To answer this question, I looked at two sets of companies : large and mid-sized ones. It was easier to spot the key differences: the investments in technology, R&D, go-to-market reorganization. But at a macro-level, these two set of companies seem to have a similar view on how to shape the business through 2025.

The five big principles

In my view, there are five big elements in play to win in 2025, in any economic scenario:

1. Shrink the time to the customer

2. Pinch the manager layers

3. Stretch the augmentation

4. Move the firm’s intelligence

5. Skill the upper middle

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As you read through this, you should be able to stack up your company and its approach across these five big principles.

As you consider these five big principles, they should also provide some ideas to:

• What if the fragmentation in geo-politics of the world continues to increase the ‘hyper-nationalist’ view of being local first?

• What if the company is unable to move fast enough to respond to security challenges: data, personnel, regulatory or supply-chains?

• What if the large language models do not give you the promised breakthroughs, how would you pivot on approach to AI?

Let me walk you through the five principles.

In the face of geo-political uncertainties potentially impacting supply chains, companies have been focussed on finding the optimum balance between buffering for disruption while protecting their margins.

With this we now see a flashback to good old fashioned productivity thinking from the linear business models era - to the determinant of breakthrough strategy choices. But ‘the shrink’ needs technology applied to the core of a business - how you serve your customers. This is beyond the classical digital transformation thinking. This is examining each activity within a firm and evaluating the value impact it has on customers.

This is important as significant productivity is a one time gain, after that it is always marginal till another wave of transformative technology or work method comes through.

As companies continue to experiment with new technologies, in much of the cases, companies continue to squeeze the dollar to drive their productivity gains. This is focussed on the right allocation of resources, shifting to more scrutinized performance of people, delayering of the organization, rolling back low ROI initiatives or even removing certain options for customers to minimize the cost of service.

The response to this challenge of ‘shrink time-to-customer’ has been pre-dominantly reorganizing go-to-market structures to answer some of these questions:

• How can I increase the penetration of my products and services in a known market to reduce my costs of acquisition of new customers?

• What other value streams can you piggy back on to the existing service platforms?

• Can I transfer more of the companies share of operations to the customer through ‘intelligent search to service models’.?

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With the focus on efficiencies and leveraging existing business elements to increase both revenue and margins, we have seen a trend over the past 18 months where layoffs/redundancies announced by companies impact the manager layers more than the execution ones.

In this process, the definition of being a manager has been overhauled. It is an expectation now that direct contribution competence and skills are needed to be an effective manager. It is a flashback to the belief in the technology sector that higher the span of control, the lesser possibility of a manager getting into the sandbox of each reporting person thereby enabling innovation.

As automation increased in manufacturing sector, we have already seen this play out starting a decade ago. It is only now that there is an impact to ‘white collar’ jobs in the knowledge levels of an organization. Technology alone is not the reason for this shift in these two years. The Covid era bench, combined with consumer sentiment and the buzz of AI had all given companies the opportunity to reshape their management philosophies.

It is not that every company laying off managers as part of their overall redundancies has mastered application of AI and other automation technologies. It is primarily because organizations have been slowed and often subverted by layers of managers creating bureaucracy and resistance to change - when rapid change is not just a need to win the future but to survive the present.

Companies will continue to focus on adopting technology and tools that either fully automate or augment people. But the gains from technology while successful in process driven automation, have eluded the impact in knowledge centric jobs. Co-pilots have not solved for clutter and the need for rework after a certain output is received. While we have seen gains in software development through Gen AI tools, this impact has not been across many other types of functions in an organization.

Wall Street Journal reports that 1.6 million Americans have not been successful finding a job despite applying for numerous ones over a period of six months. With the US unemployment rate hovering around 4.1%, should the economy grow beyond the project 1.5% to 2.7% in 2025, there is no talent for businesses to grow with. Therefore, productivity through augmentation is a necessity. Adding to this issue is that hiring is a broken function across industries.

Jevons Paradox shows that every time you make something more efficient, the demand actually grows. As Gen AI and language models get efficient, it’s not just that code is being written more efficiently, it becomes easy to build more software for applications so far not focussed upon.

Job augmentation of technology is one such area. Any technology implemented for a customer ends up changing the nature of jobs not just in the serving company but also in the larger ecosystem of jobs in the supply chain. So far, beyond co-pilots and the uneven use of these tools by employees has shown the absence of intentional design by companies. This is also because of the fragmentation and silo nature of data existing within the firm. AI cannot solve for fragmented systems. The human-tech handshake design becomes critical to success in expanding the augmentation of jobs with AI and other technologies.

In my view, there two areas of augmentation that deliver outstanding results to a company: Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management. We know employees spend on an average about forty five minutes each day just searching for information to do their jobs. This search is essentially for two things: analytics & data (business intelligence) or contextual search for information - concurrent, historical, comparative etc. (Knowledge Management). This will take companies beyond off the shelf co-pilots into customized value based implementation of Gen AI tools.

Arguably, harnessing the collective intelligence of a firm and moving it at speed to benefit - to solve problems or identify future opportunities is the single biggest challenge and opportunity in the age of AI.

As workforces shrink, as the manager layers get eliminated organizations lose a lot of tribal knowledge that helps them succeed. It would be safe to say, 50% of day to day activities inside each job in the company are in the grey zone. A simple measure would be to ask employees the percentage of actions they take that do not fall in their normal job descriptions.

This knowledge is vital to be captured as this exists in the minds of people. This is typically accessed through internal networks of informal referrals or relationships. But the limiting factor in this, especially in a large global enterprise is that it is highly localized. The speed and nimbleness companies want to build into themselves is based not so much on layers or structures but on the ability to move firm’s collective intelligence to where it matters.

Companies are inundated with information from across the business functions. But there is little effort (compared to customer data) to collect, organize and synthesize it to the benefit of employees or decision makers.

Companies are on the path to find the right approach to knowledge management, especially encouraged by Gen AI applications. The key realization for companies is that productivity driven by AI or reduced workforce is limited in absence of powerful knowledge management approach.

Creating enterprise wide knowledge management framework is hard. Once you get past the usual cultural barriers, it is a design challenge. It is easy to consolidate and organization data or information that is hard coded into multiple systems. However, the real value comes from experiences of teams or individuals across multiple sets of scenarios and contexts over a long period of time.

There is a strategic imperative for large companies to focus on this, if you consider digital age conglomerates. But this is absolutely the imperative for small to mid-size enterprises to compete with large companies.

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Companies aspire to build future capabilities at all levels of leaders. But I hear two issues:

1. Operational pressures forcing them to drive immediate outcome based development interventions (teaching P&ls, Balance Sheets, People Manager Fundamentals etc.)

2. ‘We are headed in that direction but its too far out’, we still have basic needs for our leaders to learn and develop

Companies that state these two issues are using it as an excuse to not build real tangible leadership capabilities. Over many years overseeing succession and capabilities across 55+countries, I can say one thing for certain, investment into capabilities has two include two dimensions:

• Exposure to a wide range of ideas from within and outside the industry, domain areas and functions - people with the breath of exposure have higher adaptability and openness to change. They are generally more curious than others.

• Bias for action - the impatience to get things done but with a strong focus that each action is a building block for the future. They have this ability to articulate the future so clearly that it becomes easier to build for it today.

But with so much change and the focus on efficiency of spends, where should companies invest on leadership capabilities that would deliver exponential results for the company? This is where the ‘upper middle’ comes into play. The leaders in roles at CEO -2,3 & 4 is where the sweet spot for agility is. These are leaders who are influencing decisions, sharing ideas into the future business plans and also overseeing ‘rubber meets the road’ impact. These are some of the toughest roles in any company.

This is also the bandwidth where succession falls apart. We have great operational leaders who can’t make it to the succession paths for top jobs. In part because companies like to keep them operationally focussed. The intellect, in-depth understanding of the business, the relationship networks at these levels are an asset but often under-leveraged for the future of the company.

The inter-connectedness in the company, between markets, functions, levels all come together here. To have these leaders develop multi-disciplinary, inter-connected learning is the difference between entropy and acceleration.

Focussing in developing capabilities for the ‘upper middle’ is the surest, fastest and safest way to drive change at the speed of the customer.

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We are now in an era of perpetual irrelevance; a time when change in business models, technology and socio-economic factors far outweigh the ability of people to keep up.

This exponentially has two dimensions:

• The blurred lines in how customers transfer expectations from their different experiences

• The speed at which change occurs, where ideas that seem to belong to a lab are now available in mainstream daily use applications

Professionals worldwide grapple with anxiety, anticipation on how these disruptive changes impact them.

The future-skills urgency has seen many points of view and options. Should you skill deep into one area? Should you get certifications in new areas like machine learning or cyber security? Should you learn a new language?

The number of gig workers across the world continues to increase given the shrinking of full time jobs in traditional sectors. So how would you transition to becoming a gig talent in a specialized area? What skills would you need to be successful?

If you are a manager or an experienced professional leading teams, will your job still be relevant when new collaboration technologies and models reduce management layers in companies? Is there a differentiated value you bring to being a manager or as experienced professional?

