Explore every episode of the podcast The Mindset Economy

After five years and hundreds of episodes of The Evolving Leader, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender are excited to announce a bold new chapter. In a world that is rapidly being reshaped by AI, climate change and shifting social, political and economic realities, the need for a new conversation is clear.

The Mindset Economy explores how leaders can thrive in a world where machines can think. The core premise of The Mindset Economy podcast is understanding the forces transforming work and society, and equipping yourself with the mindsets needed to navigate and shape the future.

EPISODE ONE LANDS THURSDAY 15TH JANUARY 2026. 

Launching on Thursday 15th January 2026, The Mindset Economy Podcast explores a profound shift in how value is created in an automated world.

As we move beyond the industrial, service, and knowledge economies, a new multi-trillion-dollar era is emerging. One where beliefs, resilience, and adaptability are no longer background traits, but the currency that shapes success.

Hosted by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender, the podcast examines why mindset, the interplay of how we feel, think, and see, will increasingly determine our economic prospects, our wellbeing, and our ability to navigate uncertainty.

Subscribe on your favourite platform and join the conversation about how humans can not just survive, but thrive, in the mindset economy.

For more than a century, humans have tried to mimic machines. First with our bodies, then with our minds. It hasn't served us well.

Mithu Storoni, neuroscientist and author of the Business Book of the Year 2025, wants to change the way leaders think about productivity. Not by doing more, but by understanding how the brain actually works. Because most workplaces still run on industrial-era logic, treating knowledge work like assembly line work, despite clear evidence that the brain operates in rhythms, states, and cycles that bear no resemblance to a factory floor.

Jean Gomes and Scott Allender, two of the more thoughtful voices in leadership today, both authors with deep experience working alongside senior leaders globally, explore with Storoni what emerges as both practical and counterintuitive. Mind wandering is a signal, not a failure. The timing of different types of work matters more than most leaders realise. Movement and rest are not obstacles to high performance, they are preconditions for it.

As AI takes over routine cognitive work, the leaders who thrive will be the ones who understand what the human brain does best, and build environments that allow it to do exactly that.

Reading from Mithu Storoni:
WINNER OF THE BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2025
Hyperefficient: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work (2024, Yellow Kite)

Reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:
Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, Wiley, 2023)
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, Baker Books, 2023)

Social:
Instagram           @mindseteconomypodcast
LinkedIn             The Mindset Economy Podcast
Bluesky            @mindseteconomy.bsky.social
YouTube           @TheMindsetEconomy

The Mindset Economy Podcast is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside Consulting Ltd production.

 The greatest risk of the AI era may not be losing our jobs. It may be losing our ability to imagine something better.

Futurist Sarah Housley has noticed something troubling. As AI advances and change accelerates, many people are experiencing less agency, not more. The collective imagination about what the future could look like seems to have stalled, replaced by anxiety and short-term thinking at precisely the moment when bold, hopeful vision is most needed.

Her book Designing Hope introduces the idea of protopia, futures that improve gradually through experimentation, human ingenuity, and collective action, and it sits at the heart of this conversation. Jean Gomes and Scott Allender, authors and leadership experts who bring their experience working with senior leaders around the world to every conversation, explore with Housley why rapid technological change erodes our sense of agency, why non-linear thinking is becoming an essential leadership capability, and what it practically takes to create hopeful visions of the future rather than simply managing the present.

Imagining better futures is not a luxury. For leaders operating in the age of AI, it may be the most important capability of all.

Reading from Sarah Housley:

Designing Hope: Visions to Shape Our Future (2025, Indigo Press) 

Reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender: 

Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, Wiley, 2023) 

The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, Baker Books, 2023)

Social:
Instagram           @mindseteconomypodcast
LinkedIn             The Mindset Economy Podcast
Bluesky            @mindseteconomy.bsky.social
YouTube           @TheMindsetEconomy

The Mindset Economy Podcast is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside Consulting Ltd production.

Intelligence does not protect you from dogmatism. In some cases, it makes it worse.

This is one of the more unsettling findings to emerge from the work of Dr. Leor Zmigrod, neuroscientist at Cambridge and author of The Ideological Brain. Her research reveals that ideology is not defined by what you believe, but by how you believe it. When thinking becomes rigid and fused with identity, the brain narrows. Cognitive flexibility declines. Empathy weakens. Even physiological responses to other people's suffering can change.

