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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, I'm Julie Annixter.
- [00:07]
B
And I'm Dan Hill.
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A
And this is Real Transformations, where we talk about business change that works from the inside out.
- [00:16]
B
I'm delighted to have as our guest today Carolyn Stokes. She is a strategist who works with C suites and boards to make their organizations move through AI disruption, climate risk, and geopolitical instability. Her new book is called Aftershock to 2030 A CEO's Guide to Reinvention in the Age of AI Climate and Societal Collapse. It's published by Broad Book Press and serves as a roadmap for leaders navigating the tidal wave of change going on today. A side note, Carolyn was previously my guest on an earlier podcast of mine called Dan Hill's EQ Spotlight regarding her 2019 book, Elephants Before Unicorns.
- [00:55]
A
So welcome, Caroline, to Real Transformations.
- [00:58]
C
Julie and Dan, thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure to be speaking with you today.
- [01:02]
A
Well, we're really glad to be speaking with you. You know, we've just launched this podcast, and I think your book, we're really glad it's coming right up front because it's setting a bar. So let me ask you, why did you write the book? What motivated you?
- [01:16]
C
Yeah, well, it was, what if I don't do it? I won't be feeling like I'm doing the right thing in the world. But essentially, back in 20, in my elephants Before Unicorns book, I. The very last chapter had something along the lines of, everybody's got to get ready for AI. We have to develop emotionally intelligent organizations to be able to manage AI, so we're able to lead in this new environment because there's going to be so much change. And then Covid came, and then so many different things changed. And I could see the acceleration, I could see the despair, I could see the distrust. I could see the chaos happening in organizations and the avoidance and the denial. And when I saw all of these compounding forces happening, people just get stuck. And I thought to myself, okay, what. What is the real issue here? And then I saw the outrage in social media. And that's when I realized that was the signal I needed to fast track my book. And at that time, I had just done MIT's AI for business strategy. I had done MIT's ESG, which was business sustainability. And I could see the converging forces happening from a societal perspective, especially people hyper focusing on AI instead of climate or as well as climate. And that's when I realized, okay, the only people that need to be able to handle this Moving forward are CEOs and I don't think they quite realize that.
- [02:41]
A
If I can. Dan, I want to ask one quick follow up question because it's so perfect here. What percentage of the CEOs that you've worked with embody what you said they have? They're not allergic to transformation, they're visionary and they have real psychological safety. So what percentage of the CEOs that you've seen out there worked with do you think have that?
- [03:05]
C
I can't put a percentage on it for the simple reason that unless a CEO has left their corporate work to actually start their own venture that is specifically focused on a sustainability program whereby they're putting planetary limits, planetary boundaries as at front and center. They're not there. Everybody's focusing on quarterly targets. So if I put a percentage, and here's the psychological aspect, if I put a percentage on there, everyone says oh, it's okay. So I'd rather not, I'd rather say no. Unless this happens, we're not even going to be at that tipping point.
- [03:43]
B
Sure. So there's a lot of varieties of denial. One is focusing exclusively on the quarterly numbers, but there's also the role of empathy and emotions. And to this day, unfortunately, so much of the leadership is probably not especially there when it comes to emotional intelligence. Because you say so in your book when you do these strength finder assessments that empathy is not a top 10 strength. It's not even probably a top 30 strength. So I'm really intrigued because you are indeed a mentor to CEOs. How do you move them along? I mean some are probably already on that journey a bit and you're giving them a strong nudge. But there are others that probably you're the first wake up call they might have to this if they're really low on empathy, which is so central to the proposition you're talking about. How do you navigate that? How do you make that work?
