FUTURE COMPETENCIES
Let’s start this article with a puzzle.
What…
1. Envelops you like love?
2. Transforms the way you see the world?
3. Enables you to handle complexity?
4. Helps you live life on a grander scale?
How can you…
1. Escape the competition, not just run to better them?
2. Inspire people and set positive change in motion?
3. See what others can’t see and use it to create value?
4. Claim untapped personal power and agency to enrich life?
The answer—Future Competencies.
We call them Future Competencies because they are currently underdeveloped or misapplied today and they are essential to shaping the future.
SO, WHAT ARE FUTURE COMPETENCIES?
We have given a lot of thought to this question and have identified four important competencies that are foundational to the many skills and abilities we need to continually upgrade to succeed in the ever-unpredictable future.
They are: 1) Creative Innovation, 2) Storytelling, 3) Zoom-0ut, Zoom-In, and 4) Potential Development.
To take hold of these future competencies, harken back to our last Newsletter on Substack when we talked about the importance of Meaning and Purpose. We said Meaning is a Maker…and when done right, it drives all that we make and do.
Keep this in mind as we explore the Future Competencies. They should be driven by meaning and kept viable by continual, regenerative evolution.
Competencies, like creativity, cannot be used up; they only grow with more use. They are deep proficiencies that make successful application of the other capabilities and skills possible.
In this piece we focus on identifying the competencies and their role in creating value and enriching life. Learning HOW TO develop these important Future Competencies will take time. Contact us and we can outline that process for your organization.
1. CREATIVE INNOVATION
(The emphasis is on Creative)
Why is Creativity always at the top of the list of qualities most needed in year-on-year business surveys?
We all recognize that any enterprise must adapt and innovate if it is to stay viable into the future. However, many companies and people do an inadequate job of being creative.
Creativity and Creative Thinking are not deeply understood nor well developed in most enterprises.
True creativity is immersive, enveloping, and takes you over like love. It has its own ways and conditions that invite origination and surprising outcomes.
It goes beyond basic Design Thinking, Agile Methodology, and a lot of other programmatic approaches.
When you are in the creative flow, you lose yourself and let the creative impulse lead the way (ask any true artist or scientist). You find yourself on a creative journey of exploration, surprises, bumpy challenges, and learning to surrender to a bigger source of insight and discovery.
However, most people are educated and trained to be cerebral problem solvers in seemingly predictable situations that don’t reflect complex reality. Their solutions are designed for linear challenges and can even screw up complex systems. And they are not comfortable with the enveloping commitment of creativity that true innovation requires.
Unfortunately, many have not learned the art of asking the deeper, wicked questions that start you on the journey to creativity.
So, what we see today is emphasis on Iterative Innovation, driving small improvements in utilitarian things, like better cup holders in cars…and calling that innovation.
Of course, we must make useful stuff because we, in business, are selling stuff (products, services, information). However, when we don’t lead with the creative, we rob ourselves of the joy of bringing something truly new and valuable into the world and the opportunity to create standout success.
A word about INNOVATION—Disruptive or Incremental? Yes!
Disruptive Innovation is employed when the future market changes dramatically. It destroys previous business models. It is used when there is big threat (defensive strategy) or there is a huge, urgent opportunity on the horizon (offensive strategy). Disruptive Innovation is risky, but it is an even higher risk if you don’t change in a big change environment.
Incremental Innovation/Improvement is employed when the market is stable and mostly predictable. It creates the greatest value during a stable market and is fairly risk-free.
Both are viable forms of innovation, depending on the situation. What they have in common is they both must be designed for the future, and they require a culture that is set up to specifically handle their very different demands. Therefore, a creative and responsive culture strategy is critical to employing any type of innovation.
To create standout business success, you must create something truly different that allows you to escape the quickly copying competition. Just being better is not good enough.
You will need a Creative Innovation future approach that is unlike others and is unique to your brand/business.
It’s time creativity moves from just another skill need on CEO survey lists to a strategic imperative for the future.
2. STORYTELLING
“Storytelling is the most important skill that we need to succeed in the future.”
Great Storytelling is an engaging, powerfully transformational container of coherence. Stories are sense makers that set emotions moving in the audience. (Yes, B2B leaders…this holds to true for you as well as B2C communicators.)
Often, today’s enterprises would rather cling to shopworn ways of telling stories, many of which have no chance of serving them in the future.
In business, the most worn out story is one that centers around bragging points about yourself and not about making the customer the hero of the story.
Too often business leaders think they can bypass true storytelling. They try to win people over with facts separated from emotions. They become distant observers, reporters of statistics or events and avoid becoming evocative storytellers of things that open new portals to the future.
Note that one type of storytelling doesn’t fit all occasions. We must use multiple types of storytelling flows, formats, and media to tell stories…traditional three act structures, or stories within system nodes in a process, or visual/auditory storytelling, or kinesthetic experiences, etc. Creativity in storytelling is both form and content, infused with deeper understanding and meaning.
