Looking Back, Moving Forward

Pop

Daniel Thomas Powell was born in the Rhondda valley (South Wales) at the turn of the 20th Century on 13th Sept 1901. When I met him, he was a spirited and sprightly 93-year-old who lived independently 5 minutes’ walk away from my house. He had outlived most of his children, his surviving family were scattered all over the world and he needed company and I was put in touch with him so I could offer some social interaction.

Daniel was an interesting and engaging character with innumerable stories to tell about his upbringing, the war years, his life as an engineer and his travels. I like a good story (who doesn’t?) so we were a match and it was no hardship to spend time with him allowing him to regale me with tales from his past. He enjoyed my visits, and so did I and it wasn’t long before he was adopted as ‘Pop’.

Pop was not old enough to be conscripted into the Great War and when Britain declared war on Germany on 3rd Sept 1939 and mandated conscription of all males aged between 18 and 41, he was exempted because of his job as an engineer. Pop could put his hand to almost anything and had an abundance of energy. I often found him doing things you wouldn’t expect a man of his age to do - repairing the garden shed or devising tools to simplify his day to day activities. He couldn’t function without his daily newspaper. He marvelled at the advance of technology. The washing machine held particular fascination and he often told me about his mother who spent a lot of her day hand washing clothes for the family (Pop’s father worked in the South Wales mines). Pop was a lifelong learner. He was curious about how everything worked - mobile phones, the microwave, and so on. He hated automatic cars because he couldn’t work out what was doing what, but he gracefully adapted to technological advances and was keen to understand our perspectives of a world which had changed so much in his lifetime.

Pop lived on his own until February 2006 a few months short of his 105th birthday. His one wish in the weeks before his death was that he would live long enough to get his second birthday card from the Queen (everyone receives a congratulatory message from the Queen for their 100th, 105th birthdays and every year thereafter). Unfortunately, this was not to be.

Adapting to change

A couple or so weeks ago at our acephalous Centrica Culture Guild, we discussed the skills we needed in order to traverse an uncertain and unpredictable world of work. We agreed that as lines between conventional business roles and technological functions become increasingly blurred, tasks will be best tackled by people with a broader, more holistic mindset because the future we inhabit will be one where the perfect skillset will be a blended one, not just the task oriented or technical skills but holistic job skills. Pop and his generation viscerally understood this need for a multiple skill set and the need to keep learning.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, we had already set off on the road to recognising that technical competencies and skills on their own do not lead to optimal performance. They need to be underpinned by human attributes and behaviour. The pandemic has further upended the traditional view that technical ability always trumps human attributes. In his book ‘The Attributes: 25 Hidden Drivers for Optimal Performance’, Rich Diviney argues that skills direct behaviours for a known situation. ‘’When you get into an unpredictable situation, skills on their own don’t apply and at those times we need to also draw on attributes such as adaptability, situational awareness and Resilience’’.

Margaret Heffernan writes ‘’Expertise alone won’t work without the glue of social capital’’.

Back to skills – there are so many but in our Culture Guild we managed to distil the most important down to 4 key skills:-

Curiosity

Our initial instinct as humans is to ask questions. When my children were young, I was almost worn down by the constant questioning — what? how? why? Unfortunately, putting our world into question diminishes as our childlike curiosity fades and instead we stifle the questions or worse still, pretend (even to ourselves) that we know the answers and therefore don’t need to ask the questions! Yet staying curious is key to understanding and managing the complexities in our environment. It is also key to spotting opportunities and avoiding pitfalls. We need the capacity to notice, question, make sense and act or adapt to our uncertain world.

When asked in an Interview with the Centrica Women’s Network to describe the key ingredient for a successful career, and what advice she would give to anyone starting out, Kate Ringrose (recently appointed as Group Chief Financial Officer at Centrica), answered without hesitation – ‘’Curiosity and a desire to learn. Being restless and staying curious is key to spotting opportunities and trends and allows us to expand our experiences and build an appropriate skillset’’.

Collaboration

During the last 15months, each one of us has felt the impact of the pandemic and it has been noted that a general malaise means that many of us are less motivated to become involved in initiatives which ironically would help restore some of the lost vigour. Knowing this and understanding that everyone is trying to do the best they can to cope with and adapt to an uncertain future, we must realise that what is needed is a collective effort. Even when we have all the necessary skills and attributes, individual capacity is limited so we need the collaboration of the widest possible variety of perspectives to enable us to recreate organisations and futures that we are all fully invested in. 

Resilience and adaptability

These were skills that Pop and many of his generation possessed and used with quiet efficiency and a can-do attitude. Some would say this was forced by seismic changes in their world, but similarly, over the last 18 months, the world as we knew it changed – certainties replaced by ambiguity, forecasts revised in light of massively different variables and having to reconsider plans previously thought to be fool and future proof.

Although there is no doubt at all that this crisis has been terrible for so many, it has also demonstrated our immense capacity for resilience and adaptability. This can be seen not only in the innumerable stories about career switches but also in how some have used the extra time previously used for commuting, to learn new skills or start side projects.  This gives credence to the theory that agility, resilience and adaptability are best developed through adversity. Adversity has presented an ‘opportunity’ for a reassessment and offers a challenge for us to flex our adaptability muscle.

Kindness and Empathy

As we all make the shift to embrace more dynamic roles, on both a personal and organisational level, we need to constantly ask: what skills — both technical and behavioural — will define success in a workplace that is becoming increasingly virtual and increasingly technology driven. What is certain is that we will always need both the ‘technical’ skills required for our jobs but also the human skills and attributes. Attributes such as empathy and understanding will be valuable assets for us to ensure that we do not lose the human touch and thoughtfulness in our workplaces. But, whilst some of us will find it easy to flexibly adapt and evolve, we shouldn’t lose sight of those that struggle with this concept. Our mantra should not only be to challenge the comfortable but also to ‘comfort’ or encourage the challenged – to be Kind.

A Cognitive Workout?

If we want to future proof ourselves and our organisations, we must consider not just what adaptations we need to make but also embrace continuous learning because otherwise any skills we have will quickly be relegated to irrelevance. There is some evidence that the need to keep learning is beginning to seep into the collective conscience evidenced by for instance, the popularity of hashtags like #everydayisaschoolday. 

Just as physical fitness makes sense to all of us in our modern way of life, so too should cognitive fitness. I have little doubt that Pop’s openness to new ideas and alternative perspectives gave him the ability to retain a mental youthfulness well into his 11th decade …. Now there’s a challenge for all of us.

How then do we conclude other than to say, we need to review our priorities given our changed and changing world. In relation to skills and attributes, it’s not either-or. It necessarily has to be And…. Any role related skills need to go hand in hand with attributes such as curiosity, collaboration, resilience and empathy because without a successful marriage between skills and attributes such as these, it will be impossible to move forward.

We need to look back but move forward.