Transformational Energy Units: The Fuel of Change, #15

In 1812 Napoleon marched into Russia with six hundred thousand men, the largest army Europe had ever seen.  His goal was continental dominance.  But dreams do not feed soldiers or warm them through a Russian winter.  As the march dragged on, supplies ran thin, horses starved, and morale cracked.  The farther the army advanced, the weaker it became.  When the survivors limped back across the border, fewer than one-hundred thousand remained.

Napoleon did not lose because he lacked strategy.  He lost because he ran out of energy.  The greatest vision collapses when the fuel runs dry.  That is the essence of Transformational Energy Units (TEUs)—the invisible reserves that power change.  Every transformation burns energy: human, cultural, organizational.  Without replenishment, the march stalls not in one dramatic clash but through slow exhaustion until people cannot carry the mission any farther.

John Boyd taught that maneuverability and conserved energy can defeat brute force.  But even the fastest jet stalls without fuel.  TEUs measure whether people can keep learning, unlearning, and relearning when the future pelts them with chaos.  They can be consumed by fear, overload, and uncertainty—or renewed by trust, purpose, and coherence.

Fear: The Hidden Gravity of Change

Every transformation begins with fear.  Fear of loss, of incompetence, of irrelevance.  It is the natural gravity that pulls people back toward what they know.  Suppress fear, and it burns energy underground; name it, and it becomes fuel.  TEUs are the mechanism for turning fear into flow—the courage to keep moving when certainty has vanished.

Fear taxes every system.  It slows decisions, silences truth, multiplies approvals, and corrodes meaning.  Managing TEUs means converting that fear into coordinated motion.  Leadership, at its core, is energy management under uncertainty.

Why Change Drains Workers

Consider Maria, a mid-level manager in a retail chain.  For fifteen years she had mastered her routines—Monday reports, Tuesday meetings, Friday inventory checks.  Competence was her identity, rhythm her comfort.  Then the pandemic arrived.

Overnight her company shifted to curbside pickup and e-commerce.  Her familiar spreadsheets were obsolete.  She went from expert to beginner, and her TEUs burned fast as she struggled to relearn what she thought she already knew.

Rumors of layoffs spread.  Anxiety devoured her reserves faster than any overtime shift.  Colleagues were furloughed, lunch-break friendships dissolved, and isolation did what no workload could—it drained her sense of belonging.

Working from the kitchen table while helping her children attend remote school multiplied the cognitive load.  Every ping, login, and Zoom call took another sip from her fuel tank.  Her identity—the reliable one who always delivered—wobbled.  Doubt replaced pride.

Then came the next wave: polyintelligence.  AI systems now forecast inventory, optimize routes, and analyze sentiment.  What had once been Maria’s judgment was now the algorithm’s recommendation.  Her value felt uncertain again.  Machines were fast; she was human.  The tempo gap widened, and fear whispered: Am I still needed?

Corporate sustainability goals followed.  Maria now had to weigh efficiency against carbon footprints, local sourcing against global costs.  These were moral decisions as much as operational ones.  Each demanded new learning—and burned more TEUs.

Maria’s story is everyone’s story.  The pandemic was a shock; polyintelligence is the marathon.  It demands constant adaptation, constant recalibration, and deliberate refueling of energy.

Fear into Flow

Fear burns energy without making progress.  Flow is energy moving forward and accomplishing things.  The leader’s task is to redirect one into the other.  TEUs describe that conversion in motion—the cycle of burn, replenish, and convert that keeps systems alive.

Burn is unavoidable; change consumes energy.  Replenish requires rhythm—cadence, rest, empathy, and shared purpose.  Convert turns temporary courage into lasting capability.  This cycle is the metabolism of transformation.

When DBS Bank in Singapore began its digital reinvention, leaders started by confronting fear directly.  They replaced control with curiosity, giving small teams room to experiment.  Failure became rehearsal, not crime.  Energy that once powered anxiety now powered learning.

Fujifilm faced extinction when photography went digital.  Instead of mourning film, it converted chemical expertise into healthcare and optics.  That was Transformational Energy in practice—fear transformed into focus.

Cadence: The Antidote to Anxiety

Fear thrives in chaos.  Cadence creates safety.  Predictable rhythms—daily stand-ups, reflection Fridays, clear sprint cycles—tell the nervous system: you can breathe here.  Atlassian’s Team Playbook codified such rituals so teams could balance intensity with recovery.  Predictability became permission.

Leaders who protect cadence protect courage.  Burnout is not commitment—it is unmanaged fear.

Pandemic Case Studies

Zoom — From Verb to Infrastructure

When the world locked down, usage exploded thirty-fold.  Engineers worked without rest, servers strained, and households coined the term “Zoom fatigue.”  Fear of collapse burned TEUs at every level.  Renewal came through massive infrastructure upgrades, rapid hiring, and a unifying mission: keep the world connected.