Does experience matter when knowledge is captured through AI models and distributed widely? How would you value experience when a novice can use a GPT tool to create a business plan? Where does experience actually create economic value to an enterprise?

It is critical to build a core set of ‘perpetual skills’ that transcend any functional skills and help individuals adapt faster.

In Ambiguity, People Seek Comfort In Tangibility

As companies and individuals grapple with the what and how of future-skills, we see a bias for tangibility.

This has led to an explosion of tech biased courses that are skilling people in areas like machine learning, cyber security, project management, UX/UI, data analytics, software development, digital marketing.

But the underlying skills needed to adapt and a world of perpetual change is often not invested in as it is not easy to skill or measure effectiveness in these areas.

Imagination

Unimaginative Leaders Are The Greatest Threat To The Future Of Your Company.

There has never been a time in our history that demands new paths to solve complex problems facing our world.

Every single thing we touch today in our daily lives represent ideas that were born from brilliant imaginative minds.

We talk about ideas like Uber, Air BnB, iPods, apps and more that have had significant impact on our lives.

But there is imagination all around us. Parking meters, tooth brush, paper cups, scan and pay, thermometers, keyless carignition, kitchen microwave, zoom calls, car reverse cameras, digital maps on smart phones, voice assistants, chatbots, home cleaning robots, audio headphones, phone camera scanner, QR codes, 3D movies, voice activated baby monitors, 3D printers, smart health monitors, airplanes and more.

The value of imagination lies all around for us to appreciate. Great companies are imaginative. Great leaders use imagination to rally people to the power of the future and transformation.

As Don Draper in Mad Men says, ‘Imagination in the minds of the customer has no constraints, no budgets. You occupy that space, then there is no limit to how you connect with people.

The fact is, companies don’t transform because they have a big idea. They transform because the curiosity of their people and their customers gives them the big idea.

Immortal ideas have long influenced our cultures and economies.

For the number of companies that rise and fall each year, the ideas that fuel them live on for the next bright entrepreneurial mind to reinvent and bring them to life.

Imagination creates economic value far greater than technology itself.

But how many companies nurture imagination as a culture element or as a skill for their leaders or in succession processes?

There seems to be the notion that the intangibility of such skills creates a resistance to investments. It is not easy to measure ROI in the short-term. But in long-term, imagination will keep companies and individuals relevant for exponential changes that come from outside your domain or industry.

The issues our world faces today are complex, inter-connected and ambiguous. They have not been experienced before.

Therefore the criticality for imagination has never been greater.

Comprehension

If one cannot comprehend the complex, then they cannot comprehend the path to future.

Have you been in a discussion with other people and after listening to the same information, each walk away with a different understanding?

In the ever increasing complexity of change, professionals and leaders are inundated with streams of data, information and opinions from a multitude of sources, often with biases.

The ability to bring it all together, make sense of it, but have a construction of all the elements in one’s mind, determines the nature of strategic choices to be made.

The difference between Apple & Blackberry in the initial days of Smart Phones is the comprehension of leaders in both companies faced with a similar set of data, information and choices to be made.

The nature of comprehension as a skill like all the Fast Future Five is that it is intrinsic to the individual. This makes it difficult to understand as to why people understand the same data differently.

In a time where much of the change is outside of the normal domain knowledge of individuals or the interconnections are beyond a deep specialization over years of experience, the key factor that determines the success of a company, project, new product initiative or transformation directly links up the ability to comprehend complex, unfamiliar, uncomfortable contexts.

It is not surprising that we often give up as we cannot fully comprehend the change in front of us and resort back to comfort zones of experience or functional expertise.

How can companies build and assess this skill in their workforce? Do they even have this on their radar of future skills for their leaders?

Often we talk about the speed of disruption and it is mistaken to be an outcome of execution - the ability to act with a single purpose in mind.

But in reality, speed is an outcome of comprehension. Companies, leaders, teams that comprehend a context or challenge better, executive better.

Clarity

Lack of clarity is the single most derailing factor in change.

Clarity is an under appreciated attribute of both companies and leaders alike.

Have you ever listened to a leader in your company and were left thinking, what did the person actually say?

We have many managers in companies who have made it an art to speak but not convey clarity.

The companies that are successful demonstrate clarity. Have you listened to the earnings calls of the top valued enterprises? Despite their mammoth size and complexity of operations, the clarity is astounding.

With new business models, technological advances and scientific developments it is easy to understand if one is not clear about their nature or impact.

But clarity is a direct outcome of comprehension and yet is more multi-dimensional. It involves visual thinking, design, articulation, personal courage and deep cultural sensitivity.

Clarity provides for people to make smart choices. It cuts through the unnecessary but also helps people appreciate sophisticated concepts and engage people at all levels of an organization.

Clarity provides for the courage to say no when the context does not fit. Clarity is the input to great strategy and brilliant execution.

As an intangible skill, clarity is subjective assessment based on who you ask. When clarity makes it too simple, the gravity of the context is not appreciated,

Clarity is not a skill that only leaders in companies need to have. Clarity is a professional skill that helps in career progression, collaboration and performance.

How can companies build clarity as a cultural behaviour? How can this in turn drive simplicity in business and experiences for the customer?

Clarity needs to be rewarded and recognized both in day to day work as well as in strategic choices made by next generation of leaders.

Design

Poor design is the lazy route to a customer.

Remember the next time you drive a car, you can thank an entire generation of designers who made mobility possible.

Design is the hallmark of a company that truly strives to build outstanding products and services.

You experience great design.

It could be paying an utility bill online, or shopping in a physical retail store or using an app to order food or seeing that magical pair of shoes or receiving a notification on your smartphone that reminds you of an upcoming activity.

You know when you experience poor design.

Have you heard of any company that says they aim to be 2nd or 3rd best in providing customer centricity? While every company says they are absolutely customer centric, there are the winners and laggards.

Design centric enterprises create 3X value as compared to their industry peers. Yet we see companies and leaders struggle with even the concept of design - to their business model, strategy, products & services and organization.

Why is it so hard to inculcate design as a key capability in organizations?

First, it is expensive. They need to commit time, money and resources to drive design in every aspect of the business. They must be in this for the long haul. Second, they limit design to products and services, they are unable to apply it as a principle to even how a company is run. Third, a deep misconception that design is a methodology or a step-by-step process.

Companies that have made design central to their business see not just customer advocacy but also employee advocacy.

Does your employee engagement survey ask if their company is a design centric company?

If you were to think of all the admired leaders in your company, most likely they are design centric.

Their principle of design allows them to create experiences for their teams and customer alike.

In many talent development programs, we do not see the prevalence of design as a key leadership attribute. We also do not see it widely used in succession planning or talent identification processes.

Many of the personality assessments have been built in the industrial era. They have not been adapted to 21st century platform business thinking.

But professionals and leaders who go the extra mile in applying design in everything they do, transform their businesses.

Execution

High-quality execution is an exception, mediocrity is the norm

No Company lives in theory. Neither should you.

In a world full of GPT co-pilots, a 5-year old can give a go-to-market strategy for your product that is so well articulated while many professionals struggle to do so.

The singular differentiator future skill for professionals is actually getting it done.

In the hype of AI and all the new possibilities, we forget that the majority percentage of one’s life is still outside of the scope of such hype; doing laundry, walking your dog, vacuuming your house, eating food and importantly having people conversations.

Of all the Fast Future Five, execution is the premium skill to have. This is especially important as we see massive relocation of jobs and skills across categories due to how business models are changing.

While the minimum wages for fast food workers in California increase leading to layoffs, the jobs simply shifted to gig workforce as delivery workers joined food delivery platforms.

Platform business models as digital natives employ just 1/4th of the workforce of a traditional company.

In all of these, the only value you bring to any type of employment - formal or gig is the ability to get things done.

While we admire Apple for their design, clarity on their ecosystem, their US$ 3 trillion is from their execution.

Each of their products have created multiple patents, new materials have been created, new assembly or manufacturing methods had been put in place with a complex supply chain and a geo-political environment to navigate.

They execute.

Companies have excelled at rewarding execution. They have engineered innovating ways to reward both short-term and long-term performance.

But tie-in execution to the other four of the the fast future five? That would be the game changer.

We have also seen the consequences of performance reward leading to multiple financial crises, collapse of well know company’s and causing loss of life.

But execution when done well, creates value and wealth for all stakeholders including employees.

There are two key dimensions to this:

• Drive a high-quality execution mindset

• Drive execution as an outcome of imagination, comprehension, clarity and design

Are Intrinsic Future Skills Learnable?

Yes.

There is never a doubt about the teachability and learnability of the Fast Future Five skills. But like all habits, these are learnable through a combination of methods, actions and rewards.

