- Wed, 5 August 2026
Global Leadership Voice, Adjunct Professor, MIT Mentor
New York, United States
In today’s landscape, hesitation is more dangerous than change itself because standing still compounds risk. Hack Future Lab founder and best-selling author Terence Mauri argues that leaders underestimate the cost of inaction and overestimate the cost of action. In a world where change is exponential, not linear, doing nothing isn’t a neutral choice — it’s an accelerating liability. Each moment of hesitation gives faster, bolder competitors more space to learn, adapt, and lead. In that sense, change isn’t the actual threat — stagnation is.
Thinking is no longer about optimizing in a predictable world. It’s about thinking beyond the obvious and seeing what others don’t see with a frontier mindset of foresight, courage, and agility. The economy is rewarding the frontier mindset like never before, while the rest struggle to keep pace. Take the story of the German retailer Lidl. Selling bread, butter, and other staples at cut-throat prices has made its parent company, the Schwarz Group, one of the world’s top five retailers by revenue. When Lidl had its own cloud up and running, it soon discovered that other businesses were asking themselves the same questions about whether they wanted to use the biggest cloud services based in the US and China. But what if change and uncertainty are not just risks to avoid but opportunities to seize?
As a 100-year-old conservative and profitable company, it didn’t need to rethink its business, but some of its directors spotted an opportunity to grow the business by putting a frontier mindset to work. As longer-term sustained success becomes harder and rarer, the risk of organizations or individuals being blindsided by complacency increases. They asked, “What if we could offer cybersecurity and cloud services to other industries?” It was a question that provoked assumptions more than it pleased, but the board’s first reaction was, unsurprisingly, muted. “We are a highly profitable retail company. We are not a cloud or cybersecurity firm. That’s not our business.” The frontier mindset learns not by standing still, but by thinking differently, and asking the questions that aren’t being asked.
Over the following months, the conversation about the rise of digital sovereignty continued, ultimately leading Lidl to make a strategic bet: it decided to go against the norm and launch a cloud services business. Today, its IT unit, Schwarz Digits — which became a standalone operating division in 2023 — has signed up clients including Germany’s biggest software group SAP, the country’s most successful football club Bayern Munich, and the port of Hamburg. Last year, the unit generated €1.9bn in annual sales, and it already employs 7,500 staff. What began as an internal effort to modernize and secure Lidl’s sprawling IT infrastructure has evolved into a full-scale technology business on track to become one of the fastest-growing standalone technology businesses. Lid’s story shows how the frontier mindset dares to think what others miss, and avoids the complacency mindset, which is the assumption that the current success model is a low risk bet until it isn’t, at which time it is too late to do anything. Rather than defending what had served them well, Lidl pivoted around where technology was heading and emerged stronger and more profitable than ever before.
The frontier mindset asserts that as machines get better at being machines, humans must get better at being humans, and that means practicing the art of the impossible in our daily lives: Belief in possibility, problem solving, embracing risk and change, and boundless thinking, which is removing limitations. Speaking at the Oslo Business Forum last autumn, a very well-dressed man approached me after my talk and said, “Great speech, in my industry we need to adapt, we need to evolve and take risks to stay relevant. If we don’t act boldly and learn at the speed of our clients, we become history,” I replied. “Thank you. Which industry are you in?” He looked at me and smiled. “I’m a funeral director.” My first reaction was paranoia. Was I part of a Netflix Black Mirror film? After my surprise, we spoke for 20 minutes about how the $30 billion-a-year US funeral industry is evolving, from live streaming and space burials to eco-friendly and digital memorials.
He said: “Even a traditional and risk-averse industry such as funeral care must think bolder to stay ahead of change. Is that scary? Yes. Is that exciting? Yes! What keeps me awake at night is the question, are we leading for yesterday or tomorrow’s world?” As we said our goodbyes, I felt nothing but respect for the funeral director because he had embraced the frontier mindset and was already reaping the rewards with faster growth and happier clients.
Most leaders are trapped between two risky zones when it comes to navigating uncertainty – the panic mindset (urgency high, confidence low) and the complacency mindset (confidence high, urgency low) – rather than the frontier mindset. Hack Future Lab’s research shows that only 87% of people believe they lack the frontier mindsets, instincts, and leadership to meet this moment with courage. Adobe’s approach to its competitor, Figma, is another example of what happens when an established leader gets trapped in a complacency mindset. For years, Adobe dominated the creative software market with powerful but complex tools like Photoshop and Illustrator, optimized for professionals in a desktop-first era. Figma entered with a frontier mindset — one rooted in experimentation, collaboration, and risk-taking. By making design cloud-based, real-time, and social, Figma turned what had been a solitary process into a collective one. Where Adobe focused on protecting its legacy products, Figma relentlessly iterated in public, co-creating with its community and learning faster than Adobe could adapt. The result is that Adobe now finds itself disrupted not by technology alone, but by a frontier mindset — one that values momentum over perfection, curiosity over conformity, and growth over inertia.
The future belongs to those who can embrace the frontier mindset: navigate paradox, improvise under pressure, and create coherence from confusion. Think of a doctor weighing empathy against efficiency; a climate scientist balancing realism with hope; a commander deciding whether to trust data or instinct in a fog of conflict. These are not technical puzzles. They are human paradoxes that require agnostic thinkers, empathy, and imagination. Yet our institutions and businesses were not built for the frontier mindset. They were built for predictability, certainty, and avoiding risk, even when taking a risk is less risky than standing still.
Each technological era has demanded its own kind of mindset. The industrial age prized conformity. The information age prized knowledge. The AI age will prize those who can lead from the unknown — the ability to achieve clarity from complexity, see around corners, and go where others haven’t gone before.
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