The wisdom to engage the group, and other new rules of work

Posted on August 24, 2016 by Gaylin Jee

There are 22 applicants for a role you are filling. So let us imagine that you invite them over at the same time for an open house over pizza. They all need jobs, so you tell them, “If you want me to hire you then just get everyone else a job.” Within 13 days, one candidate lands jobs for 3 other people. Having discovered a new skill, this candidate pulls out to go and pursue a career in recruitment.

This is part of a story from Brooke Allen, reported on by Adam Grant (author of Give and Take) in The Atlantic. Allen had the wisdom to engage the group in helping, not only with his decision, but also with helping each other to find work.

These are new rules of work.

Allen’s ad originally asked for someone “with a good heart and a giving personality.” That’s so unlike what we have been conditioned to ask for. Not formal enough, assessable, measurable, barely tangible. Is this fitting for serious business?

Over pizza candidates get to see the actual place of work, they meet the people they’ll work with, and they learn about the work itself. But at the open house pizza gathering Allen sets up, he also lays out these rules:

I’d rather everyone help each other find work than try to convince me they are better than the rest. I’ll help you find work, too.
If someone is “overqualified” for the position, I will try to find them a better job elsewhere rather than pay less than I should.
I have to care enough about you that I will tell you reasons the job I am offering might not be best for you, and you need to care enough about me to tell me why you might not be my best choice. Once we get all the objections on the table, we can address them, and only then will we both be capable of making a good decision.
I won’t get between you and your dreams. If you have a dream, I need to know what it is so we can figure out if this job gets you closer. If you don’t have a dream then that’s fine, as long as you really want one and you’re not addicted to wishing and complaining. I’ll consider hiring you if you can make my dreams yours too.
If you don’t have a requisite skill right now, I won’t hold it against you as long as you get up to speed before I make a hiring decision. People should help each other learn things, and I’ll help too.

We can write the new rules of work.

Do these really work in practice? Decide for yourself. There are a few more examples or stories in the Quartz article How to hire good people instead of nice people.

Some parting words (rules) from Allen which I like. Aim to treat others the best way you can imagine treating them, be honest and they cannot help being honest back, be authentic and they cannot help being authentic back. Strive to be a better person than you are, and you’ll figure out the rest.

What is your remarkable? Are you selling it?

Posted on July 15, 2016 by Gaylin Jee

In 1991, Douglas Edwards became Google’s first brand manager. The company was barely a year old and Edwards was employee number 59. For his interview, Google co-founder Sergey Brin turned up wearing a T-shirt, gym shorts and in-line skates. He asked Edwards to answer his famous challenge. After five minutes to think, I want you to explain something complicated to me that I do not already know. If the candidate wasn’t the right fit, at least it could be an hour of insight gained, airing, absorbing and debating new opinions. Edwards passed the challenge. He was invited for sushi with the team after the interview.

A few weeks after joining, Brin suggested:

“Why don’t we take the marketing budget and use it to inoculate Chechen refugees against cholera. It will help our brand awareness, and we’ll get more new people to use Google.”

At the time Edwards thought this to be a bold and revolutionary approach (a little crazy perhaps?) to growing market share. But as he explains in this excerpt from his book I’m feeling lucky – the confessions of Google employee number 59, a little while later he agreed that saving lives was probably a better use of budget than running ads, which just annoyed people to no effect.

The idea of ads annoying people to no effect is one Seth Godin speaks widely to. The end of the TV-Industrial Complex has not resulted in the end of Television Thinking. Television thinking is trying to reach everyone by any means any time with your message. It was based on the principle of interruption, interrupt your audience and grab their attention, bombard them with a message.

The alternative to this thinking is permission marketing, defined as the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want them. And to get this right we must create and sell things that are remarkable, not only because the other options are boring but because they will be unsuccessful, no matter what anyone tells you.

Seth Godin issues an energetic plea for originality, passion, guts and daring.

‘Today, the one sure way to fail is to be boring (or annoying)…make a difference at your company by helping create products and services that are worth marketing in the first place…’

I agree.

