Peter Hinssen

Peter Hinssen's central claim, repeated across every conversation, is that the disruption of the last several years is not a passing storm but a permanent condition. "Wat als dit geen storm is? Maar eigenlijk het nieuwe klimaat," he asks ¹, and from that single reframing almost everything else in his thinking follows. If turbulence is the climate rather than the weather, then waiting for things to settle down is not caution but self-sabotage: "the cost of waiting is catastrophic" ¹. He pushes this same logic in his book work on The Uncertainty Principle, describing a trade-off he thinks every leader has to internalize: "Hoe langer je wacht, hoe duidelijker het signaal is... Maar hoe langer je wacht in een wereld die snel verandert, hoe minder opties dat er zijn" ²³. Clarity and optionality move in opposite directions, and most organizations are structured to chase the former while quietly forfeiting the latter.

That structural blindness, in his account, is embodied by the corporate budget. He calls it, flatly, "het meest archaïsche instrument ooit geweest," a process that in November produces "heel veel fake news in Excel" and by March is already fiction ². His proposed replacement is not a better forecasting tool but an older human capability: scenario thinking, which he traces to Peter Schwartz's team at Shell during the 1970s oil crisis ¹. The prescription attached to it is concrete and recurring across sources — leaders should ring-fence roughly 10% of their time, about five hours out of a fifty-hour week, to stay open to "de dag na morgen" ¹²³. Paired with agility and resilience, this forms what he calls a "holy trinity" for operating in uncertainty ¹, and he extends the same argument to corporate strategy more broadly: established companies, he says, should stop reasoning like private equity and start acting like venture capitalists, willing to kill failures ruthlessly and pile resources onto whatever actually works ¹.

On AI specifically, his position has sharpened rather than shifted. He situates the current moment historically, comparing it to "de eerste drie jaar na de gebruders Wright," noting that only 66 years separated the Wright brothers from the moon landing and suggesting the coming acceleration could be "nothing short of spectacular" ¹. He is explicit that this is not blind boosterism: he calls himself "een soort pathologische optimist" ²³ but insists the loudest voices on both ends are wrong — the tech elite's hype is explained by gold-rush self-interest ("Dit is the Gold Rush and we can become incredibly rich if we find a way to leverage this" ²), while doomers like Harari overcorrect the other way. His own belief sits between them: "technologie ons niet slechter gaat maken, maar beter gaat maken... maar dan moeten we wel durven en het omarmen" ¹. At the same time, he is unsentimental about AI's limits. It remains, in his words, "maar een IT technologie," bound by "garbage in, garbage out" ²³, which is why he predicts 2026 will be a year of disappointment: companies expecting to "buy their way into a more productive future" with licenses alone will find their data hygiene and skills weren't ready ²³.

His practical advice for individuals who feel behind is deliberately low-friction: get a €20-30 monthly subscription and just start experimenting, calling it the fastest way to catch up ¹. He treats his own writing process as proof of concept, describing how he wrote his sixth book using Claude and ChatGPT as sparring partners, saving an estimated 20-30% of his time, and stating he would "never write a book without AI again" ¹. On the competitive landscape between AI vendors, he reads Anthropic's enterprise focus as strategically sounder than OpenAI's stretch from consumer to business, since free ChatGPT usage burns compute money while enterprise deals build durable revenue ¹ — and he dismisses fears of a bursting bubble with characteristic bluntness, noting any crash would recover far faster than the multi-year dotcom collapse ¹.

Europe is where his optimism curdles into frustration. He is adamant the continent's problem is not talent — "top Europese AI scientists" exist, he says, but "ze werken voor Google, Amazon and Microsoft" ²³ — but fragmentation, rule-debating instead of full-court offense, and a capital market unwilling to make big bets. The result, in one of his sharper lines, is that "de grootste hoop van een Europese scale-up vandaag de dag is to be acquired by a US big tech. En dat zou niet mogen zijn" ¹²³. He points to DeepSeek as the missed opportunity Europe should be embarrassed by, arguing Mistral in Paris could just as plausibly have delivered that moment and the élan that would have come with it ²³.

Running underneath the frameworks is a personal, almost folksy resilience narrative. He recalls entrepreneurial lows candidly — "There is no way out," he admits some moments feel like, before insisting "there is always a way out. Blijven proberen... there is always a silver lining" ¹ — and even references getting "fired from your own company" as part of the territory ¹. This lived texture is why his abstractions land as instructions rather than slogans: uncertainty is not something to survive but something to convert, in his words, into fuel — "laat ons dat als brandstof zien" ³. The throughline across every source is the same: curiosity paired with critical thinking is, in his estimation, the most valuable skill for the coming decade ¹, because the world he describes will keep moving faster than anyone's plan for it.