For most of my life, I've been a runner — and for almost ten years, a seriously competitive one, racing middle and long distances on the track, on the road, and cross country. Add up every training run and every race, and I have covered a bit more than 100,000 kilometers on my own two feet. That is about two and a half times around the planet, one ordinary step at a time. It took me roughly four decades.

Now imagine that every step I took doubled the length of the step before it — one meter, then two, then four, then eight. How far would just thirty of those steps carry me?

Not thirty meters. Not thirty kilometers. Thirty doubling steps would carry me twenty-six times around the world — and somewhere along the way, clean past the moon.

A hundred million steps for two and a half laps of the planet. Thirty steps for twenty-six. That gap — between adding and doubling — is the gap between the way our minds are built and the way our world now moves. Today, let me invite you to look at exponential thinking through two lenses at once: the Sixth Wave of technology innovation that is already reshaping every industry, and the kind of creative leadership it now demands of us.

A mind built for a linear world

Here is the uncomfortable truth about our brains: it was not built for the world we now live in. Its roughly 100 billion neurons evolved over hundreds of thousands of years for a life that was local and linear — a few dozen faces, a day's walk of territory, and threats we could see coming one step at a time. So we think the way we once walked. We add. One step, then another, then another.

Let’s face it: We are terrible at doubling. Look again at the first few doubling steps in my running example — one meter, two, four, eight, sixteen. Deceptively dull. Nothing much seems to be happening. That is precisely the trap. Exponential growth is deceptive before it is disruptive: it creeps along, indistinguishable from nothing, and then it detonates. By the time the curve becomes obvious, the people who were merely adding have already been lapped — twenty-six times over. The danger is not that you run too slowly. It is that you keep running, stride after honest stride, in a world that has quietly started to multiply.

Why now is different: the Sixth Wave

Every long wave of innovation has ridden a wave of new lead technologies. What makes the Sixth Wave different is not one technology sector but the convergence of three — and the speed at which they collide.

Three technology spaces are merging at once. Digital technologies, led by artificial intelligence, are the driver — the enabling force accelerating everything else. Human-centered technologies are the uplift — longer lives, better health, cheaper and deeper education. And clean, sustainable technologies are the constraint we must solve to keep the whole thing running. In earlier waves, the lead technologies advanced on separate tracks. In the Sixth Wave, they fold into a single, self-reinforcing surge — a supersonic tsunami of change.

And the slope has changed. In the Fifth Wave, Moore's Law roughly doubled computing power every two years, and it took about four decades to reach a million-fold improvement. In the Sixth Wave, driven by AI, that doubling has compressed toward a quarterly rhythm. The same million-fold leap that once took forty years may now take five. Even if that estimate proves optimistic, the direction is not in doubt. (Check out my earlier blog article titled This Shocking Stat About AI Will Change How You Think About the Future to understand the massive technology acceleration we can expect in the coming two decades).

For incumbents, this is deceptive-then-disruptive at civilizational scale. “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change,” Charles Darwin observed. In the Sixth Wave, responsiveness is no longer a virtue — it is the price of admission. (I explore all of this at length in my forthcoming book “Riding the Sixth Wave of Innovation.”)

From 10% to 10×

If the Sixth Wave is the tsunami of change disrupting every industry in the coming years, exponential thinking is a key skill for learning to surf it.

Credit where it is richly due: the futurist Peter Diamandis, with his “moonshot mates” Steven Kotler and Salim Ismail, has done more than anyone to popularize the “exponential mindset.” Diamandis maps how any exponential technology unfolds through six stages — digitized, deceptive, disruptive, demonetized, dematerialized, and democratized, the famous 6 Ds. And his core distinction is worth tattooing on the back of your hand: incremental thinking chases 10% improvements, while exponential thinking reaches for 10× outcomes. One is additive. The other is multiplicative.

At Thinkergy, we map the contrast across a dozen dimensions — vision and scale, growth mentality, time horizon, risk attitude, leadership style, and more. But you can compress the whole table into a single question. The incremental leader asks: “How can we make this better?” The exponential leader asks: “What if we reinvented this completely, from scratch?”

And here is the multiplier most leaders miss. New technology alone changes nothing:

Exponential technology × incremental thinking = incremental results.
Exponential technology × exponential thinking = exponential results.

Same tools, opposite outcomes. The variable that decides which future you get is not the technology in your hands — it is the thinking you bring to it.

