Chapter 1: Vulnerability
Key concepts: Chapter 1: Vulnerability
Chapter 1: Vulnerability
Three Leaders Facing World's End
- Crowfoot watched bison vanish at Head-Smashed-In
- Durmugam tried restoring fractured Nangiomeri culture
- Churchill refused Hitler's terms, authored new context
- Each faced collapse of their people's entire world
Three Responses to Collapse
- Crowfoot chose pragmatic adaptation, signed Treaty 7
- Durmugam chose restoration, trapped between two broken worlds
- Churchill chose creation, built institutions for unknown future
- Success or failure less important than shared condition
Ontological Crisis and AI Threat
- Ground beneath identity, value, meaning gives way
- Leadership practices face existential threat from AI
- Question: is work our buffalo?
- Old virtues like diligence may lose their point
Context vs. Circumstances
- Circumstances simply are; context assigns meaning
- Blockbuster failed due to obsolete context, not blindness
- Excellence within obsolete context is still obsolescence
- Shift from information economy to intelligence economy
Context Creators vs. Prisoners
- Leaders must author new contexts, not inherit them
- Ask what becomes possible because AI changes everything
- Thriving requires creating meaning, not managing facts
- New context empowers meaningful action
Future-Now Thinking and Ontological Agility
- Inhabit possible worlds as present realities
- Herman Kahn trained RAND strategists to think unthinkable
- Scenarios are training grounds, not predictions
- Practice seeing what could be, not what will be
Urgency of Change Itself
- Change has become pervasive, perpetual, accelerating
- Waiting to see if AI talk is hype is not strategy
- Understand ontological scaffolding beneath current life
- Compose new context, create value, mitigate risk