Edwards says he quit the advertising agencies he worked for before Google because he didn’t like the idea that he might have to sell something he didn’t believe in. At Google there was a headlong rush to reshape the world in a generation, accompanied by impatience with those not quick enough to grasp the obvious truth of Google’s vision.

Remarkable.

What’s your remarkable? Are you selling it?

Seek inspiration beyond the oversimplfied

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Gaylin Jee

As guru Brian Solis recommends, I like to seek inspiration beyond the oversimplified.

At our fingertips online is a generous sharing of insights and opinions, thought-provoking, present, creative, curious and clever. Whatever you are looking for you can find. It’s up to you to pick, pocket and personalise your sources.

I’m sharing a few of my secret sources here. They inspire me, shuffle my thinking and give me ideas to connect to each other.

Ideas

https://www.brainpickings.org/ described as ‘An inventory of the meaningful life’ and ‘cross-disciplinary interestingness, spanning art, science, design, history, philosophy, and more.’

https://aeon.co/ ‘Ideas and culture.’ Aeon is a digital magazine of ideas and culture, publishing an original essay every weekday.

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/ ‘What studies say about human behaviour and productivity.

And then there is http://www.getpocket.com. Pocket is actually bookmarking tool. But it also curates content and delivers it to me in a newsletter. It looks for articles based on the articles I have previously bookmarked or saved to Pocket. What they feed me is spot on. Quite ingenious really. Almost every headline fascinates me.

Rather than bemoan our world that is so information-laden, I celebrate the rich access to all this clever insight and opinion. As said above – it’s up to you to pick, pocket and personalise your sources.

Where do you find your inspiration?

People want power because they want autonomy

Posted on April 13, 2016 by Gaylin Jee

A new study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin presented two different conceptions of power to us, power as influence and power as autonomy.

“Power as influence is expressed in having control over others, which could involve responsibility for others. In contrast, power as autonomy is a form of power that allows one person to ignore and resist the influence of others and thus to shape one’s own destiny.”

The authors were interested in which of these two conceptions satisfies people’s desire for power. Do we want power to control others through our influence, or is it more about increasing our own autonomy?

The studies across three different continents, Europe, US and India, offer evidence that:

“… people desire power not to be the master over others, but to be the master of their own domain, to control their own fate”.

We want power over people because we want to be free. This absence of constraint, of plans not being thwarted, of ambitions not being frustrated, in essence an increase in power as autonomy, seems to quench our thirst for more power. But an increase in power as influence does not seem to have the same result, it does not quench that thirst.

The freedom to make your own decisions, and the sense of well-being that comes from doing what you want, is important.

As Julie Beck notes in her article in The Atlantic:

“All told, this research indicates that the desire for power may be somewhat misplaced: Generally, when people say they want power, what they really want is autonomy. And when they get that autonomy, they tend to stop wanting power.”

Tell me about the last time you failed

Posted on March 31, 2016 by Gaylin Jee

On the whole, expect to fail. Do it quickly. Learn. Move on. Perhaps even to something different. That’s the new formula. And it makes sense to have new formulas in light of the fact that the business models we used yesterday no longer seem to produce the results we need for tomorrow. The rules of the game have changed. And it happened while we were sleeping. It’s called the World After Midnight (WAM).

“Most of us spend our lives acting rationally in response to a world we recognise and understand but which no longer exists.” Eddie Obeng on the WAM

This new formula for success goes by the name of rapid fire, rapid fail. Obeng calls it Smart Failure. Failing fast and often is the best approach and the key to success in many areas of business, says a Mu Sigma Report (a decision and analytics firm). Take it from the software industry, and as an approach echoed by engineers working in the pharmaceuticals, material sciences and automotive industries. To develop a successful product, try out many ideas through successive experimentations. Technology can enable that. Then learn from each small failure, so that your end product is better. Failure isn’t bad for business, it leads to something else happening.

‘When you view building a business as a series of experiments, you start to see failure as an inevitable step in the process.” Andrew Filev, CEO and founder of Wrike, a software firm in Mountain View, California.

But can we widen this approach to other working contexts? Are we ready to fail? And are customers and brands ready for that too?