- [04:34]
C
Well, I also want to add here that the term empathy has been weaponized and also it's been, there's. MIT even reported it in the past week or so that there is this empathy tax usually for women. So men are expected to not demonstrate empathy. They are and they, they understand and they believe they've been raised specifically not to that it is regarded as a weakness, especially in today's climate. So how do you create empathy is looking at the system. So one of the, one of the challenges is even with the article that MIT wrote, which is the empathy tax and why it needs to be shared is that that's almost like moving into the DEI movement that, you know, obviously we've moved past now that's been completely deconstructed and now it's actually being weaponized even further beyond the Joe Rogan and Elon Musk interview from several years ago, whereby there's now a hyper masculinity that, that is taking, taking force. So what I encourage people to do now in 2026 is to think about all of the systems that are around. And I'd love to hear Julie's perspective on this as well because of her systems work is that develop empathy for those systems that are happening rather than forcing a CEO to think to themselves, well, I have to be empathetic towards this person when actually they may consider it to be sympathy. So I prefer to look at the systems like a polymathic system empathy. So you can see all of the systems that are all conjoined and all working together to be able to see what the reactions, what the second order, third order outcomes will be to be able to then move forward. And that changes it pretty significantly.
- [06:22]
A
In this article that's on your website about polymathic leadership and it's also in the book, I really was fascinated by this idea. First of all, that psychological safety isn't a nice to have. It represents operational infrastructure because if people aren't speaking up about what's going on without fear, hello, you know, the system is not working. So I'm curious, how do you help leaders create those conditions, that mental sovereignty that you talk about, where people can think clearly, collaborate effectively and remain grounded under pressure.
- [06:57]
C
So when we're talking about psychological safety, we need CEOs to I and this is going to be a delicate topic to abandon the kind of culture surveys that typically happen because they're not really, as I was saying earlier in this conversation, people will look at a data point, a percentage, and they'll say, oh, that's fine, you know, it's up a point or it's down a point, let's not worry about that. So I'd rather go along the lines of saying, okay, put that aside. Get the current data point about what people are interested in, what they're worried about getting, get all of that data, even anonymize it, it doesn't matter, synthesize it. We've got such powerful systems right now. The new fable from Anthropics, Claude, is supposed to be absolutely outstanding and a CEO should be able to create some kind of system. If you have all of that information, within four days you should have an entire strategy or good insights on what should be done next based on all of the systems that boards require. But as you know Julie, and as you know Dan, the issue is that you have to do something about it, languishing in it or avoiding it, which I talk about the different types of fight form, freeze fight, free form CEOs that in my, in my book and you know, each of these CEOs, any leader, me, you, anyone, will look at data and then will either become angry or will want to avoid it, or will want to appease certain people because we're nervous or whatever our typical response mechanism might be. So the invite really is to look at the data, identify whether or not that's going to be aligned with what needs to happen, and then to move forward and then to explain it. So I think a lot of the stuff that we've been trained to understand about leadership, it's so outdated now. We have AI, we have the planetary boundaries and limits that we need, we understand what the societal upset and discourse is, and we need to completely reinvent how we operate our minds and our bodies and our organizations to solve much bigger problems and to ensure that we're able to continue driving the organizations forward for the long term, for the boards to feel like they've got insurance there.
- [09:26]
B
So, Carolyn, when you were on my EQ Spotlight, I think just within the next few weeks after you were my guest, I had two people in a row who mentioned that they would conservatively estimate that 25% of all managers are bullies or could qualify as bullies. So when I saw in your book, your new book you're talking about, you published an article and he co authored it on bullying and stopping bullying. So what are the systems that you think through Claude, whatever the means, maybe based on your article, what are the mechanisms, the systems, the means, the moments of truth in terms of stopping and reducing this epidemic of bullying that's still exist.
