Tracking Your Leap Into the Future

Five things your data told me about your future.

After more than five years of research and development, and hundreds of thousands of data points across the globe in all markets, my teammates at Global Learning and I just released our Future Strong Assessment tool. It tracks individual, team, and organizational readiness for a crazy, disruptive future, filled with more unknowns than knowns, and more surprizes than predictable outcomes. (Go here for free trial. Email me [below] for team assessments and workshops.)

Here’s what we’ve learned from your own data…

1. The Future is a Team Sport

Of the three possible readiness scores (Future Strong, Passive, or Shackled), less than 15% of the workforce have deep strengths in all the behaviors needed to be future strong. It takes a village to build a strong future.

Many of our most-driven innovators also have major blind spots in emotional intelligence, empathy, and are just not focused on how hard others are working to achieve team goals. (Think Steve Jobs, at his best and his worst.) And on the other side of that: Many of your most-caring and culturally-minded teammates are too risk-averse and too concerned about how they’ll be perceived — holding them back from blowing the doors off of tomorrow.

Facing a disruptive, crazed, and VUCA-driven future, team diversity and deep personal connections have never been more urgent. Diverse thinking; diverse passions; diverse priorities; diverse personalities; diverse strengths. When only 15 out of every 100 of us (or less) fully embodies all that it takes to be future strong, team cohesiveness and team strengths truly matter.

2. A Future So Bright You’ll Need Sunglasses at Night

If you are willing to do deep introspection… If you are willing to disrupt yourself faster than the disruptions being thrown at you...

Early on, my interviews and research found a that those best equipped to adapt to and be agile during extremely disruptive times had a deep sense of “inner knowingness” — and used that as their compass when all around them was blowing up.

Consistently, when I asked disruptive heroes across the globe “What makes you…you?” every single one was able to pinpoint specific values, mindsets, and crucible moments in their lives that shaped how they view and react to disruptive changes. Just like the movie cliché, where most of us see a blur of disruptive chaos, they see slow-motion clarity and opportunity.

So we shaped our instrument to be a mix of deeply introspective questions and relevant business environment survey questions.

And your data supports this insight about future readiness: People who are strong in Self-Awareness and Passion & Drive are two- to five-times more likely to get ahead of disruptive changes than those who struggle with self-awareness and struggle to leverage their passions. 

3. We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us

On the other hand, I also discovered the 80/20 rule of Inner Knowingness: 80% of us think we know who we are…but don’t. And have done only 20% of the necessary introspective work.

The biggest barriers to being future strong are your own biases and filters — conscious and unconscious — as they prevent you from seeing/ learning/ unlearning/ disrupting yourself as rapidly as necessary.

People who score Passive or Shackled in three or more behaviors are likely to have significant blindspots relating to why and how they must change.

If that sounds even remotely familiar to you... Run, don’t walk, to take any assessment that provides these kinds of insights; then sit down with a trusted coach or mentor, discussing the results.

4. Company Systems are Far Too Future Passive

The most consistent dips in future strong scores are in the areas of Risk and Grit. But what’s crucial to understand is that those dips are driven more by corporate cultures and infrastructures than by individual shortcomings.

Ten months before he died in 1993, the father of modern quality controls, W. Edwards Deming, declared that most management systems are destroying our best efforts: “A bad system will beat a good person every time.”

Despite most senior executives' battle cries of CHANGE! and INNOVATION!, most of us work within corporate systems that are still too risk-averse and that are designed to beat perseverance and grit out of us.

The number one finding in our Future of Work Study: 2015—2020 is that too many leaders are holding back the future because it comes wrapped in risks. While most leaders have been hyperfast in pushing for cost and efficiency changes, they have been glacially slow in rethinking the people systems that would free human capacity.

5. Your Future is Personal

When we do assessment debriefs and workshops with teams, the biggest changes needed to stay future strong are personal. Not creating or working at the next Uber, AirBnB, or SpaceX. For most of us, those kind of moments come after necessary personal changes.

First comes personal change: Deeper introspection. More listening to one’s inner voice. More disrupting of oneself. More taking a stand, even if you stand alone. More selectiveness in choosing which hardships are best for you. More building daily routines around passions, dreams, and personal priorities. More living the legacy one wishes to leave behind.

Yes, after analyzing hundreds of thousands of data points and tens of thousands of conversations… Your future is most definitely personal.

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Bill Jensen Site, Twitter, FB. Email: [email protected]. Bill’s latest book, Future Strong, is about the five deeply personal choices each of us must make to be ready for all the disruptive tomorrows heading our way.