The Top 5 Tomorrowist Insights of 2024

Heading into 2025, technological advancements and economic forces will require leaders to readily adapt and proactively reassess their operations at a never-before-seen pace.  

To help you prepare for these changes in the new year and beyond, here’s a look back at five compelling conversations and their key takeaways from the SHRM Tomorrowist podcast this year.

AI Adoption Is Accelerating, so Leadership Must Remain Agile  

Pointing to the success of 21st-century “geek” organizations such as Netflix and SpaceX, Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, identified the behaviors that will set successful, high-growth organizations apart in the AI era.  

McAfee emphasized that maintaining outdated approaches to operations and planning will cause organizations to fall behind the competition. True industry disruptors, he said, will embrace key behaviors that drive agility and innovation, namely the rejection of hierarchical decision-making, the prioritization of data-driven processes, and the development of a culture of experimentation.  

McAfee also explained the pitfalls of prioritizing the opinions of the most senior, highest-paid people—or HIPPOs—in strategic planning. Rather than regarding the intuition of senior leadership as the final verdict, he believes these opinions should serve as starting points for investment decisions. Successful organizations will prioritize data-driven decision-making and continue to measure, experiment, debate, and collect data to determine the best course of action and pivot if necessary.  

Traditional bureaucratic operations—such as an overemphasis on planning—only hinder organizational agility. “It’s because they’re running everything through committees and there are all kinds of approval loops,” McAfee said. Instead, successful leaders should “learn, get feedback, iterate, and gather evidence as you go,” he said, adding that doing so will allow organizations to “move so much more quickly than you do with these big-integration, collaboration-heavy approaches to running big projects.”

Watch or listen to the episode: Embracing Agility in the AI Era with Andrew McAfee

Strategic AI Implementation and Usage Will Be Critical  

To stay ahead of the curve, leaders must maintain an understanding of the latest AI models and the risks of AI use within their organizations. Martin Keen, IBM master inventor and host of IBM Technology’s YouTube channel on AI, warns that shadow AI, or employees’ use of AI tools without official sanction from their companies, can lead to significant data security and governance issues.  

“If I am an employee of a company using, let’s say ChatGPT, and I’m not supposed to be, I could potentially be sharing documents that are confidential within the company, and now they’re part of the training dataset for the next version of ChatGPT,” Keen warned. To ensure that their organizations’ data is handled securely, leaders should establish governance models that regulate AI use and structure processes to align with organizational priorities.  

Keen explained that powerful “frontier” models such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini may require significant computational resources and regulation, while “on-prem” (on-premises) models can be more directly controlled. For organizations looking to balance capability and security, Keen suggests using in-house models for critical operations while allowing regulated use of frontier models for less-sensitive tasks.  

With both frontier and on-prem models, Keen believes that clarity in communication and prompt engineering, the ability to craft precise and effective prompts for AI, will be the best way to harness AI’s full potential. “The clearer we can be about what we want as the output, the better output we’ll get,” he said.

Keen believes that prompt engineering can also be helpful in reducing hallucinations—a phenomenon in which AI models generate incorrect or nonsensical outputs. While AI hallucinations will likely never go away, he explained that “we always need to set the context, and we can use things like custom instructions to really define how the AI should go about looking up its information.”

Watch or listen to the episode: Understanding AI in the Future of Executive Leadership with Martin Keen

Declining Employee Productivity Is a Leadership Problem 

While leaders often blame declining employee productivity on the distractions of smartphones and other technologies, the real culprits are frequently poor scheduling, inadequate pay, and lack of empowerment—factors that heighten stress and undermine focus and autonomy.

“It’s a system problem, and sometimes leaders might miss that it’s a system problem,” said Zeynep Ton, MIT Sloan professor and author of The Case for Good Jobs (Harvard Business Review Press, 2023) and founder of the Good Jobs Institute. Ton acknowledged that rethinking an entire work system may seem overwhelming for leaders. However, she argued that the real risk for employers lies in avoiding change and adhering to outdated management practices.

Declines in productivity impact both customer experience and employee turnover—which Ton said could account for up to 40% of payroll costs. While some companies fail to quantify upfront costs of turnover, such as hiring and training, Ton said that organizations almost never account for greater, indirect costs such as operational inefficiencies and lost sales. While these factors are rarely connected back to leadership decisions, Ton believes that maintaining operational efficiency will require leaders to empower employees through systematic change.  

Offering an example of effective leadership, she explored how a client saw dramatic increases in employee engagement and productivity by simply empowering those on the front lines to better solve customer problems. Not only was customer experience enhanced and the bottom line improved, but employees in turn experienced less frustration and greater job satisfaction. “System change is not as risky as it looks,” Ton said. “You don’t have to change the whole system all at once.”

Watch or listen to the episode: How to Transform Employee Productivity with Zeynep Ton

Political Polarization Threatens Business Continuity

Political polarization in the U.S. reached a year-end high in the fourth quarter of 2024, and Americans’ inability to communicate across party lines continues to make it harder to tackle significant issues. Arthur Brooks, professor at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School, believes the U.S. is at a critical juncture—and leaders must act now to protect their organizations and their employees.  “Until there’s greater unity across differences, we can’t solve any problems,” he warned—and this same message rings true for the workplace.  

To keep political polarization from infiltrating workplaces and disrupting a business’s ability to function effectively, Brooks argues that leaders need to take a firm stance and refuse to take political sides. While healthy disagreement about work-related topics is essential, bringing divisive political arguments into the workplace can make employees feel isolated or disengaged, and can harm morale.

“There’s 3% of your workforce that’s blowing up your Slack channel, saying that you’re an irresponsible citizen in a bad company unless you make a statement,” Brooks said, urging leaders to stand up to “minoritarian bullies.” “I’m telling you, when you do stand up to the 3% ... your employees are going to cheer for you.”

Brooks also advised leaders to promote civility and foster cohesion within teams to support organizational productivity. He believes that encouraging respectful disagreement will train employees in civil discourse, fostering a culture of civility within organizations and inspiring a broader cultural change.

Watch or listen to the episode: Political Polarization in the Workplace with Arthur Brooks 

Fostering Civility in Society Starts in the Workplace

Echoing Brooks’ message, CNN’s Van Jones believes there’s a need for leadership, especially within organizations, to reverse the growing incivility in U.S. culture. Jones views the workplace as one of the only places where people from diverse backgrounds interact regularly. Consequently, he argues that executives will play a monumental role in addressing the country’s incivility crisis.

“If you have civility at work, the country can work. If you don’t have civility at work, the country won’t work,” said Jones. He urged leaders to communicate with empathy and understanding to set an example for employees. However, Jones emphasized that civility is about learning how to have difficult conversations and respectfully disagree—rather than simply being agreeable.  

“I don’t want you to be safe psychologically. I want you to be strong psychologically,” said Jones. Rather than demanding safe spaces, he said, young people must build psychological and emotional strength by being exposed to challenging topics. “You get strong by being challenged,” Jones explained, noting that navigating difficult conversations furthers professional development by building resilience and critical thinking skills. By encouraging civil discourse, leaders can demonstrate support for all employees while encouraging productivity in both the workplace and society. “Civility is not optional. Civility is key to civilization,” Jones concluded.  

Watch or listen to the episode: Civility in the Workplace with Van Jones  

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