Thriving through disruption: Leadership strategies that deliver
In conversation with The Academy by Intuition
If you’re a leader in today’s world, you understand the uncertainty of your environment.
New technologies, a workforce with changing needs and ideals, along with your own personal development are likely top of your priority list. Here, you’ll learn how to become an effective leader in today’s business world, gaining a deeper understanding of the key skills both you and your team needs to generate impact.
If you would like to watch the conversation in full, click here.
Use the menu below to navigate between sections.
- Introduction
- How do leaders adapt in an era of constant disruption?
- How to connect in an era of disconnect
- The golden age of humankind?
- How to possess the right mindset to succeed in today’s business world
- How can leaders build a team that thrives and innovates?
- How can leaders give effective feedback?
- Using the human sense to develop strong cultural links
- Designing a learning experience that has actual organizational impact
- What critical human skills need to be honed in 2025?
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Introduction
Juanita
Hello and welcome to Conversations with The Academy by Intuition. Today’s topic is Navigating disruption: Leadership, learning and growth in 2025. I’m Juanita, your host for today’s Insight-packed session brought to you by Intuition.
Today we explore key findings from Intuition’s Learning Pulse 2025 and the numbers reveal an urgent shift in the way we work and lead. AI has become the top learning priority for 72% of professionals, reshaping how organizations prepare their teams for the future. But it’s not just about what we learn, it’s about how we learn it.
73% of employees now demand training that directly translates into their daily roles. And here’s a critical wake-up call. Nearly half of today’s skills could become obsolete by 2030.
These insights aren’t just statistics. They signal a pivotal moment for organizations to make changes. So to help us unpack these challenges, I’m thrilled to welcome one of the incredible minds from The Academy by Intuition.
Welcome Devaprakash.
Dev’s expertise in technology, leadership and team development will provide practical strategies to empower organizations, helping leaders and teams not just to survive but to truly excel. Dev is a dynamic leader with a passion for blending technology and coaching.
From guiding tech teams as a CTO to empowering CEOs and startups, Dev helps leaders drive innovation, adapt to change and achieve sustainable growth. Dev, would you like to add a few more words before we start with our Q&A?
Dev
Wow. Thank you very much, Monita, for the lovely introduction. I’m always challenged when I hear the word dynamic leader. It starts with a dynamic childhood, I think, and then dynamic parenting, and a dynamic workforce. That’s how it nurtures us. But thank you very much for the lovely introduction.
How do leaders adapt in an era of constant disruption?
Dev
I love this question. And, you know, I think I always have a different answer to this question because the stories that you heard yesterday or this week or last week, it’s always what nurtures your mind. And given that what we have with the entire AI landscape, things are evolving at rapid speed. Even me being involved in technology day in and out, suddenly someone comes in and says ‘have you seen this tool’ or ‘have you heard about this’ or ‘do you know that this is coming up?’ And sometimes it’s even non-technical people talking about this. They’re talking about tasks that are automated and process that are optimized.
A lot of usage is happening, right? So you ask yourself as a leader, then, oh, my God, am I getting outdated? What am I going to do? What’s the role as a leader I have? What do I really do nowadays? And it’s a very challenging situation.
And challenging, I use it as a word that means a real challenge, a good challenge. If you take it as a challenge with a mindset where you say, I’m going to see it as I’m going to lose it or I’m going to see it as a tough fight, then that’s a different approach than rather saying, it’s a challenge, but I’m going to win this game. I’m going to level it up and I’m going to make the exercises that will make me stronger and better and help the organization and the team for wherever we can find faults, optimize process, or we can speed up or ensure quality or even listening to our customers or even students, where we are trying to find out what’s the pain or what’s the real value they are sitting on? How can they better improve their lifestyle as well.
It’s ultimately, also, when you win a lot of time through automation, through robotics and AI and everything. What do I do with all that time? Are we as an organization saying we are going to fire all these people? Or are we enabling new products, new values, new business verticals that make us look at the market from a different perspective?
And I think that’s the change I see in the uncertainty when the organizations are adapting or asking themselves, what is the right next step? Is this a leader who can understand this and navigate the organization and the team? Or is this a leader that’s going to stick to their experience so far? And experiencing difficulty with decision-making or taking risks or adaption as overall required.
