The future has no mouth, no checklist, and no patience for our linear fantasies. The future is not demanding anything — it’s a human projection. “Upgrade” is a technological metaphor that is undeserved applied to human behavior.
I will outline what the caring trickster attitude, this rare untamed trait of quirkiness and disobedience in people, loves to unleash in our hebavioe repertoire. .
Which leads me to a fundamental question: Why are the very skills that test our human courage and vision almost never included on lists of future skills? I mention here athletic ability, artistic expression, dealing with horror, health, literacy and a devotion to duty.
Less Travelled but Most Intriguing Alleys of Behavior Shaping
The behavioral repertoire the caring trickster in us loves is: Athletic Ability, Artistic Expression, Dealing with Horror, Nurturing Health, and Devotion to Duty. Especially when they are combined and merged, they unfold their payload for human behavior design.
Dealing with Horror - Courage Under Fire
Emotional horror occurs when something familiar becomes unsafe, when trust is fractured, or when one’s sense of self, reality, or connection to others is threatened in a subtle but existential way.
What role does fearlessness play toward dirt, confusion, and madness?
Fearlessness toward “dirt,” “confusion,” and “madness” does not describe external things, but inner attitudes and the willingness to cross boundaries in one’s own thinking and behavior.
- Fearlessness of dirt reflects a readiness to question or transgress social norms of cleanliness and order.
- Fearlessness of confusion shows the capacity to endure ambiguity, contradiction, and temporary chaos without rushing toward neat solutions.
- Fearlessness of madness signals the courage to move beyond conventional rational norms — into spaces, where unconventional, perhaps risky thinking can emerge.
Taken together, these three forms of fearlessness point to an unusual, kind of dark relationship to what is considered “ordered.”
Devotion to Duty - Commitment That Counts
If you compare kids that learned early in their life to fulfill duties in the household with those who did not share responsibilities this research found that increasing children’s engagement in household chores fosters acquisition of essential life skills and aspects of self‐esteem. The relationship between involvement in household chores and children’s life skills (L. Xia et al., 2025) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691825009424?
What is most amazing to me are these two findings:
Cohort alignment: Shared chores create a common behavioral baseline. When a cohort learns “this is how we take care together,” they build collective devotion.
Role ownership: Tangible responsibilities of small but real tasks create identity that is formed from the pride of completing them, not because the tasks matter.
We look with an ambivalent eye of the West at how Japanese children “function” in teams without losing their desire for joy. Time to discard this preconception. This type of behavior repertoire seems to create later in life fewer culture clashes, smoother cross-functional collaboration, and adopted work rhythms. It should not be mistaken with hammering the principle of order and obedience into people.
Athletic Ability - Strength in Motion
Viewing “sportiness” merely as a measure of physical fitness—or as a parameter of performance—is short-sighted. Good sports do far more than build coordination and endurance. They cultivate strategic thinking, such as anticipating the next move; enhance decision making under stress; and develop Durchhaltevermögen—the mental resilience to persevere through challenges.
Two studies: A network meta‑analysis found that adolescents participating in ball games (soccer, basketball, table tennis, volleyball) show significantly better executive functions (inhibition, working memory, cognitive flexibility) compared to non-athletes. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40722112/
How do athletes perform well under pressure? https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1750984X.2024.2414442
Health Literacy – Individual and Collective Sustaining
If “promoting health” is understood as a sense for self-care, then this ability absolutely fits into the needs of modern work environments. It goes much deeper than work-life balance as feel-good management. Those who explore and maintain their own health remain capable of performing, learning, and working.
For this reason, I see health literacy (the ability to manage stress, recovery, sleep, nutrition, and vitality) as a key competency of human identity.Read this study: Sørensen et al. (2015), European Health Literacy Survey, a large population-level study (8 countries, 8,000+ participants). Finding: Low health literacy is strongly associated with poorer health, higher hospitalization, increased chronic disease, and lower ability to manage stress and self-care. Source:. https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2458-12-80
Artistic Expression – Self-Mirroring
Artistic work is far more than self-expression. It is the translation of emotional states into visible form. Through engagement with symbols, aesthetic sensitivity, deep reflection, multisensory encoding, and an acute ability to “read the room,” it fosters profound self-understanding. In other words, artistic practice actively encourages identity questioning and formation, encouraging individuals to explore who they are and how they relate to the world.
