Minter Dialogue with Brian Solis

In this episode, I sit down with Brian Solis, a digital analyst, anthropologist, and futurist. We explore his journey from digital disruption expert to personal transformation advocate, discussing his latest book, “Mindshift: Transform Leadership, Drive Innovation, and Reshape the Future.” Brian shares insights on the rapid acceleration of digital adoption during COVID-19 and the subsequent challenges in true business transformation. We delve into the importance of self-awareness, humility, and empathy in leadership, particularly in an era of perpetual disruption. Brian offers a compelling perspective on the need for innovative, creative, and empathetic leaders to help unlock our collective potential. The conversation touches on societal issues, the crisis of meaning in work, and the lack of resilience in modern society, concluding with a call for new leadership at every level to navigate ongoing disruption.

Please send me your questions — as an audio file if you’d like — to nminterdial@gmail.com. Otherwise, below, you’ll find the show notes and, of course, you are invited to comment. If you liked the podcast, please take a moment to rate it here.

To connect with Brian Solis:

• Check out Brian’s eponymous site here
• Find/buy Brian Solis’ book, “Mindshift: Transform Leadership, Drive Innovation, and Reshape the Future,” here
• Find/follow Brian Solis on LinkedIn
• Find/follow Brian on X (formerly Twitter)

Prior Minter Dialogue episodes with Brian Solis:

• About Brian’s book, Lifescale (2019)
• About Brian’s book on the User Experience X (2016)
• About WTF, What’s the Future (2013)

Further resources for the Minter Dialogue podcast:

Meanwhile, you can find my other interviews on the Minter Dialogue Show in this podcast tab, on Megaphone or via Apple Podcasts. If you like the show, please go over to rate this podcast via RateThisPodcast! And for the francophones reading this, if you want to get more podcasts, you can also find my radio show en français over at: MinterDial.fr, on Megaphone or in iTunes. Music credit: The jingle at the beginning of the show is courtesy of my friend, Pierre Journel, author of the Guitar Channel. And, the new sign-off music is “A Convinced Man,” a song I co-wrote and recorded with Stephanie Singer back in the late 1980s (please excuse the quality of the sound!).

Transcription courtesy of Flowsend.ai, an AI full-service for podcasters

Minter Dial: Brian Solis, Holy Toledo. This, I think, is our fourth interview on my show and it’s always great to catch up with you, Brian. Let’s give us give a, give everybody a little bit of a summary of where you are, who you are. What’s up with Brian Solis?

Brian Solis: Minter, I feel like we only talk when we have a new project between us and that means that we just have to have more projects sooner and, and faster in between because it’s been far too long, my friend. So, if, if you don’t know who I am, it is not going to be a surprise because I fell off the face of the earth intentionally after my last book, which was Life Scale, which is one of the last moments we spoke to, to actually live what I was preaching in the book, Life Scale, which was how to live a more creative, productive and happy life. So, my name is Brian Solis. I’ve been a long-time digital analyst and practicing digital anthropologist and futurist. I’ve written eight books before 60 research reports helped to humanize a lot of the digital disruption that we’ve been seeing over the last 20 plus years, to make sense of it, to help executives, to help entrepreneurs, to help anybody really not only understand what these trends meant, but what they can do with it to be more successful, more creative, more innovative, and to help businesses transform to sort of meet these new opportunities and overcome these new challenges that came along with it. And the reason I’m here today, other than to hear about all of your incredible success and, and ventures, is to talk about my first book in five years, which is book number nine, called Mindshift. And it’s kind of brought me out of this cave, if you will, to the screens of everyone watching this or listening to this now to talk about the future of leadership in a new era of disruption that we’re going through. And that I think is what inspired me to write the book and, come back to helping people kind of navigate this disruption.

Minter Dial: Well, that was definitely one of my questions. What, what brought you out of the cave? I didn’t think of you as in a cave, of course, Brian, but let’s talk about the transformation that’s undergone that requires now a different approach. How would you describe, I mean, since Life Scale, I mean, already at Life Scale, during that time, So, much shit was going down, So, much innovation, new techs everywhere, and, and, and yet it feels like we’re in another era already five years on how would you describe what has gone on in the transformation that you’re talking about?

