Why adaptation—not expertise—is becoming the most important skill in a world of infinite answers.

There is a quiet fear running beneath the surface of so many careers right now.
It’s rarely spoken aloud, but it shapes how people show up. It fuels burnout. It creates pressure to be certain, to be faster, to know more. And at its core is a question that feels too dangerous to say out loud:

What happens if AI can do what I do?

For those of us in knowledge-based work—software, coaching, consulting, design, delivery—this fear is starting to take shape. It isn’t just about automation. It isn’t about losing jobs to robots. It’s about something deeper.

It’s about relevance.

If AI can now write code, generate strategies, reframe problems, design content, and answer complex questions—what is left for us to do?

And perhaps more pointedly: what is left for me to be?

I’ve sat in that question myself. It’s not hypothetical. I’m not in my current role because I’m the most technically accomplished person in the room. I’m here because I can do something that’s becoming increasingly rare.

I can adapt.

I can look at a system, understand the constraints, sense what’s really going on beneath the surface—and apply what I know in a way that works here, now, for this group of people.

And most importantly: I know how to move when I don’t yet know the answer.

That’s not expertise. That’s something else entirely. And it took me years to understand it.

The Myth of Mastery

For a long time, I believed success came from knowing more. From mastering the method. From finding the right answer and delivering it well.

That belief got me far. Until it didn’t.

When I was preparing for the dive that would become my world record, I reached the limits of what I could learn from others. There were maybe two people in the world whose experience I could draw from. But their equipment was different. Their bodies were different. Their context was different. What worked for them didn’t work for me.

So I had to learn something deeper. I had to reverse-engineer what they were doing, ask why it worked, strip it back to its underlying principles, and then rebuild it for the dive I was doing, in the conditions I was in.

There was no book. No checklist. No course.

Just questions. And slow, deliberate exploration.

That’s when I stopped trying to become an expert.

That’s when I became an Explorer.

What Explorers Do That Experts Don’t

Most people learn to succeed by following a path. They gather knowledge, build skill, and become known for their ability to solve a particular kind of problem.

But when the environment changes—when the map no longer fits the terrain—that path stops working.

This is what I see everywhere right now.

AI has created an environment where answers are no longer scarce.
You don’t have to be an expert to write a good Agile strategy or code a UI. You just have to be good at prompting a machine. But prompting only works if you know what you’re looking for. And that requires something different than expertise.

It requires the ability to see, to sense, to adapt.
It requires you to be able to look at a problem and ask, not “What’s the right answer?” but “What’s really happening here? What’s needed? What could I try?”

That’s what Explorers do.

They don’t just take information. They test it.
They don’t just follow instructions. They adapt them.
They don’t just learn. They derive.

And they build a capacity that I believe is now more valuable than any technical skill:
the ability to make meaning of ambiguity and turn it into purposeful motion.

Oh, and they do this again and again and again. Because they know that every time they engage, something shifts. The context changes. The players change. And so they learn and adapt—again.

What Most People Get Wrong

Most people assume learning stops when the course ends. That if they can repeat what they were taught, they’ll succeed.

But success in today’s world doesn’t come from repetition. It comes from translation.

You have to take the general and make it specific.
You have to take the known and apply it to the unknown.

And that’s hard. Because it requires discomfort. It requires failure. It asks us to let go of the safety of instruction and move into the uncertainty of real-world conditions. It demands that we build something new from the ground up—without a script to follow, and often without knowing if we’re on the right path.

And perhaps hardest of all, it asks us to be vulnerable—to say, “I don’t know… yet.” To admit that we’re still learning, even as we lead. That’s not something our current systems reward. We’ve built a world that elevates certainty, rewards clarity, and often confuses confidence with competence.

But the Explorer doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. They move anyway. And that’s what I had to do in the water. It’s what I do now with AI. And it’s what I believe more and more people need to learn to do if they want to thrive in the years ahead.

The Edge We’re All Sensing

People are sensing this shift—even if they don’t have the language for it yet. Even leaders at the top are naming it. Steven Bartlett, for example, has spoken openly about the need to stay close to failure. To keep the edge. To protect the hunger that fueled him in the beginning.

He’s built that into his company through a role called the Head of Failure—a position designed to normalize experimentation and deliberately increase the rate of failure. Not as a gimmick, but as a signal: failure isn’t just allowed, it’s expected. It’s a system for learning.

That’s not just clever branding. It’s recognition that in a world changing this fast, our systems for learning have to evolve too.

To me, that edge he’s talking about—that willingness to fail, to stay uncomfortable, to keep asking better questions—that’s Explorer territory.