- [10:05]
C
And it's a very, very tough one because you've got different types of bullying. Obviously you've got the classic schemer and screamer, Lyudmila Praslova, who led that article, she coined that phrase. And you've got those classics and those classics, let's say they run an organization and I know of many organizations where they have CEOs like that they have inherited, you know, a very successful company, they're regarded as the, the hero CEO and that everybody does everything that they, they want to do, that everybody should be doing exactly what they want. To do now there's no escaping that they do not that most of those people do not want to evolve until typically they are in a situation where maybe they've had some kind of health challenge and they're able to have stopped and paused and, and you know, to take a second look at, at their behavior and to understand that it wasn and that maybe they will want to try and find another way. But let's say you just have a line manager in an organization that may be a bully. One of the things that we didn't state in that article is that all bullies have some kind of trauma. So the issue is that they look for a sense of control because they are psychologically wired to perform to ensure that they're not made to feel less than. So, you know, when you look at it from a psychological perspective, it's actually quite sad and they just need a hug. But the problem is that they're caught in the system and trying to untangle oneself from that system is really, really hard to do if that's what you're being rewarded for. So the problem is that most organizations will reward for it unless an organization is, is snubbed, is publicly outed by it and then all of a sudden the CEO of an organization will, you know, sweep in and say we will not tolerate this, that this is HR's problem, when actually it was the CEO that tolerated it in the first place. So how do you out it? It has to come from the CEO again. And that's where yes, you can have. And this is something that's evolving depending on the organization.
- [12:22]
B
Sure. I'm just going to ask one quick follow up. Throw it over to Julie. So, because I'm interested in this because it's, you know, you talk about how these CEOs who have this toxic environment so often have trauma in their childhood that there's still, as you said, a seven year old child inside of them someplace. Then you have all the trauma of all this dramatic change that's taking place and people who feel like they are going to be outshined and put out of work by AI. So you've got inherent trauma, you've got the new trauma of the bully bosses, managers. You got the trauma, the changing macro environment. There's a lot going on here and it's going to take a very adept set of leaders to navigate this with even a fair degree of success.
- [13:10]
C
Yeah, totally. And this is why I strongly recommend that I have a whole chapter on it about the CEO. In a very short period of time in the first 100 days. Because I have these 100 day programs that they are able to follow in the book. They don't need to hire me, they don't even need to hire a coach. But it is advisable to very, very quickly bring on a chief coaching officer to help them unpack the societal, the philosophical, the different systems that need to be created within the organization to endure, to be able to sustain themselves and really and ideally to have a whole suite of coach for that period of time to create that transitionary period. Because without it. And it all has to be done at the same time, of course, but without it it's like you're right, you've got all of these bumper cars bumping into each other. And as you were describing it, the language in my mind in bright letters was hot mess. Because we're human, we're delightfully human. Embracing that is great. But we also have major planetary systems that we need to solve for people to be able to buy the products that we want to sell. And I think that's the, that's the bottom line.
- [14:38]
A
You know, it's fascinating as I listen to this, I think, you know, you're obviously a systems person, a frameworks person and I've spent most of my career sort of in a design centric, you know, view of industry. And I think that those organizations that really embody human centered design, listening to the marketplace, listening to each other, importantly willing to prototype and iterate and fail forward fast as IDEO says. And they're very different than the ones that you just described. I think they're more agile. I mean I think about P and G, Nike, Google, IBM, there are others, but those are a few that I know well and I've watched them allow, create, cultivate an environment where innovation, experimentation, et cetera can happen. So I'm curious, like where do you see, like where does design, human centered design is sort of that whole movement fit into what you've been seeing out there in your hundred day work?