There are three simple yet powerful ways to learn the Fast Future Five:

• Learn inter-connectedness: look at all the related areas, subjects to the work you do, understand influences, trends, disruptions from those and apply that to how your job or work would change in the coming three years

• Practice 2 by 2: Learn more about two other industries and two other domain areas. If you are in manufacturing, learn B2C business models, if you are in technology, learn platform businesses. If you are in Supply Chain, learn finance. If you are in Marketing, learn machine learning

• Practice 2 by 2 in self-actions: Read a lot, we mean a lot. Write a lot, Both of these help demonstrate your comprehension and clarity that are critical translators to your imagination or design or execution

Encourage yourself to build for the future. It is often easy to stay in the ‘line of sight’ - ‘why do I need to learn something else when I still have the pressures of my today’s job.’

But when change comes suddenly, you are left out.

Make future a central focus on your thinking and doing, this will reflect in how your career builds and importantly your perpetual success.

Over the past two decades, we've seen many evolutions in business models, from traditionally linear to platform to direct-to-customer. Today, many companies are digital natives—businesses that began operations in the Internet age and rely on digital technologies to run effectively.

As this business model grew in popularity, customer obsession became a major headline. Digital native organizations promised that, with the speed of a new software code, they could personalize products or evolve faster than traditional businesses. With the integration of new artificial intelligence and machine learning tools, this promise seemed easy to keep.

However, the cumulative trillions of dollars spent on digital transformations globally haven't seemed to correlate to equal or exponential customer centricity. In fact, many companies with a digital footprint for customers are still linear in how they provide experiences, and they're simply increasing the complexity of operations. But in all digital design, simplicity is margin, and complexity is cost.

Now, with the birth of AI, can a new class of business models solve the linearity and design problems that digital natives need to address? This is the question Dr. Efi Pylarinou and I attempted to answer in our chapter "Thinking Like An AI Native" in the book The Fast Future Blur.

The 5 Dimensions Of An AI-Native Business

Imagine it's 2030, and AI nativity is the standard business model. If your business was born in this age, what would an AI-first business look like? I believe there are five key dimensions of business that will be fundamentally different among AI natives.

1. Discovery

The thousands of AI-first apps available to consumers are all focused on discovery. At a basic level, it’s the same need for an accurate search, but the contextual result is the real potential for AI natives. For example, at a B2B company, discovery could be driven by the search for real-time inventory, while in a B2C organization, it could help a customer plan a vacation.

2. Design

This dimension is the ability to create economic value using AI for the design of a product, service, process or business model opportunities. The ability to design customer experiences from the collective intelligence across enterprises and ecosystems is how companies can find new revenue opportunities. This could also apply to internal cases, like developer experience or how third-party service providers can plug into your business.

3. Decision

The real business value of AI technology is the ability to make cross-customer, enterprise and ecosystem decisions. There are two big opportunities with the decision capabilities of these tools. First, they can make intelligence truly agile. Second, they can unearth opportunities that companies and customers thought were impossible. With the contextual capability of systems, process and people augmented by AI, leaders can make better business decisions.

4. Dexterity

The lag between market changes and an organization catching up can be significant when leaders are unable to operate with dexterity. This has a cascading impact on building organization capabilities in a timely manner, and customers need to see that the companies they engage with can adapt quickly to the emerging landscape. AI technologies will be key for identifying blind spots and seeing around the corners for new opportunities.

5. Deduction

Finally, deduction is key to the speed of an organization. How quickly do customers and teams get past the initial flood of information to narrow down the opportunity or a problem? How is data being distilled from a comprehensive range to a specific context? We can lose significant hours of work when our teams have to put too much effort into collecting and analyzing the information needed to perform their jobs. AI native companies, however, will have the ability to declutter and deliver specific, contextual scenarios, possibilities and choices.

While these five dimensions serve as a robust way to imagine an AI-first business born in the next few years, they're also a foundational framework for existing businesses to plan out an AI transformation approach. For example, leaders can begin thinking about the ways AI may impact their business and where to start with a technology that's in such early stages.

Thinking Like An AI Native

In the coming articles, I will dive deep into each of the five dimensions and the application areas of customers, enterprise and ecosystem. But for now, I'd like to present three considerations that can get you started with thinking like an AI native. First, identify use cases for a customer, enterprise or ecosystem across all five dimensions. Then, be clear about the data foundation needed for the dimension to work across all three application areas. Finally, be bold about making things redundant to create more opportunities for innovation. The starting point of AI design is the future, so it's time to start using our imaginations.

We live in a golden age of design. From the industrial era all the way through the dot com era and beyond, good design was a privilege reserved for a few companies with big budgets to spend on R&D or branding. In a world where every company is a technology and data company, design is now the competitive advantage. In fact, I believe the recent record rise of unicorns is not just indicative of access to capital, it is indicative of access to brilliant design.

THERE’S NO SINGULAR DEFINITION OF DESIGN

A lot has been written on design thinking; however, I prefer to discuss design thinking as an imaginative skill rather than a methodology. Most approaches focus on product or become problem-solving extensions. For example, empathy for a situation or customer is good, but it’s like being on a treadmill—it keeps you fit but in the same place.

Design is a metaphysical ability to ideate. It is probably best discovered through these two statements:

• Buckminster Fuller: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

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• Donald Judd: “Design has to work. Art does not.”

In these statements you discover the disruptive, transformation nature of design—and the need for it to be functional, leading up to drawing an emotive experience for the users.

IMAGINE, DESIGN, PREPARE, LEAD

I put a premium on curiosity, design and imagination. These three very human capabilities are key to building a future yet to be discovered. Design is a fragile human process and probably the best competitive advantage in the automation era.

In the words of Jony Ive, “Ideas are extremely fragile. Ideas are not predictable in terms of when you will have them or how many you gonna have. Over the years, we created a team and environment that when they do arrive, we nurture them.”

Let me walk you through the four dimensions.

IMAGINE

Design is that pure idea as it pops into your mind, unadulterated by limitations of the existing reality and unbiased by what is possible. That idea is the imagination brief. Groundbreaking ideas can be traced back to the brilliance of an imagination brief that is inspiring and distinct.

An enduring example of this is the iconic Coca-Cola bottle design in 1915. This comes from an imagination brief that is iconic in itself: a “bottle so distinct that you would recognize if by feel in the dark or lying broken on the ground.” It also lays out certain design principles that establish how this idea should be brought to life.

DESIGN

With an inspiring and distinct imagination brief completed, now is the time to get some details on paper about how the idea would work. To keep the idea pure, resist the temptation to jump into the realities of execution. Drawing out the details and interfaces helps create a compelling working vision of the imagination brief.

Imagine a traditional animator drawing storyboards frame by frame. It is that level of passion for bringing the imagination brief (story) to life that made characters like Mickey Mouse powerful enough to directly impact copyright law in the U.S. Plenty of companies, including Uber, Xerox, Airbnb and Zoom, have also made design a verb.

PREPARE

This step is about identifying and building the right capabilities in leadership, technology, processes and organization to bring the idea to life. It’s about experimenting through prototyping to test these capabilities before being handed off for live production. It’s about gathering insights that help sharpen the compelling storyline of customer experience in the last mile.

You have to ask, “Is Apple great at the imagination brief or is it better at building the right capabilities to bring an idea to life?” The contrast of organizational culture and methods between NASA and SpaceX is another great example of how iterating and developing rockets rapidly put the first humans ever on a commercial spacecraft.

LEAD

Lead is the powerful last mile when the idea interacts with the users. A product or service, a solution, or even an NFT all interact to create an experience. It is that storytelling and last-mile focus that matters to validate the imagination brief. This is what I call the Pixar moment for your idea.

The race for super apps is a telling example of storytelling and last-mile focus. The ability to help customers reimagine how they get their service across seemingly disparate areas of needs fulfilled in the last mile is fueling the race for the Super Apps by WeChat, Paypal, Yandex, Rappi, Grab, Reliance, Tata, Gozem and many more.

Does your company commit design crimes against humanity?

No one creates great design by default. In fact, the world is full of leaders who create poor designs. This includes interfaces that are just not human, customer processes designed for internal convenience, job application processes that don’t want you to apply, cities that are too complex to navigate, and airports that are entirely dysfunctional.

To avoid this conundrum, remember two things: Always start with a brilliant imagination brief, and weed out unimaginative leaders—especially at the top.

In an episode of Mad Men, Don Draper, creative director of the advertising firm Sterling Cooper, is pitching a new campaign idea to a marketing chief from Heinz. He shows a large picture of plain fries with no ketchup and explains, “It’s clean, it’s simple, and it’s tantalizingly incomplete. What’s missing? One thing: Pass the Heinz.” (He then applies a transparent film over the top of the image that says “pass the Heinz.”)

The Heinz team wanted to see their product in the ad. To that, Draper said: “The greatest thing you have working for you is not the photo you take or the picture you paint; it’s the imagination of the consumer. They have no budget, they have no time limit, and if you can get into that space, your ad can run all day.” While the fictional Heinz executives weren’t impressed, the real-life Heinz team ultimately turned Draper’s pitch into actual ads.

Draper’s response to the Heinz team is perhaps the best explanation of curiosity. It exists in the minds of people, with no time limit and no boundaries. It is always on. The best intangible asset a company could possibly have are curious, imagination-driven leaders.

It’s easy to forget that Walt Disney was fired from his job at a newspaper because he lacked imagination. Of course, he then used his imagination to build the “happiest place on earth.”

