Tracey Follows, CEO of Future Made, argues that AI and networked platforms are shifting us from a single authentic self to multiple fluid identities. She calls this the Great Decentralization and says leadership now requires navigating complexity and adaptability rather than control. Women's ability to context-switch gives them an edge in this new landscape.
Chapters
Hello, thank you very much for having me here today. It's a joy to be here and to share this experience with you where we're talking about and exploring women's leadership. I'm Tracey Follows, I'm a futurist and the CEO of Future Made. We're a futures consultancy in the UK, but I'm here really to talk today about some of the work I do in the area of identity and the future of identity and specifically to talk about how the changes in technology are in fact shaping the complex self and how that is good news for women and women's leadership. Perhaps start by, um, saying that it's not just that things are changing, but the, the very nature of change itself is changing. What do I mean by that? I mean that with the emergence of technologies like AI, actually it's fundamentally challenging some of our old notions, our traditional ideas of identity. For example, some of you might have been writing with AI assistants like ChatGPT, where you're becoming digital collaborators, extending your own voice and your capabilities, possibly even your language skills across, across territories and into reaching new global audiences. You might be in virtual meetings with digital twins where you can turn up to 3 different meetings all at the same time, or using social algorithms to express your institutional authority in leadership on LinkedIn, but perhaps using Instagram to humanise your leadership journey in another, in another and different way. And you're probably using AI avatars to just create new forms of your own presence to represent or re-present yourself in different ways. All of these are examples of how we are transcending those old physical limitations and cultural constraints Now, why is this happening? It's happening because we've decided to use the internet. This is the internet. It's the birth of the internet and the evolution of it. And what you can see here is that the main property of the internet is that it's networked. That's exactly what you're seeing, the network connections and interconnections. And so I call this the Great Decentralization. We've decided to apply the internet to our business, to our social life, to organizations, even to lots of other areas of our individual private lives, like dating, for example, even. And this has changed the system that we live in, and it's changed it fundamentally. No longer are we living in a world of rigid hierarchies and linear systems like we were sort of post-First, Second World War. We're actually moved into a networked world, which is more about peer-to-peer connections, distributed influence, dynamic relationships, as you can see from this imagery. And actually, we now inhabit this system as fluid, multiple, plural identities, not as a fixed, centralized identity. The centralized control that used to exist in the old systems has now given way to a flat, inclusive, participatory, and peer-to-peer version of the world. And so we have a new system. And just to say here that Really what has happened is there's a shift from rigid hierarchies to interconnected peer-to-peer connections. And that of course has a big impact and implication for the way in which we say our identities. No longer are they fixed identities, they're now fluid, multiple, and can exist in many different forms all at the same time. So one way of saying this is that we have a changing self that mirrors the changing system. No longer should we expect to have a designed self that we have deliberately designed, um, to be fixed and unchanging based on institutional roles that we might want to, um, take. That's really to do with, uh, hierarchical structures. Um, and neither should we necessarily be striving for authenticity because no longer is it about authenticity. It's about profiling ourself through lots of different data so we can inhabit lots of different places. As different versions of ourselves. And now it's about the complex self being fluid and adaptable, where we're made of multiple attributes that we can arrange and rearrange, mix and remix to fit the context and to create the role we want to play in that context. We are now empowered by network connections and we now have a networked identity. We are the complex self inhabiting a complex interconnected system. And this is very much how I think we should now see the world that is emerging. It's less about the standard of authenticity and more about the standard of multiplicity and plurality and self-continuity. How are we going to ensure that our complex self is fluid and multiple yet remains anchored in some of our core purpose and values. One way of looking at this is to think about what it does to our leadership style. And my argument really is that actually leadership in the old world of the design self and the hierarchical organization used to be about managing, managing and ordering and retaining control. And now in the world of the network where we have the complex self, it's more about navigating and and sensemaking because the world changes as it connects and interconnects in that very dynamic way you just saw from the network effects of the internet. So less about managing, more about navigating. It's less about holding a position and more about your power flowing from the making of connection. It's less about proving and giving evidence of where you once solved a problem, or overcame a barrier, and now more about the adaptability quotient, not the provability. The adaptability quotient looks for the skill or trait of adaptability in someone so that they aren't thinking about the past as much as they're thinking about the future. They can write scenarios, they can rehearse scenarios and work out what the implications of different alternative paths might be. And it's less about presentation, the presentation of one authentic self, and more about the exploration and in fact the curation, the skillful curation of many multiple selves over space and over time and across different teams and different audiences that you want to deal with. And I think just to close, the great idea here, the symbiosis, if you like, between what's happening with the system and how the self is changing is that this has always been a strength of women. Women have always been in the job of context or code-switching or role-playing, managing multiple identities across family, community, and professional roles. And now technology is really, well, amplifying that natural capability. So we might say that the future belongs to those who can skillfully program and navigate their complex selves across these expanding networked contexts. We'll be leading through control, not through connect— sorry, we'll be leading not through control, but leading through connection. And so as you think about these couple of days as you are at this event, maybe we should think about how leadership style is changing to deploy different combinations of attributes, how we embrace the network and celebrate this plurality of identity. Recognize that in a networked world, women's natural ability is to navigate these multiple contexts and actually to view our multiple roles not as fragmentation, but as a complex programmable database of assets that can make up, mix, and remix our identity for the context we want to be in. The great news is the future of leadership isn't about choosing between versions of yourself. It's, it's about deploying your complex self in the right way, in the right place, at the right time to create transformation. Transformative change in an increasingly networked world. Thank you very much, and I look forward to having a discussion and taking some questions.