- [15:35]
C
Yeah, it's everyone else really. I mean all of the companies that you just mentioned have big pockets. They can do this. The great thing about large organizations with big pockets, they're able to invest in teams and they're able to experiment, which is absolutely fantastic. They've been able to work with the McKinseys and the Deloitte's and the Ernst and Young specifically to identify what the challenges are well in advance and to be able to adapt accordingly. And they have to move very, very quickly, as you know. So this book is really for everyone else, I don't expect. And it's almost like bringing the Montessori into, into all the other organizations that are so stuck on frameworks and systems that, that they've been so used to from, you know, because that's what they, they continue to read. I pick up a magazine, actually I don't pick up magazines anymore. But whenever I read something online, I will look at it and I will literally sink, my heart will sink when I see that. That is old paradigm thinking. It's like, why is, why these kind, why is this thinking being amplified right now? Where is the, where is the mindset? Where is the, where is, where is the fresh thinking for where we're going and what a lot of the leaders are actually showing? And I, what I do know is that a lot of the big name companies won't necessarily show what they're doing or how they're doing it to provide that level of confidence because they want to protect their lunch. They don't want to share those kind of insights because it's a very competitive world. So that's why I think the leaders, everyone else needs to have these kind of insights so they can. Because I believe, and I've come across the CEOs and the leaders that are stuck, they're stuck in a place. I'm trying to create a visual here, but they're stuck knowing that something has changed, feeling that something has changed, but they don't quite know which foot to put forward and in which direction. One of the images that I shared with somebody the other day, because they were lost, I said, you're currently in a little dinghy in the middle of a lake and the lake is so big that you can't see land on either side. But you know that it's close, but you don't know which one is the closest, which will, by rowing which way would be the closest. And you're, you're in that frozen moment of not knowing. And often people give up without having the insight to know which way they need to go. So as you know, in my book, it very much covers a. Well, this is where you are, this is the mindset that you need to shift to. This is the reality. And you know, here's a smorgasbord of things that you can do to help you identify where, how you need to level up. Because we're that close for people that can't see what I've got an inch between my finger and my thumb. We're that close to, you know, serious systems Shifting for us that are going to make us feel a little bit like how we were in the pandemic. And it may happen in 12 months, it may happen in 24 months, but we all know that we've got a net zero goal by 2030. We just heard the Earth overshoot day was announced about 10 days ago. Yeah, about 10 days ago. And it's actually been brought forward. So we're using the planetary resources by July 30th of this year, 2026. And the only year we did not actually see that decline was the year of the pandemic because we had to reduce many things, economic activity. Yeah. So we know that things can shift, which means that we're able to sustain life and to prevent the mass migrations that are happening that will actually compound and make employment and life a lot more challenging. That's going to happen in the next five to 10 years. So, you know, I know that sounds like a bit of a downer, but we all feel this. We feel the anger when we see what's happening in the news. We feel the hopelessness. But my book is really to provide some kind of insights on what can be done to move forward.
- [20:20]
B
On that note, and also circling back to a comment you just had a bit ago about it's a competitive world. Now, you have a statement at one point, you said, companies don't exist to be moral leaders, they exist to win. And yet I can tell you as a reader of your book and knowing your conviction and passion, that you want them to win, I guess, but I think you also want them to be moral leaders, but you're just saying they don't exist to do that. So what's your prescription or what's your advice or counsel that you've been giving to executives who try to, I guess, square the circle, that seemingly one doesn't have time to be moral. And yet I very much want them to be moral leaders in their companies. And I think their employees do, or many of them do.
- [21:04]
C
Yeah, I think there's a. There's somebody that I want to want to suggest people read up. Ron Carrucci. He wrote a book about justice and inside most people, most people like that 7 year old want to be some kind of superhero. And it's about finding that in people and then being able to move forward. And really we're relying on the CEO to do this work. I interviewed in my first book, Elephants for Unicorns, a man, a CEO, that had created a new product that was vegan, a vegan product, vegan shoe product. Native shoes here in Vancouver. And he had to go through that whole process himself. I asked him, how did you go through that process? What is it that you did to get to that point where you would transform from, from being a financial leader in Asia to, you know, creating a vegan shoe product? And it was when he realized, you know, what was happening to the world, what was happening to, you know, from a carbon footprint perspective from, you know, from plants to food production to the waste carbon footprint, et cetera, et cetera. He had that reckoning and we all have that reckoning. And often we'll have it on a weekend and often we'll have a glass of wine or 2 of 10 to forget about it and then we get back in the saddle on the Monday. And that's the kind of cycle that most of us are on. And a lot of people will break that cycle and choose to do something else. Actually, I mentioned Lyudmila Praslova earlier. We're just writing a white paper now for an academic journal specifically on the different types of leaders that are shifting into this kind of environment. And they exist. They're just not your usual hero, braggadocious type of CEO. They're there and really they need more FaceTime. We need to see them in the media. They need to be normal. Normalized. Pardon me, excuse me, I just banged something. They need to be normalized. So we're able to go, ha, they do exist. There is a better way. Let's move forward. But as we know, they're not very clickbaity usually, so they're not amplified.
