On a recent episode of the Banking Transformed podcast, host Jim Marous spoke with Brian Solis, head of digital innovation at ServiceNow and author of the new book “Mindshift,” about how leaders can navigate uncertainty and drive meaningful innovation in an era of unprecedented change.
Q: Can you discuss the personal and business transformation happening right now?
Brian Solis: This new book is my first in five years, and it is my first book that gets into the heart of my work throughout my career, which is studying trends. I identify trends, study them, and rank them as to which are longer, shorter-term trends and which are viable at all.
What moves into a separate area for later tracking, and then how to scenario plan around them so that you’re not reacting to them when they happen, that you’re proactively future-proofing your organization towards them, and if they don’t pan out, then it’s better than not being ready but the exercise itself, it’s a discipline.
Q: How has AI’s evolution changed the way we need to think about innovation?
Solis: Each one of these, in their own right, should have been transformative for banking or for any business. But instead, what we did and what we’re doing right now with ChatGPT and generative AI in general is we are bringing it into business as usual.
We are scaling yesterday’s mindsets and yesterday’s processes and yesterday’s products and services toward tomorrow, much in the same way we’ve done going all the way back to the industrial revolution and there’s nothing wrong with that, but you have to balance it with disrupting yourself as well.
Because if you’re not willing to give yourself the gift of disruption, someone else will. And it’s not a matter of if; it’s always a matter of when.
Finding Clarity in Uncertainty
Q: What strategies can executives use to achieve clarity in uncertain times?
Solis: Yes, there is a Donald Rumsfeld quote that I model in the book as a mental exercise for everyone. It starts like this: “The center is, I know what I know, the next realm is, I know what I don’t know,” and that is typically where we tend to operate.
I know what I know, my experiences, my successes, my failures, lessons learned, and I know what I don’t know. I know what I don’t know is sort of that guardrail to protect us from uncertainty because the outer realm is, I don’t know what I don’t know, and we tend not to play there.
Q: How do you balance what you know with what you don’t know?
Solis: Once you start exploring this realm of uncertainty, you start to find answers, and you can layer those answers, you can make it as overwhelming as you want or as simple as you want. But the point is, is to take new steps in these new directions, to find those answers, to experiment, to pilot whatever, anything that people do in innovation, this is not new to them.
But once you start exploring these questions and answers, what you’re doing is you’re making it tangible and what you’re doing is subconsciously and consciously, you’re finding clarity in uncertainty. You are actually finding ways to move in new directions in the unknown.
Leveraging AI for Leadership Growth
Q: How can leaders use generative AI to improve their learning process?
Solis: There’s a quote by Vinod Khosla, who’s one of the most prolific and successful venture capitalists of all time based in Silicon Valley. He recently posted on X that businesses have no idea what’s about to hit them and went on to continue that the rules of engagement are going to change here in the short-term and that he feels that only 2 to 300 people in the entire world understand what’s about to happen.
So, let’s go back to Vinod’s words. Businesses don’t understand what’s about to hit them as the rules of engagement change. So, when we stop as a leader, and this is where our mind shift begins, you have to be self-aware enough that you don’t know what it means and then you have to be curious to want to know what it means.
Q: What’s different about the way successful leaders approach AI?
Solis: Most people will just hear it and say: “Okay, let’s go. What do we need to do with gen AI? Instead, what I’m doing is I’m asking myself, “What does he mean by that?” And started to do research on what rules of engagement will change and how they will change.
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Making the Mindshift
Q: Can you share examples of successful mindset transformation?
Solis: In the book I talk about Steve Jobs. You can’t come from Silicon Valley and not reference Steve Jobs, but I think this story would surprise a lot of people. I tell the story of how Steve Jobs almost killed the iPhone in 2004 before it even became the iPhone and how his team changed his mind.
Another one who’s not in the book but I’m a personal fan of his — I used to actually work with him back in the early days of Airbnb — is Brian Chesky. Brian has undergone constant metamorphosis throughout our time. As a leader and co-founder of Airbnb, he’s gone through several. Airbnb has shifted, pivoted, and evolved multiple times.
Q: How do organizations overcome resistance to fundamental change?
Solis: A mind shift is a mindset overhaul. It’s recognizing that in order to get there, you have to start with humility and self-awareness, and then start to unlock all of these skills that were actually going to help us be better with AI, like curiosity, imagination, experimentation, all of the pillars of innovation itself.
The Role of Customer Behavior Shifts
Q: How are consumer behaviors changing the way businesses need to think?
Solis: I wrote a series for Worth magazine recently on the first one outlining what’s called the introvert economy and how COVID has shifted consumer values, and banking is right in that target zone and how people are thinking about money, how people are thinking about value, how people are thinking about long and how they’re not thinking about long term plans.
I wrote a second piece as a follow-on to build on it: If I were in any services industry, I would look at the convergence of how this market shift is happening. So, it’s not just the consumer; it’s just overall business and consumer markets, how the introvert economy is shaping up as affected by the attention economy and then as affected by the AI economy.
Q: How can regulated industries embrace innovation while maintaining compliance?
Solis: In any regulated industry, you will be confronted with every reason and excuse why we can’t do what I’m about to say. But that’s exactly why you need to do it. If you are in any services industry, your customer is not the regulator.
Your customer could be a business, an entity, a consumer, or whatever it is. Those things are in constant perpetual shifts, and you can use AI to help you figure out what those shifts are, but either way, you have to pay attention to them.
And I don’t mean things just like Web3 or Blockchain. Of course, those are factors, but those are things that you would use to achieve an outcome that matches where this is going, and we don’t spend enough time; this is the scenario planning, I do. This is where I became a digital anthropologist by understanding behaviors so that I could reverse engineer them to define strategies for those things.
The Future of Decision Making
Q: What significant changes do you see on the near horizon?
Solis: The biggest one that I recently wrote about was the future of decision-making in an era of AI. What happens in a world where Google search, for example, no longer serves the mindset of someone who’s busy and moving fast, the attention economy, who’s focused on their core values and what they need, the introvert economy, and who is also empowered to find information because they know how to prompt better?
Q: How should organizations prepare for these shifts?
Solis: I think it’s about at least recognizing that it’s okay to explore that you don’t know what you don’t know, and our natural response is to just say F that or let fear take over. And I think the secret I learned along the way, still learning to be honest, is there’s this binary relationship between fear and courage.
Like I can only step into the unknown because I’m going to be brave and courageous heroic but in reality, they exist together. You should have fear or at least some sense of awareness while you can also be courageous moving in this new direction. I think it’s a big personal way as a human being that I learned to start that it’s okay to not have the answers, it’s okay to feel fear and it’s okay to fail.
For a longer version of this conversation, listen to “MindShift: Unlocking Innovation and Humanity in the Age of AI”, a podcast with Jim Marous, available here. This Q&A has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Justin Estes is an award-winning writer, strategist, and financial marketing expert with expertise in banking, investments, and fintech. His clients include the NYSE, Franklin Templeton, Credit Karma, Citi and, UBS, and his work has appeared in Forbes, Barrons and ThinkAdvisor as well as The Financial Brand.