One caution, because it matters. Exponential does not mean reckless, nor does it mean abandoning the incremental. The best creative leaders are ambidextrous thinkers — they reach for the 10× moonshot, yet know when a situation calls instead for patient 10% improvement. But holding both mindsets is not the same as doing both jobs. The exponential leader dreams the breakthrough and sets its direction; the detail-minded people around them turn it into something that ships and keeps getting better, 10% at a time. Steve Jobs thought in exponentials — and had a Tim Cook to build the operational backbone. Knowing who does what is a discipline in itself.

What it means for creative leaders

This is where exponential thinking stops being a Silicon Valley slogan and becomes a personal practice. In the Genius Journey — Thinkergy's creative leadership development method I developed — this is the territory of Destination Stops 5 and 6.

• Stop 5: Stop working only for the money. Start loving what you do, and knowing why you do it. Purpose is simply passion in service of other people — and the more people you serve, the bigger your impact grows. That is what gives an exponential vision its gravity.
• Stop 6: Stop being myopic and thinking with only half your brain. Start being an integrated whole-mind thinker. You cannot reimagine a system you can only half see.

Here is how to put both stops to work — five shifts from linear to exponential leadership.

• Shift from 10% to 10×. Set goals so bold they embarrass your spreadsheet. Moonshots are not arrogance; they are a forcing function that changes what you even look for.
  Tip: If your target could be hit by simply working a little harder, it is an incremental goal wearing an exponential costume.  
• Leverage the converging technologies. Exponential outcomes ride exponential tools. AI and digital technologies are the driver — the enablers accelerating everything else — and the biggest breakthroughs will come from the collisions between fields, not from deep inside any one of them. Put the new tools to work, and watch the edges where AI meets health, energy, and education.
  Tip: Your next real competitor probably comes from an adjacent industry and wields a technology you dismissed.
• Shift from optimizing to reimagining. “You never change things by fighting the existing reality,” Richard Buckminster Fuller asserted. "To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." The incremental leader refines what exists. The exponential leader replaces it with something new and better.
  Tip: Ask what you would build if your own product did not already exist.
• Experiment, and pivot fast. Progress in an exponential world looks like a toddler learning to walk — fall, get up, learn, repeat. “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work,” Edison famously noted when experimenting on the incandescent lightbulb. You are not chasing failure; you are practicing how to fall without breaking anything that matters.
  Tip: Design your experiments so the downside is survivable and the upside is uncapped.
• Design for network effects. Linear value adds one customer at a time. Exponential value compounds — each new member makes the whole worth more to everyone already in it. Build the thing that grows more valuable the more it is used.
  Questions: Where does your value multiply as your crowd grows? And if it doesn't yet, how could you redesign it so it does?

The choice ahead: Gradual demise or exponential take-off

In June 2026, after the record-breaking public listing of SpaceX, Elon Musk became the first human being in history to cross the trillion-dollar line. Does one person deserve that much? Set the politics aside for a moment and look instead at his mentality and genius. He has worked brutal hundred-hour weeks for years. And he has built not a company but an interconnected ecosystem — Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, xAI — where each venture feeds the others. Whatever else you make of him, he is a master of thinking exponentially. “In five years, digital intelligence will exceed the sum of all human intelligence,” he predicted recently. Exponential to the last.

We need more creative leaders who think at that scale — not to enrich themselves, but to aim their exponential ambition at humanity's hardest problems. And I believe the Sixth Wave will produce them, because for the first time the tools to serve billions are landing in the hands of small, bold, purpose-driven teams.

So the real question is not whether the exponential curve is coming. It is already here — quietly doubling while most leaders keep politely adding. The only question is whether you will meet it by running the old way or by learning to double.

Stop optimizing what exists. Start reimagining what could be.

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2026. 

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• The exponential law of the Sixth Wave — why the future now arrives earlier than any leader expects — is the subject of my forthcoming book Riding the Sixth Wave of Innovation. If you want the full map of the three converging technology spaces and what they mean for your industry, that is where I lay it out in depth.
• And if you want to build the exponential mind in yourself and your team — to travel Stops 5 and 6 and beyond — that is exactly what we develop through the Genius Journey, Thinkergy’s mindset-based creative leadership program. Reimagining what could be is a skill, and skills can be trained. Contact us to design an engagement tailored to your specific needs.