Brian Solis: All right, well, this, I think the life scale experience was, was one of which I was personally living. So, you know, the irony of, of that time was here I am helping others navigate disruption and then found disruption personally. So, you know, these, these devices, the constant digital addiction, the distractions, the, you know, I started to study what that was doing to me and what it was doing to society, and then playing that out into scenarios like what does it mean for the future of, I don’t know, raising children, the future of education, the future of productivity itself, the future of creativity. And that book was how to navigate that personal disruption. It was the one and only of the nine books that was a personal endeavor. But right after that, we saw that digital disruption become even greater. And then Covid happens right after that book came out, and we saw the rapid acceleration, almost the overnight acceleration of that personal and professional disruption. So, people in general had to use more digital because they were at home, work to study, to shop, to be entertained. And then at the same time, you had the world shut down, and then you had businesses having to understand you. And I have been in this game for a long time, but I think we were working together in digital transformation in the 2010s, and here we are 2020, and now all of those companies that were slow to digitally transform had to do this right away. And So, you started to see sort of the semblance with a mass global disruptive event accelerating all of the things that we had been saying to do for a very long time. And I thought at that moment we were going to see finally the transformation that we had talked about. It wasn’t just about using digital within your organization. It wasn’t just about becoming digital. It was about transforming your business for a digital world and all the things that that means. So, we started to hear words like next normal and new normal. And I was believing that we were moving into this transformative state. And then I think what we started to see was, yes, indeed, they, they, they were digitizing things, but not transforming. And, and that new normal and next normal was just essentially like a rubber band stretching and then snapping back here in 2024 with. We didn’t actually transform at all. We just digitized yesterday’s ways of working and doing business. Analog processes, et cetera. We didn’t reimagine what the world could be. And in 2022, we had the introduction of generative AI and probably the fastest growing technology ever. And Another disruptive moment of, of which could transform not only how you work, but how you think, how you create. And we saw almost immediately the rapid applications within business and just in general, using it to do what you did yesterday, better today. So, we’re not reimagining much. In fact, we’re automating more than we could be in terms of getting the deep philosophical sense of it, augmenting. How could we use it to do what we didn’t do yesterday, having these types of bigger thinking. So, to take a step back, the pattern recognition from COVID to climate change to generative AI, to understanding, to watching the advent of spatial computing hitting mass consumerism and understanding where that can go. As a futurist, you’re always looking at current events or emerging events and playing out potential scenarios of what that could look like in these contexts over these time frames. So, I started to play out these scenarios. Spatial computing, generative AI, the waves of generative AI, understanding what the horizon of AGI could look like and what that means. And So, when you play out these scenarios, you recognize where we could be and then you look at the trajectory we’re on and you see that there’s a, there’s a mismatch, which means that I recognize an opportunity for new types of leadership, like innovative creative leaders, empathetic leaders, to help us achieve our potential, versus continuing to build on yesterday’s industrial revolution cycles and just taking it, making things more scalable, more efficient, faster, bigger, better, cheaper. Not that it’s a bad thing, but just seeing that these are disruptive events that are unlocking new doors that we are not pursuing.

Minter Dial: I get that. And probably some companies are going to be quickly on the ball and getting this. Maybe even the startups are going to have the advantage of having that as their sort of North Star almost as opposed to old companies that legacy systems and thinking. I wanted to reflect on one piece you said was So, good. Personal and professional technology’s changing, of course. I feel like the big shift and maybe why the mind shift is such. The thing is, it’s really the change in humanity’s thinking, let’s say more prosaically, how the personal elements, values, ethics, the personal ambitions, the personal story, personal comfort, life and death, these elements have shifted. Not just consumer thinking, but employee thinking. Andp So, when you’re just trying to make the best AGI, replace people, cut costs, you know, be more efficient, be more productive, all that just seems like a bunch of garbage. You know, why do we need to buy another Cadillac? You know, why do we need to get 16 more rings or, you know, whatever. Two. Two more dresses. Consumerism. Ah. You know, it’s really exciting. Shopping is exciting. Oh, my gosh.