In business we have spent a lot of time trying to reach ‘perfect first time.’ For years we have aimed to refine and control, to measure and predict, to reduce margin for error, streamline. We have thoroughly believed and put full effort into making our work, outputs and our futures more knowable, comfortable and sure.

Yet rapid change and technological evolution (which we all drive) is painting a future quite different from this. We can’t predict with too much accuracy. Now our task is to accept that and to learn to work with iterations of a future. We have to be committed to the experiment without being sure of success at the end, or what exactly the success might be. We need to be able to try something new that nobody has done, and get it wrong. We haven’t let go to that quite yet. We ask people to be creative and innovative, but in our organisations we still have a relatively poor tolerance for getting it wrong. We see it and often feel it as incompetence.

When we do start to let go, it will show in the people we look for – we’ll want people who know how to fail and can learn from it. In interviews, we’ll ask: “Tell me about the last time you failed?” or “How often do you fail?” At regular meetings we might ask “What are you learning from your failures?” or “How many failures have you had so far?” We might even ask future employers: “How does your organisation fail?”

Sound far-fetched? Maybe it’s the language we’re using. It seems somewhat black and white for the complexity of our world.

Some worldview adjustments on failure will emerge over time. Failing may just become smart.

Are you ready for a game-changing future?

Posted on February 24, 2016 by Gaylin Jee

Our desire to attract and recruit Game Changers is increasing.

That’s because they can use the chaos of rapid change and advancement to fuel organisation competitiveness and success. Game Changers drive innovation. We need innovation to survive. But recruiting Game Changers is just one of the steps to a future-fit organisation and not necessarily the first. Few organisations are ready for the Game Changers they seek, or have within their midst.

Game Changer

Game Changers are people who accelerate evolution at every level. They have this ingenious ability to see round corners and to spot hidden or less than obvious opportunity. Their openness to new ideas and willingness to take risks combined with a high drive to initiate change means they can upend organisations, industries and markets. And they do, because they are typically obsessive about turning their ideas into reality. However it is actually quite common for Game Changers to leave large organisations. Why is this?

To understand more about Game Changers, business insight and talent consultancy eg.1 carried out research and produced this report “The DNA of a Game Changer.” Their work sheds a lot of light on a much-needed group of talent with the potential to change landscapes for those around them. Game Changers are described as needing space and latitude to be creative and to demonstrate their value to the business. Their obsessive imagination and relentless focus on making their ideas real is what we seek yet it also means they can come across as demanding, uncompromising and impatient. They can alienate others and appear disruptive. Frustration can drive Game Changers to seek fulfilment away from the structures that limit them – slow moving, hierarchical and risk-averse organisations.

If we want Game Changers and the successes they drive in our organisations, we need to ensure they are championed by an individual who is senior or has influence within the organisation. We also need to get comfortable with allowing them the freedom they crave to make decisions as well as give them permission to take some risk (and fail). How many of us do this already on a day-to-day basis?

And it doesn’t stop there. Even solo Game Changers or innovation heroes will not produce the competitive edge we need for what lies ahead. We need to think about the collection of individuals who, together, can accelerate evolution at every level. These are not collections of Game Changers, or Game Changers and their minions. There are other roles that help to secure game changing results. The four additional roles identified in the eg.1 work for truly game-changing teams are Play Makers, Strategists, Polishers and Implementers.

Nathan Ott (CEO of eg.1) and Dr John Mervyn-Smith (Chief Psychologist of eg.1), in collaboration with Dr Adrian Furnham (University College London) have designed a way to identify these role players. It is called the GC Index and it is a completely online tool that assesses real and potential contribution of individuals to a company, role or project. It challenges traditional methods – in place of measuring personality type, skills or leadership qualities, it focuses on output. That’s a welcome distinction. The eg.1 work turns a corner in the way we approach the future.

Are you ready to change the game?

For more information about the GC Index and how it can be used in your organisation, drop us a mail. We are accredited to administer the tool and to deliver personalised feedback.