Moderna — Purpose as Jet Fuel

Scientists faced impossible deadlines and personal sacrifice.  TEUs drained daily.  But a single, moral sentence—we might save millions—refilled them faster than rest.  Purpose became the power source.

Uber — From Rides to Eats

When streets emptied, revenue vanished.  TEUs evaporated in fear and uncertainty until the company pivoted to food delivery.  That new sense of service recharged energy, giving workers and drivers renewed meaning.

Across every case the rhythm is the same: fear ignites the burn; purpose and coherence refill the tank.  Strategy and technology matter, but stamina decides survival.

CROME: The Levers of Energy

Leaders cannot prevent TEU burn, but they can guide the cycle through five levers: Coherence, Resilience, Orientation, Motivation, Empathy (CROME).

• Coherence keeps everyone rowing the same way.

• Resilience builds shock absorbers.

• Orientation provides maps, even short-term ones.

• Motivation reminds people why the struggle matters.

• Empathy acknowledges the cost.

CROME is not a checklist; it is a balancing act.  Push too much motivation without empathy and people burn out.  Over-control coherence and you calcify.  The leader’s role is to steward energy, not just assign tasks.

Fear Transformed: Global Lessons

In Rwanda and Ghana, Zipline uses drones to deliver blood and vaccines where roads fail.  Over one million deliveries and 100 million autonomous miles later, their engineers still talk about the mission, not the machines.  Seeing a life saved replaces fear of failure with pride.

In Kenya, Safaricom’s M-Pesa faced political resistance and technical risk, yet its purpose—banking the unbanked—overpowered fear.  Each successful transaction restored national confidence.

In Mumbai, the Dabbawalas deliver hundreds of thousands of lunches daily with near-perfect accuracy.  Their strength is rhythm—cadence so precise that even monsoons cannot disrupt it.  Routine becomes resilience.

These examples share a pattern: fear met with purpose, uncertainty met with trust, exhaustion met with meaning.

Polyintelligence and the Energy Gauntlet

The fusion of human, machine, and ecological intelligences—what this series calls polyintelligence—magnifies both capability and cost.  Humans must adapt to machines that learn faster and never rest.  Organizations must embed ecological intelligence, balancing sustainability with profit.  Leaders must orchestrate across these domains without losing human identity.

Each fusion burns TEUs.  Workers lose confidence when AI outperforms them, or when environmental mandates reshape familiar roles.  Cognitive overload and identity drift are the new occupational hazards.  

Polyintelligence is necessary for survival in the Sixth Great Transition—but it is not free.  TEUs are the only currency that can pay for it.

If polyintelligence came with a warning label, it would read: “Combining human, machine, and ecological intelligences will cause fatigue, disruption, and identity shock.  Use TEUs responsibly.”

Energy Meets Tempo

Boyd taught that tempo wins battles; TEUs remind us that stamina decides who finishes the war.  CROME gives leaders the levers to sustain that stamina.  The hidden side of transformation is not technology or strategy—it is energy.  The future belongs to those who can balance tempo with Transformational Energy, keeping the music alive when others fall silent.

Digital systems now move at speeds our biology cannot match.  My next article in this series explores what happens when machines take the lead—and why leaders must design organizations that can operate beyond human tempo without exhausting the human spirit.

*I use AI in all my work.

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Futurist, and Lecturer at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on X @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Vices and Virtues that Impact Foresight, #14

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How many of us have tried to convince another about the merits of an argument using data, facts, science, evidence and logic, only to make no progress at all.  The biases and lenses we all use to filter information changes our reality and view of the future as the following examples demonstrate.

On a frozen January afternoon in 1982, Air Florida Flight 90 sat on the runway at Washington National Airport. Snow drifted across the tarmac, visibility was low, and ice clung to the wings and engine inlets. Inside the cockpit, Captain Larry Wheaton studied the power readings with a growing sense of unease. “That doesn’t look right, does it?” he said softly—less a warning than a quiet appeal.

His first officer sensed the danger too. The instruments looked wrong. The engines felt slow. Nearby aircraft reported dangerous levels of ice. Yet both men excused their concerns, hoping the other would carry the burden of truth. Their unease grew, but neither spoke with the clarity reality demanded. Weak signals accumulated around them like snow flakes.

Moments later, Flight 90 lifted off with too little thrust. The engines stalled almost instantly, strangled by ice. The aircraft plunged into the Potomac River, killing seventy-eight people.

There was no mechanical failure.

The system did not break.

The humans did.

This cockpit was not simply a tragedy—it was a perfect illustration of moral misalignment: the quiet internal distortions that disable clear perception, distort orientation, and prevent leaders from acting on reality as it actually is. The pilots were not incompetent or malicious. They were human beings under emotional pressure, swept along by subtle vices—fear, deference, denial, avoidance, ego sensitivity. Each distortion was small. Together they made catastrophe inevitable.