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Curiosity is also key to understanding past events and to helping build our future.

UNDERSTANDING EXPONENTIAL CURIOSITY AS A NUTRITION LABEL

There are five elements of exponential curiosity. Thinking about it like a nutrition label, when you add each of the five elements together, you get 150% of your daily curiosity value. Here is the composition.

• So what? (Question everything): 35%

In an article on this site, the author questions what sound otherwise silent electric cars should make and presents an opportunity to redefine how cars sound.

Too often, legacy thinking holds companies back from transformation. And legacy thinking isn’t just an internal issue—it stems from deeply held industry beliefs or social norms.

• What’s that? (Intentional ignorance): 25%

At the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library, President Clinton spoke about a debate he had with President Bush over healthcare, and specifically the German healthcare system. Clinton says Bush won the argument, despite admittedly not knowing anything about the German healthcare system.

Leaders have a wealth of access to information, sources, and experts to inform their opinions. But being disarmingly candid about not knowing everything encourages open inquiry. It also creates an opportunity to involve others in the brainstorming process.

• Who cares? (Try it): 30%

In this fast-paced digital world driven by platforms, most services you use are, at the end of the day, an algorithm. This environment enables leaders and companies to fail really fast. It also helps them think laterally across industry or customer segments. For example, in Southeast Asia, major ridesharing companies branched out into food delivery, and then into banking and entertainment streaming services, all in pursuit of “superapp supremacy.”

• Who are you? (Irreverence): 40%

Remember the very first time Dr. Watson meets Sherlock Holmes? Holmes greets Watson with irreverence, then begins to micro analyze him. That’s what irreverence is about. It’s not disrespect—it’s a relentless focus on purpose and how everyone fits in.

Organizations struggle with the conflict between good ideas and personality politics. Leaders with exponential curiosity stay focused on the purpose and ignore the politics of personalities.

• Is that you, really? (Humor): 20%

Even polarizing figures like Elon Musk have moments that show off a sense of humor, whether it’s his Tesla shorts, the flamethrower, Tesla’s quiet electric leaf blower, or the Baby Shark tweet that set off a market surge.

Exponential curiosity could lead to a rabbit hole of self-centered ideas. But a self-deprecating, edgy sense of humor can help you stay balanced in the pursuit of greatness.

IS EXPONENTIAL CURIOSITY TEACHABLE?

I believe that it is, but first you have to weed out unimaginative leaders at the top. They pose the greatest risk to the future of your company. The fact is, companies don’t transform because they have a big idea. They transform because the curiosity of their people and their customers gives them a big idea. When your customers are more curious about the future of their world than your leaders, you know you have a problem.

As we try to grapple with rapid changes in customer behavior and the technology enabling these changes, it is often left to leaders to first decode complex constructs before they even try and apply them. The future of work is one such area on which so much discussion is taking place.

The future of work is a state of being a highly customer-centric company. One way to approach the future of work is by building an agile organization, which starts with embedding agility into your business strategy. It's highly unlikely that a single-industry-thinking, rigid strategy is agile enough to achieve the customer-centricity required. In my experience consulting companies, and as I've previously written, agility is more about how you do things than how you are organized.

It Is Always About The Customer

Future-of-work discussions should be anchored in a business strategy that innovates without the boundaries of industries, technologies or expertise areas. It involves acquiring capabilities that are dissimilar or unnatural to your business. This can mean the difference between thinking like a siloed industry or thinking like a customer, because in a customer's mind there are no boundaries.

Companies spend enormous time and effort on strategic planning. While most of this is necessary and sometimes works, one area that often lags is strategic workforce planning. Most companies are still focused on productivity games like sales per headcount or revenue-growth-based hiring plans, but this can be done by a finance person sitting in an isolated room on an Excel sheet — or in today's world, by a bot.

Changes in work methods should only take place if they truly, directly and positively impact your customer. We need to fundamentally understand that the design of the future of work begins with the design of the future of your business. As companies innovate to deliver platform-centric ecosystems and experiences, they must reimagine how the work they do delivers the desired customer outcomes.

The temptation to redefine work is understandable with many low-hanging fruit technologies like chatbots and process automation, but the patience and imagination needed to build the full customer impact case is essential to realize the true value of redefining work or methods. Automating marginal activities may give you one-time productivity gains, but it does not give you a competitive advantage with your customers.

Redefining Organization

The future of work is disruptive to the existing organizational model. Companies struggle between product-centric, functional expertise-centric and strategic business unit-centric models. What if we looked differently at what it means to be customer-centric? The tribes and squads model, made famous by Spotify, is one example of how exploring new organizational structures can support you in your goals of keeping pace with customer demands.

There are seven elements of an organization that experience the impact of future-of-work thinking:

1. Organization capabilities: It helps creates go-to-market capabilities that have no functional boundaries.

2. New work models: Determining the right mix of full-time, gig, flex or remote teams, shared jobs etc.

3. Automation versus autonomation: Creating the right balance between automated tasks to independent decision-making technology.

4. Design and simplification: Applying similar design thinking and principles externally and internally.

5. Performance management: Reassessing the value of jobs, performance and reward when value delivered is through new work methods.

6. Employee experiences: Creating expereiences that eliminate organizational friction to become more customer-centric.

7. Insights and analytics: Defining key metrics to drive the shift in how work is done and the changes that the customer experiences.

Redefining Jobs

As you map out the impact on those seven elements of your organization, the focus then shifts to how jobs themselves could be done in the future. Don't change how work is done just because you can. It is easy to automate marginal activities or tasks as tax on labor is higher than tax on automation in many countries, but this may not necessarily provide deep value to your business.

In a previous article, I detailed how your organization should consciously adopt at least four of these six future-of-work elements to be considered to be in the future of work:

1. Traditional full-time work.

2. Gig talent.

3. Robotics.

4. Robotic process automation.

5. Smart interfaces.

6. Physical augmentation.

What if we were to ask all managers to plan how jobs could be done with these six elements in three to five years from now? It would give employees a greater understanding of the work, methods and change required of them. This shift in examining jobs is critical to shaping new workforce capabilities. It's probably safe to assume your organization has leaders who use curiosity, imagination and design as the foundation of your business. Why not let them help guide these critical developments?

Many jobs are poorly designed. Employees frequently do tasks or responsibilities outside of their defined job descriptions. What if we could have a job framework in which employees could customize their at least 30% of their own jobs?

What Does This Do To Your Strategy And Organization?

1. Innovation Without Boundaries

Significant barriers to innovation are more internal complexity, the organization model and how information flows through traditional structures. Companies that are equipped for the future of work are not only able to do things faster, but are also able to learn from dissimilar experiences and apply them to their context.

2. Pivot Capability

Organizations need to have the ability to pivot. This is about understanding and building deep capabilities that allow you to be a forward-thinking, purpose-driven company. This pivot capability could lead companies to enter new industries or just reimagine how they deliver to their customers.

3. Organziation Model

Companies have product-centric units while some have continued to be functionally organized. Either way, these companies are in pursuit of the next big idea or are following their customers across a maze of applications, behaviors and interfaces. The future of work questions several conventional management norms and radically changes the role of people managers.

Imagination Needed

All of this needs real imagination, and I do firmly believe that unimaginative leaders are the greatest threat to the future of a company.

Welcome to the world where ideas have no boundaries. When you think about it, there never have been in a customer's mind. They only have a transfer of expectations: "I had a brilliant experience at the hotel check-out; I wish I had the same at my medical center."

Immortal ideas have long influenced our cultures and economies. The idea that "ideas don't die" was spoken into existence during the civil rights movement in the United States and has since been used as a call to action for businesses to stay on the cutting edge of consumer interest and profits. For the number of companies that rise and fall every year, the ideas that fuel them live on for the next bright entrepreneurial mind to reinvent them and bring them to life.

It would not be a surprise if Zoom were to buy an airline, a rental car company and pick up a coworking company along the way, with a Starbucks tie-up.

Extinction is an ideas issue, not a strategy issue.

• We know from CB Insights that 52% of S&P 500 companies have disappeared in the past 15 years.

• From 1964 to 2016, the average tenure of companies on the S&P 500 shrank from 33 to 24 years. By 2027, it is expected to shrink to just 12 years.

• In a 2017 PwC study, 56% of the CEOs anticipated a nonindustry player to disrupt them. The report also explains why consumers are willing to buy products and services from nontraditional players.

While companies have been disrupted, gone bankrupt or exited in some form of survival, the ideas they took to their customers still remain and have been made disruptive by other companies. The first aspect of agility is being at the intersections between industries, knowledge domains and aspects of the future of work. Disruptive companies are masters at these intersections. Here's why.

1. They look at an idea in its purest form, with no limitations or boundaries of industries, segments, categories or applications.

Consider Kodak — no, not the film side, but the company's pharmaceutical foray. What makes it easy for companies to cut across boundaries of industries and do things they have never done before? What makes a brick-and-mortar retailer disrupt health care services? Why would a space rocket group be a terrific electric vehicle manufacturer? Why are customers are willing to buy insurance policies from noninsurance companies?