Brian Solis: There’s a. There’s one of. One of the things that the book really just gets to the core of is just how to think differently, how to recognize the patterns that no one else has seen and then how to make sense of it. I actually, this is my copy of it that came out before the book was released. You know, the. What do you call it, a reviewer’s copy. But I take it with me everywhere I go. You can see all the highlights and the fold, the earmarks, because I actually practice what I preach. So, it teaches you first how to open your mind.

Minter Dial: Is that the beginner mindset, would you call that, or.

Brian Solis: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s the beginner’s mindset. And it kind of explains how, you know, not to. Not to get too existential, but it explains that every. How we go through life, we see the things that we know, we recognize. We apply our experience, our successes, our failures to most of what comes before us. And without realizing it, our own beliefs, our own biases kind of help interpret what we see and what we do.

Minter Dial: About it and close down our openness. I mean, wisdom, knowledge, close down.

Brian Solis: In fact, why it’s counterintuitive and why I wanted to talk about it is that actually the more successful you are, the more experienced you are, the more this becomes a challenge in you, innovating and recognizing new opportunities. And So, there’s a saying that in the beginner’s mind, there are many opportunities. In the expert’s mind, there are few. And if you think about in the world of business, if you look at generative AI or if you look at any modern emerging technology that requires some type of transformation, you will inherently. Fine. Most people will find every reason why you can’t do something about it, right?

Minter Dial: Well, that’s because the tolerance for risk is So, low.

Brian Solis: Yes, absolutely. We get comfortable. And So, it explains how to at least explore openness, to see the possibilities of which then it teaches you how to build then on those possibilities to make it more tangible. And then once you make them more tangible, how do you explore those opportunities to be meaningful? And it teaches you in a very. A very approachable way. Right. I’m taking 20 something years of futurism and analysis and trying to make it So, that every day people can just recognize opportunities and then tell the stories about those opportunities in ways that other people feel excited about those opportunities versus I don’t want to hear it. We can’t do that. It’s too expensive, it’s too dangerous, it’s too risky. Why would we want to do that? And instead realizing that in a world of just perpetual and accelerated disruption, it’s not slowing down and it’s not getting any less important. Maybe you’re the leader that the world or your business or your community needs, and it is the tool to help scale opportunities.

Minter Dial: There are So, many pieces to get into this, Brian, as usual. But I want to go back or go into something that you deal with a little bit later in the, in the book, which is about self-awareness.

Brian Solis: Yes.

Minter Dial: And you quote the. Or use this quadrangle from Tasha Urich and it. And, and there was a study that says that only 10 to 15% of people are self-aware. I, I tend to feel like that is the biggest starting point because until you’re more self-aware, you don’t know what your imperfections are. You don’t know what you’re missing. You think you know it all. You, you’re afraid to ask for help. You’re, you don’t have the humility. You don’t have the beginner mindset. You’re like, I’m a total expert. I’ve been running a business for 25 years. What do I need to do to change that seems to me like the big piece. And then the question has to be, well, how do you actually become more self-aware?

Brian Solis: Isn’t it amazing? Thank you. By the way. I mean clearly you read the book. It is true that most people are not self-aware, yet most people feel they are self-aware.

Minter Dial: Hubris sometimes.

