive Futures Institute releases the fourth and final Volume from the The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption.
This fourth Volume is about your organization. What does our unpredictable, complex, and systemic world mean for you as a business?
On release, “Volume IV — Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation” jumped to #1 Best Seller (Kindle) and #5 Best Seller (Print) in Green Business on Amazon.com. The book also reached #1 New Release in the following categories: Sustainable Development Economics, Business Planning & Forecasting, Strategic Management, Organizational Learning, Business Technology Innovation.
In the context of reinventing business and governance ecosystems, this final part of our guidebooks covers critically important topics for management teams, boards, and investors to take advantage of disruption as a springboard to drive ethical and sustainable value.
This Volume, “Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation”, concretely examines how organizations, entrepreneurs, and policymakers can reconcile multistakeholder strategy with sustainable futures; leverage the convergence of sectors with emergence of new fields; understand the evolutions of space exploration and the shifting centers of gravity to Asia and Africa.
This book also includes two workbooks with a rich set of case studies and toolkits on transformative innovation, prototyping the futures, reinventing governance, and creating resilience through futures intelligence capacity building.
“Readers can immediately develop antifragile strategies to imagine aspirational futures and create sustainable value while building resilience…”
- Junior Borneli, CEO & Founder of Startse, Excerpt from the Foreword to Volume IV
This standalone Volume IV, “Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation”, offers a fresh perspective on what our unpredictable, complex, and systemic world means for you as a business.
“What makes this standout among other works on futures is Roger’s two decades of corporate leadership experience working with some of the most visible companies in the world.”
- Lieutenant Colonel Jake Sotiriadis, Ph.D., Director, The Center For Futures Intelligence, National Intelligence University
Volume IV develops through the following seven chapters and two workbooks.
This compendium is the brainchild of celebrated futurist Roger Spitz, President of Techistential (Climate & Foresight Strategy) and Chair of Disruptive Futures Institute in San Francisco. Dr. Lidia Zuin, who collaborated on the publication, is a journalist, researcher in emerging technologies, science fiction writer, and professional futurist.
The book’s research and practitioner frameworks are tried and tested in the real world. These insights are field-ready, benefiting from the unique profile of Roger Spitz, equally as former Head of Technology M&A where he advised key decision-makers on over 50 transactions globally with deal value of $25bn, and today as a climate venture capitalist, leading professional futurist, and bestselling author.
The Disruptive Futures Institute has exclusive rights to use the practitioner foresight frameworks and case studies from Techistential, the global Foresight Strategy & Futures Intelligence practice based in San Francisco. Techistential helps clients anticipate next-order impacts of accelerating change, build resilience and futures intelligence, and rethink governance for the disruptive 21st century.
EXPLORING SUSTAINABLE VALUE CREATION
Drawing from Techistential’s renowned strategic foresight practice and the pioneering Disruptive Futures Institute, a wealth of differentiated insights shines throughout the entire book as the authors explore questions such as:
- How to use disruption as a springboard for sustainable value creation?
- What does our complex and unpredictable world mean for you as a business?
- How can we develop Anticipatory Governance for leadership and boards given the increasing cost of business as usual?
- How to unpack the true ESG debate, to understand the fundamentals versus public market noise?
- What Sustainability and ClimateTech opportunities are created by the energy transition?
- How can organizations approach ecosystem innovation through Business Models-as-a-System (BMaaS)?
- How will industries intersect, converge, then emerge in the next era of digital disruption?
- Why is Space becoming the financial frontier as an investment theme, more than just a place?
- What could change as the center of gravity shifts to Asia and Africa?
Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation
What does our complex and unpredictable world mean for you as a business?
“Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation” focuses on strategic decision-making and effective governance systems for our deeply uncertain world. Understanding the world depends on our perspectives.