Are you in good shape? #futureskills #futurethinking

Posted on February 11, 2016 by Gaylin Jee

We are gradually phasing into a digital world, one that is starting to look and feel very different. And yet in our organisations, we still focus so much on what we have been used to in the past. We look for and build more traditional leadership and management skills. Our HIPO’s (high potentials) are typically good at strategy and implementation. And we reward them for climbing a ladder to larger budgets and bigger teams. But will these HIPOs prepare us adequately for what’s ahead?

‘We can no longer predict the future with any accuracy, but we can build ourselves to flourish there.’

Do you still think you can predict and control what happens tomorrow? Is your strategy to hang on to what you have, to keep doing what you do better than anyone else, to avoid out-disruption through your excellence, tweaking bits at the sides with a new product or service? That is not likely to be enough.

What never seemed possible is now reality. New technologies, ways of living, consuming, working and interacting emerge all the time. We need people in our organisations who think and see things differently, who drive new frontiers, who believe in their ideas and pursue them, who take risks. What we offer (like the corporate ladder) may no longer be attractive for the people we need most, if it ever was.

Embracing and leveraging a future that looks little like today is held somewhere in the way you think. Vast and constant change presents a steady flow of new opportunity. Our mindset and the way we view the world, and the skills we build to thrive within it, are critical enablers to unlock that. But they are so often overlooked as we debate the differences between management and leadership, fight over technical expertise, and insist on ways of working that simply do not yield the outputs we need.

How about shaping a future that changes the game? How about refreshing the lens on the people you need, how you attract them, and the ways of working that make this all possible?

It is likely that the outputs and skills we need most will be in short supply tomorrow, exactly because many people and organisations are just ‘hanging on’, being buttressed by change and disruption.

Your appetite to explore and develop the skills you’ll need for tomorrow will become a competitive lever for you. Proactively and positively crafting your own future using new technologies will become essential.

At 33 Emeralds we challenge you to think about how you are going to fare in a world that is uncertain and unpredictable. We have worked with many individuals in organisations, as well as game changers who have left corporate life to shape their own craft. We believe in a business case, offer simple insight, and assess appetite for risk and change. We form intelligent strategy and define approach to fit current realities, allowing you to experiment, build your own savvy, and execute on whatever it is you have lined up.

Are you in good shape for tomorrow?

It is our belief that focusing on predicting the future will leave us short. Instead, we should aim to build ourselves for it. And then approach it with glee.

If there is nothing that excites you about your future, perhaps you should give us a call.

What can you see? Innovation for life

Posted on December 22, 2015 by Gaylin Jee

Jamie Lawrence speaks about the real power of a growth mindset on HR Zone. People with a growth mindset, put simply, believe they can. They embrace learning and fear failure less. Here are a few examples from Jamie’s post that illustrate the difference between a growth and a fixed mindset:

Fixed: This is too hard

Growth: This may take some time

Fixed: I’m no good at this

Growth: What am I missing?

Fixed: I made a mistake (messed up)

Growth: Mistakes help me to learn (what can I learn?)

When I read Jamie’s post, I was struck by the thought that a growth mindset must be an essential enabler of innovation, but also innovation with significance. I have written before about following your passion and why this could be the worst piece of career advice, and how innovation on its own is can be empty:

‘The world has an infinite supply of interesting problems. The world also has an infinite supply of important problems. I would love for people to focus on the latter.’ Andrew Ng, founder of Google Brain and co-founder of Coursera.

Just for a moment, empty your mind. Think about it as a blank slate. Imagine your work is empty of fulfillment and significance. What if that emptiness was then viewed as a snow-white page ready for prints? What if you then applied a growth mindset to what you could do?

The innovators DNA talks to 5 key skills we can all refine. Implicit in this work is the belief that these skills can be developed by anyone. One of the 5 skills to refine is to be able to observe the world like an anthropologist. Anthropology teaches us to be aware of the lens through which we view the world, and to observe ‘the other’. When you attempt put your own worldview aside, it is amazing what you can ‘see’.

How can what you do merge with what you like to do, and with what is significant?

What can you innovate into your life? Is ‘life’ and ‘work’ as separate as you thought? Is innovation for life? The future may hold fewer boundaries than we’re familiar with. Let’s see who can get used to that.

