Survival Skills 2025

Knowing how to survive in the heat of the desert, does not help much in the darkness and cold of wintertime in Alaska.  Likewise, having the skills to operate in an environment running on 1970 business processes and practices does not offer much for a business operating in 2025.

New graduates today will be entering a world that is a completely different place than we faced decades ago.  Their skills will need to be relevant for today and tomorrow.  They will need to understand, and skillfully utilize intelligent digital platforms, intelligent tools, intelligent cobots (digital agent, partners and coworkers), and how to interact with intelligences of all kinds in our emerging polyintelligent world.

I fear though we will miss our mark.  Today, we check our phones between 72-100 times a day, spend many hours a day using our phones, but nothing in our schools teach us how to use our smartphones optimally, strategically or skillfully. We focus on banning them from schools, not because they lack utility, but because we use them wrongly and destructively.

Our world uses smartphones, but we don't teach them in school.  Our systems and processes use smartphones, but we don't educate ourselves, or our kids on how to use them effectively, optimally or positively.

Now comes a world where artificial intelligence will be inside everything.  We will depend on AI to support us in all of our endeavors.  Will we treat AI as another smartphone - a toy, hobby or uninvited guest to be banned from our schools, or will we recognize its utility and build a deep understanding of it into our educational curriculum so we can amplify and optimize that which is positive, and manage and diminish that which will cause us trouble?  

*I use AI in all my work.

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Kevin Benedict

Futurist, Lecturer and Humorist at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

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***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.

When Time Became Geography, #5

The world’s most powerful weapon in the 18th century wasn’t a cannon, a fleet, or a fortress. It was a clock. Not the kind that told you when to put the kettle on — the kind that decided whether your king’s treasure ships arrived in port or rested on the sea bed. A carpenter with a stopwatch ended up doing what navies and kings could not: he made the oceans predictable.

Clocks don’t usually win empires. But then again, most clocks don’t redraw the map of the world – on time.

The Scilly Naval Disaster: Longitude's Bloody Lesson

In October 1707, Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell, one of Britain’s most celebrated naval commanders, was sailing home from Gibraltar at the head of a great fleet. The journey had been brutal: storms, poor visibility, overcast skies that blotted out the stars. Latitude — north and south — they could measure. Longitude — east and west — they guessed. And guesswork at sea is gambling with death.

As the fleet approached England, the officers believed they were safely in the English Channel. In reality, they were dozens of miles off course, bearing straight for the Isles of Scilly — a rocky graveyard southwest of Cornwall.

On the night of October 22, the catastrophe unfolded.

• HMS Association, Shovell’s flagship, struck the rocks off Gilstone Ledge and sank in minutes. All 1,400 men aboard drowned.

• HMS Eagle, HMS Romney, and HMS Firebrand also ran into the rocks. Hundreds more perished.

• Survivors described chaos: the sea boiling with wreckage, men clinging to timbers, cries vanishing into the roar of the waves.

In a single night, between 1,600–2,000 sailors died — not by cannon fire, but by navigational error.

The disaster was a national humiliation. Britain’s most advanced navy had been defeated by the complexity of geography. Insurance markets trembled, trade partners panicked, families from Portsmouth to Plymouth mourned. Admiral Shovell’s body was later found washed ashore.

The Scilly Disaster laid bare a cruel truth: latitude without longitude doesn’t get you where you want to go. Confidence on one axis meant nothing without accuracy on the other. This was the disaster that pushed Parliament, in 1714, to establish the Longitude Prize. The empire needed a solution, or the seas would keep collecting bodies.

Profitable and Sustainable Futures with TCS Expert Jayasree Kottapalli

In this episode, our guest is Jayasree Kottapalli, Head of Sustainable Solutions, Communications, Media and Information Services at TCS. In this conversation we learn how businesses can thrive at the intersection of profitability and sustainability. Jayasree shares her personal journey into sustainability, unpacks the forces motivating organizations to act now, and explores how breakthrough technologies—AI, digital twins, sensors, simulation, and modeling—are transforming sustainability strategy. 

Read the full report on sustainability here: https://lnkd.in/ezQC8abU

gies—AI, digital twins, sensors, simulation, and modeling—are transforming sustainability strategy. 

*I use AI in all my work.

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Kevin Benedict

Futurist, Lecturer and Humorist at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @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.

Polyintelligent Leadership, #4

When the ice cracks beneath you, you had better already know how to swim. The Sixth Great Transition is that cracking ice. Science, technology, society, economics, environment, geopolitics, and philosophy are all shifting at once—faster than most leadership playbooks can process.

In such an age, the leaders who survive—and the rare few who thrive—will not be unrehearsed. They will be practiced and polyintelligent.

What Polyintelligent Leadership Really Means

Polyintelligence is the braiding of three core intelligences into a single leadership operating system. Human intelligence provides judgment, ethics, empathy, and creativity. Machine intelligence delivers the speed, scale, AI, automation, and pattern recognition that humans alone cannot achieve. Ecological intelligence keeps the entire system honest, teaching us that every decision has ripples that extend into environments, ecosystems, cultures, and futures.

The polyintelligent leader doesn’t toggle between these streams as if flipping switches. They braid them into one strand of unified decision-making—fast when speed matters, deliberate when ethics or complexity demand it, and always aware of the wider system in which they operate.

The Leadership Shift

Author and military strategist, Robert Leonhard, reminds us that time is the dominant dimension of competition. Author Christian Brose shows us that compressing the chain between sensing and acting is decisive. Frank Diana warns us that multiple futures are always in play—and the leader’s task is to prepare for all of them.

Polyintelligent leadership is not about mastering each domain separately, but about standing at their intersection and conducting them as one.