It is only proper to begin with a nod to Elon Musk, the PayPal guy who created an electric vehicle company, solar-powered home systems and a reusable rocket that flew American astronauts on an American commercial spacecraft from American soil for the first time in almost a decade. There is the influence of a single idea across sectors he is disrupting, from creating interplanetary redundancies for humans to asserting that an autonomous car is safer than human driving or that a minimalist designed autonomous spacecraft is almost fail-safe.

2. They adopt technologies, acquire capabilities and build expertise in areas that seem dissimilar or not natural to their industry.

I put Dyson on par with Tesla when it comes to design. What is the connection between your smart home vacuum cleaner and an electric vehicle? The same asthat between a toothbrush manufacturer and dental insurance. Dyson made a splash entry into electric vehicles only to exit for an interesting reason. It believed that the entry barrier in the EV industry was low, meaning that any company could acquire this capability and compete. Tesla's Achilles' heel has been manufacturing; what if Tesla did not make its cars? What if it gave out its manufacturing but kept batteries and software to itself? This would probably make Tesla ramp up its sales and be a true definition of a platform business.

If a nonindustry company can adopt, adapt or absorb the right expertise, technology and capability, it will disrupt traditional well-established industry players.

In simple terms, Uber is an industry disrupter but not an original idea company. The idea or the need to have a car pop up when we want and wherever we want has been there since the beginning of taxi mobility. But Uber's ability to mix physical movement with an algorithmic platform fulfills the mobility need better than a traditional taxi model does, hence the disruption. Mobility is a capability, not a service or a product. This capability allows the company to follow through on the idea of delivery (of people or of food).

3. They reimagine how work is done and develop augmented talent, a seamless human and technology value proposition.

I consider the future of work to be a state in which six key elements come together seamlessly:

• Traditional full-time work by humans.

• Gig work focused on expertise done by humans.

• Robots (including drones), from warehouses to retail, hospitals, fast food, manufacturing, agriculture, etc.

• Process or service automation through robotic process automation.

• Smart interface (e.g., voice, virtual assistants, facial recognition) or wearable (AR/VR, embeddable) augmentation.

• Physical structure augmentation (e.g., exoskeletons).

If your company has any four of these six elements working together seamlessly, you can say that you are in a future-of-work state of the organization. The nature of strategic workforce planning changes from a productivity and capacity planning focus to reinventing how jobs are done focus. Ask the question, "How can this job be done differently using these elements?"

Unimaginative leaders are the greatest threat to the future of a company.

We spend a disproportionate time in awe of imagineers — Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk — in a desperate need to emulate. Instead, companies will do well to focus on two areas: identifying, recognizing and promoting leaders with imagination and imaginative concepts, and weeding out the blockers of imagination, especially at the top.

Consider this for proof: Twitter "killed" Vine, a well-received, short-form video app, only to realize that the same idea (this time in the shape of TikTok) is at the center of world attention today. It is now reportedly interested in acquiring TikTok.

“How do we reconcile recovery planning with our pre-pandemic strategy?” is a question I hear often these days. While some sectors have been hit harder than others, I believe that executives across the board should be looking for ways to reinvent.

Recovery is how you hedge a risk; growth is all about how you imagine

Souplantation closing permanently demonstrates the hard hit food services businesses have taken. That’s understandable: Diners are wary of mass contamination from high-touch surfaces. But if consumer behavior has changed, does that mean consumers don’t want buffets anymore? Or would they still like the buffet experience, but in a manner that could offer less exposure? These are the questions executives should be asking.

In some cases, change was needed even before COVID-19 hit, and the pandemic provided a shove in one direction or another. For a long time, I have been talking and writing about how every business is a technology, data and platform business that needs imaginative leadership.

The retail industry as a whole has seen mass consolidations and closures — and not just because of COVID-19. Often, a lack of adaptability is to blame. So for stores that were already on the decline, it’s not surprising that COVID-19 has had such a strong effect.

I believe retail will continue to reveal the forefront of consumer expectations. It’s all about how companies adapt, reinvent and deliver. For example, to compete with the growing e-commerce prowess of Amazon and Walmart, Target recently acquired technology assets from the same-day delivery service Deliv.

The entertainment industry is another sector at a crossroads. Consider Netflix, which may as well have built its business model in anticipation of a pandemic. In 1998, Netflix started doing online DVD rentals, and it released on-demand video streaming in 2007. Apple, on the other hand, got a bit trapped by device strategy. Steve Jobs introduced Apple TV in 2007. But it was unclear for some time whether the device would be a steaming platform or if it was meant to enhance home internet of things applications.

Fast forward to 2020, and the streaming buffet is alive and well with Disney+, Hulu, YouTube Premium, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+. While streaming services have likely seen an increase in viewers because of the COVID-19 outbreak, some TV networks have taken a hit. For example, live sports came to a grinding halt — and so did sponsorship revenue.

Big tech’s entry into healthcare is changing both access and research and challenging traditional players. Apple has the Apple Watch; Walmart has opened primary care centers; and Amazon has made a foray into telehealth. These companies have far more reach and holistic data on consumers than the average healthcare company. So when you combine that with their innovation on interfaces, the result is a service that is reimagined. In addition to these big companies, there are many other startups innovating to reimagine healthcare services.

We can’t talk about hard-hit industries without covering hospitality and airlines. Both are dependent industries, meaning that they depend on physical presence, capacity and tourism demand. Hitting revenue goals while reducing capacity in restaurants to preserve social distancing is on many managers’ minds. We could start to see rationalization of properties through sell-offs or acquisitions. Destination hotels could also start to create local-based offerings.

Airlines mostly have themselves to blame for their financial woes. Using their profits to buy back their own shares has clear implications in a downturn. It is clear that it will be a long while before the volume of travelers returns to the pre-pandemic level. Recovery is how you hedge a risk; growth is all about how you imagine. Frontier Airlines bet, incorrectly, that customers would pay to keep the middle seats open on flights, while other airlines considered it common sense. How will they keep their buffet going?

So, how do we approach reinventing the buffet?

1. Keep in mind that customer needs and customer behaviors are two different things. I will feel a need to sit down for an experience meal at a restaurant, but my behavior — how I go about doing that — has changed. So it is critical to build your strategy around the need first and then apply the behavior aspect.

2. Complete stakeholder views matter. In a classical strategy, we would go with “where you play” and “how you win.” To build recovery-based growth, it’s better to start with understanding the expectations of stakeholders. These must include employees and communities.

3. Validate your pre-COVID strategy with customer needs, behaviors and stakeholder expectations. If you can’t win with everyone involved, you aren’t even playing the game.

4. Don’t be a single-industry thinker, and don’t make it a single-industry play. No company has ever reinvented itself by behaving like a single-industry company. Learn quickly. Take inspiration from ideas from other industries, and bring them to your customers. In this process, you’ll also discover new customer segments.

5. Critically examine your leadership deck at all levels. Leaders who lack imagination pose the greatest threat to your future. Companies fail when leaders can’t imagine a future that’s different from the past.

Buckminster Fuller, the American architect, systems theorist and futurist, offered strong advice for how we can approach strategy today: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

HR teams have done some outstanding work responding to the threat of coronavirus. In what is being called the world's largest work-from-home experiment, we have discovered that many organizations are not prepared. There has never been a more important time to talk about agility. But it is also important that we do not confuse resilience with agility. Crisis management is about resilience and adapting to survive, while true agility reshapes how you do your business ahead of time in a customer-centric way.

Agility is being 'at the speed of the customer' and has three elements.

In my 2018 paper, "How Agile is Your HR?," I put forth three elements of agility. These elements can be applied to how you shape your business strategy, leadership capabilities, organization model and HR. A winning people strategy is shaped around:

1. Intersections: Between industries, knowledge domains and aspects of the future of work.

2. Interfaces: Agile interfaces are well designed and bring your product or service into the lives and activities of the users while delivering quality performance to customers and rich data to the business.

3. Insights: The value of your HR data is important to growth, innovation, profitability and revenue potential — and it can speed up a culture of analytics.

Agility is about how you do things, not so much about how you are organized.

We have grown up in and inherited box-and-line thinking around the organization. It helps us manage scale, drive predictability, determine wages, etc. But this has to be combined with reinventing how we work. Being digital and all the elements of the future of work — AI, robotics, the gig economy — are part of how we do things for our customers.

In my view, anything that touches an employee is about HR. If the refund process is poorly designed, it is an HR issue. Companies that have such HR expertise deeply embedded into the design of “how we work” win. There are so many areas that need bold imagination and design thinking: Augmented talent strategy, performance management and strategic workforce planning are some of the big ones. I always ask the question: Can you do anything in a company in three steps? Or can an employee make their own choices 70% of the time on how they experience the company? I believe this can be done.

An augmented workforce is a necessity.

One of the lessons we've learn in battling the pandemic is that we needed a seamless mix of digital, mental and physical capabilities to respond. We have seen doctors and medical companies use AI and analytics, technology companies create tracking or tracing apps, and people participate by physical distancing. This learning is fundamental to the future of work and how HR needs to morph into a "how work gets done differently" function that can seamlessly integrate elements of full-time employees, gig talent, service automation, smart interfaces and physical structural technology into one workforce of the future. This will change everything we know as HR today, including how we measure the value of the contributions of a given job.