- [23:36]
A
Well, if we go back to your PlayStation days, and I loved the phrase, you're creating the ultimate distraction platform, but there is. We have become a society that understands how to operate visually and online. And something that fascinates me, having worked with the US military quite a bit, is they understand war gamings. You know, they get in a room and they put the facts on the screen and whether it's a, you know, a sophisticated simulation, data driven or not, they are. They're testing scenarios, you know, and, and how many companies are you seeing that, that do that? You know, whether it's scenario planning or war gaming. Do you see much of that?
- [24:16]
C
I do. And when I see it, I'm going to sound negative. And then I will provide you with a positive aspect, which is that most people will do those war gaming simulations, but they won't call it wargaming simulations. But I like that. I like that a lot. I get it. And it's actually very appropriate in 2026. But to have those simulations and. But this is where I go negative. You do that in organizations that aren't able to work as a team, a true team, because they'll say, no, we can't do that because we've done it this way. No. Oh, that. That's just going to be a problem all the way down there. And they come in with that ego because they're like, well, that just can't be done. And they're. And it's just immovable often when that happens. So you'll have those off sites, you'll have those meetings. And it takes so much organizational memory, not memory, but so much organizational movement. It can take days to get to that final destination. And then. And then you get to that final destination. I'll get the applause going. Good job, Caroline. You managed to get us over the edge because it was, it was, it was not looking good because of the personalities in the room. I literally get a standing ovation. It's like, that's always embarrassing, but it happens. I'm sure that's been the same with you, Julie, as well. And then the real work happens on the Monday when everybody gets into their work zones because all of a sudden there's this giant gap. How does the leader that had a different perspective walking in then get to a different solution, then after a weekend, then on Monday, try to explain to everybody what that reality is because they're still processing their own mindset or their own. Their change their belief system. They're not feeling confident. What exacerbates this, I find, is remote working. So when there's remote working, it's hard for that the mirror neurons to work. So everybody feels like they're able to move along in lockstep. So it's a huge, huge challenge. And actually I was talking to somebody CFO just the other day and he was saying he so misses everybody working in the same space where they can solve something in two minutes instead of something dragging out because of misunderstandings of communication based on all of those things. So, you know, I love what you were saying about the war gaming because I can just imagine you've got all of these people in the room, they're all working it out collectively because they know that the mission is the most important thing. There are no egos associated with it unless it's a Tom Cruise movie. So I guess it. I get it. And that's the issue. I think egos. And people are always very concerned about the term ego because people say, I don't have an ego. And I have to remind them, everybody has an ego because you have set beliefs, you have a belief system, you have expectations, you're unwilling to adjust to the bigger cause that is the ego. So when that happens, it's a huge challenge. And everybody just needs to do the work all the time to be able to get to that end point. I have seen it work well, but it takes a lot because the majority of leaders don't realize how much they've got going on under the hood and how, how uncomfortable they are with instability and losing faith.
- [27:58]
A
So what is the key event in this moment of such disruption? And it's very messy and a lot of companies are struggling. What is the key for leaders to developing psychological safety besides just hiring a coach, which is clearly a good thing to do. But I'm curious about what is the process?
- [28:18]
C
Yeah, I'd strip it down to bare minimum because as we know, Amy Edmondson did a phenomenal job of explaining what psychological safety is. A lot of people have added context to it and I think they've confused it. And I think it has been, it has metastasized in some way. The bottom line is you're not trying to do emotional dumping of anything and everything on a Monday morning after you've had a bad weekend and expecting psychological safety there or oh, I didn't feel very good in that presentation and just hear me out, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's about being able to say, I don't know how to do that, to be able to make that happen and to be able to have that frank conversation or, huh, I can see that this may actually cause a problem. Can we talk about how we can evolve that? Or this may actually take a little bit longer because I need to solve those kind of challenges, not the emotional dumping that I think has been masquerading as psychological safety for some time. So it's just re engineering what psychological safety is. And one thing I've noticed, I was actually with the CEO earlier this week on Tuesday, alongside a Google internal therapist. I don't know if that sounds how it should sound. She's a therapist that works within, in house, within Google.