The Responsible Revolution with TCS Expert Kiran Gupta

This episode of FOBtv, features podcast host Kevin Benedict, and guest Kiran Gupta, Global Head of Sustainability Services for TCS.  In this forward-thinking discussion we dive into the critical intersection of technology and ecological responsibility. We explore how cutting-edge technologies like AI, digital twins, and sensors can revolutionize ecological system management and enhance long-term sustainability planning.

TCS Digital Twindex Sustainability Report: https://tinyurl.com/3tha7p58 

*I use AI in all my work.

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Kevin Benedict

Futurist, Lecturer and Humorist at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @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.

The Future of Sustainability with TCS Futurist David Kish

 In this episode of FOBtv, our guest is TCS futurist and thought leader David Kish.  We dig deep into the "Future of Sustainability", and the concepts of regeneration, circular economies, coexistence, interdependencies and more. This episode introduces listeners to a new era where both the problems and solutions can be found in the convergence of domains such as science, technology, societal, geopolitical, economic, philosophical, and environmental.  This is the future of life on earth folks!  I learned a great deal.

GenAI: Getting Personal and Productive with Expert Ken Hubbell

In an era where every company is trying to navigate the complex world of generative AI, many leaders are still searching for the practical, day-to-day applications that truly move the needle. This is not another episode about the future potential of AI. This is a look at its practical present. Join us as we sit down with Ken Hubbell, a pioneering author and AI expert who has been at the forefront of the generative AI revolution since its early days. Ken pulls back the curtain on his career-long journey, sharing candid insights from his experiments, high-stakes projects, and the surprising ways he uses AI tools every day.

Why Polyintelligence Matters, #3

In April 2010, a volcano under Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull glacier erupted, releasing a vast ash cloud into European airspace. Within hours, 100,000 flights were grounded. Millions were stranded. Global supply chains faltered.

Some organizations froze, paralyzed by the unexpected. Others instantly rerouted cargo through sea and rail, shifted production across borders, and reallocated staff in real time. Same event, different outcomes. The difference? Some companies could sense across domains, interpret the signals, and respond before the chaos became catastrophe. That’s practiced polyintelligence in motion.

Polyintelligence: A Leadership Imperative

Polyintelligence isn’t just a clever buzzword or a luxury—it’s the new operating system for leadership in the Sixth Great Transition. It is the fused capacity to sense, decide, and act across three synergistic domains:

• Human Intelligence: Context, ethics, imagination, intuition. The ability to interpret complexity, weigh meaning, and lead with conscience.

• Machine Intelligence: Pattern recognition, automation, scale, simulation. The capacity to sift signal from noise and act at speed.

• Ecological Intelligence: Systems awareness, interdependence, constraint recognition. The wisdom to live within planetary limits and anticipate feedback loops.

Futurist Frank Diana once put it simply: “The future belongs to those who connect dots across domains before others even see them.” Polyintelligence is dot-connecting in a world of entangled systems, relentless acceleration, and high stake consequence.

Complexity, Optimism and the Sixth Great Transition, #2

“You can’t manage your way through a great transition with a spreadsheet.”

Yet that’s exactly what many leaders are trying to do—optimize their way through systemic collapse using 20th-century tools and yesterday’s assumptions. What we’re facing isn’t just disruption. It’s a full-blown operating system upgrade for civilization. And it requires a whole new kind of leadership.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, disoriented, and vaguely betrayed by the promises of progress, congratulations—you’re alive during a Great Transition. Not a blip. Not a market correction. A full-system transformation of how humans live, work, relate, think, and survive.

The last few times this happened, it gave us steam engines, global supply chains, electric lights, indoor plumbing, and middle-class dreams. This time, the outcome is still undecided.

For thousands of years, humanity has lived in the shadow of a wall. It was the wall of complexity—the place where our imagination outpaced our ability to calculate, predict, or control. We could see just high enough to glimpse possibilities, but not high enough to map them. Sailors hugged the shoreline because oceans were too complex to navigate. Doctors bled patients because the body’s mysteries remained opaque. Economies rose and collapsed because no one could model the system they were part of.

Even games reminded us of our limits. For millennia, the board game Go was considered unassailable by machines. Its possibilities may even outnumber the atoms in the universe. Human players mastered it not through brute force, but by intuition, creativity, and pattern recognition. Complexity was our fortress.

Then, in 2016, a machine climbed the wall. Google’s AlphaGo didn’t just defeat the best human Go player—it overwhelmed him by seeing thousands of futures in advance. Not by being cleverer, but by being able to contemplate what we could not. The wall of complexity cracked.

Polyintelligence and the Sixth Great Transition, #1

History follows you everywhere — it trails behind like an unshakable shadow, reminding you of debts, traditions, and unfinished business. The future, though, doesn’t wait outside. It kicks in your door, uninvited and unpredictable, carrying a mixed bag of opportunities and crises. Leaders don’t get to choose whether it shows up. The only choice is how prepared they are when it does. And if you want to see how intelligence survives such intrusions, don’t start in a boardroom. Start in an anthill, where survival depends not on hierarchy but on coherence, connection, and the ability to adapt together.

Ants don’t follow blueprints. No single ant knows how to build a ventilation shaft or coordinate a food convoy. But collectively, they do. One ant finds sugar, lays a trail, and thousands follow. They aren’t smart because they think; they’re smart because they’re connected. This is ecological intelligence in action: simple parts forming a coherent whole through optimized information flow. Every signal matters. Timing is everything.

Now jump to New York City in the 1990s. Crime was spiking. The subway system looked like a rolling mural of despair. The social fabric frayed. But instead of collapsing, the city pivoted. Not with brute force, but with a strategy. Police adopted CompStat, a software solution that enabled near real-time crime mapping across the city.