Because it’s not enough to be smart. You have to be willing to move without knowing.
You have to be able to stay human inside the uncertainty.

For People Like Bob

I’ve met a lot of Bobs over the years. Truth is, I’ve been Bob too.

Bob is smart. Capable. Thoughtful. He works in IT, which doesn’t sound like the place you’d find an Explorer. But Bob is one—he just doesn’t call himself that. He doesn’t scale mountains or dive into caves. He scales systems. He dives into complexity.

Bob sees what others miss. He senses what others have learned to ignore. He makes sense of things—not just facts, but dynamics, patterns, people.

And that’s where it starts to get hard.

Because Bob lives in a world that rewards compliance. A world that values predictability over perception. In this world, pointing out what’s not working isn’t seen as insight. It’s seen as disruption. Being the one who names the pattern often means becoming the squeaky wheel. And no one wants to be the squeaky wheel.

Especially not in systems where speaking truth to power is still seen as insubordination, not intelligence.

So Bob gets stuck. He gets sidelined. Sometimes even gaslit. He starts to doubt himself, wondering if he’s the problem. He tries to play by the rules, but the rules keep shifting beneath his feet. Nothing ever quite lands. Nothing quite fits. His frustration grows, not because he’s failing, but because he’s trying to navigate a system that was never designed for how he sees or works.

Because he’s trying to explore inside a culture built for experts.

These are the people I want to work with.
Not the ones chasing mastery.
The ones trying to stay awake in systems that want them to go to sleep.
The ones ready to stop hiding what they see—and start navigating with it.

Explorers are the Bridge

Because in the post-AI world, the safest path isn’t to know more.
It’s to know how to move.

And Explorers?
Explorers move.

They adapt to what’s in front of them, but they don’t lose themselves. They shift how they move, how they think, how they lead—but not who they are. That, to me, is the most powerful kind of freedom.

It’s something I’ve always admired in people like Viktor Frankl, who survived the worst of humanity and never let it strip away his own. That capacity to stay intact while shifting shape. To respond to a situation without becoming it.

That’s what Explorers do. They don’t just survive change. They shape themselves to meet it—and in doing so, they quietly shape the world around them.

Because in the post-AI world, expertise will always be outpaced.
AI can generate answers — beautifully, instantly.
But it can’t:

  • Sense context

  • Navigate ambiguity

  • Spot patterns in messiness

  • Reframe questions

  • Work with emotion, intuition, or values

  • Know which direction is worth going

The bottleneck isn’t intelligence. It’s interpretation. It’s application. It’s choice.

And that’s where the Explorer mindset becomes essential.

Explorers will always find a way. And they don’t do it by having the answers.
They do it by creating maps specific to where they are. They stay grounded when things get noisy. They know how to find clarity when there isn’t any. They keep moving.

They know where they are starting from. They can see where they’re going. And they know how to break that into small, deliberate jumps—base camp, to camp one, to summit.

They know how to manage the fear (because there is always fear). They know how to make it safe enough to move. They know how to choose. How to find options—especially when it looks impossible, and everything has already been tried.

They live in agency. In teams. In collaboration. They evolve.
They live in emergence and create paths that others can follow.

Exploration is the shift. It is a skill. One that I had to learn. I was never born an Explorer.

Exploration is a pattern, a skill

My journey to the Guinness World Record helped me see it—because I had to live it. I still do. When I’m learning to sail solo. When I take my Land Cruiser deep into Northern Botswana for solo bush trips. When I sit down to build what’s becoming the Explorer’s Edge.

There’s a pattern to how Explorers move.
I didn’t see it at first. I only knew I kept hitting the same walls every time I tried something new. Every time I stood at the edge of a first — a first dive, a first solo sail, a first bush trip into the middle of nowhere — I found myself needing to remember what helped me move the last time.

So I mapped it.

Not because I had the answers.
But because I was tired of forgetting what I already knew.

That map became the Explorer’s Compass.
Five points. Five ways we return to ourselves when the world tilts sideways.
Five ways to get moving again when everything feels like it’s stopped.

Not to control the journey.
But to find a way through it.

I didn’t build the Explorer’s Compass because I wanted to teach people how to lead.
I built it because I needed a way to stay human while navigating uncertainty.

And now, as we move into an era where expertise can be automated, but presence, perception, and purpose cannot… I believe we all need something more than knowledge.

We need a way to keep moving.
A way to keep choosing.

We need to build our Explorer intelligence — and become everyday Explorers.
So we can step into the answers AI gives us—and make them our own.