Future Ready Digest Vol. 1 No. 9
Jim Hamill (Dr)
Director at The Future Ready Hub - supporting organisations in becoming future ready for an increasingly volatile, digital and AI world.
Welcome to Vol.1 No.9 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?- organisations remain unprepared for an uncertain future; employees running on fumes, losing patience with change initiatives; the need to pivot performance appraisal systems for a flexi-work world; changing mindsets required for successful change; challenge power structures for society to benefit from emerging technologies; the latest MIT research on AI and ML; change proficiency urgently required; can AI fix digital debt in the workplace?
Early findings from our own Future Ready Global Executive Survey suggest that this is a considerable underestimation - with over 80 percent of those surveyed stating that their organisation needs "to improve the speed and effectiveness of our response to emerging threats (and opportunities)." As argued in two recent blog posts, however, we do agree that digital transformation is no longer the most important challenge facing organisations today. Embracing constant change to become future ready is.
While embracing change has become mission-critical, this HBR article argues that employees are losing patience with centrally-driven change initiatives. "The most common mistake when it comes to change management today is trying to build momentum for transformation by hitting the accelerator. A 2022 Gartner survey found that 75% of organizations are adopting a top-down approach to change, where leaders set the change strategy, create detailed implementation roadmaps, and deploy a high volume of change communications. Their aim is for workers to buy into the new path and for managers to lead the charge as champions and role models for their teams. Unfortunately, a combination of the pandemic and relentless sprinting means many employees are running on fumes."
Time for new performance appraisals? Via INSEAD - "Managers concerned about asynchronous work often champion a return to the office. However, this could give the wrong impression to their teams that they value presenteeism and the performative aspects of work. But an employee’s presence in the office doesn’t necessarily equate to them being productive. People busy polishing their resumes or responding to LinkedIn posts are hardly productive even if they appear hard at work while sitting next to the manager’s office. Adopting an outcome-based appraisal system, rather than one that emphasises productivity KPIs, can help prevent this. It can also move the conversation towards collective problem-solving, building trust between managers and their reports."
"Picture yourself as a CEO in 2019 with a crystal ball. You knew that a global pandemic would turn the world upside-down within months. What would you have done differently for your business at that time, given that knowledge?." Perhaps a more appropriate question would be, why did it take a global pandemic to force new ways of thinking when the need for change was obvious? Also, why are many leaders now regressing back to the way things were done before?
The authors of this new book entitled Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity argue that a more inclusive vision of technology can emerge only if the basis of social power changes. "Progress is never automatic. Today’s 'progress' is again enriching a small group of entrepreneurs and investors, whereas most people are disempowered and benefit little. Confronting the prevailing vision and wresting the direction of technology away from the control of a narrow elite may even be more difficult today than it was in nineteenth-century Britain and America. But it is no less essential."
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An interesting selection of research papers from MIT Sloan on artificial intelligence and machine learning includes - AI is changing most occupations but still far from replacing humans; AI and an equitable future; AI-fueled productivity boom; AI workers need protection; AI requires stakeholder buy-in; AI and machine learning are transforming digital marketing; good data = good AI.
Microsoft's latest Work Trend report argues that AI can remove digital debt, completely transforming the way we work. "We’re all carrying digital debt: the inflow of data, emails, meetings, and notifications has outpaced humans’ ability to process it all. And the pace of work is only intensifying. Everything feels important, so we spend our workdays trying to get out of the red. Nearly 2 in 3 people (64%) say they struggle with having the time and energy to do their job - and those people are 3.5x more likely to also struggle with innovation and strategic thinking. And nearly 2 in 3 leaders (60%) are already feeling the effects, saying that a lack of innovation or breakthrough ideas on their teams is a concern. There are only so many minutes in the day - and every minute we spend managing this digital debt is a minute not spent on the creative work that leads to innovation. In a world where creativity is the new productivity, digital debt is more than an inconvenience - it’s impacting business."
Does your organisation have strong change proficiency, allowing it to respond quickly and effectively to a rapidly changing, volatile, and increasingly digital environment? Worth a read via John Kotter.
Oh well!!! A report by PAC concludes that Defra is using such old programmes that users in some cases need to find old secondhand laptops to run them and that 80% of IT applications are either unsupported or in extended support. For an organisation handling 14m paper transactions per year, there is no strategy in place for reducing reliance on paper. Between 2021 and 2025 over ￡726m will need to be spent on modernising legacy services.
Too many organisations still paying lip service to this.
Please participate in our recently launched?Future Ready Global Executive Survey and Roundtable
Take care and thank you for your interest in the Future Ready Digest.
Jim H