Jean Gomes and Scott Allender, whose combined experience advising and writing about leadership at the highest levels informs everything they explore on the show, press Zmigrod on what this means for leaders specifically: the sharp distinction between values and ideologies, why uncertainty makes certainty feel irresistible, and how AI is shifting radicalisation from passive consumption to active dialogue, potentially reinforcing bias in powerful new ways.

The question running beneath the whole conversation is one every leader should sit with: how often do we confuse conviction with clarity, and what would it take to cultivate the kind of flexibility that allows us to think freely in a polarised, AI-accelerated world?

Reading from Dr Leor Zmigrod:
The Ideological Brain: How Rigid Beliefs Harm Our Minds & Bodies – And Why It Matters (L Zmigrod, Penguin, 2026)

Reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:
Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, Wiley, 2023)
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, Baker Books, 2023)

Social:
Instagram           @mindseteconomypodcast
LinkedIn             The Mindset Economy Podcast
Bluesky            @mindseteconomy.bsky.social
YouTube           @TheMindsetEconomy

The Mindset Economy Podcast is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside Consulting Ltd production.

Most leaders say they want candour. Almost none of them have it.

Amy Edmondson, Harvard professor and the world's leading researcher on psychological safety, argues that the problem isn't culture, it isn't trust, it isn't people. It's the invisible interpersonal risk that makes speaking up feel more dangerous than staying quiet. In a world where AI is accelerating the pace of change, that silence is becoming increasingly costly.

Edmondson sits down with Jean Gomes and Scott Allender, authors and leadership experts who have spent their careers working at the sharp end of organisational change, to reframe psychological safety not as comfort, but as permission for candour, a subtle but important distinction that changes how leaders should think about the environments they create. She explains why intelligent failure is a capability to be built, not a mistake to be tolerated, while learning, not knowing, is fast becoming the defining leadership skill of the AI era.

For anyone leading teams through uncertainty, this episode offers a sharper understanding of why high-quality conversations are the most underleveraged asset in most organisations, and what it actually takes to have them.

Reading from Amy Edmondson:

Right Kind of Wrong: How the Best Teams Use Failure to Succeed (Penguin, 2024)
The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth (Wiley, 2025)

Reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender: 

Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, Wiley, 2023) 
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, Baker Books, 2023)

Social:

Instagram           @mindseteconomypodcast
LinkedIn             The Mindset Economy Podcast
Bluesky            @mindseteconomy.bsky.social
YouTube           @TheMindsetEconomy

The Mindset Economy Podcast is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside Consulting Ltd production.

The rules that got you here may be the very thing holding you back.

Ja-Naé Duane and Steve Fisher call them super shifts, fundamental changes so significant that many of the assumptions underpinning how we work, lead, and create value are quietly becoming obsolete. Expertise, control, certainty: the frameworks that once provided stability are starting to break down. Most organisations are yet to reckon with what that actually means.

Jean Gomes and Scott Allender, leadership authors and advisors who have spent their careers working at the sharp end of organisational change, push Duane and Fisher on what this means practically for leaders who are already stretched, already uncertain, already looking for ground that holds. Together they examine why our sense of agency may be more fragile than we think, why the shift from control to co-creation is not optional, and what kind of mindset is required when the past is no longer a reliable guide.

If you sense that something fundamental has shifted but struggle to articulate what, or what to do about it, this episode is a good place to start.

Reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender: 

Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, Wiley, 2023) 
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, Baker Books, 2023)

Social:

Instagram           @mindseteconomypodcast
LinkedIn             The Mindset Economy Podcast
Bluesky            @mindseteconomy.bsky.social
YouTube           @TheMindsetEconomy

The Mindset Economy Podcast is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside Consulting Ltd production.

What does leadership look like when nobody really knows what’s coming next?

In this episode, Jean Gomes and Scott Allender are joined by Chris
Hirst, former global CEO and leadership advisor, to explore how leaders and
individuals make decisions in a world shaped by uncertainty and AI. Chris
challenges some familiar ideas, arguing that working hard is not enough, and
that the real differentiator is how you show up, not just what you can do.