Whatever shape the storytelling takes, it needs to be human, resonate, inspire, show transformation and effect positive change.
If your organization’s storytelling isn’t doing that now, it’s time to redesign and prepare for a new kind of storytelling in the future. (If you are curious to learn how these ideas can benefit your organization, just give our Master Storyteller, Drew Beam, a call!)
3. ZOOM-OUT, ZOOM-IN (and handle complexity)
Steve Jobs (yes, there always must be at least one Jobs quote) said that the number one sign of intelligence is being able to Zoom Out and In.
Zooming-Out takes intuitive, bold imagination to land on that higher perch of perspective, to take in the whole system story and then Zoom-In to design “roll-up-your-sleeves” solutions that can handle the complexity of whole system change.
Who teaches that in schools or organizations?
Remember, we won’t be different if we can’t see or leverage something different that others don’t.
We must be unreasonable and expect to find that magic something that most miss. Then use it to make something most will never make (Steve Jobs’ history is filled with these stories).
We do that by Zooming-Out, taking in the whole field, the whole system. And we do that by opening our peripheral vision.
All great athletes zoom-out and take in the whole field or court, anticipating where the unseen opening will appear. Then they zoom-in to make just the right move, just the right play, at just the right time.
In enterprises, we zoom-out by looking at the Zeitgeist (the spirit of the times), the environment, the economy, and cross-pollinating fields. We do this well when we stay broad in our interests, seeing the connections and crossovers in disciplines, and see where they can open new possibilities within our own field.
We zoom-in by bringing the zoom-out insight to the creative process so that we can make the unseen tangible. We understand how to mix the great complexity of the system with the particulars of great design and execution.
We can do this in the future because we have learned that handling complexity requires a Container (Vision/Story), Connected Networks, and Flow, letting it naturally travel into new solutions. Complexity can’t be manhandled, and many managers are not comfortable with complexity. They have been trained to make linear decisions for cause and effect and predictable outcomes, not necessarily to lead creative outcomes in complex systems (everything in nature is part of a complex system).
The question is…Do you think your enterprise has a high performing Future Shaping Competency of Zooming-Out and Zooming-In, while handling the complexity of the unpredictable future?
4. POTENTIAL DEVELOPMENT
“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low and achieving our mark.”
We are more afraid of our own power than we are of our shortcomings.
As the poet David Whyte puts it, we are often afraid to live on a “grander scale”.
“Know thyself” is intentionally right, but it is most often misunderstood. Truly knowing thyself means knowing that there are parts of ourselves that are knowable and parts that are not knowable at different stages of our development. Only in the right conditions do we discover our unseen power and claim a greater sense of personal agency and potential.
Only when we hold the belief that we are made to live on a “grander scale” can we begin the journey to discover the pathway to that better future.
But many times, we’d rather fit into the narrow “pleaser box” that society or organizations hand us, rather than risk becoming who we really are when we are living to our full potential. This scares people.
Part of our role as leaders, mentors, or outside advisors is to give people permission to imagine themselves on a grander scale and support them in developing it.
In our consulting, we often find that part of our work is to give clients permission to stretch and leap, as they secretly want to do but haven’t given themselves that permission. When they do, they realize results that even amaze them.
Leaders need to give themselves and their people permission to stretch and leap into a new identity and higher expression of what is truly theirs.
When leaders put limits on themselves, it can keep them from understanding the true power and potential of people they lead or with whom they work. In other words, “put on your own oxygen mask first before helping others”, as airplane attendants advise us.
Sadly, we find that many people in companies feel their potential is either unseen or hurtfully underutilized. This causes stress for the individual and sub-optimization of the organization’s collective potential.
At the same time, organizations too often produce future plans that are not worthy of their true potential. They end up doing “last year plus 10%” planning when they should be imagining the full potential of the future and designing ways to create that outcome.
Also, many companies fail to recognize that potential is contextual. For example, at each point on a company’s business model life cycle (from Start-up, to Go-go, to Prime, to Stable, to Decline), there is a different type of potential that is important and different kind of leadership that is required.
The same holds true for individuals. We must “see the person” in front of us and recognize where they are in their stage of growth to know how to support them in realizing their full potential.
Warning—Humans, when really seen, are often strange, weird, and unpredictable living complex systems that can’t be planned or predicted (think of your own family). You can only set up positive conditions and let them run.
That’s the scary part for managers, and it is the essential reason we need these weird and wonderful fellow humans in our organizations to scare us a little bit with their uniqueness.
Our wish is for people and enterprises to understand there is unseen potential just waiting for us. This should be the topic of all employee performance sessions and all enterprise planning for the future.
In a future of AI and other radical change, too much of the talk is about the technology and too little about how we must change our relationship to human experience and development (individual and collective).
That is why the Future Competency of Potential Development must be one of the big four competencies of the future.
Article by: Dan Beam CEO of BEAM,Inc.
Illustration by: Drew Beam CCO/Partner of BEAM,Inc.