ChatGPT can tell us what we can do – it’s our job as educators to figure out what we ought to do.
Dr Roze Phillips “Africa’s favorite futurist’ speaks on ChatGPT and provocations it raises for school educators at iStore Education’s Leader Breakfast.
Spaces for Dignity. The White Paper!
How African businesses and business schools can cultivate regenerative practices that unlock Abundance.
Access White Paper: https://l.ead.me/bexTAT
Are you ‘Future Prepared’?
“According to a 2018 study by Rohrbeck and Kum, “vigilant” or adequately futures-prepared organisations were “33% more profitable than the average” and, from a growth perspective, outshone what the researchers dubbed “neurotic” (overprepared), “vulnerable” (underprepared), and “in-danger” (notably underprepared) firms by recording 75% growth in market capitalisation over a seven-year period (2008–2015), “or 200% additional growth”. The futures-prepared have one thing that separates them from the rest – Futures Intelligence. It is the difference between anticipating, embracing and navigating uncertainty and fearing it.”
The White Paper
We are excited to launch our inaugural White Paper in collaboration with GIBS Business School (Gordon Institute of Business Science)‘s Personal and Applied Learning Centre. It emphasises the importance of anticipating and embracing uncertainty instead of fearing it. Futures Consciousness offers a set of strategic foresight skills for the future-fit because, as per Peter Drucker: “The best way to predict the future is to create it”. You can also access the full paper above and sign up for our 2-day Futures-Ready Executive Programme at GIBS launching early in 2025. More to come on this.
Access White Paper: https://gibswebsitestorage.blob.core.windows.net/cmscontent/media/yhbhh0g0/cross_developing-leaders-with-futures-consciousness_2024.pdf
Cognitive Offloading – the Hidden Danger of AI
While we are training our machines, our machines are training us. Are we outsourcing our thinking, the very thing that sets us apart as humans? AI is helping us write faster, work faster, and think faster. But could it also be quietly eroding our ability to think deeply, solve problems creatively, and connect meaningfully? Are we slowly training ourselves out of the very skills that make us human? The real risk of AI isn’t job losses, it’s that we might lose our ability to think. It isn’t just automation, it’s atrophy, which if ignored, could shape tomorrow’s work in ways we might regret. It’s about mental fitness. If we stop practicing critical thinking, creative problem-solving, and deep collaboration, those muscles weaken, just like any underused muscle. Listen to Dr Roze as she unpacks this for us.
Women Empowerment is not the same as Women In Power
This Saturday we all celebrated Women’s Day in South Africa — a day where we honour women’s resilience, leadership, and contribution. But Dr Roze says it’s time to stop celebrating resilience and start asking the system to be accountable. She calls it The Permanent Understudy Economy and that “we need to stop empowering women”. If that seems a bit counterintuitive—especially during Women’s Month, then yes—because it’s become a comfortable lie. We love to say, “Let’s empower women.” But empowerment often assumes that women are the problem. That they lack confidence. That they need fixing. We’ve made a career out of asking women to endure, adapt, and be endlessly ‘empowered’ without ever actually transferring power. That’s the heart of the Permanent Understudy idea.