Here a study about the implications of art therapy with teens https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9067/9/7/1029?utm_
These five abilities live in sharp contrast to what the business world is keen to produce.
The Business World worships Hy-pe-ism
For me business forecasters who insist on future skills hot lists are victims of HY∙PE∙ISM, a contemporary expression of emotional overdrive, forcing inflated self-perception. Sufferers experience a malign form of silliness, manifesting in stubborn behavior.
What is hyped by business forecasters in case of future behavior shaping?The idea of core skills that manifest for modern jobs.
Today’s employers are obsessed with digital, social, and cognitive “core skills” that can be slotted neatly into any industry. Bodily pleasure, health promotion, or think of the capacity to love? Largely irrelevant. The corporate world chases the next human innovator, yet its imagination is trapped in a narrow cage: the skills it values—data fluency, coding, teamwork, or problem-solving—are simplified, predictable, and painfully conventional.
Meanwhile, the behaviors that truly push humanity forward—bold curiosity, boundary-breaking creativity, moral courage—are sidelined as impractical. In the rush to standardize talent. We risk training a workforce that can brilliantly operate machines but struggles to envision the future.
An example. The World Economic Forum identifies in its Future of Jobs Report 2025 ten key skills that are expected to be in high demand by 2030. https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_Report_2025.pdf
I will guide you, skill by skill, to discover the blind spots through my superb power lens.
- AI and Big Data Proficiency in artificial intelligence and data analytics.
My Superb Power lens: Beyond using AI to predict outcomes, how can AI augment human curiosity and perception, not replace it? Can we drift with the data, noticing anomalies, contradictions, and surprises, rather than compressing everything into tidy patterns? How nice it would be to be attentive to the unexpected stories data tells, rather than just metrics it produces.
- Networks and Cybersecurity Skills related to digital infrastructure and security.
My Superb Power lens: Security is usually about containment. How can one navigate digital spaces as living, shifting ecologies? It´s not about just patching vulnerabilities, but sensing flows, noticing emergent behaviors, and responding intuitively — like a conductor listening to an orchestra in real time rather than reading a score.
- Technological Literacy Understanding and utilizing digital tools effectively.
My Superb Power lens: Literacy is often about utility; superbness is about dialogue with tools. It’s not mastery for output but attunement. I miss how a tool shapes perception, how interaction transforms thought, how digital systems can inspire improvisation.
- Creative Thinking The ability to generate innovative ideas and solutions.
My Superb Power lens: Creativity should be reframed as exploration without preconception. It’s not the ability to generate ideas efficiently, but the capacity to follow curiosity into unknown territory, to listen to accidents, to allow mistakes to bloom into insight.
- Resilience, Flexibility, and Agility Adapting to change and overcoming challenges.
My Superb Power lens: These are not just tools to “bounce back” or adapt. To me resilience is a capacity to stay present in tension, to dwell with discomfort and uncertainty without forcing resolution. I miss rhythmic responsiveness: knowing when to move, when to pause, when to allow events to shape you.
- Curiosity and Lifelong Learning Commitment to continuous personal and professional development.
My Superb Power lens: Lifelong learning is defined as instrumental. Learning is seen as accumulation. But it is immersion. Curiosity is defined as a cognitive skill, but it has an important sensorial component: noticing textures, rhythms, anomalies; following tangents; delighting in the unresolvable.
- Leadership and Social Influence Guiding and motivating others effectively.
My Superb Power lens: Leadership is not direction or persuasion, but resonance. It’s the ability to sense collective mood, to create spaces where others can improvise, to encourage exploration without coercion. Influence is a subtle creature: shaping possibility rather than outcomes.
- Talent Management Guiding and motivating others effectively.
My Superb Power lens: This is traditional framework. Each person is a ball to be tossed according to plan: assessed, positioned, optimized. The manager’s skill is measured by precision, timing, and control — keeping everyone aloft without dropping the work. Success is measured by output, retention, and growth metrics.