From old to new rules – the space we choose to play in

Posted on October 26, 2015 by Gaylin Jee

I think we need a shift in lens.

The change we see (and drive) in the world generates a constant stream of opportunity to be explored. When we are paranoid, we are defensive, which makes us operate by old rules, ‘close in and protect’.

If we lift ourselves away from paranoid, we have the space to get curious, expand, explore, collaborate.

We can’t predict what’s going to happen with any accuracy, or control too much for it. But we can build ourselves to play in the new future.

That’s the shift I think we need.

All change please

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Gaylin Jee

It is the human interface with new technologies that will mostly likely drive the best personal and business value propositions into the future. Yet both companies and individuals can miss the people behind the tools and the mindset of change for adoption of new tools. I sometimes wonder if one of the barriers to digital transformation lies in a thinking trap we’ve fallen into. It’s about change and the rhetoric around it.

I once attended a Social Anthropology lecture that covered “The myth of the unchanging past’. My much-admired, clever and somewhat quirky lecturer presented it so eruditely, and it’s been with me all the way since I was a student. But it’s taken a while for what was presented to fully sink in.

The myth speaks to the fact that we tend to assume the past never changed, and it was rather idyllic for that. We see the past as rose tinted, constant and in sharp juxtaposition to today, where there seems to be constant change clutter and chaos. Our worldview of change is as an imposter, arriving one night and settling in, needing management and containment. That’s why we have separate ‘change management projects and budgets’, run by change specialists. We don’t see change as part of who we are, and what we drive.

If you think about it, not even two days have ever been the same. Change has always been with us. Yes, the rate of change has increased. But aren’t we the ones with our feet on the pedals, accelerating the pace of change through our preferences, choices, actions and inventions?

If we have come to view change as an outsider to be managed, how does that shape our orientation to both the present and the future?

Drew Hanson interviewed Rita J King in an article for Forbes in 2012: Imagination: what you need to thrive in the future economy. Rita had this to say:

In the Imagination Age, we can collectively imagine and create the future we want to inhabit … The shape of the future is reliant on the ability to think ahead. In the Imagination Age, we are attempting to create the future we can imagine.

If we want truly novel things to happen in our organizations, we need to learn to let go of the thought that we can always foresee and plan what that newness is going to look like.’

Is that a bit of a departure from what is expected of our leaders now?

Change is all about us, it is us, and it always has been. The mindset we need for future imaginations doesn’t manage change the imposter (the thinking trap). It accepts it, lets it out and plays with it – not always an easy thing to get right in an organisation. But there are some skills that we can develop that would be useful for that. I’m interested to hear what you think those are.

A value proposition for the future

Posted on October 31, 2014 by Gaylin Jee

What’s your value proposition for the future?

I have a few questions to reflect on.

Here’s the context. More than a few individuals and businesses are ‘doing’ social media, seemingly because everyone else is doing it. There is a mix of urge, rush, relish and reticence to be present, present on platforms that are fast-growing or driving lots of referral traffic, new platforms, old ones. And some are feeling somewhat skeptical about the value of it all. When times get tough, it’s a low’ish priority, and social activity and commitment drops.

What’s happening is that social wasn’t crafted and formed up front with a good dose of reflection and strategy, and it hasn’t stuck in any value-driving way. In place of developing an orientation for the future, we are just busier!

What could be happening, is that social engagement could be steering us to a better place in tough times, keeping a thread that’s linking into the future, staying connected and exploring new possibilities.

So here are the questions:

Do we start with our goals and context as number one, and see how social technology may or may not plug-in, where and how, to everything we do? Or is it a pack-on?

Is there a change process involved in adopting new social tools? How does that impact enjoyment, uptake and return?

Do we sometimes say no thanks to some platforms, even if they are (very) popular? (We can and we should.)

What happens when we let an external provider take all the reigns for our social media activity? Are you just present, with a target frequency of posts? Do you lose some of the nuance, because interaction is brokered through a third-party, and you are not close to that interaction?

Social media can activate a piece of a larger puzzle, a plan, a future goal. To do that, we need to think about our individual context, where we are now, where we might want to be, what tools can make that possible. Then we need to identify the skills we need and focus on developing them.

