Dealing With Disruption: Experiment, Adapt, Thrive

• As schools figure out how to incorporate AI into the curriculum, there will be a “messy” middle period full of trial-and-error experimentation—and a lot of collaborative learning.
• To learn how to scan the future for upcoming disruptions, students can experiment with today’s edge technologies. They also can practice making predictions about current events and adjusting for new data.
• Business leaders will need to move from an either/or mindset to a both/and mindset as they rethink strategic choices and trade-offs.

 
Today’s business graduates will be entering a working world marked by constant and unpredictable change. “It’s important for business schools to help students recognize that it’s not a disruption they have to prepare for, it’s a series of disruptions,” says Scott Anthony, a clinical professor of business administration at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business in Hanover, New Hampshire.

For that reason, he says, one of the top skills business schools can teach is adaptability. “In a world of never-ending disruption, it’s one thing to spot it. It’s another thing to do something with it or about it. Students need to be able to find the opportunity that comes along with the threat so they can see what the potential possibilities are.”

Scott Anthony

Dealing with disruption will be the theme of Anthony’s presentation at AACSB’s 2025 Deans Conference, to be held February 3–5 in Las Vegas. It’s a topic he’s focused on for much of his career. He spent more than 20 years at Innosight, the consultancy founded by Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor who invented the term “disruptive innovation.” Anthony, who has twice been named to the Thinkers50 list, currently teaches courses on Leading Disruptive Change, Horizon Scanning, and AI and Decision-Making. His ninth book, coming out next fall from Harvard Business Review Press, will look at “epochal disruptions” of the business world.

Anthony recently talked to AACSB Insights about what disruptions are on the horizon, how business schools can prepare students for a chaotic work environment, and why he is optimistic about the future.

One of the biggest disruptors facing the world today is artificial intelligence (AI). It obviously is having a huge effect on business and society, but how do you expect it to impact education specifically?

AI is an incredible tool that can raise the ceiling for everybody, but it comes with risks and challenges. It’s very clear that when students are able to use AI to create 4,000-word essays of beautiful prose, we as educators have to think differently about how we’re assessing learning and how we’re having students go through the struggle of learning.

AI is one of the class of technologies that can be considered a line creator—there was a world before AI and there is a world after it. When you look at line creators, the middle is messy, and you never know exactly how things are going to play out.

During this middle period, there’s going to be a lot of trial-and-error experimentation, and that’s all right. What I’d wish for is collective learning about this experimentation. At Tuck, there’s essentially a community of practice that meets regularly so we learn about what’s working, what isn’t working, how different people are using AI to enrich the classroom experience, and what challenges they’re running into.

AI is one of the class of technologies that can be considered a line creator—there was a world before AI and there is a world after it.

There is a lot of active experimentation. For instance, one first-year required course has gone back to pen and paper tests where students fill in blue books. Many professors have returned to in-class exams. And there even have been some radical ideas. One senior faculty member holds 30-minute conversations with each student at the end of term. In a class of 65 people, that’s more than 30 hours spent directly assessing learning. Another teacher uses an AI-driven chatbot to simulate negotiations.

All this experimentation can be very exciting. Of course, AI can be daunting and scary as well, but I’m an optimist by nature.

Aside from AI, what developments do you see on the horizon that have the potential to be deeply disruptive to the world?

In my new book, I list 10 that I’m watching most closely. In alphabetical order, they are: additive manufacturing, AI, autonomous vehicles, cleantech, distributed ledger technology, drones, mixed reality, new food, robotics, and smart health.

There’s a lot going on—there always is, but it feels like there’s more going on now than ever before, and I think it feels that way because it’s true. Exponentially advancing technologies and the blurring lines between industries mean that what was once an isolated phenomenon now affects everybody in every industry and every pocket of the economy.

One very persistent lesson you learn when you study the past is that succeeding with disruptive change requires patient perseverance over long periods of time. According to Amara’s Law, we always overestimate the effects of technology in the short term and underestimate it in the long term. For instance, while ChatGPT is a relatively new product, AI itself traces back to a 1956 conference at Dartmouth that coined the term and started a lot of the research agenda. With disruptive technology, you always have a lot of development before you have the thing that seems to be an overnight sensation.