HR is an uneven capability in any industry.

Let's face it: HR is an unevenly distributed capability in any industry compared to other functions. We find so many levels of sophistication, or lack of it, regardless of the brand. I have seen big brands with antiquated people practices. Even basics like HR analytics or reporting are missing or at a nascent stage. So it is difficult to paintbrush the function with what we hear from a progressive set of companies.

If you leave the hype aside, the majority of companies have HR functions that don't match up to the customer side of thinking. For us to make any decent impact on the future of the world, we need to first even out this range of low to high capability to an acceptable narrow band. Agility can help us get there.

Don't mimic; get inspired.

There was a point in time where you would not be considered great HR if you did not copy GE's 9-box grid. But copying best practices has led us to be a copy-paste HR function that does not apply its thinking to the business context. This applies to business practices too. Companies that copy end up being rigid because they have been too lazy to do the hard work of building what works for their business. While there is the broad view of agility that is applicable to all industries and companies of all sizes, there is a need to define agility for your company. For instance, ING and Spotify have made tribes and squads popular. Companies that have gotten on the bandwagon of being organized in tribes and squads realize that 70% of agility is not how you are organized, but how you do things.

Tomorrow's agility comes from yesterday's decisions.

The need to act is vital, and it begins with the customer. What we do for the customers is the only guiding principle in how things should be done in HR. If there is something we do in HR that does not directly fit what we do for our customers, we must drop it. It is important for leadership teams to spend the time applying the three elements of agility to create a rapid transition toward it.

A possible silver lining to the COVID-19 crisis: It has a sense of urgency that, in my view, was needed all along to redefine jobs and our workforce at large.

At the time of writing, about 26 million jobs are reportedly lost, which has essentially wiped out the jobs gained over the past decade. But the impact of COVID-19 on our economy is different than the 2008 financial crisis in one key aspect: It’s global. It has brought life to a standstill.

It is important to understand the talent factor. The U.S. economy was growing at 2.1% at the end of 2019, which was slightly above the prerecession average. Unemployment was 3.5%, the lowest in 50 years. With 26 million jobs now lost, the real unemployment rate could be as high as 20.6%.

Say the economy recovers in the second half of 2020. Will all of the jobs that were lost come back? I believe they won’t, for two reasons. First, the pace of recovery may not be quick enough. Second, businesses that are hardest hit will be risk-averse, meaning they won’t want to take on the costs of new hires.

The talent cycle of downturn and recovery

In my hypothesis, a general model comes into play any time we experience a downturn and recovery. For example, when an economy dips and recovers, the level of employment drips to 75%-80% of the period before the dip. As a result, automation or digitization accelerates. Whether it’s online ordering or deploying a pizza-making robot, it creates far higher efficiencies for much less.

While this can cause job losses in one area, there are jobs created in a different area of the value chain or in another sector. In this hypothesis, about 5% of the unemployed get different jobs — but they do become employed. About 15% of the unemployed will still find it difficult to get jobs, either due to outdated skills or slow recovery. In this scenario, these people end up as gig workers: freelancers, independent contractors or self-employed business leaders.

Thinking of an augmented workforce

In a traditional sense, we write job descriptions with the mindset of having enough work to justify employing a human. But what if we were to ask how this job could be done differently going forward? Does it have to be done by a full-time employee, or could it be done by gig-based talent, an automated process technology like RPA, by chatbots or by a physical robot?

Amazon and Lemonade provide two good examples. Amazon has deployed a mix of humans and machines in its warehouses, and Lemonade has an army of chatbots organized into roles and tasks that allow the humans at the company to be very agile in delivering results to customers.

According to Statista, by 2017 South Korea had 710 robot workers for every 10,000 employees in its manufacturing sector. I believe other countries will catch up as scale brings down the cost. Or, new models will emerge, such as Vicarious, which you can think of like a robot hiring agency.

This would also mean accelerating your adoption of technology and digital tools. Companies that have run multiyear digital transformation projects still find themselves unable to be customer-centric. They’ve realized that they cannot come across as digitally savvy to customers if they are not also digitally savvy internally. Traditional workforce planning is no longer relevant, and I believe a new approach to building augmented human teams is needed.

Gig talent is here, but not leveraged strategically

Consulting firm EY has a dedicated jobs portal for gig talent. This allows them to build expertise that is specific to their clients and projects. Unicredit, an Italian bank, encourages internal gigs among its employees through a structured portal and process.

Based on my research and experience, I believe that every company should pull about 20%-30% of its workforce from gig talent pools. That’s not for cost-cutting purposes — it’s to gain competitive advantage on skill or expertise. Most companies look at work and try to fit that work into a box on a given organization chart. What if this was no longer relevant and the question asked was who on the entire planet has the right expertise to deliver this need for the company?

Here’s one idea: Offer gig jobs to employees that your company laid off due to a downturn or crisis. That would allow the company to retain knowledge and goodwill while minimizing disruption.

Reimagine people practices

By 2025, I predict there will be four or five bots (a combination of RPA, chatbots or algorithmic technology) for each human employed. I believe it is now clear that strategic workforce planning needs to be reconsidered. But that applies to all aspects of how companies manage people. Performance management is a good example. When jobs are augmented, productivity increases. The worth of a job as measured will change. On the one hand, jobs may become easier to do, but on the other hand, employees will need higher-level skill sets. Measuring performance as we do today is no longer relevant — it’s a remnant of the industrial era that was focused on activity, time and output.

We also need to reimagine learning. How people learn has changed in a world driven by social media. Traditionally, a manager owned all aspects of managing employees. Now, that is no longer the case. Yes, managers continue to focus on keeping the organization devoted to its purpose, cohesive and driven by values. But individual employees own everything else, including their own career progression and continued learning. If companies want to achieve rapid reskilling, they should give ownership of new skills and knowledge to employees. An employee with a real need is a better driver of change.

The importance of imagination

Slow transformation is no transformation. The ability to imagine, build and continuously challenge legacy practices is critical to creating new methods and opportunities for people. As we look at the recovery process, imagination and speed are skills that will be highly valued by stakeholders.

We hear a lot of buzz on the gig economy and gig workers. I prefer to call these two the gig talent economy. While it is easier for certain types of industries—for example consulting—to bring in skilled contract workers as a key component of their talent strategy, it is a talent pool that all industries will find relevant, though they may not have studied this as a strategy yet.

Take EY as an example. Its GigNow platform aims to create a dedicated and distinct identity for attracting gig talent.

The Definition and Numbers

The gig economy refers to the “urbanisation” of the workforce, or the increase in the percentage of the workforce participating in contingent work. Contingent workers include: Any employee paid by task or by project and considered to be in a temporary relationship with your organisation, which could range from on-demand workers who perform a single-day job to long-term contractors even up to the senior executives brought in to manage a company’s transformation.

McKinsey Global Institute’s James Manyika and Susan Lund, in their paper ‘Independent Work: Choice, Necessity, and the Gig Economy’ say: “Some public estimates place the amount of the workforce involved in contingent work as high as 40%. Another recent study cites 20%–30% of the working-age population in the United States and the EU (as many as 162 million individuals) as engaging in contingent work.”

Understanding the Trend

a. Jobs created per dollar earned is slower and lower

Since the last economic crisis driven by the sub-prime bubble, we have seen more of a jobless economic recovery. For the same state of business health before the crisis and after the crisis, companies are growing with lesser number of employees.

In a recently published article in Inc., Leigh Buchanan writes about ‘Why Companies Are Operating Lean (Even When They Can Afford to Hire)’. She points out: “The data shows that fast-growing companies are hiring fewer people, even as revenue swells—and even while it’s the credo of politicians, the press, and entrepreneurs that starting companies means creating jobs.”

b. The gap between education and employment

In his Wall Street Journal write-up ‘Why an Honors Student Wants to Skip College and Go to Trade School’, Douglas Belkin points to an increasing trend of school students in the US opting for vocational courses rather than four-year degrees.

“These forces are leading to a course correction now rippling through US high schools, which are beginning to re-emphasise vocational education, rebranded as career and technical education. Last year, 49 states enacted 241 policies to support it, according to the Association for Career and Technical Education, an advocacy group.”

He continues, “The conversation is being fuelled by questions about the declining value of a college degree as well as the rising cost of tuition and student debt. Low unemployment and a strong job market are exacerbating an already growing skills gap, raising prospects for tradespeople like welders who are in high demand.”

The US is not alone in this. In a country with a large population like India, gig talent is a good answer to unemployment. In a column in Livemint, Ruchira Chaudhary examines whether India is ready for the gig economy. Such a focus on vocational education will only add to the gig workforce available to both small businesses and large companies.

c. Automation and displacement of the workforce

This is a widely discussed topic. A McKinsey Global Institute study, ‘A future that works: Automation, employment and productivity’, states that jobs with repeatable physicals, processing or that involve collecting data will be automated. The authors estimate that about 60% of occupations have at least 30% of activities that can be automated. This will lead to more of the employed shifting to being gig workers. This also leads to future solutions for social security such as universal basic income.