What follows is a fascinating conversation about ownership, mindset, and
the small behaviours that compound over time, from how people actually get
hired and promoted, to why complaining and blaming quietly hold us back. This
episode offers a practical lens on what creates real value and what does not.
It is less about theory, and more about what it takes to move forward when the
rules are no longer clear.

Reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender: 

Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, Wiley, 2023) 
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, Baker Books, 2023)

Social:

Instagram           @mindseteconomypodcast
LinkedIn             The Mindset Economy Podcast
Bluesky            @mindseteconomy.bsky.social
YouTube           @TheMindsetEconomy

The Mindset Economy Podcast is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside Consulting Ltd production.

AI is not failing because of bad technology. It is failing because of bad questions.

Dr. Leo Anthony Celi, critical care physician and researcher at MIT, has spent years exposing a problem that the machine learning community would rather not face. The datasets training our most powerful healthcare AI do not just underrepresent certain populations. They reflect, and quietly reinforce the inequalities already baked into our systems. Building bigger models on broken foundations does not fix medicine, it scales the dysfunction.

In this conversation with Jean Gomes and Scott Allender, Celi makes a counterintuitive case; that AI could become a Trojan horse for genuine transformation, not because the technology will save us but because confronting its failures might force us to ask better questions about who gets seen, who gets studied, and who gets to shape the tools that increasingly govern our lives.

Dr Celi shares why he is bringing musicians, indigenous philosophers, and religious communities into rooms usually reserved for data scientists, what a basketball game and a tangled net reveal about who actually solves hard problems, and why the four qualities most needed from AI are the same ones most needed from leaders: creativity, humility, curiosity, and a healthy scepticism toward easy answers.

For leaders navigating the AI era, this is a conversation about what it really means to build systems worthy of human trust.

Reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender: 

Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, Wiley, 2023) 
 The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, Baker Books, 2023)

Social:

Instagram           @mindseteconomypodcast
LinkedIn             The Mindset Economy Podcast
Bluesky            @mindseteconomy.bsky.social
YouTube           @TheMindsetEconomy
 
The Mindset Economy Podcast is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside Consulting Ltd production.

How much of global conflict is driven by our own biology? In this episode of The Mindset Economy, we are joined by Dr. Nicholas Wright to examine the "brain-war" connection through the lens of neuroscience and military strategy.

We explore the neuroscience of war, how our evolutionary wiring influences modern battlefields and how the experience of conflict fundamentally reshapes the human brain. Nicholas breaks down the cognitive biases that lead to escalation and shares insights on how understanding cognitive psychology and military psychology can help us navigate a more stable future.

In this episode, we discuss:

- The biological origins of human conflict and aggression.
- How war physically alters brain function across societies.
- Overcoming cognitive pitfalls in high-stakes strategic decision-making.
- The future of neuro-influence and its role in international relations.
- The impact of AI on warfare and autonomous drones.

Resources Mentioned: Nicholas Wright's book, Warhead: How the Brain Shapes War and How War Shapes the Brain, is available now.

Reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender: 

Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, Wiley, 2023) 
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, Baker Books, 2023)

Social:

Instagram           @mindseteconomypodcast
LinkedIn             The Mindset Economy Podcast
Bluesky            @mindseteconomy.bsky.social
YouTube           @TheMindsetEconomy
 
The Mindset Economy Podcast is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside Consulting Ltd production.

Leaders are being asked to solve problems from this century with mental models built for the last one, and talking on The Mindset Economy podcast futurist, innovation leader and co-author of SuperShifts Steve Fisher tells us that makes that point often. Steve raises a question worth sitting with: when AI spots a pattern humans can't see, who actually makes the final call?

Steve argues that we're moving from a world built on knowing to one built on sense-making, and explains why so many AI initiatives fail even with a huge budget behind them, because organisations are upgrading their tools without upgrading their beliefs. He also draws a sharp comparison between the shift from Windows to web development in the early 2000s and what's happening now, except this time the change is faster and it's hitting everyone at once.

If you enjoyed this extract, find the full conversation on Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts https://www.youtube.com/@TheMindsetEconomy

'Whatever you do, don't turn up and be yourself.' 