You teach a course on “scanning the horizon.” How can business leaders train themselves to watch for the major changes that could be coming?

One thing I teach in class is the line from futurist William Gibson: The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. You can get the weak signals of tomorrow by experiencing them today, by picking up edge technologies that have not yet hit the mainstream.

One of the key activities we do in class is called Report from the Future. I tell students to pick a technology that exists but isn’t mainstream and that they haven’t used before. Maybe they haven’t tried immersive reality or bought a nonfungible token or asked AI to generate a song. I tell them to play around with the technology for a little bit and then reflect on how they can see that technology emerging over the next decade.

You can get the weak signals of tomorrow by experiencing them today, by picking up edge technologies that have not yet hit the mainstream.

Whether I do this activity with MBA students or executives, they always say, “It was a lot different actually using the technology than just reading about it.” One student watched an e-sports tournament. He said, “I thought it was a joke until I actually watched it. It was amazing. It was captivating. It had all these high stakes. I learned things I didn’t anticipate.”

When people actively look for the weak signals and play around with them, they’re far better at being able to see and make sense of the future. They still don’t know what’s going to happen, but they’re at least getting more ready for it.

Disruption, by its nature, happens suddenly and often before organizations have all the pertinent information. How do you teach students to make good decisions even when they’re dealing with so many unknowns?

One way I do this is by having students participate in prediction markets. Researchers like Phil Tetlock have shown that the superforecasters—those who are really good at predicting the seemingly unforecastable—say, “No matter how uncertain I am, I’m going to make a call on something, and then I’m going to adjust that call as I get more data.”

So, I give students five or six different things they can choose from—everything from “Where is Taylor Swift’s ‘Tortured Poets Department’ going to be on the Top 100 list on a specific date in November?” to “Will another company join Amazon in having a full-scale return-to-office mandate by the end of the year?”

Then I have them go to the Good Judgment Project, where people make their own calls on these things, and have them pick something they disagree with. I have them make the argument for why they disagree. I will track these predictions and let them know who was right and who was wrong.

When people are publicly saying what they disagree with, there’s a little risk. That gets them engaged, and that’s how they learn.

The point isn’t to find out who’s better at this. It’s to get people in the practice of saying, “In a world of uncertainty, I’m going to make a specific prediction. I’m going to monitor that prediction, and I’m going to adjust it as new data comes in.”

But it’s also fun. When people are in a situation where they’re publicly saying what they disagree with, there’s a little risk. It’s not bad risk, it’s not break-your-arm risk, but there are stakes. That gets people engaged, and that’s how they learn.

To be able to teach about the challenges and possibilities of disruption, business faculty must be well-grounded in the topic themselves. How can school administrators ensure that their faculty have the necessary knowledge?

I think one thing that can help is bringing in people from outside the traditional mold. Our dean at Tuck, Matthew Slaughter, does a very good job of celebrating all the different minds that make up the faculty, ranging from traditional scholars to people with more of a practitioner background. On complex topics, there are always benefits to bringing together people with different perspectives.

Finally, when you speak at AACSB’s Deans Conference, what are the most important points you hope attendees will take away from your presentation?

The meta message is that we’re in a world where we’re thinking about the future and we’re thinking about strategy. Historically, the essence of strategy has been about choices and trade-offs. We can either do this or do that.

But I’m a believer in the power of the paradox mindset. In a quickly changing world, we have to go from an either/or mindset to a both/and mindset where we see the combinatorial possibilities that exist when we rethink things. That’s critically important for our institutions, our scholarship, and our students.

I’ll often start a presentation by talking about the circumstances we’re in now, which are very foggy. There’s a lack of clarity and we can’t see where we’re going. But even though there’s fog around us, we have to speed up.

After starting the presentation with one meteorological phenomenon, I end with another. I show a picture of a rainbow. I say, “We’re facing these tensions, choices, dilemmas, and trade-offs. But sometimes these things come together to create a thing of beauty. Just like sun and rain come together to create a rainbow. So, let’s look for more rainbows.”