Dr Sari Stenfors, a well-known futurist and strategist, feels that management is likely to be much more decentralised by the end of the century, while at the same time much more autonomous: everyone will be their own manager, with AI helping people become the best versions of themselves.

With a PhD in Business Technology, Dr Stenfors focuses on global change and shaping a future that is full of hope. She has worked in the fields of AI, blockchain and cybernetics, and currently advises global organisations on navigating their way through the whirling eddies of change and setting course for a better future. She will be talking about management, the impact of technological innovation and its future prospects at the Ülemiste City Future Forum in Estonia this April.

What does it mean to be a futurist?

It starts from the belief that we’re on the threshold of an era in which everything’s set to change, and change drastically. At the moment, we’re in a situation I refer to as a metacrisis, with so many things are changing at the same time. What I really think is important here is how we can find ways out of these difficult situations – how we can get through this era of change so that the result is a better and more hopeful future.

The world’s in this constant state of flux right now, and our minds inevitably come up with dramatic and not very happy stories that make it even harder for us to find our way out of the situation. That’s why shaping positive future scenarios is what I specialise in. We need that sort of vision, because without it, it’s very difficult to see a way out.

What exactly is this metacrisis you mentioned, and what kind of companies are turning to you for help?

It’s an amalgam of all the consequences we’re seeing in the world today – biodiversity loss, climate change and political instability. Big problems, little problems. It’s the microplastics that have gotten into everything, too.

We’re faced with all sorts of challenges that can seem like isolated problems at first glance, but when we look deeper, we see they’re interlinked.

We’ve been approached by some of the world’s biggest NGOs, by governments, by major corporations and by organisations like the United Nations. How we can adapt, how we can find solutions and how we can steer change in the right direction are the key issues we’re addressing.

What do you think management will be like in the future, and how do you think it will differ from our current approaches?

One form of future management I see is something you might call “third-party”, which is to say it’s neither human- nor AI-led, but something new, born in partnership between the two. It might be some sort of new entity that merges human creativity and intuition with the power of AI.

The world today is very different from the one we’re aspiring to. My feeling is that by the end of the century, management is likely to be much more decentralised and autonomous: everyone will be their own manager, while AI will be helping them become the best possible versions of themselves.

Organisations are sure to change dramatically, too, because the way we go about work right now is far from the best use of our resources.

Is technological innovation likely to help us make better use of those resources in the future?

I think it will, yes. There’s a downside to that, of course, but I truly believe that technology will help us become better people, and that’s what I want to focus on.

For instance, I’ve created three different AI assistants that I’ve trained to focus on different things. What they have in common is that they all specialise in psychotherapy, and they all know how to make me make myself a better person. They know everything there is to know about me, about the kind of person I am. With them, I have three different perspectives on everything, and whenever I do something, I check in with them on what they can do to make me a better person.

Are, say, ethics and morality the kinds of things that always need human input when it comes to management? To what extent is AI capable of handling that itself?

I think AI’s capable of generating synthetic ethics and understanding how humans behave. For example, one of my three assistants operates on Buddhist philosophy. It’s a lot more ethical than I am, and teaches kindness towards others. So yes, I actually think AI’s capable of being much more ethical and creating more peace in the world than we ourselves can.

There are a lot of negative sides to being human, and I think AI will help us understand how complex we really are. It could turn us into much better people, and work with us to create a better world, if we give it the chance to.

Do you agree that we’re becoming increasingly reliant on technology? Where will that lead us?

Yes, we very clearly are. By the end of the century, AI might be a form of training that helps us develop our senses and abilities and utilise the full potential of our brains.

The belief has been around since ancient times that we have far more than just five senses. Maybe some of them are hidden away, just waiting to be developed. Intuition might be something we could hone, or we could unearth new abilities within ourselves through meditation or something else. If AI was able to help us do that, that would be amazing.

What risks does technological innovation pose?

There’s no end of answers to that question! It all has to do with our brain’s natural tendency to focus on the negative and on the dramatic, as if we’re constantly waiting for things to go wrong. A simple Google search is enough to be alerted to the dangers, to be told that the world’s falling apart.

In the face of that, my aim is to offer something different: a view of the future that’s full of hope. I’m focusing on how we move on from the crisis. What are the pathways that will help us, help humanity, through difficult times?

Apart from AI, what are the main innovative technologies that are likely to influence the future?

I think technologies that help us learn new ways of organising things will be very important. That’s why I’m such a firm believer in the potential and possibilities of blockchain. I don’t mean financially – just organisation and the quantum economy, which will help us achieve decentralisation. That will be a key innovation in the way we organise ourselves as people.

Longevity is another important issue. I’m convinced there’ll be all sorts of new solutions we can embrace in the future that lead to advances in that field. Longevity doesn’t necessarily or only mean longer life, but first and foremost an improvement in quality of life at the end of our lives. It also means generations of people working together, since we might be perfectly able to work until we’re 100.

So we have to think about how we organise a world of work in which people from very different backgrounds work alongside one another: older people, the wisdom that comes with their age and experience, combined with the energy and freshness of young people. If we can bring those two aspects together, it could shape the model for future work.

What do companies and business networks stand to gain from technological developments?

I suspect big corporations will function very differently in the future. They might not even be permanent structures by the end of the century, but form temporarily from various networks in order to pursue innovation. Which is to say that if they need to make something, they’ll join a production network; if they need marketing, they’ll join a marketing network, and so on. All of this will be able to constantly change according to need.

AI is capable of synthesising different scenarios and therefore enabling continuous, flexible strategic planning. For instance, if a decision is taken to do something, you can immediately analyse what the outcome is likely to be and what people or resources you’ll need.

That means that humans and AI networks will be able to work together in a more flexible way in the future. You might spend 15 minutes a day working in one company, then another 15 minutes in another company, and the rest of the time you spend gardening or whatever. Both the way work is organised and the way organisations are structured will become much more dynamic and flexible.

There are all sorts of mental health and overworking issues these days. How might technology improve things on those fronts?

The industrial era made us wear masks and forced us into frameworks in which we had to behave in a certain way. You had to be efficient, you had to be disciplined, you had to be machine-accurate. Now that we have actual robots to do our work for us, we can finally ask ourselves who we really are.

That involves acknowledging our imperfections and our biased ways of thinking, but it’s about discovering the best aspects of human nature, too – our capacity to love, to be there for our friends and to connect with nature.

AI can help us with that. In fact, my three AI assistants are already helping me gain a better understanding of myself. For example, if I’m feeling nervous in some situation or other, I just ask them what I should do. And they give me advice, like: “Sari, I know you. You’re always nervous in these sorts of situations. The best thing you can do is go out for a walk in nature. By the time you get back, you’ll feel much better. Then we can talk about it.”

We’re not always open to criticism, especially if it comes from our friends or colleagues. But for me at least, having created AI assistants that give me honest feedback, it’s much easier to take from them. AI reflects our true nature, making it a powerful tool for self-development.