That line got Chris Hirst plenty of grief on social media, but he stands by it. Appearing as a guest on The Mindset Economy podcast, Chris tells us that he can't stand the phrase 'authentic leadership' because he's watched too many senior people use it to excuse bad behaviour. His actual advice is simpler: show up as the best curated version of yourself, not whatever version happens to be easiest that day. Chris breaks career progress down into aptitude and attitude, arguing aptitude gets you in the room but attitude gets you the job, because there's always someone else with your exact skill set waiting behind you. There's also a sharp point on why so many people say they want to work in strategy, when he thinks execution is actually the harder and more valuable skill.

If you enjoyed this extract, find the full conversation on Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts https://www.youtube.com/@TheMindsetEconomy

Your brain isn't a muscle, but we've been running our workplaces as if it were since the 1950s. Neuroscientist Mithu Storoni traces that mistake back to the Industrial Revolution, when the idea of efficiency got applied to assembly lines and then, without much thought, to knowledge work.

In a conversation with Jean Gomes and Scott Allender on The Mindset Economy podcast, Mithu explains what happens inside the brain when you push through sustained attention for twenty or thirty minutes past its limit, why that feeling of boredom at eleven in the morning is actually a signal, and what alpha waves have to do with clearing mental clutter. Her point lands hard for anyone stacking back-to-back meetings all day: a brain forced to behave like a machine ends up performing like a very basic AI.

If you enjoyed this extract, find the full conversation on Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts https://www.youtube.com/@TheMindsetEconomy

Psychological safety isn't about being nice, it's about permission for candour. In this short extract taken from The Mindset Economy podcast, Amy Edmondson (who built her career studying psychological safety) explains why. Learning is never comfortable. You're taking a risk every time you admit you don't know something or that you got it wrong.

Amy walks us through why hierarchy makes this harder, what leaders can say to open the door for honest input, and why asking a genuine question is one of the most powerful things a leader can do. She also makes the case that anyone on a team, not just the person at the top, can practice this kind of leadership.

If you enjoyed this extract, find the full conversation on Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts https://www.youtube.com/@TheMindsetEconomy

"People are not excited about the future anymore." 

That's the opening line of design futurist and guest on The Mindset Economy podcast Sarah Housley's book Designing Hope, and it's where this conversation starts. She talks through why the big visions of the last century, fossil fuels and plastic among them, delivered real progress and real damage in the same breath, and why nobody's replaced them with anything new.

In conversation with co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender, Sarah also discusses how the constantly refreshing newsfeed on your phone has trapped everyone in a permanent present, unable to think properly about the past or the future. Her answer isn't utopia and it isn't dystopia either. It's something she calls protopia, a future that's a little better than yesterday, built by people willing to be ambitious without pretending it'll be perfect.

If you enjoyed this extract, find the full conversation on Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts https://www.youtube.com/@TheMindsetEconomy

Forget fascism and communism for a second. Leor Zmigrod studies ideology as a way of thinking, not a specific set of beliefs, and that reframe changes the whole conversation.

On The Mindset Economy podcast, Leor explains what actually makes someone ideological: a rigid system of rules they refuse to question, and a habit of sorting the world into who belongs and who doesn't. It has nothing to do with which side of a political debate you're on. Leor pushes back hard on the idea that unshakable convictions are admirable, arguing instead that they narrow how you think in every part of life, from your job to your family to your hobbies, and that this rigidity leaves a mark on the brain itself.

If you enjoyed this extract, find the full conversation on Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts https://www.youtube.com/@TheMindsetEconomy

In 2026, AI is mostly being used to retrieve information faster, and during his conversation with Jean Gomes on The Mindset Economy podcast, Dr. Leo Anthony Celi shares that that's a massive waste of what the technology could actually do. He wants AI built to make us more creative, more humble, more curious, and less gullible, and explains why training it on nothing but the internet's corpus leaves out centuries of moral wisdom from religious and indigenous traditions.

Leo reminds us of AlphaGo's famous move 34 against Lee Sedol, the move nobody expected, making a case for why creativity needs a mix of different bodies of knowledge, not just more data from the same sources. He also talks candidly about the pushback he gets from people building these systems, and why he thinks the answer isn't to lecture them but to warm up the room a couple of degrees at a time.

If you enjoyed this extract, find the full conversation on Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts https://www.youtube.com/@TheMindsetEconomy