Disruption itself is generally neither good nor bad. Its impact depends on one’s perspective and the nature and timing of one’s response. There have been two notable implementations of disruption: Joseph Schumpeter described “Creative Destruction” as a process by which a new industrial mutation destroys an old paradigm. Clayton Christensen described “Disruptive Innovation” as a specific process that innovative products follow to disrupt an old market.
Looking forward, though, disruption is disrupting itself. In the new paradigm of systemic disruption which we define as Disruption 3.0, disruption is an omnipresent constant, persistently intersecting and self-reinforcing. This presents opportunities to create sustainable value through experimentation and transformative innovation.
Disruption’s Inverse Relationship with Predictability
The cost of continuing to run businesses as if the world is stable and linear is increasing. As uncertainty increases over time, it becomes more costly to rely on the assumption that the world is predictable, as predictability is only viable when parameters are known and stable. The greater the extent of unknown variables, the less predictable the environment.
The world’s consultants spend their time advising on restructuring, optimizing processes and inventories, finding every possible source of assumed cost savings and cost synergies. At the same time, the greatest cost of all is ignored: The cost of assumptions.
The cost of assumptions is going through the roof for those intent on business as usual.
Disruption will continue to drive significant shifts in business models, value creation, and value destruction. Withstanding systemic disruption requires effectiveness over efficiency. With extensive field-ready insights and tools, learn how to capitalize on these value shifts by using disruption as a springboard to create value.
“[This] is essential reading for any CEO, leadership team, board member, or investor… Paradigm shifts, emerging technologies, AI, cybersecurity, and the energy transition will generate fundamental transfers in value.”
- Sebastian Bihari, Venture Capitalist, General Partner & Investor at Vektor Partners
Anticipatory Governance: Multistakeholder Strategy for Leadership & Boards
How can we develop Anticipatory Governance for leadership and boards given the increasing cost of business as usual?
We are in a world of radical accountability, transparency, and traceability where digressions stand out. Shifting values, stakeholder prioritization, alignment, and tracking the triple bottom line matter deeply. Boards, leadership teams, and governance structures have to integrate these new values in the context of emerging exponential technologies, AI, and climate change, where ethics and sustainability move to the top of the agenda.
In this multistakeholder systemic world, there is no such thing as discrete or isolated events — impacts cascade, spill over, and amplify.
We need to incentivize futures intelligence and resilience through longer-term thinking. With disruption now a constant, the cost of being prepared pales in comparison with the reputational, financial, and human costs of lacking anticipation.
This Volume shows how to concretely go beyond resilience, build capacity for futures intelligence, and focus on transformative innovation (versus ineffective surface-level point solutions).
Effective anticipatory governance is not possible without leadership teams and boards appreciating the range of potential responses to the respective levels of uncertainty.
Unpacking the ESG Debate: Public Market Investing & Prioritizing Sustainable Bottom Lines
Today, the fight against climate change is often an opportunity for banks, financial institutions, and ratings agencies to develop a new marketing product, a new green bond, and a new net-zero tracker index fund as often as they can. Investing may gradually move from taking certain ESG inputs into account in portfolio allocations to integrating impacts by regulating and incentivizing the actual outcomes as ESG outputs.
Maintaining sustainability (in its broadest sense) may be contingent on humanity’s ability to manage and problem-solve ourselves out of the most complex, systemic, and existential risks.
Greenaissance & Sustainability: The Ultimate Disruptive Opportunity
What Sustainability and ClimateTech opportunities are created by the energy transition?
Greenaissance is an era of renewal with momentous innovation and green investment opportunities. Businesses and investors must consider a broad set of stakeholders, partners, and complex ecosystem interactions to increase the energy transition’s viability. We explore how to achieve systems-level change for sustainable and transformative innovation (versus ineffective point solutions).
We look at the nature and scale of the climate opportunity to discover how every company, industry, sector, and country will need to radically transform and decarbonize to deliver on their environmental commitments.
Emerging technologies have a key role in supporting climate efforts, and we showcase numerous examples of startups and breakthrough transformative innovations.