The Link between Gig Talent and Agile HR

So, where are the people falling out of the organised employment sector and what are they doing? How can you find this talent pool and organise them to your benefit?

In my earlier columns on how agile companies need an agile HR first and how companies can integrate gig talent into strategic workforce planning, I’ve explored the idea that gig talent is the new talent pool. That companies that cannot adapt their thinking on talent to include such workers will lose out on deep-expertise in their talent strategies.

When it comes to the HR function itself, it requires multiple big shifts, one of which is that 20%-40% of the headcount within HR needs to be gig talent. This will allow HR to deploy deep expertise in real time and be present at the point of need anywhere globally (and in accordance with labour regulations).

Here are some of the ways that gig talent drives agility in HR:

1. Hiring gig talent is about getting deep expertise, and not about driving down cost. In fact, in most cases we found gig workers were paid similar to or higher than employees for their specialisation.

2. Gig talent is everywhere. In each country, language and culture, you will find people with expertise who can contribute with very little lag time.

3. It is about speed of expertise—delivering capability ahead of time.

4. It is the best answer to expensive travel-based deployment of people at the global, regional, or country level.

5. Gig talent as a percentage of HR headcount can change, adapt and scale rapidly based on the context. For example, when you need expertise to manage a turnaround, or mergers and acquisitions, or strategic projects.

The best part is that gig talent in HR does not need to be HR talent. For example, if your HR function wants to build an augmented reality (AR)-based training module, it can be done with far greater capability by hiring an AR design and delivery expert rather than the learning function partnering with IT to get this done.

Simplicity is another big factor in HR agility. The HR function has become increasingly over-specialised and over-engineered. One of the reasons is that it continues to have a headcount with at least 20% slack time. Gig talent will be key to driving simplicity in HR as they are not full time in a company. Full time HR headcount creates complexity in their slack time.

But the key is to understand the ‘deep-expertise’ aspect of gig talent and integrating that into your talent strategy and strategic workforce planning.

In a LinkedIn blog post, Janina Kugel, chief human resource officer (CHRO) at Siemens, talks about being agile and deploying experts quickly at the point of need. However, she does not mention or may not have considered having gig talent in HR as a core part of transformation. This could be a game changer in deploying experts. Especially for a company that operates in multiple cultures, contexts and with multiple business imperatives.

Finding Gig Talent for HR

I am a huge fan of Starbucks. For its hot soy chai tea latte and for training me to be a customer. But more so as an appreciation of how much of a hub it is for gig talent. There may be an area for it to consider expanding to—to become a platform to find gig talent combined with being a co-working space. Here are a few other existing platforms: Up Work, Fiver, Task Rabbit, Hire my mom.

On the HR front, we see the emergence of specialised firms. The Belgium and Europe based HRbuilders and Noble House Asia from Singapore are two such examples. EIM too has an HR practice on interim executive staffing. While LinkedIn is a key platform, it will be disrupted on the gig talent front if it does not adapt or evolve.

Sofia Van Overmeire from HRbuilders explained that the requests they received in 2017 for gig talent across Western Europe in HR were for HR generalists (36%), and in the areas of talent acquisition (25%), compensation and benefits (10%), and human resource information system, or HRIS (7%). The learning and development area, which was traditionally open to hiring freelancers or temporary staffing, stood at just 4%.

She highlights that the UK and the Netherlands are very mature in this market. Germany and Belgium are catching up with the previous early adopters. In the Nordic countries the labour system is already flexible, hence the need for gig talent is less than in other regions and the concept as we discuss in this article is less known. The lack of social security and benefits plus the feeling of not having jobs security are major reasons for the slower development of this talent pool in France, Spain, Portugal and Italy. This is also explained by Helen Fouquet in her article ‘France’s gig workers are desperate for Macron to fix the rules”.

Noble House Asia, an HR gig talent startup, has seen a good response. Co-founder Sanjay Lakhotia says the biggest demand for HR gig talent in Southeast Asia is in the areas of training and development, leadership development and talent acquisition.

Lakhotia highlights four big challenges he sees in the adoption of gig talent in HR: Awareness and availability of such talent, quality of freelancers, culture fit and scoping of assignments accurately. He says, “Indian HR professionals are still not ready to think how HR freelancers can fit and understand the organisation culture.”

How do the gig talent perform as compared to full time employees? In my view far better. Katherine Kuhn of Elite HR Advisor, which is the US partner of HRbuilders, says it the best: “The freelance or gig worker in a company is held to far higher standard on performance than a regular full time employee. Also for gig talent, their work is their performance else they will not survive.” She believes that the learning curve of a gig worker is far better than a full time employee who has been with a company for a long time.

Wolfgang Doerfler, partner at EIM with whom I co-authored an earlier paper on gig talent and workforce planning, says there is significant demand for HR professionals in the lower and middle levels. He also finds that companies are experiencing so much change that they lose staff and engaged employees. They then scramble for interim staffing in key roles. However, details like location, regulations, etc play a role. He believes that ‘oversized’ (those with more than necessary experience) temporary managers create huge value like in the case of a project in the Romanian subsidiary of a global company with 350-plus employees.

An interim senior HR executive was sent in to manage a turnaround in the face of huge staff turnover and lack of engagement. He created significant value to the company in this situation.

Is there a Model We Can Apply to Adopt Gig Talent In HR?

In an earlier article, I had laid out an approach to adopting gig talent through comprehensive strategic workforce planning. You can adopt gig talent into the HR function with these two broad steps. This can be further layered with location of the role/job or this could be done virtually as well.

1. Understand the intellectual property impact of hiring gig talent

2. Know why you need the gig talent to replace a job typically done by a full time employee so far. (Reproduced from Gig it up)

Plug and playTurn-around specialistsDomain specialistsGeneral/functional management

The most common today where there is need for someone to hold the fort or fill the gap or vacancy temporarily, this is mostly reactive.

These are typically in response to a crisis—for example a break-down in processes or operations, or when the whole company is at stake or specialist resources in cases of plant shut down or market or product closures.

This is where specific specialisation is needed to solve a problem or deliver a project or contribute to a high growth business. This has contours of a specific deliverable, etc. This is not necessarily determined by time. Book editing, graphic designer, quality assessor, employee benefit programmes designer, etc.

These are experienced professionals who have the depth and gravitas to step into interim roles heading functions or business verticals either at CEO -1 or CEO -2 levels that bring in both strategy and implementation expertise in case of M&As, transformations, hive-offs, etc.

Is Gig Talent an Answer to Organisational Slack?

I recently had lunch with the very insightful Robert Kazanjian, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Organization and Management at Goizueta Business School of the Emory University.

In my enthusiastic way, I shared with him an example of a company that found an innovative way for its employees to ‘gig’ on projects.

He looked up and said, “Don’t you think that is the level of organisational slack [excess capacity] in that company?”

He had a point. If gig talent fills the ‘slack’ in an organisation, it adds to agility. Many companies have created seasonal workforce models to manage flexibility for their businesses.

However, I do believe that with all the market forces and trends, gig talent is a serious pool of talent to understand, plan for and integrate into a company’s talent strategy. In the gig economy, especially in the Ubers of the world, as Peter Campelli writes, Are Algorithms Good Managers in the Gig Economy?

Companies will need to adopt technology platforms to manage gig talent pools. A key element of this talent pool is the ability to deploy virtually across country boundaries. This, combined with the need for a systematic approach to hiring, measuring performance and rewarding gig talent, will necessitate implementation of such technology platforms within companies.

So, designing a new integrated approach to talent is an essential starting point.

Five Changes to Make Gig Talent a Reality

Gig talent does add agility to HR, by bringing in deep expertise. Adoption of gig talent can be accelerated if HR can work upon these five areas:

1. Their own mindset, and rapidly. Often HR comes in its own way to accelerate innovation or new practices or new culture.

2. Integrate all types of talent, to help managers adapt to the new pool of talent positively.

3. Re-imagine the four areas of HR key to gig talent: Workforce planning, hiring, performance management and rewards.

4. Build a framework to retain knowledge in the company even though the work is done by gig workers.

5. Look at gig workers as a potential pool of successors to key internal roles staffed by full time employees.

Gig talent is a promising area of talent. It can be truly global as it tears down talent availability and deployment without borders.

However, it has its share of challenges around IP protection, confidentiality, conflict of interest and labour regulations. It is only a matter of time before companies find smart approaches to these challenges rather than say no to an extraordinary gig talent pool.

Without doubt, HR must lead the way and be ahead of time in every industry, culture, market and company.

In my earlier column on Founding Fuel on why the Human Resource (HR) function needs to be agile, we discussed two key aspects:

1. That the HR function must be at speed with the customer—to ideate, learn, deploy talent and build the right organisation capabilities.

2. And that agile HR blurs the lines between the customers and employees. This essentially means an employee experiences what the customer does.

If these work in tandem, employee experiences mirror customer experiences designed and delivered by the company.