Brian Solis: I could tell you a funny story. I was in Italy at, at a, at essentially look a future. A future looking conference with executives from European businesses and then also the consultancies that work with those executives. And we were there to explore the future. I was the, the opening keynote and I’m, I’m networking with everybody at the breakfast before the event begins. And the word hubris is something that I, that actually came up in my mind as I’m reflecting through these conversations of realizing that most people in the room didn’t have anything to learn, but they had something to say. And I was thinking, well, what am I going to say to this group of people that’s going to get them to see the potential here in this case was exploring the possibilities of what I at the time had five stages of AI business transformation. And I got up on stage and said one of the things that One of the drivers for innovation is self-awareness. To recognize that you are not on the path that you think you’re on and you are not estimating the full impact of what’s about to happen through it through a lens of humility. And I said, I don’t know what I was thinking, I said it. But I said if I look into, if I look at this room, in order to be innovative you have to start with the self-awareness and the humility to recognize that you have something to learn and probably something to unlearn in order to explore the unknown. Because it is in the realm of the unknown that we’re going to find new possibilities to explore and experiment with and then bring it back to build. I said what I don’t see in this room is self-awareness and humility. Yet we’re here talking about it and I was thinking, oh boy, I hope this goes over well. And then got into the presentation. But in that moment you captured the zeitgeist of this was before the book came out. You captured the zeitgeist of exactly how you have to reset the conversation in order for people to really hear what you have to say. So, self-awareness is the beginning of that opportunity to then recognize where you have something to learn, where you have something to do something differently. I had to unlearn and learn all of the things that went into this book to recognize. Like hey, even I, I suffer from the same things that everybody else suffers. I see a cool new gadget, I’ve got to have it because that’s just who I am. My, my Ray Ban meta sunglasses. Oh, these are amazing. Having AI on my face and, but in that mindset I cannot fully understand it’s, it’s, it’s possibilities, its meaning. And I have to step back, I have to be more self-aware of this. You know what, what I teach this, this exercise in the book, you know what it means and the stages of just getting to what it means and exploring its potential So, that then you can build upon it. So, self, the first half of the book really is about the stages of recognizing, of how to even get to a place of learning.

Minter Dial: Well, I wanted to just weave in one of your six elements. Six stage right, Weaving in. I observed and from my angle a little bit differently that this lack of humility, this, you know, poor self-awareness and inability to listen and need to say is also what’s damaging all of our relationships. And, and the reality is businesses is about relationships and innovation doesn’t happen in an igloo by Yourself, you need other people. You can’t possibly know everything about everything. So, you need to collaborate. And yet it’s. I’m going to tell you something. You wait a second. Why don’t just relax. I mean, the funny thing is you always know what you’re about. Well, you don’t always. By the way, Jordan Peterson is a master at that, at just speaking without knowing what he’s going to say. And I think that’s interesting. However, basically if someone says to you, tell me your story. Well, I know my story. That’s really boring. Have the curiosity to want to learn about somebody else’s story.

Brian Solis: Isn’t that it isn’t that, isn’t that. Again, it comes down to self-awareness and humility like that. Some, someone else’s story is important, worth someone’s time. I guess a lot of what we’re talking about is a reflection of the state of the world. You know, I’m, I’m in Southern California which is as the news is going around, even if, even if you watch this, a year or two years from now, it’ll be a moment in, in Southern California’s history where we’ll, we’ll have had an unprecedented disaster. And everyone was largely unempathetic. Everybody had an opinion about how we got here. Everybody had an opinion about the politics of what led to the response system. Everybody’s going to have a, an opinion about the leadership, of how the, that we didn’t have the best response possible because of whether they were on the left or the right of a certain political spectrum. But we lost the ability to be empathetic. We lost the ability to understand humans. We had the inability, but the gall to just not care about the mass loss that we’re experiencing and not just human life, but the memories and everything that’s attached to those stories. And that self-awareness, that humility, the lack of empathy. As a futurist, you can’t help but want to play that out in terms of scenarios like, well, what does that mean to the future of politics? What does it mean to the future of education? What does it mean to the future of relationships and society? And society itself. Right? So, none of this is good, but yet every single person that I would probably tell that to who’s part of this Southern California scenario would say that I’m wrong, that of course they feel for people, but, but you know, they got, they did it to themselves because they allowed these people to run the state or run the local government. So, not to get political. But it is the same challenge that we see this is just a closed mindedness. It’s the reinforcement of the, of the belief system. You surround yourself with the people and the information that protects what you, what you believe. And once you’re there, you can’t believe that you’re not doing these things. And So, therefore you are most prone to disruption whether you know it or not. And even when you’re disrupted, you’ll probably not agree that you’re being disrupted. And So, now let’s play that in the context of an employee not believing that they have skills to learn or unlearn or that no matter how successful or how many degrees that they have, that may be potentially their role at some point will require them to do something differently. I can tell you the story of spending time with the former CEO of, of Mercedes. He, he was telling the story. This is about five years ago at south by Southwest. We’re sitting there over breakfast and he says, you know, I’m thinking one of the things that keeps me up at night is worrying about my employees in the factory understanding that on the horizon we’re exploring robotics, we’re exploring artificial intelligence, that we’re going to be able to automate a lot of these things. And I’m trying to figure out what, how to reskill them in order to be necessary somewhere in the ecosystem. And then he said, and it’s personal for him. He said that his daughter was a radiologist, went to school to become a radiologist, was a successful radiologist, said that his daughter was already going back to school for a new future because she knew on the horizon artificial intelligence was going to at probably take over radiology from the onset. So, that mindset of recognizing, internalizing, seeing that disruption was either coming or there and empathizing with the possibility to change and how they were going to help bring about that change. That’s the mindset that we all have to try to get to, to help not just others, but ourselves.