As sustainable is the new digital, sustainable futures will drive both impact and value creation. Transformative innovation, climate foresight, climate intelligence and opportunities are major themes covered throughout this book.
Systemic & Transformative Innovation
This book covers actions and drivers for achieving systems-level change, including virtuous inflection points, transformational innovation, effective systemic change, and building resilient futures.
Climate Intelligence Is Futures Intelligence: Levers for Change
Climate intelligence (CI) enables resilient climate-aligned decisions and actions by understanding, anticipating, measuring, disclosing, and monitoring climate-related risk. With CI, we can build resilient adaptation and identify emerging opportunities.
Ecosystem Innovation: Platform Evolution 2.0 & Business Models-as-a-System (BMaaS)
How can organizations approach ecosystem innovation through Business Models-as-a-System (BMaaS)?
Similar to living organisms, these living BMaaS have an innate capacity to co-evolve and transform within their ecosystems. BMaaS are emergent, fluid, and dynamic ecosystems that blur boundaries between partners, customers, suppliers, and competitors. They constantly nurture the creation of new markets, work collaboratively to address systemic challenges, and act as a catalyst to collaborative innovation.
Ecosystems have the power to positively disrupt economic systems. BMaaS harness open ecosystems as a complex set of interacting relationships and networks. The stronger these relationships, the more resilient the systems.
The only way to reinvent a business model for today’s complex world is to approach it like a system.
Digital Disruption: Industries & Sectors Converge, Intersect & Emerge
How will industries intersect, converge, then emerge in the next era of digital disruption?
The clearly delineated “industries” or “sectors” are disappearing. In this liminal world, there are no industry boundaries. The magic happens when intersections create new combinations.
Complexity’s biggest dangers arise when we are mired in assumptions and boxed into existing sectors instead of noticing new patterns on the fringe. For instance, tomorrow’s beef and dairy industries may face the same existential challenges as today’s fossil fuel industry.
Radical transformations are moving beyond automation, cognification, and digitization.
The current definitions of separate, distinct, and clearly delineated industries or sectors will disappear. Industry lines between automotive, healthcare, media, technology, entertainment, energy, chemicals, oil & gas, real estate, retail, banking & finance, insurance, and transport are quickly becoming outdated. The existing definitions of sectors or industries will evolve, as all of these will be redefined, reshaped, and transformed.
“What’s unique is how this book connects fields and areas which are often treated separately… What does it mean when organizations have their industries reshaped overnight? How do we rewire leadership teams to understand that disruption is a constant?”
- Cathy Hackl, Founder of Journey, Tech Futurist & Author
New fields and sectors will intersect and emerge, driven by radical transformation (from automation, AI, and digitization), compressed life cycles, constant change, convergence of technologies, cross-fertilization, ecosystems disrupting economic systems, and blurring competition.
Previously distinct areas converge, fuse, and transform. We offer guidance for leadership teams, investors, and market analysts on how to adopt new filters to evaluate companies, fields, and ecosystems.
The World Is Too Complex to Be Reducible
The future is hybrid. In a liminal world, there are no industry boundaries. Today, even tangibles are intangibles — cars, planes, and computers rely on software. They are essentially digital assets under the disguise of a mechanical body, and much of their value is intangible.
The Minimum Viable Fields (MVF) of (i) Technology, (ii) Energy Transition & Nature, and (iii) Media & Immersive Storytelling will drive all companies.
Space: The Financial Frontier
Why is Space becoming the financial frontier as an investment theme?
Today, every company is a technology company. Tomorrow, every company might be a space company.
Space has reached a tipping point. A combination of technological advancements and geopolitical importance have led to new, democratized, and widespread business opportunities. Power in space will always influence power on Earth.
As venture capital and high-profile billionaires take the investment reins from national governments, a new wave of economic activity and technological development may continue to manifest. This rapid increase in investment and privatization of industry could create a self-fulfilling prophecy that enables the budding commercial space industry to potentially transform society.
For most of human history, space was unachievable; now it’s merely dangerous.