The MIT Leadership Framework, one of many, speaks to ‘sense-making’, ‘visioning’, ‘inventing’ and ‘relating’. Developing and exercising your curiosity, learning, connecting, finding and sharing new insights, showcasing your thought leadership, shaping current and new offerings – that’s leading too.

Leadership is enabled these days with a myriad of new social media at our disposal. We can all lead, ourselves, others, our businesses. And we can also shape our own value proposition into the future in so doing. In place of a one-size-fits all, let’s think about the unique and different, the personalised, the customised.

Explore what’s new out there, evaluate what tools might work for you, say no to ones that don’t, experiment. Think about what will make you valuable in the future. Find and remain connected to a network of global early adopters who explore, engage and share. With curiosity and an open mind, we will delight ourselves.

Why? A blog on innovation

Posted on September 25, 2014 by Gaylin Jee

This is a guest blog I wrote for The Performance Hub. You can find the original post on their website here.

It is said that everyone saw the apple fall from the tree, but only Newton asked why.

What’s the relevance of asking ‘why’?

A mindset of understanding and inventiveness, which starts with asking ‘why?’, might be essential for operating in a business climate that is cost-pressured, fast-paced and critically customer-centric. Curiosity may not be so bad for the cat after all – the desire to do new things in new ways could hold the keys to successful and abundant futures.

If we are defining innovation quite broadly as the implementation of a new or significantly improved product, service, process or interaction that creates value, then creativity is going to play a key role. Creativity can generate the ideas that, through innovation, eventually add value to your products, services and interactions. Those improvements could offer competitive advantage. They could propel you through tough times and help you truly relish better ones. Think Rene Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean, or Seth Godin’s “Purple Cow.”

Some say creativity is not a discipline as such – but it is essential for innovation. Without creativity, innovation is stumped. We are naturally creative when we grow up, we can learn to be uncreative. Think about the child that constantly asks why until eventually they’re told not to ask so many questions, or told, ‘that’s just how it is.’

So if we learn to be uncreative, can we learn to be creative again? Many will tell you, yes! With practice. Here is a quick quiz that will assess your creativity and provide you with a few tools to spark ideas. Clay Christensen also talks about the developing the Innovators DNA, a set of 5 simple behaviours that can be practiced. If these sorts of behaviours aren’t being encouraged somewhere in your organisation, perhaps it’s time to start.

Associating
Questioning
Observing
Networking
Experimenting

It’s not always easy to support ‘why’. Competing demands can push us towards just getting the job done, in the way we know how. But just getting the job done is no longer enough.

‘Daniel H. Pink looked at society’s future and saw that it belonged to the creative minds.’

If we’re not developing and innovating with the ability to see familiar things in a new light, we may not be around in the future witness the change we didn’t drive. Take a look at some of these future videos, and you’ll get a sense of what I mean.

Gather info, reflect on the root of challenges, push your thinking into what the future might look like, generate and evaluate your ideas, and most importantly, allow some experimentation with the ‘whys’.

In your Pocket

Posted on July 16, 2014 by Gaylin Jee

How about a job with flexible hours and unlimited vacation?

One that promises ‘your ideal computer setup’, 50% credit towards your purchase of any mobile devices, ergonomic desk setup, wireless stipend, catered lunches and lots of free snacks and drinks. That’s in addition to 100% Medical, Dental and Vision Coverage, 50% spouse/dependents, and other benefits.

In return, you need to be passionate about what you do.

That’s what Pocket, offering the app to beat when it comes to bookmarking and managing links, will provide in return for helping to build a company that revolutionises how people consume web content.

Sounds kind of cool, doesn’t it? Like some people are pushing the box on what we traditionally experience at work (think unlimited holidays). Something you might want in your pocket?

Superman is dead, and other thoughts on leadership

Posted on June 12, 2014 by Gaylin Jee

What do these words describe? Sense-making, visioning, inventing, relating.

It’s the MIT Sloan 4 Capabilities Leadership Framework.

How many leadership development programmes have a mainframe like this, how many leaders in organisations are developing these critical – some might say ethereal – components of leadership? I can think of a few leadership pointers that are less complex to assess, and easier to enhance than say ‘sense-making’ or ‘visioning’.