I suggest considering a different metaphor: think of bricolage instead of assembly-line. Then talent is not a set of identical, ex-changeable objects to manipulate; it is a heterogeneous collection of resources. The manager does not simply toss and catch. They compose co-operation according to context.
- Analytical Thinking Assessing complex situations and making informed decisions.
My Superb Power lens: Analysis often slices and isolates. Truly exceptional analytical thinking, however, is dialogical: it engages with complexity, holds contradictions, recognizes patterns that aren’t immediately actionable, and weaves intuition together with logic. A dialogical approach values a multitude of clues over the comfort of a single, tidy answer.
- Environmental Stewardship Understanding and addressing sustainability challenges.
My Superb Power lens: Stewardship is more than compliance or strategy. It’s an embodied attentiveness: noticing the subtle rhythms of ecosystems, sensing the pulse of living creatures, responding in a way that honors unpredictability and interconnection. Action is guided by resonance rather than by target.
What a par force ride in the desert was this!
Those who now still worship the WEF predictions should sit down, feel shame, and count their blushes.
Moving Beyond the Behavior Upgrade Hype
After outlining which behavior repertoire should not be neglected anymore and how limited the hype-ism of future skill hot lists is I will now close with referring to the revenues of superb powers.
The revenues of superb powers are obvious: If superb powers take the lead and is invited to trouble the linear, then:
- Organizations, teams, and individuals cultivating them witness the gaps the hype tried to hide.
- Its explorations reveal the bumps and cracks in reality’s surface: bottlenecks, misalignments, cultural friction.
- Its collective ownership stops doing gymnastics in a sandbox and shapes the rhythm of the organization itself.
How to Avoid Getting Swept in Behavioral Order Hype?
Think carefully.
Identify the incentives of whoever is promoting the order doctrine, Ask: “How does this person or group benefit if I believe this “follow the order” hype?”
In case of future skills hot lists be aware which policy makers and business leaders abuse the listings to narrow and constrain human potential.
Listen to your intuition.
What is a healthy and charming cure against behavior upgrade hype?
Get a first taste of how letting our Caring Trickster speak to us helps to break free from “skill order addiction”.
Here are first three different well-tested recipes by clients for your imagination cooked in my Dadaistic Behavior Kitchen:
Superb Powers activating method “Anti-Forecast Forecast”
Create by yourself a prediction so illogical that hype becomes invisible next to it.
Example. “By 2050 leaders will communicate through tap-dancing postal octopuses - or …opinionated orchids”. Hype thrives on certainty; Dada confuses certainty with absurdity.
Superb Powers activating method “The Over-Literal Attack”
When specific skills are hyped, interpret it painfully literally.
Example. “This skill is a game changer.” You: “Which game? Jenga? Bocce? Mahjong? Thumb wrestling?” Hopefully, the metaphor breaks, and so the hype aura.
Superb Powers activating method “Hype Reversal Therapy”
Whenever a fashionable claim about best-in-class behavior is exaggerated, respond with
deliberate enthusiasm for its opposite.
Example: “Only AI-supported decision makers will increase company performance by 15 percent; those who refrain will endanger the company’s future.” Counter-statement: “AI is an
algorithmic tool that will soon collide with its own limitations. Decision makers who are sensitively applying the knowledge of ancient medicine will become the skilled protectors of corporate
success.” Dada works by centering unconventional value.
Digest the examples. In my basket there are so many more possibilities of outperforming the skill order doctrine. I am curious to discuss them with you along your projects.
Patricia von Papstein
The Dadaist Psychologist with a Fondness for Unruly Mental Health
read other essays of this series here
Essay IV Dream Destination Breeding Place
https://www.blisstobusiness.com/2025/12/08/superb-powers-essay-iv-dream-destination-breeding-place/
Essay II Questioning Behavioral Order Models
Essay I Articulating the Not Yet
https://www.blisstobusiness.com/2025/12/08/superb-powers-essay-i-articulating-th-not-yet/
Superb Powers Essays Intro
https://www.blisstobusiness.com/2025/12/08/superb-powers-intro/