- [29:37]
A
There we go.
- [29:37]
C
That sounds better. And she was saying precisely that. She said leaders are being expected to be able to manage all of these things with an organization. So they then burn out. They're unable to do their job because they're burning out because they're just being expected to be everybody's therapist. That's not what it's about. It really does need to be Able for everybody needs to be able to stop and redefine what that is and to have clear boundaries, make sure the organization has really good therapists on site and for people to understand this is what it is, this is what it isn't. This is how we now conduct ourselves. And it's basically a reset. It's reinventing how things have been going down the line. And just to say Julie, can you imagine in a military setting it's like that. To me in a military setting that's exactly what it is. I don't know how we're going to do that is appropriate for something that is mission critical. Not well, I've got this problem at home, blah blah, blah blah that might colleague made me feel not very, not very safe.
- [30:47]
A
You're exactly right. Because when, when it is you know life and death and when it is very high stakes environments and just that's the military mindset and ethos is what do we need to do to solve the problem There is. It's phenomenal.
- [30:59]
C
Sorry Dan, I interrupted you.
- [31:01]
B
No, no, that's quite right. I, I mean I think a lot of this has been involving emotional labor and you talk about hidden emotional labor and you actually mentioned the book that. Yes to an earlier point that logs has fallen historically to women within the organization quite probably. So I sat there and said well this chief coaching officer is going to have to be a Buddhist Aristotle who's also a woman who's also this and that. It's going to be a very talented individual. So they're going to need some more cohorts to pull all this off.
- [31:34]
C
They need a lot. I think that is, that is a moment in time that we need. It may be very short lived. Maybe they only need this chief coaching officer in the organization for six months to do that reset and then walk away so that it doesn't become this constant therapy so people are able to feel empowered to do what they need to do.
- [31:57]
A
Well, I have one last question and it's this. Given your amazing experience out there in the world with leaders all over the world, if you had one wish for leaders today in terms of the workplace culture that they are leading, what would it be?
- [32:11]
C
One wish. One wish. Okay. Well this is a gentle one and really it's my one wish is to please stop. Take a moment. Really just take a moment. Put your phone away, put everything away and work out what difference do you want to make in 12 months time? What do you want to do differently? How do you and just leave it like that. I was about to go into the. And then how do you want to do it? Don't even go into that. Just what do you want to have? What do you want that's different this time next year based on everything that you know right now?
- [32:45]
A
Lovely. I could talk to you for hours, by the way, and probably will after
- [32:51]
C
I could talk to you for hours as well. These were really great questions.
- [32:54]
A
Dan, do you have another question?
- [32:56]
B
No. No. I think we should probably actually close it out because we're either going to go 12 hours or we're going to have gone the 35 to 40 that we actually did go. So I think we should draw it to a close. So I want to thank you so much, Carolyn, for being our guest today. It's fascinating, it's fabulous, it's energetic. It's probably chaotic and confusing to many who are listening, but it's also crucial. So I've used up all my alliterative bullets there. And I'll mention that your book is newly out. It's my broad book press. We encourage people to go buy it, obviously, and we wish you all the best. So that's basically what I had to say. And maybe Julie wants to close it out.
- [33:35]
A
I just want to say the name of the book. Aftershock to 2030 A CEOs Guide to Reinvention in the Age of AI Climate and Societal Collapse. And I found so much wonderful material on your website and on your LinkedIn. I encourage people to go there. And Caroline, it has been a pleasure. Like I said, I loved the book and I'm so glad. Great to finally meet you.
- [33:57]
C
Julie and Dan, thank you both so much for having me on your show. It's been really wonderful.