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How to connect in an era of disconnect
Juanita
From what I hear, it’s quite important to look within, from the leader’s perspective and to see the impact? And see the human element within the whole equation around growth and innovation?
Dev
Absolutely. That’s what I think the beauty of AI will be, that we will as a society start to connect more from human to human. Right now, we’re consumed with the digital communication tools we have and all the social media channels we have, we are utilizing them. But there’s also human connection when you look back 20, 30 years ago when you were in metros or when you were on long journeys – you were talking to people, even though you weren’t communicating, you at least had that eye contact. And now the eyes are directed 45 degrees down to the phone which we have in our hand.
And once we identify that that’s one way of communication and there are other ways of communicating with humans, that’s where I think the peer connection will evolve over the next few years, when we identify that we can internally develop ourselves to the next level and then help the people surrounding us also embrace that fact.
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The golden age of humankind?
Dev
You look at the medical advancements which we are doing, which points us in the direction that we will live longer. And in every country at every age, we are talking about superfoods, we are talking about supermedicines, we are talking about AI coming into medicine which is going to be more precise and more looking at the data and letting not only just come from a gut feeling, but also from a research base or data-driven decision-making in the medical sector.
So when you look at the fact that you’re going to live longer, which means you have to also be able to handle humans even longer. It’s not like I’m going to work and I get my pension in my 60s, 70s, depending on the country, and then I can just be myself. I think that phase will be something all the nations have to think about in terms of what are we going to do about these people in their 60s and 70s, who are still super fit and super passionate about what they can do with their lives.
So they don’t go into the traditional old age home and they’re stuck between four walls watching TV and reading books. You can utilize much more with these people. So I think this will be a wonderful time to expand that golden age as well.
How to possess the right mindset to succeed in today’s business world
Dev
One of the things I say in relation to corporate culture, and especially coming from the leadership angle, I always wonder how much adaptability is ingrained in your company? I think that’s the one mindset we need to start to understand that even if you have a business which is only running locally, I think internationally, you have to think about how geopolitics are playing a huge role in how things are evolving in every country, with all the latest changes we are seeing.
Then we have health conscious changes happening. You have education coming in. You have AI coming in. So all the businesses are seeing that there is disruption. Consciously or subconsciously, they can feel it. And when we stick to the traditional way of thinking I’m not going to adapt like businesses we have seen in the past, or these companies which have been challenged, where they have been the late train takers, they are probably too late. And adaption was very slow. You see how the businesses vanished? We can talk about so many companies that disappeared. But you can also see startups coming through, very young, fresh startups that are adapting to the market very quickly and evolving. I always look at startup entrepreneurs and founders. Their adaption ratio is quite high because they know immediately if they don’t adapt on the market in the first phase of what they are trying to scale, they’ll be completely lost.
Whereas corporate cultures where the businesses are running for quite a few decades and more, they feel they have a big culture and organization. How do we shift that? How do we bring these skills of adaption to every employee and to every stakeholder and look at it from a startup mindset or beta mindset or whatever you want to call it, that we remain fresh and we look at the evolving market and situations?
Super businesses can be born out of nowhere and make their billions and trillions quickly. The time it takes to hit those numbers is getting shorter and shorter. And that’s really an amazing thing. When you look at Open AI, and see how many years it took them to get to this trillion dollar business, and you look at the last company to do it, Open AI took one third of that time. So it’s going to be very interesting to see how we adapt.
And that’s the one framework. It’s not really a framework, but it’s the one keyword I always used to use, how able are you to adapt? Be it from a leadership mindset standpoint, be it from an organizational culture standpoint, be it your marketing, be it all the departments you have in your organizations. What way do you see adaption happening where you work?
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How can leaders build a team that thrives and innovates?
Juanita
Okay, Dev, thank you so much for your insights in segment one. Let’s move on to the second segment around building high performing and inclusive teams.
This is a very big topic, which we read about, we hear about, shifting gears into ‘team’ dynamics. So, what does it take to build teams that not only perform, but that can thrive and also innovate? I think innovation is key, as part of the transformation process and ensuring that the company is relevant as businesses change.