Minter Dial: So, we’re not going to be able to have a longer conversation this time, which is really going to go on me. But what I see, Brian, out of this is the trauma that’s happening. I have friends who’ve had their houses completely razed and we’re recording this on the 11th of January. So, we’re still in the middle of it, 20, 25. But I feel like we have a society that has two problems. One is a crisis of meaning and I don’t know why I’m working. I don’t know what it’s all for. And the Second is a distinct lack of resilience because actually, even though there are hardships that do happen, the majority of us haven’t had a societal hardship at the size of a World War II Covid was not that it came in the. On the waves of no damage, no issue, no trauma for decades. So, it became, it felt like the biggest thing that ever happened ever, you know, ever. But that. First of all, that’s not true. We don’t study history anymore. We don’t remember actually that division in 1858 was a whole shitload more than it was in 2016, 20, 20, 24, whatever you want in the United States. And, and So, we’ve, we’ve developed a situation where we are no longer resilient as individuals. Where therefore the role of leadership, the role of businesses must adapt to that which is add more meaning and provide and know how to deal with shit.

Brian Solis: Yeah, we’ve. We’ve become a society of. Well, you, you know, this is a term that I’ve used for a long time in watching the evolution of digital at a personal level is that we’ve become accidental narcissists and we’ve lost. And now with the lack of self-awareness, we just have lost the ability to even recognize that within ourselves. And yet that’s as individuals, then as communities of individuals and then as societies. It isn’t going to play out very well. And this is why I was hoping through the book and the six stages you’re talking about, the receive part, which I think is the most important for all of us, is to at least put ourselves in a position to be open enough to receive the signals that allow us to see things differently. If not for your business or your team or your family, but for yourself to just take a step back. Because none of this is sustainable and disruption doesn’t care. It’s an equal opportunity purveyor of either opportunity or the opposite of it. And I’m a hopeless optimist. I was inspired to write this book because I believe that we do need new leaders at every level. Not just as a title, but just as a role. What role do you want to play in this? Understanding that it’s inevitable, it’s happened, it’s going to keep happening. So, we either do nothing about it and insist that we’re in the right place, in the right frame of our mind, or we. We explore opportunities to be whatever, whatever way you want to define successful.

Minter Dial: I think you use the word disrupt or be disrupted, receive, perceive. We’ve conceived, believe and achieve So, many more things that we could have talked about, Brian, but we’ll leave that for people who are going to get your book.

Brian Solis: Yeah, I hope so.

Minter Dial: Yeah. How can you, how can people get your book, which came out at the end of 2024, how can they get it catch up with you and find out how to bring in more Brian Solis into their leadership?

Brian Solis: Well, that would be wonderful. First, thanks for, for having me on. And for those listening or watching, thank you. I’m @BrianSolis.com the book is pretty much everywhere online.

Minter Dial: Wherever you buy books and a national bestseller, I heard.

Brian Solis: Yes. Yes, it did bestseller status. Thank you. And then I’m at Brian Solis pretty much on all the social networks that are delivering disinformation. So, I’ll see, I’ll see you on. I, I try to, I try to keep an optimistic tone out there.

Minter Dial: Let’s do it, Brian, you and me. See you hopefully soon. Brian, thanks for coming on.

Brian Solis: Oh, yeah, thank you. And I do look forward to seeing you in London.

Minter Dial: Beautiful.