Disrupt The Disruption
By Les Mottosky
Everyone loves the feeling of a new year. That time where we rip the metaphorical sheet of paper off the easel and begin with a fresh one. We're societally conditioned to celebrate it.
But routine, tradition and romance are never good reasons to ignore reality.
So this article won't.
We're now living in the year that the smirking mask gets ripped off a situation nearly every country in the world will be forced to contend with: politicians have been overspending for decades, and the last five years in partic have created a crisis. The year of 2026 will almost certainly reveal it.
Is there any happy new year news? Indeed: the seeds of the next human revolution are about to sprout.
The tech era began in Silicon Valley and as the app-for-everything shake-up shifts to lay-offs-en-masse ushered in part by AI, we won't just see the error of our ways, we'll feel it. Those Cali entrepreneurs noticed the key to grotesque success isn't as much about solving a meaningful problem as it is in creating addictive convenience. Coding is the base, while psychology and biology are the real juice. Billion dollar valuations don't come from programming alone, but in successfully hacking human behaviours.
While we frantically indulged our depleting dopamine drip with Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and TikTok, large language models like ChatGPT and robotics quietly and consistently learned our ways and developed in the background. Now – or so we're told – these AI tools want our jobs.
This job-pocalypse is anything but assured, but we've brushed shoulders with an idea real enough to shake-us awake. There'll probably be enough employment lost to AI that we're forced to look in the mirror and ask: How were we ever convinced to feed the same beast that wants our livelihood?
This is not an assignment of blame or an accusation of carelessness. In a very real way, we're all held hostage by our current perspective. Which is to say, we can only observe in the world that which we already believe about it. To break free from a stale worldview, we must periodically question it and assess it's legitimacy.
This requires curiosity and experimentation; it necessitates trial and error.
Trial and error is the underlying principle of science, entrepreneurship, and leadership. Early on, it feels like more error than trial and an insult to how things are supposed to work. But widen the lens and the pattern appears everywhere. Nature experiments too. Ducks and other birds have been seen tangled in plastic six-pack rings, while avian cousins resourcefully weave plastic directly into their nests. Same environment. Different responses. Adaptation is uneven, imperfect, and unrelenting.
This is where we find ourselves now.
The systems we trusted no longer behave as expected. The tools we celebrated now challenge our relevance. The assumptions that guided decades of growth are producing consequences we didn’t intend and can no longer ignore. When this happens, cleverness stops helping. Optimization stalls. Speed becomes noise.
We’ve reached an inconceivable moment: when understanding what to do next no longer works.
Wendell Berry named the threshold long before this moment was forced upon us:
"When we no longer no what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey."
This isn’t a call to retreat or nostalgia. It’s instruction. The real work of 2026 will belong to those of us willing to act with care when certainty is gone. We'll choose responsibility over convenience, stewardship over scale, and consequences we’re willing to live downstream from.
That isn’t sentimentality, but adaptation.
In an increasingly fragile world running out of slack, care may be the most practical strategy left.
And here's the Happy New Year message: care is what humans do best.
TAGS: #Disrupt The Disruption #Radical Reframe #Wisdom In Leadership #Adaptation As Innovation #Care More Consume Less
Les Mottosky
Adaptation Strategist & Advisor // Revealing competitive advantage. I help leaders build aligned creative cultures that can measure their vitality and adapt to rapid change. It's not easy. But it's simple.
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