Dev, so the question is, what are some foundational elements that can make a team truly high performing and what can leaders do to intentionally create an environment of trust and psychological safety?
Dev
Wow, that’s a big question. But I love it. I love it.
I love to work with teams and when you work with humans, you have no other option than to upgrade yourself, or else you remain where you are. I think teams have a uniqueness.
Every team is special. Every team has the potential to become a super team and every small disturbance has the potential to become the kryptonite for the super team. So, I don’t have one short answer for this, but I always feel fundamentally what works for the team is actually found by the team themselves.
As a leader, I think we often have this challenge where we want to make everything work and sometimes we often go too fast or too deep into it. When you let the team to work it out, make sure to give them the space, but also let them know you are reachable, and they will handle it. Of course you have to keep in mind your metrics and you can’t let them handle it forever, there’s some business metrics to it. I always look at sports – I’m a basketball freak. When you see the coaches and they have a time out, and when there’s a strategy in play, as a team they’re playing to win. So they have a time out and the coach will take the whiteboard and he’ll draw up a play and says ‘we’ll play like this’. But when it comes to the real scenario, when they go out on the court and then they start to play, that play will work some times and it won’t work other times. As a coach when you say, it didn’t work out this attack, but let’s look at the next attack and it still doesn’t work out, as a leader, what do you do? Do you say, why didn’t you guys follow my plan? Or do you say, what you did was an amazing. But let’s put it into our workbook, into our cheat sheet.
So that’s the question you have to ask yourself.
The teams will figure it out if you have given them the process and the trust and all the nurturing that they are accountable for their results. And I find it very interesting from the KPI discussions we have with lots of HR people – I always try to find out, is it only the metric we are looking at? The number of sales or number of projects completed? Or do we also look at behaviors? How do they determine if a person is truly putting in the effort and also leading others to drive on their work? Those elements don’t speak in the numbers.
I’ve seen organizations who have literally given promotions based on behaviors. As a result, you don’t need to bet on their motivation levels for the next year. I can tell you this skyrockets because they feel truly honored and respected. And regardless of the effort, they feel acknowledged. And that’s a very important quality. People nowadays have this understanding if they’re not respected in the workspace. And sometimes it doesn’t have to be reflected on the salary sheet – It’s I want to feel heard. I want to feel recognized. And in comes in the magic word empathy.
How do you create a safe space where they feel psychologically safe? They empathize with each other. And also the leader has the magic instrument and knows of when to control and when to let go. And that’s a skill set which requires you to be with the team together and understand their rules and how they play on the ground. Rather than sitting on the side and just instructing and then we feel like if it doesn’t go well, we have to get stuck in and sort it out. That’s the difference between controlled leadership and servant leadership. That’s the battle we have as humans, which also extends into parenting. When do we step in as a father and mother to our kids? And when do we let them go and fail and learn and then see how we can adapt.
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How can leaders give effective feedback?
Juanita
We always hear about this topic of feedback. How to give effective feedback that can actually help someone shift course to grow? In practice, what does effective feedback look like? And how can leaders empower their team members so they can give and receive feedback constructively? What have you seen in the corporate deliveries you’ve done and also in the coaching consultancies you’ve delivered?
Dev
That’s a wonderful question because feedback, as we say, it’s a gift. We want to give the best gifts to all our team members and stakeholders and whoever is involved so that we can grow to the next level. I think feedback is often a misused word. When you don’t have the right format to deliver it and the correct intention, then we have a situation where I want to give you a feedback, but I am just criticizing you, which isn’t the best way to do it. There are so many frameworks and so many ways of handling it.
I can share with you the way I give my feedback. The very simple rule I have is, if someone has done an amazing thing. I won’t take five minutes to think about it. I will immediately give a compliment. That’s the one thing I always do, because appreciation doesn’t have to be delayed. Appreciation, gratitude, has to be instantly given because that’s something that can’t be measured with metrics. It can be a small thing, and when the person feels valued in the organization, that’s the perfect thing to drive motivation, instinct, purpose, and everything comes into that. You want to score, and you want to really evolve and help the company and yourself grow into the next level.