The truth is, it takes a deep, long, and often hard look at yourself, driven by yourself, to be great at things like relating and sense-making and visioning. And this doesn’t happen in isolation.

Organisations, or collectives, that have these sorts of capabilities are no doubt better at creating wonderful experiences and products. They are tapped in, tuned in. Leaders create and curate the conditions where people who are wondrous at these things are also valued and supported, at more levels than just the top. It’s not an easy job, producing remarkable things. Command and control is not so far behind us. According to Peter Senge, leaders will probably excel in about two of these areas.

How much are our comfort levels are at play when we face developing these leadership skills? How does this impact the way they percolate through our organisations?

The results of a study by the Institute for the Future (IFTF) are great for pushing thinking boxes. They speak of skills like ‘cognitive load management’, ‘design mindset’ and ‘new media literacy’ in addition to sense-making and social intelligence, which could be said to map to the MIT framework. And they say everyone will need them. Take a look at their skills of the future list here, and their forces shaping the world (which is partly how they arrived at this list of skills). In 5 minutes, give yourself a score out of 10 for each skill. How do you measure up?

This is one view, there are many. I like this study because in place of predicting what jobs are needed, they looked at what skills we will need. These skills will be in short supply in 2020, says the IFTF. And we should all be thinking about our value proposition in the future workplace, and about crafting one that we will enjoy.

Perhaps we could plot an assimilation of these skills on the innovation curve. Early adopters will drive their own value into the future. They’ll be testing and refining, creating futures. It strikes me as a case of the disrupted and the disrupters. But that’s a whole other blog. What you’ll notice is that these skills will start to apply in just about every avenue of your life.

The future is not far away. Is it already here? Perhaps the future is starting today.

So here are the questions, the exciting ones. What does the future require of leadership? What seeds are we planting for the leadership we’ll provide and need in the future?

There is no longer a lone ranger, one hero. Superman is dead. That’s ok.

The knowing doing gap

Posted on April 9, 2014 by Gaylin Jee

Today I have been asking myself this question:

Who puts into practice all the top tips we’re gifted with through our plentiful social media streams?

Last year I conducted a little experiment. It was motivated by a theme that runs through a lot of my work – choosing to be smart about how we manage our working lives and the vast amounts of information we encounter on a daily basis. The experiment was this: I had booked a longish holiday but wasn’t savouring the thought of returning to an overly full inbox of emails to process. Before I left for the holiday, I cancelled my subscriptions to updates, newsletters etc. In short, I didn’t miss much of what was being delivered to me, and it was a good chance to refresh or ‘re-relevance’ the slate.

Now I am doing another experiment based on the question above. I read at least five to ten ‘top tip’ articles a week. Some of them really offer little gems that we all could use to maximise our enjoyment of life and work. I am intrigued to find out how much of the advice we receive every day on Twitter and LinkedIn is put into practice.

Here are some of the titles of recent ‘top tip’ articles:

▪ 4 ways to fast track that promotion

▪ 5 ways to make your employees hate you

▪ 10 tips to a more professional Linkedin profile

▪ 11 rules of highly profitable companies

▪ 12 tips for team building

▪ 33 ways to be an exceptional entrepreneur

Jeffrey Pfeffer spoke about a ‘knowing – doing’ gap. We know what to do, we just aren’t closing the loop and doing it for better results.

Using the hashtag #DoingGap, through my twitter account (@gaylinjee), I am going to turn the ‘top tips’ from these articles into questions, to see who is actually putting them into practice and with what effect. Join me and add your own answers. I’d love to hear them.

33 Emeralds

Positive Digital Disruption

Category Archives: Business

The wisdom to engage the group, and other new rules of work

What is your remarkable? Are you selling it?

Seek inspiration beyond the oversimplfied

People want power because they want autonomy

Tell me about the last time you failed

Are you ready for a game-changing future?

What can you see? Innovation for life

From old to new rules – the space we choose to play in

Why? A blog on innovation

In your Pocket

Superman is dead, and other thoughts on leadership

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