How To Beat The Odds In 'Interesting Times'

Last year was a bad one for many, but this is the normal. The good news is chaos brings opportunity - you just need to know where to look.

I believe that it's always been an ‘interesting' time to be alive, but there does seem to be something in the water at the moment. I'm writing this blog with Donald Trump’s inauguration on in the background.

Whether it’s Putin flexing his metaphorical - and in his case literal - pecs, the pound plummeting, inflation escalating, the unknown and everlasting boredom of Brexit…not forgetting that we’ll all be out of a job soon thanks to the rapid rise of the robot!

It's safe to say things are a little more up in the air than we’ve been used to, and we don’t like it…I received a car sticker by the conceptual and politically influenced artist, Jeremy Deller, in a friends Christmas card this year that simply said “Fuck You 2016”.

But my sense is that we’re only in the shallow end…in the words of futurist Ray Kurzweil in his essay 'the law of accelerating returns', "in a few decades, the world will be unrecognizably different. We won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate).”

If we want to thrive in this environment we need to embrace change, get comfortable with the unknown and adapt…it's the only viable option.

In my last role, we adopted Winston Churchill’s words “never let a good crisis go to waste” as our mantra and mindset during the 2008 financial crisis and our innovation training business subsequently blossomed: Those who skilled themselves up to initiate change would have a better opportunity to manage the change that was inevitable.

In the last 6 months, lots of businesses have pressed pause on investing in anything other than what they see as fire fighting the day to day, as part of a bigger ‘wait and see’ strategy. I get it as a panic setting but it is undoubtedly the wrong approach.

The uncertainty is unquestionably going to increase as the global political, economic and social forces shift through time.

The best investment you can make right now is to teach your people how to adapt and lead for change: Take note from the age old saying ‘What is often mistaken for 20 years’ experience, is just one year's experience repeated 20 times’.

Employees are just humans who happen to be at work. Let’s treat them like humans and help them feel secure, understood and able to self lead. It is the self led who will make it successfully and profitably through these uncertain times.

They work more productively, innovatively and creatively. Fact. Create a culture of impact, growth and purpose and watch the bottom line soar.

In the words of Jack Welch, ex CEO of GE (which in his tenure rose in value by 4,000%) "An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.” and another from the King of creative wisdom, Steve Jobs “there’s always one more thing to learn”.

The secret to sustaining a self-led team is flexibility. You have to be flexible and diverse with your ways of working to create opportunities for people to flourish, develop and innovate so they experience purpose.

Happiness, as defined by Professor Paul Dolan, London School of Economics, is "experiences of pleasure and purpose over time". We need to have a balance of both. Money can buy pleasure, but it can’t buy purpose.

This requires a very different mindset from traditional leadership. It’s about experimentation to encourage growth. That means letting go of ego; the boss isn’t really the boss any more.

Read Jim's 3 tips to help you on the journey on Minutehack.