Whereas when we look back at criticism or things where we feel like there can be improvement, my personal take is always to sleep on it. Or I would pause for a moment, breathe, and find a pattern where I can use a feedback mechanism. For example, understanding how I provide the insight to this person of what my need is. What am I really looking at? Rather than just saying, this was bad or this isn’t working or this is good. There have been a couple of leaders where they look at, rather than giving the feedback on the metrics or on the result, they ask, how can I help you to achieve this? How can I ensure that this doesn’t happen again? Or where do you need support that we can connectedly and together see that we don’t repeat this instance again? Rather than looking at or discussing the instance itself, they ask how can I support you? Where can I guide you? Where do you think I have to take a step back rather than judging you? This gives the person receiving the feedback the opportunity to think rather than to defend. And that’s important.
One thing for sure is we have been trained that we need to defend. If someone is coming up with an excuse, and let’s give a very simple example whereby somebody shows up late and then says oh, sorry, I missed the alarm. Which can be true. But this person is defending themselves. They’re saying they didn’t just sleep in, but the alarm just didn’t work or they didn’t hear it. Rather than you acknowledging this person and saying, yeah you are late, and I want to make sure that this doesn’t happen again, rather it’s how do you guide the person to answers where you help them.
So when you feel like you are attacking or you’re asking them to defend, you’re not looking at value of the feedback. You’re looking at a conversation where it goes back and forth like a tennis match.
Juanita
It seems to be a subtle shift in the way we think about errors, or even something good. It seems like a subtle shift, but I think it’s very important because with that slightly different way of thinking, the impact can actually be very positive? And you’re right. I think we do probably, it’s just a human trait, right? We may get defensive, and that’s a good way of bringing defenses down for the other party. And it really builds the trust at the end as well. It’s like a nice little loop. Good feedback, building trust.
Dev
And when you were saying that it connects me with all the other skill sets. You need to have the active listening skill set. You need to have a way of being open-minded, open to questions, posing open-ended questions. These are so many skill sets required.
And it is, in fact, in the beginning tiresome, I can tell you. When you look at corporates where they have their departments, their cultures within their departments and, the chemistry or the bond they have. They sometimes go across departments where they don’t know each other. They’re not familiar. But I always say gratitude and empathy doesn’t deserve or doesn’t need a ringtone or a bell. It comes from within. Even if you don’t know the human being, when we go to a tea shop and order and we say, thank you, there’s nothing biased in there. So we have thid gratitude and empathy inbuilt. So across culture, across departments, you can find the bridges to find meaningful conversations. And in the conversation leads to actions and then action can lead to feedback. And most often when you look at the data, when you hear the feedback, it’s always portrayed as a negative thing. Or when your boss calls and says can I give you feedback? And you think oh my goodness, what’s the problem? That’s the feeling you get.
And we have to change that.
We have to change that to the point where feedback can be a learning curve. Feedback can be a ladder where you improve yourself. And where giving feedback is also an art, when you find yourself in a position where you can connect the bridges rather than forcing the position of the opposite to defend or to argue. That’s also a way to give feedback. So a way to give feedback and ask for feedback is going to be a very crucial thing in a leadership position, especially in corporate culture with cross-functional teams and departments and different missions, ambitions, and KPIs to follow. That makes it very interesting.
Juanita
To add to the mix of the typical corporation now, we have remote teams, hybrid teams. Sometimes you’re in the office, regional teams. So even more so that giving feedback and receiving feedback, right? Because it’s always a two-way street.
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Using the human sense to develop strong cultural links
Juanita
You mentioned cultures a few times. Organizational cultures. And because of regional teams, you could actually have different cultures within a team where there’s diversity and especially when you’re collaborating and your colleague is from a different country, could be in a different region. The culture is totally different. So what do you think leaders can do or do different to foster more inclusive cultures and diversity within their teams so that we can actually leverage and even drive innovation and performance? Is there any advice you would give a leader in this situation?
