A fireside chat with Chuck Hamilton on preparing your workforce for resilience and adaptation - at the Workforce Transformation Conference
Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.
Join us
October 1 at Workforce Transformation Online for a Fireside Chat with Chuck Hamilton
The pressure for change has been building for a long time. We know that we need to create workforces that are at once resilient (able to recover their balance when they encounter external or internal shocks) and adaptive (able to change to help shape the future). To achieve this we need fundamental change in how we build and empower our people.
Roles trump Jobs - people play multiple roles, from the roles associated with their jobs, to project roles to ad-hoc roles and the roles they play outside work, supporting people across multiple roles comes ahead of job architectures and career paths
Foundational and social skills matter - foundational skills are the skills used to build new skills, social skills are the skills we use to work with each other - both are critical to resilience and adaptation
People take ownership of their careers - once upon a time our career was a series of linear steps up the career ladder (or jumps for the high potentials among us), today careers are more like braids of different roles that we play in different ways for different organizations over a long and productive life
None of this is new. People have been discussing these themes for at least thirty years. In other words, for pretty much my whole career. But the urgency has changed.
The Covid-19 Pandemic is forcing organizations to make changes in weeks, or days, that they thought would take years. Ibbaka has one customer that had been discussing the option of moving their support staff to remote work for several years, they even had a plan that would let them do this over nine months. Under Covid-19, they did it in three days! Change can happen fast when it has to.
Workforce transformation is putting new demands on every part of the HR organization. We need to hire in new ways, design jobs that are open and flexible, find the benefits that matter to a workforce that is mostly at home and sheltering from a pandemic. None of this is easy. But one of the most stressed, and critical, parts of the organization must be learning and development.
Learning and development needs to move all learning online while at the same time addressing new needs (like cybersecurity at home) and helping with organizational resilience. Soon they will be tasked with organizational change as we come to accept that for many of us the old ways of work are not coming back.
On Sept. 21 McKinsey and Co. published a useful though piece on A transformation of the learning function: Why it should learn new ways. There is an interesting figure in this piece.
Looking through this, it struck me that Stability and Dynamism maps to the tension between Resilience and Adaptation. Both are important. Organizations that lack resilience will fail before they have a chance to adapt. Organizations that over emphasize resilience will keep on returning to their steady state, failing to adapt, until the world has moved on so far that they finally fail.
Skills for Resilience - Social Skills supported by Business Skills
Based on our own research, see below, the most important skills for resilience are social skills! People need to be able to communicate with each other and to find ways to adjust for an organization to be resilient. Some examples of social skills are …
Asking questions
Active listening
Collaborative problem solving
Business skills are also important to resilience. To survive one has to stay in business and this takes business skills such as Negotiation, Planning, Budgeting.
Skills for Adaptation - Foundational Skills with Business, Technical and Design Skills
Adaptation is a different story. It almost always requires new skills. Foundational skills are the skills used to develop new skills. This is central to adaptation. Required, but not sufficient. Adaptation also requires Design skills to devise new solutions, technical skills to implement them and business skills to get them out into the market.
Some foundational skills
Mathematics
Critical Thinking
Abstraction
Learning (this is of course a complex skill that can be unpacked in many different ways for different people)
Concept Blending (see the note below on domain knowledge)
Some design skills
Design Thinking
Prototyping
Sketching
Some Technical Skills
Software Engineering (specific languages would be Tools at Ibbaka rather than Technical Skills)
Machine Learning
Bayesian Networks (belief networks or decision networks)
One other key thing to realize about adaptation is that it often requires the ability blend concepts and experience from two or more different domains. Resilience generally requires deep knowledge in one domain while adaptation asks us to blend domains!
Ibbaka itself is an example of this. We are blending our experience in market segmentation, value management and pricing with our knowledge of skill and talent management and organizational design to help our customers understand and then realize their potential in growth.
Who will be at this fireside chat?
Chuck Hamilton will be sharing his insights from leading global mentoring and virtual learning while at IBM. Over the past few years he has been putting his ideas to work in a larger context, guiding important conversations on open innovation, learning and the transformation of work.
See his Ted Talk The Future of work in an uncertain world (from way back in 2013 but prescient!)
Karen Chiang is a co-founder at Ibbaka and the COO. She has to find the people for and organize our own workforce while shaping a culture that will let us deliver on our mission of From Potential to Growth. See her skill profile.
Steven Forth (that’s me) will be moderating, drawing out Chuck and Karen on their experiences. Ping me at steven@ibbaka.com if there are questions you would like me to ask them. See my skill profile.
First results from the Critical Skills for the Future of Work Survey
In the midst of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic we reached out to people to get their insights into the new skills that were required in what is becoming the new normal. We asked questions like
“What are the emerging skills for your own work?’
“What are the critical skills you use to work with other people?”
“How do you develop and apply new skills?”
“How transferable are your skills?”
“How mobile are the people in your profession?”
