You Are Already Being Disrupted

Here is a statement that Cameron Hedrick, CLO at Citi, does not say gently: if you don’t know it yet, you are in an event right now where you are being disrupted without your permission.

AI. Geopolitical shifts. Structural changes to how organisations are built and how work gets done. The disruption is not coming. It is already here. The question is not whether you will be affected. It is whether you will be the one doing the disrupting — or the one being disrupted.

Cameron is direct about the stakes: “There are two ways you’ll be disrupted. Either you’ll disrupt yourself proactively, or something else will come and disrupt it for you. And if you’re the one who waits for somebody else to do it to you, you’re normally going to be on the losing end of that transaction.”

Why Entrepreneurial Thinking Is the Right Frame

In a conversation with IKN CEO Sarah Clarke, Cameron and Sarah both landed on the same answer independently: the mindset most suited to navigating this moment is an entrepreneurial one. Not because everyone needs to start a company, but because the cognitive habits of entrepreneurship are precisely the ones that the AI era demands.

What does thinking like an entrepreneur actually involve?

Systems thinking. Entrepreneurs don’t optimise individual pieces in isolation. They ask how this plus this plus this equals something new. They think about connections, dependencies, and second-order effects. This is exactly the kind of thinking that becomes more valuable as AI handles more of the linear, deep, domain-specific work.

Long time horizons. Entrepreneurs naturally think across multiple timeframes simultaneously — what does this mean in one month, six months, three years? This is not how most employees are trained to think, but it is how wisdom develops. And it is precisely the kind of thinking that organisations will need more of.

Accountability for outcomes. In a world where AI can produce the work, the human’s value increasingly lies in owning the outcome — not just the task. Entrepreneurs are inherently accountable in this way. It is a different relationship with work, and a more powerful one.

Scrappiness and automation-seeking. Entrepreneurs by definition look for ways to do more with less. They are always asking: what can I automate? What can I eliminate? What can I delegate so I can move to the next thing? This is not laziness. It is the orientation that AI most rewards.

The Uncomfortable Reality of Self-Disruption

Sarah Clarke is candid in the conversation about what proactive disruption actually feels like from the inside. It is lonely. It is frightening. There is a powerful pull toward the comfort of the familiar — back into the weeds, back into the manual tasks, back into the things you already know how to do well.

“It is so uncomfortable. It’s so vulnerable. You feel so exposed when you’re in a space that hasn’t been clearly defined,” she reflects.

Cameron does not minimise this. He names it directly: loneliness, fear, self-doubt — these are the real experiences of anyone who is actively disrupting their own role. But his perspective is clear: those experiences are preferable to the alternative. “I would choose that over loss of agency.”

The ambiguity is already there. The question is whether you are moving toward it deliberately or waiting for it to arrive on someone else’s terms.

What Proactive Disruption Looks Like in Practice

This is not abstract advice. Here are three concrete things leaders can do right now to begin disrupting themselves:

Re-architect your job with AI. Take your current role and map the tasks within it. Which ones could be done by AI, or substantially assisted by it? Now ask: if those tasks were handled, what would I do with that capacity? What is the higher-order version of my job that becomes possible? Start moving toward that version now.

Create conditions that require you to face ambiguity. This is Cameron’s specific prescription. Do not wait for the ambiguity to arrive. Build situations where you have to navigate it. Volunteer for projects without clear briefs. Explore a new domain. Try an AI tool you’ve been avoiding. The goal is to build tolerance for not-knowing — which is a skill, and one that can be practiced.

Think about what you are building, not just what you are doing. The entrepreneurial frame asks: what am I trying to create here? Not just what task am I completing, but what is the story? What is the output of my judgment and discernment, as opposed to the output of my execution? Shifting from the second question to the first is one of the most important reorientations available to anyone navigating this moment.

On What Remains Durable

Cameron closes the conversation with a thought that is worth holding onto. In the midst of all this disruption and change, some things will not change. As long as humans exist, there is a specialness to us that machines do not share — the capacity to feel pain, to love or not love someone back, to hold perspective that spans multiple disciplines and time horizons simultaneously.

These are not soft skills. They are the hardest skills. And they are the ones that are most worth doubling down on.

Disrupt yourself. Build the things machines cannot build. And keep developing the parts of you that no model will ever replicate.