Dev
I probably learned it he hard way, when I look back at my career, as you know, my background is Swiss. So I was in an organization where we were multicultural. We had 10 languages, department, media sector. So I came to understand at a very early age that there is no such thing as common sense. That’s a very big word, which we have in, not only in corporates, but everyone has that. People say that’s absolute common sense. And I would say what is common and what is sense? It’s not so common, is it? So when you look at, even the best innovations, does it work on the market? Does it work in that country? Does it work in that particular industry? There are so many things. We often take things for granted, you know, and that’s how you also look at culture, right? Even our ancestors with lots of non-corporate traditions have built up such a strong culture and foundation. And we are trying to recreate it in some ways or even, as you rightfully said, remotely, right? So how do we get this connection? And I think the deeper you go into the relationship with each one, the more you will understand that’s not a common sense. That’s actually a human sense.
I, as a human, I am completely individual and I have completely different choices and my way I want to live compared to you. And everything is still beautiful and everything still makes sense. We have to see them as a human, understand where they are coming from. What’s their value system. What’s their path? And if you look at it like that, and think oh my goodness, do I have to become best friends with all of them? Probably not, probably not. But if you want to have a sane evening and a sane weekend, rather than an insane weekend, where you always think only about your job and you let the frustration out and you let all the anger out only in the evenings, that won’t be sustainable. So how do we ensure that we get back to the culture? We try to accept and we try to respect different people’s personality and behaviors and the way their culture is. But setting a culture in the team is such an important thing. Again, I’ll go back to the sports.
You can take whatever sports background, it can be football, basketball, anything. It doesn’t mean when you bring all the super players together, they will win the championship. Which has been recorded in the history of many sports history books. They have all the money, they bring the best team together. But the culture was probably not set there. They have been losing. And I think that’s the superpower where even non-identified players or even some superstars and the non-identified players come together and they win the cup one after the other, because they set the right tone in terms of leadership and culture, how they hustle, how they revisit each other’s purpose and drive on that continuous passion towards that goal they have as a team, right? And I think that’s the beauty of every leader to find out how can I ensure that there is a culture in my organization.
As I said, in my previous organization, we always had the understanding of the entire organization’s culture. And that translated into the small departments where there was a small pivot and small tweaks because they were younger or much more experienced or they were from finance or they were HR. But the adaption didn’t mean it was completely left off from the organizational culture. It was always kind of hands on hands on.
And it goes from top to bottom, bottom to top. It goes in all directions where I think the culture has to be so that we are compelled to look at it, to challenge it, to see that we are driving, we are thriving, and we want to have innovation as you rightfully say, not only from the business side, but also from the team.
When we were forced with COVID to work remotely, to set up the office at home, we went to this vulnerable space where people could see my home.
Juanita
Dev, we used to work together in two previous career chapters. So we went through the pandemic together and we did great stuff, delivering training, and development, and learning experiences. I remember those days.
Dev
Absolutely. When we saw family members running around or the pressure cooker coming out. But when we started to embrace it and we say it’s part of the culture, it’s okay. You mute yourself, unmute yourself. And let’s not get too uncomfortable with this? It is an uncomfortable situation anyways. So let’s embrace it. Let’s get through it. And I think that bonding we created within that space where we started to look at people from different angles, from different perspectives, and that’s the healthy conversation we needed to have. There’s no fixed number, but around 80%/20% work versus private life conversation. It’s a must have. It’s absolutely a must have. And that’s very essential for the corporates to also incorporate into their culture.
Juanita
Correct, yeah, I think it’s honoring the individual, honoring the team member, and also adjusting to how the business climate has changed. In the case of COVID,, who knew it was going to happen that time? That way? And how we had to pivot and change the way we did everything at work, at home, it was interesting.
Dev, thank you, this is a really great discussion on building high-performing teams, because clearly this topic is hot, it’s trending. When we talk to our corporate clients, it always comes up, and even if we run a longer learning intervention, or even coaching or mentoring that we follow up with when we do corporate deliveries, that part about creating super teams and is there a magic formula, it always crops up, so it’s one of our very popular topics there.