Shifting the Centers of Gravity: Asia & Africa
What could change as the center of gravity shifts to Asia and Africa?
By 2030, China and India could be the two largest economies in the world. The cascading effects have the potential to reshuffle world order.
China’s geopolitical strategy is centered around technological development, especially in AI, which it can develop very effectively given its scale, approach to privacy, and the government’s strict control of both public and private institutions. China’s race to AI supremacy will have a profound impact on world order, disorder, and global AI geopolitics.
China is investing in surrounding countries and Africa through multiple modern Silk Roads, creating a network of future partners, suppliers, and customers. Beyond China, Asia as a whole is on the rise. India has an incredibly large, young, and entrepreneurial population which is projected to overtake China’s stagnating population in 2023 or shortly after. Africa is also poised to become a future center of gravity, with rapid growth driven by its demographic surge and “Cheetah Generation,” which is helping to smash old African stereotypes through entrepreneurship and technological adoption.
WORKBOOKS: REINVENT LEADERSHIP WHILE INVENTING THE FUTURES
Volume IV includes two practical Workbooks that provide new tools for your decision-making processes so you can leverage disruption as a springboard to value creation. These Workbooks explore frameworks and case studies related to leadership, anticipatory governance, transformative innovation, and design fiction:
- Disruptive Futures Leadership Workbook — Reinventing Governance & Strategic Decision-Making: This Workbook offers practical tools for leadership teams to adopt from the various frameworks developed throughout our Guidebook (e.g. the 6 i’s, AAA Framework, Being AAA+, DECODE).
- Disruptive Technology & Innovation Workbook — Invent the Future: This Workbook offers practical tools and case studies to help evaluate and create the possible futures. By combining science fiction, design thinking, and foresight, we can imagine new possibilities, invent visions of the futures, and prototype them.
BUY THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO THRIVING ON DISRUPTION
The printed Guidebook is available to order at bookstores (Amazon, Barnes & Noble…), while the eBook downloadable on Apple Books, Kindle, Kobo…
To discuss bulk order discounts and custom offers, including using The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption for academic or executive program curriculum support, please reach out to: info@disruptivefutures.org.
To see the four published Volumes as a collection, go to the Amazon book series page here.
A COLLECTION IN FOUR STANDALONE VOLUMES
The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption is a four-Volume Collection published by Disruptive Futures Institute. The lead author is Roger Spitz, in collaboration with Lidia Zuin:
- Volume I — FOUNDATIONS. Reframing and Navigating Disruption: How to make sense of our complex, nonlinear, and unpredictable world.
- Volume II — FRAMEWORKS. Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty: Practical frameworks to help you and your business stay relevant in the 21st century.
- Volume III — YOUR LIFE. Beta Your Life: Existence in a Disruptive World: What does constant change and uncertainty mean to you as an individual?
- Volume IV — YOUR BUSINESS. Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation: What does our unpredictable, complex, and systemic world mean for you as a business?
Further information, including extensive media interest and additional praise, is available on www.thrivingondisruption.com.
Details of Volume IV — “Reframing and Navigating Disruption”
Keywords
Anticipatory, Business Models-as-a-System (BMaaS), Complexity, Disruption, Decision-Making, Foresight, Futures Intelligence, Governance, Greenaissance, Multistakeholder, Resilience, Sustainability, Systems Thinking, Transformative Innovation.
BISAC Subjects & ISBN — Volume IV
BISAC Subject 1: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Future Studies; BISAC Subject 2: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Strategic Planning; BISAC Subject 3: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Green Business
ISBN: 978–1–955110–06–8 (print); ISBN: 978–1–955110–07–5 (ebook)
About the Disruptive Futures Institute, the World’s Capital for Understanding Disruption
San Francisco-based Disruptive Futures Institute is a leading Think Tank offering education, research, and thought leadership on capacity building for our increasingly complex and uncertain world.
Inquiries: media@disruptivefutures.org