Most systems do not crash into icy rivers; they drift, little by little, until the drift becomes distance. And always, misalignment destroys foresight long before it destroys anything else. Every inflection point begins with weak signals. Every future arrives with early warnings. But leaders, teams and organizations who are internally misaligned cannot adequately perceive them.

You cannot anticipate what you refuse to perceive. Let me repeat this point, “You cannot anticipate what you refuse to perceive.” Weak signals register only in systems that are aligned enough—internally clear enough—to let discomfort become information that is acted upon. 

Flight 90 was surrounded by signals: ice on the wings, abnormal power readings, sluggish acceleration, warnings from other pilots. But misalignment muffled those cues until they were no longer signals—only noise.

When leaders and organizations lose alignment, they lose their future.

Practicing & Navigating the Future, #13

Imagine being assigned to repair a complex machine without proper instructions. You know it should function, but you’re not sure whether the leftover screws, washers and roll of red wire are optional or the reason it doesn’t turn on. That’s what leading without foresight feels like.

Frank Diana, principal futurist at Tata Consultancy Services, argues foresight is the instruction manual for navigating the future’s chaos. Only his manual doesn’t give you a single design—it lays out multiple possibilities.

Frank Diana’s Map of the Future

Diana’s core idea is simple: stop predicting one future and start preparing for many different possibilities. He calls the method possibility chains. Picture them as dominoes. One disruption triggers another, then another. Generative AI enters the office, hiring patterns shift, training budgets move, spans of control widen, real estate needs shrink, tax bases wobble, regulations evolve. Each trigger is a link in a chain, and together they form a picture of how the future might branch.

This is what makes Diana distinct. He isn’t interested in trend lists that sit in slide decks; he’s interested in how trends connect, converge, multiply and amplify. Foresight isn’t prophecy; it’s practice. Leaders rehearse possible branches the way pilots run simulators—so when turbulence comes, muscle memory kicks in.

The Great Energy Rethink with Expert David Carlin

In this episode of FOBtv, we tackle one of the most urgent questions of our time: Can the world grow richer without cooking the planet? Our guest, David Carlin, argues that we’re framing the climate challenge all wrong. The real goal isn’t to use less energy—it’s to use cleaner energy, and that shift in mindset radically reshapes how we think about growth, development, and the future of global prosperity.

Take a deep dive into the report: https://lnkd.in/ezQC8abU

Subscribe to Watch: https://lnkd.in/eMZitkhz 

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/dKrmUPmS

*I use AI in all my work.

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Futurist, and Lecturer at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on X @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Loops, Truth, and Tempo: The Strategic Genius of John Boyd, #12

John Boyd never got queasy on a carnival ride. He loved loops. He flew them, he studied them, and eventually he turned them into one of the most powerful strategic tools of the modern age. In the cockpit, loops were his edge—rolling, climbing, and diving until he was behind his opponent in forty seconds or less. Later, in briefing rooms filled with generals and CEOs, loops became his metaphor for how to outthink, outmaneuver, and outlast any rival.

Boyd was a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, but calling him that undersells him. He was part pilot, part mathematician, part philosopher, and part troublemaker. He asked questions nobody wanted asked, and once he started, he wouldn’t stop until you saw the world differently.

The 40-Second Rule and Energy–Maneuverability Theory

Boyd’s legend began in the cockpit. They called him “40-Second Boyd.” His standing bet was simple: start in any position, and within forty seconds he would maneuver behind you for the kill shot. Nobody could beat him. What made him unbeatable wasn’t just raw reflexes—it was science. Boyd created the Energy–Maneuverability Theory, which quantified aircraft performance in terms of energy gained or lost during combat. Suddenly, dogfights weren’t just instinct—they were math. Pilots who flew by feel now faced someone who could calculate their every move in joules of energy. That gave Boyd an unbeatable edge and reshaped how aircraft were designed and flown.

The Birth of OODA in the Sky

To understand why Boyd created the OODA loop, you need to imagine the cockpit of a fighter jet in the middle of a dogfight. The airframe is rattling under g-forces that press your body into the seat like a lead blanket. Your vision tunnels. Blood drains from your brain. Every turn, climb, and dive squeezes your body until you fight to stay conscious. At the same time, you are calculating airspeed, altitude, fuel, weapons, enemy position, and the physics of the sky. One hesitation—one wrong assumption—and you are dead.

Boyd thrived in this environment. He constantly observed what the enemy was doing, oriented himself in relation to the changing situation, decided on the best maneuver, and acted—all before the other pilot could finish their thought. In aerial combat, that tiny advantage in loops meant life or death.

Fighter pilots in dogfights have to track dozens of variables at once: the position of the sun blinding the canopy, the enemy’s angle of attack, the feel of the jet shuddering near a stall, the shrinking margin of fuel, the blur of tracers arcing past. Every second, the environment changes. Every second, new data floods in. The pilot who loops through that chaos faster seizes the initiative and forces the other to react on stale information. That is the heart of OODA—speed to truth.