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Designing a learning experience that has actual organizational impact
Juanita
Our corporate clients work with us and very rarely they do one-off interventions. They tend to be longer programs, regional programs, and it could be management associate programs, talent programs, calendar programs, etc. So, when we work with our facilitators like yourself, we want to make sure that we develop learning journeys that really can lead to lasting change within the organization, it’s not just ticking the box in a happy-clappy sheet, but we want to see how that is translated, right.
Maybe you can share a little bit, Dev, about how you’ve worked with with organizations before to design learning experience that can go beyond theory. Understanding the theory is quite important, because we do a lot of experiential learning. So, how do we ensure the new skills that we teach our participants in the class can translate into behavioral change that managers and HR leaders can actually see, and then how does it get to tangible results being realized? Maybe you can share a bit about that around the learning design experiences.
Dev
That’s a very powerful word, behavioral change. When you look at human psychology and you try to understand when does the behavior change and how does it change, it’s a very fascinating world to be in. I always love the conversations with people that come from the fire or the hunger which actually sits within.
Now, when you have a hobby, I want to become the, let’s say, the greatest guitar player in the world and I’m truly, really, really willing to do it. It does not only mean that me learning it will make me succeed, it’s how I practice it, and how I get the support from the people. Even if I’m the best guitar player in the world, if no one’s listening to it, it takes a lot of self-confidence and discipline to say, okay, let me play for the next year in a single room and no one listens to it. So, there are a lot of angles to it.
Recognition is a very important factor in the corporate sector that whatever learning experience you do, that you get recognized by your peers or by the effort or by the results you’re driving. Because that’s a very important factor. We have been trained since we were kids. When we do a great, amazing thing, we get recognition and that’s not wrong. I think recognition doesn’t mean it has to come only in one way or form. It can be in any form. It shouldn’t be like, oh, it has a monetary reason or there’s this employee of the month saga going on in some companies. It doesn’t have to be in that form. It can be in any form, right?
Whatever makes that person or the team feel valued. So, I think recognition is a very important thing when they practice it. Now, how do we ensure that they are practicing it? I think that’s where you are insisting or trying to find out, where is their hunger? Where is their pain? Or where is that thirst for them to evolve?
I have seen people with all the experience in the world struggling to unlearn, because that’s also a very important skill when we look at it from a different angle, when we look at cross-functional teams, when we look at different cultures and you also mentioned remote working, so unlearning also has to happen in that context. And I think when the unlearning doesn’t happen, we get stuck in what we know and our mind psychologically loves if we have answers. So, if I’m sitting on a learning experience and I think this is something I already know, I’m feeling very comfortable. I’m very happy. I know this already, right? I’ve heard about it. I’ve seen it. I have done it. I have won the awards and I’m really rocking it, right?
When you sit on that stone and then you go through a learning journey, you actually won’t go through that journey. You really have to push that rock up to the end when the session is done and you won’t have the hunger or thirst to transform or to even inspire others and that learning time or the energy would have been a waste.
Whereas, when you see and say remove that stone and say how can I learn? Or how can I see something new from this learning? Or is it something which I have totally been missing? So, then unlearn, relearn, and learning becomes such a thing where I become really hungry. You start to apply it and then you really realize even though for me to become a guitar rock star hero, it takes 10 years. It literally requires me maybe five minutes a day to learn a small thing and every day, those five minutes practices will one day make me a rock star. I don’t need to sit for hours and just memorize everything.
The entire learning journey also changes with all the instruments we have, with all the digital tools we have. That’s the beauty of having possibilities to track, possibility to see how people are progressing, and also a very essential reflection for them to read and see where are they feeling comfortable or are they getting into their stretch zone and do they really enjoy their learning? Because I have to be honest, if you are enjoying your learning, you’re probably not pushing yourself too much.
Juanita
You have to get into the zone where you’re a little bit uncomfortable. Especially when you’re unlearning.
Dev
So, it becomes uncomfortable. All my learnings, whenever I feel like this is comfortable, this is where I feel like myself, I realize oh, I’m not pushing myself? And if we look at successful organizations and startups and corporates or anyone, they push themselves, they keep on pushing themselves. I think when you look at all your emotional intelligence, or system thinking, or processes, or anything that you want to take into business consideration and you are ready to take it to the next level, I think the learning behavior is a very important skill set.
