Cognitive Resilience: Personal and Organisational Performance in the AI Century

Every generation believes it is living through unprecedented change. Most are mistaken. However, history reminds us that technological revolutions have always disrupted established ways of thinking. Printing transformed knowledge. Steam transformed industry. Electricity transformed production. Computing transformed information. Each generation experienced uncertainty. Each believed the future would be fundamentally different from the past. Each was right. Artificial Intelligence represents another such moment. Yet this book is not really about Artificial Intelligence. Nor is it primarily about resilience. It is about you, people. It is about how individuals, organisations and societies continue to understand the world clearly enough to make good decisions while everything around them becomes increasingly intelligent, interconnected and complex. For more than three decades my own work has explored this question from different directions. It began with context. Long before artificial intelligence became part of everyday conversation, it was becoming clear that organisations frequently misunderstood the environments within which they operated. They misunderstood risk. They misunderstood dependency. They misunderstood the changing relationship between technology, markets and society. Increasingly, they misunderstood themselves. (Marks and Spencer plc is a classic example in the current context). Those observations eventually developed into research on Business Continuity, organisational hardening, asymmetric competition, information assurance, cyber/digital security and resilience. Along the way came work on Obstructive Marketing, the Invisible Apocalypse, Mixed Reality Leadership, AI Governance and Resilience in the AI Century. Each explored a different aspect of the same underlying question. How do you and organisations continue to function wisely as your environments become more complex? This book attempts to answer that question.