Future Ready Digest Vol 1. No. 8
Jim Hamill (Dr)
Director at Future Ready Toolkits - supporting organisations become future ready for an increasingly volatile and digital world.
Welcome to Vol.1 No.8 of Future Ready Digest - keeping you up-to-date with the latest research and thinking on building future ready organisations. Please register to receive notifications of future Digests.
Summary?- bold thought leadership; McKinsey on the transformation challenge facing organisations in 2023; Harvard - driving organisational transformation; change management not keeping up with the pace of change; why commute and a new book on Culture Shock from Gallup; digital maturity is no longer the main challenge - becoming future ready is; continuous employee listening - the new competitive advantage; a brief history of tech skepticism; AI and the future; is speed really the key to a successful transformation; AI is not the problem, the system is; corporate boards still struggle with digital.
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"Amid a sea of mediocre content, thought leadership that dares to go against the grain is a breath of fresh air. Those brave enough to stick their head above the parapet will be rewarded. Taking a controversial stand or railing against 'the way things are done around here' is a strategy that, done properly, should ruffle some feathers. But remember, those turned off by your approach likely won’t have been the people you were targeting anyway."
A new McKinsey report identifies ten major organizational shifts causing significant implications for structures, processes, and people. Worryingly, only half of the 2,500 executives surveyed stated that their organization was well prepared to address external shocks with two-thirds stating that their organization was too complex and inefficient to respond effectively.
An interesting case study from Harvard, especially for those struggling to transform legacy mindsets and ways of doing things. "Leaders often give the impression that they welcome change, but when plans challenge traditional strategy and culture, resistance and control typically follow.....Social defenses exist collectively to maintain legacy beliefs and practices, which provide a sense of order, predictability, and identity. They exist in the organization's structures, strategies, and cultures, making leaders feel proud & followers safe. Change leaders need to understand their organization's social defenses to make meaningful changes in a sensitive way."
Well worth a read for all involved in change management. "Thankfully the brain and body have another radar system we call the Thrive Channel, which instead of looking for threats, seeks opportunities. When our brain spots possibilities, a set of chemicals (different than with Survive), like oxytocin and vasopressin are released into our bodies causing our energy level to rise but not spike. Thrive is accompanied by emotions like passion and excitement rather than anxiety or anger. Instead of narrowing, our focus expands as curiosity about the opportunities broadens our field of vision." Supported by surround sound communications empowering employees to communicate and work across silos in a networked and nimble manner.
Interesting and a new Culture Shock book on its way from Gallup. "Commuting became embedded in our work culture because of a dismal aspect of human nature: the concept of 'learned helplessness,' which results from people accepting a norm because they think they can’t change it."
Good advice on undertaking a digital maturity audit. But for me, digital maturity is no longer enough. The real challenge is ensuring the future readiness of your organization for a volatile, digital world. This covers a much wider range of issues - strategy, organization, people, culture, orchestration, leadership as well as digital.
Via McKinsey. "At a time when organizations are facing wave after wave of disruption rather than occasional upheavals, the annual employee survey approach is no longer sufficient. It should be supplemented by a continuous-listening strategy - a process driven by people analytics capturing employee sentiment in both the short and long terms. Through continuous listening, business leaders can monitor the pulse of the organization at the moment and create an ongoing dialogue with employees. Such a dialogue can engender trust and partnership and can spur long-term improvements to employees’ workplace experiences and performance, as well as companies’ ability to retain top performers."
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Some interesting quotes here ?? "The telephone (1878): “The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys” - William Henry Preece, Chief Engineer of the British Post Office. The Internet (1998): “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s” - Paul Krugman, Winner of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Some sense in a sea of nonsense about generative AI and a good way forward. "Schmidt suggested that within the next five years, a reasonable path is that we will have systems that are similar to a savant in a specific topic. Because of this highly skilled and highly specific system, we need to start imagining what it would be like to have an AI assistant that is fully conversational and able to discuss topics accurately without providing hallucinogenic responses. For example, having a Physics AI assistant that could read all available journal articles and publications, review public datasets, and suggest correlations, anomalies, and areas of research to focus on, that guides a student along while they are working on their Graduate Degree."
Useful advice here from McKinsey, but in a world suffering from change fatigue, we do need to be careful that the need for speed is not seen as top-down enforcement. The main barriers to change are organizational, people, and culture related. To overcome these barriers, we need to empower high-performing teams to drive change. Also, the focus on "transformation" is no longer enough. The main organizational challenge today is becoming future ready.
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While the West gets itself in a mess, other countries get it. "The defining quality of the UAE’s vision as a global hub for AI research and development is that it views progress in this area fundamentally through the lens of the public good."
The problem is not AI. The problem is the system. “If you view what Google is doing in the context of a capitalist system, it’s behaving as responsibly as you could expect it to do. But that doesn’t mean it’s trying to maximise utility for all people: it’s legally obliged to maximize utility for its shareholders, and that’s a very different thing.”
The Sound of Silence. Can you speak up at work? Via Gallup.
Corporate boards continue to struggle with digital. "For most directors, deep discussions of digital technology can feel like a foreign language."
You? "A typical day - an inbox already brimming with threaded conversations, cascaded internal news via large distributions, meeting invitations of all types, solicitations from external vendors, phishing attempts from bad actors etc and then it’s all downhill from there. Periods of concentration and productivity are derailed by interruptions, and time is wasted searching for critical information among the various platforms." So, what you gonna do about it? - via HBR.
Delighted if you could participate in our recently launched Future Ready Global Executive Survey and Roundtable.
Thanks again and take care. As always, comments and feedback are very welcome.
Take care.
Jim H