I always try and see how can we drive the thirst and hunger as a facilitator, because it goes both ways. The learners need to be hungry and willing to adapt rather than having this position of I know this and I know it 10 times better and I have a certification or I have done this X, Y, Z times. Why do I need to unlearn this? And the beauty is with many participants when they are unlearning, the transformation starts to kick in and sometimes it’s just the 90-10 ratio. 90% is known to be doing what they need to, but 10% are not doing it, and this means zero evolution. So, the 10% not doing it, if you find out why are they not doing it, what is the hurdle, is it the framework, is it the behavior, or is it the limitation they are seeing themselves? If you unlock that and they start to do it, then the 90% and even beyond will be coming where I think also a lifelong learning skill set can be enabled in their mindset, right? They start to become really hungry and that advocates for learning.
Juanita
I think in the past projects we really work together with the key stakeholders as we design. We can do the design so it’s great learning about how you put the various interventions in place but I think to be able to unlock that spark in our participants is also quite important and the support from our clients and stakeholders is also important so that when we put everything together it ticks all the boxes in terms of the requirements, but something else is happening within, because then the change can actually take place and they can become visible to the leaders because they will translate into hitting KPIs, OKRs etc.
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What critical human skills need to be honed in 2025?
Juanita
You spoke about certain human skills. You spoke about what the participants and the learners could go away with at the end of a learning intervention. Are there two or three critical human skills you think that we really need to hone in this technological age? Because we want to future-proof our own capabilities, our own skill sets. We don’t want to be irrelevant. They say we don’t want to lose jobs to AI and technology, but what if they take over things that we can do from a human-to-human connection. Do you think there’s two or three critical human skills that you think that we should be honing and sharpening beyond technical knowledge?
Dev
Beyond technical knowledge, I think in the age where we are right now, I often see, and that again depends human-to-human, it’s different, but in my experience, I would like to revamp and enable critical thinking and I think most people confuse critical thinking with negative thinking.
It’s not about thinking negatively or to look at everything skeptically or to just be very careful. No, I think critical thinking is an asset you should have where you don’t just buy the first word or buy the first thing you see on your screen. If it says 90% discount, then why is it 90%? What was it the last time? Critical thinking has to be present, especially when we look at what AI can do.
If we are looking at AI’s evolution over just the last three months, when you see at the visuals that AI can create and the video or audio. There was a saying in the late 90s, early 2000s, that what you see is what you get. Now, with AI, it’s actually not I see something and you get it. One can get an image of me and you don’t know if it’s me or the AI image. The clones and the agents are at play. I think critical thinking is absolutely an amazing asset to have connected with systems thinking and creative thinking. That’s a different angle of thinking.
Now, I don’t want to sound too technical. People will feel like that’s a lot to have nowadays. But I think critical thinking, when you support it with creativity, which is one asset that makes us really special as a species. It’s the creativity we have. The thing that AI won’t ever be able to do. How I react to a joke, and storytelling.
How am I able to understand a joke, to narrate a joke, to understand the seriousness of a joke sometimes? That’s the human thinking we naturally have, and creative thinking. Whereas in systems thinking, where we try to see the connectivity, the connectedness, the understanding of an ecosystem, the entire business cycle, or even the life cycle, where we adapt and see there is more than just what we see in this first layer.
And I can give you much more than three human skills because AI gives us a huge reminder of why are we humans. Why are we not dogs, or animals, or anything else? And why are we humans? And I think AI is a reminder for us, where we can say, oh, we are humans, because I am a human, because I have XYZ capabilities, or speciality in myself. And when you discover that self, and you find that peace, and you find that happiness, and you find that alignment within you, and where you can truly nurture others, and just imagine how businesses would run, and how organizations would run, how countries will run. The whole thing will change. And I think AI is a good reminder, or a wake-up call, if you want to call it that. Go in, ge into the human habits which we have to create. And that’s something which I think is truly powerful for us, at this time, to evolve, and to be part of the next generation which is coming up.
Juanita
Beautifully put, Dev. It’s clearly explained, and very inspiring, too.
Thank you for sharing your practical insights, and your wisdom. It was really insightful. Thank you so much.
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