Employee experiences are about design thinking

I had also articulated how smartly designed digital interfaces can enhance employee experiences. This includes things like the ability to access information customers may need, simplify routine tasks, or make it easy for employees to choose and access solutions or services they need.

The future of employee experiences is more about designing and applying customer thinking to employees

That said, I have to say—the future of employee experiences is not exclusively digital. It is more about designing and applying customer thinking to employees.

But it seems a majority of the discussions, thinking and papers by thought leaders and companies are emerging from a digital business or digital HR perspective. I think that is discomforting. Because to me, digital is just one of the elements of ‘How’ of an employee experience. It does not contain the ‘What’.

Similarly, the obsession with employer branding. Many companies have created this as a parallel brand proposition to what their customer brand stands for. I’d argue, it must be the same for both customers and employees.

One brand for employees and customers

To deliver outstanding experiences to customers and employees, there needs to be only one brand promise, not different interpretations or definitions. How you deliver that brand promise may differ.

There can only be one brand promise to customers and employees

But there can only be one brand promise to customers and employees.

Take General Electric as a case in point. It has worked hard to articulate sharply what the brand is all about, how it matters, and why it is still relevant in a digital world. This TV commercial, What’s the Matter with Owen, offers pointers to just that. It has Owen, a programmer just hired by GE, perceived as an old-world company. But he has ‘kind-of-a’ problem explaining to his friends from college or his folks at home what is it that he is going to be at work on and why it matters. It seamlessly bridges a gap between generations and “working on trains” becomes a defining term to bridge the gap in understanding the term ‘digital industrial’.

May I suggest you watch this interview with Linda Boff, the chief marketing officer at GE as well? She offers a good insight into the thinking behind this campaign: Stay true to your brand, the reality and the aspiration. And do not create a parallel brand for employees.

To develop one brand for employees and customers, you will have to answer three questions:

1. What does my brand stand for today and in the years to come?

2. What are the specific aspects of the brand that are a promise?

3. How does the customer experience these brand aspects?

The Coca-Cola TV commercial That’s Not My Name is a good answer to these three questions.

It replaces the iconic brand name with the names of its consumers. It exemplifies contemporary pop local culture. Its music resonates both the message and irresistible charm of the brand. In short, that’s what the company and employees strive to be a part of.

The eight employee experiences (E8©)

Employee experiences are not “touchy feely teddy bear” talk. They are very tangible experiences of your external brand at work internally.

Consider this, if your company delivers ‘transparent pricing’ to your customers, are you transparent in how performance is assessed for your employees and paid for?

That raises some questions:

1. How can we translate a brand into a tangible employee experience?

2. And how do we do this by applying customer thinking?

Employee experiences are very tangible experiences of your external brand at work internally

To answer that, I sat and penned down what was the best part of all the companies I worked for or consulted with. This was a list of 20-plus companies. They spread across industrial applications, packaging, packaged consumer goods, retail, pharmaceuticals, banking, financial services, agriculture, media, manufacturing, consulting, and oil and gas.

A quick insight into these experiences:

1. The firm’s purpose is well communicated, well understood and well applied consistently across the organisation, cultures, and geographies.

2. The New World manager handles only two tasks: performance management and reward. Everything else is owned and driven by employees.

3. An employee finds it easy to plug-and-play—to draw upon resources, knowledge or tools to perform on the job every day.

4. An employee feels the capability of the company in delivering to customers. It is easy to deliver on expectations.

5. Decisions are transparent. An employee understands the thinking and data/information used.

6. Employees experience simplicity of people programmes or work practices in the last mile—the point of touch or execution.

7. There is straight talk. Any questions get a forthright, fact-based response.

8. Employee or work issues are resolved seamlessly between the manager or any other department. There is no need to start over again each time you connect to resolve an issue across the value chain.

To design and deliver these eight experiences you may need digital capability. But first, you need fundamental design capability. It calls for a higher order of purpose from HR.

Designing these experiences is not about processes alone. Instead, think about how all aspects of HR and the organisation can come together as a single point of experience for employees. If you have ever been placed on hold by a customer service call centre to be bounced around from technical service to accounts to service, you’ll know exactly what I mean by this. What a customer wants is a seamless single point of experience.

Design will determine what HR does and how

To design experiences like these, some basic principles have to be applied. Design will determine what HR does and how.

Go ahead; test yourself on this one-question mini diagnostic:

Test a few of your basics that drive E8©

Take a one-question mini-diagnostic (fully anonymous). Open only till January 30, 2018.

START NOW!

It helps to keep these on top of your mind as you go about designing your employee experiences:

1. These experiences are from an employee’s point of view. They are not about functional aspects like organisation development, pay/reward, training or hiring experiences.

2. Take a holistic approach to HR analytics. Most of the data HR uses today is static and lacks Big Data. It is centred on movements, age, performance, etc. Instead, start tracking how these experiences correlate to customer outcomes. Ask how are they driving the desired culture or performance? You will then have much richer data and a holistic view of an employees’ life at work. It will allow use of HR data for your firm’s strategic needs.

3. You may need to look outside for deep expertise, if necessary, to identify employee experience opportunities. HR may not have such expertise internally. Through partners, deep expertise can be deployed and withdrawn for rapid results.

4. Simplify the centres of expertise (CoEs) in HR. It is common to have such go-to teams of experts for recruitment, talent management, organisation development, compensation and benefits, leadership or training. In my view, you need only two CoEs: Employee Experiences and Organisation Capability. The former will integrate all areas of talent, rewards and training. The latter will focus on organisation design, leadership and succession, mergers and acquisitions, etc.

To define employee experiences, HR needs to redefine its involvement

HR will have to redefine its involvement and capability to influence areas in its control. Any point of poor experience anywhere in the company is an HR issue—not just the employee experiences with HR. Poor employee experiences impact your firm’s ability to attract talent, foster engagement or create a great culture. In my experience, companies that do this well don’t have a ‘within HR’ focus. They spend a lot of time with people on jobs identifying design opportunities and influencing them.

Any point of poor experience anywhere in the company is an HR issue

And they don’t think of how to deliver experiences before they design what experiences to deliver. That way HR becomes an intelligent function. Not a digital copy of the existing confusion or complexity or silos.

Have you heard of these?

The Hyperloop transportation system, 3-D printing a heart, the cloud, Gatorade’s smart cap bottle, the talking paper format for explaining key points simply, BMW motion sensor, Google Glass, Coca-Cola’s ‘That’s not my name’ TV commercial, Light Fidelity or Li-Fi for high-speed data transfer using LED bulbs, Channel F video game console by Fairchild, Disney MagicBand—a wristband visitors to the theme park can use to access entertainment options, making humans inter-planetary, coffee Ripple Maker, mining asteroids, James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke, Mad Men.

Google them and you’ll see how exciting these ideas are. They all represent disruptive change and exemplify design thinking—an approach to continuous innovation that is based on understanding people’s needs, the context of their lives, and imagining an entirely new way of doing things.

Most of these ideas have led to new businesses or organisation models that are shrinking the gap between a customer and the company, blurring the lines between employees and customers. They do this in two ways: One, employees are customers too. Two, the digital onset has made several layers in a company redundant, so employees are almost in real-time contact with customers.

Retail is a good example of these blurring lines. At a retail startup in India that my company was consulting for, we discovered that the best feedback on low prices came from our own women employees, who also represented the customer demographic.

This is true of all businesses—including in a business-to-business (B2B) context.

Shouldn’t HR be a multiplier of ideas rather than just be a process-driven department?

Let me pause here to bring you to HR, the focus of this column. If disruptive change is your firm’s goal, shouldn’t HR be a multiplier of ideas rather than just be a process-driven department that manages hiring, salaries and leave? Can it anticipate and prepare for the firm’s strategic needs? Is it ahead of the business curve or lagging behind? How would you rate your HR function on its innovation?

Disruptive change needs agile HR functions. And to be agile you need design thinking.

A caveat here: I have reservations about treating design thinking as a step-by-step approach. Nor is it necessarily a problem solving approach. Design thinking to me is an idea in its purest form as imagined in one’s head, unconstrained by whether it might be feasible or not. It involves having a high degree of visual vividness in one’s head. When the idea comes on to paper, it has elements of the thinking applied. From there, bringing the idea to life is like prototyping or product development.

These three views combined best articulate my own understanding of design thinking:

1. “You never change things by fighting existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – Buckminister Fuller

2. “If you can connect dreams and details, you can achieve a lot.” – Bill McDermott of SAP fame

3. “Design is how things make you feel.” – by Forbes India writer Anamika Sirohi

(If you may be interested in reading more on this, here’s a fascinating read on the journey of design thinking and how it has evolved through the years.)

My approach to design thinking for HR is to base it on business ideas or thinking. It is about ideas that one never thought possible, both for customers and employees.

Here are some ways the leadership and HR can apply design thinking principles to make things simpler for employees, build an innovation-friendly culture where individual behaviour is aligned to the kind of outcomes your firm seeks, and for better employee engagement.

Observe, understand root cause, change behaviour

A small change in behaviour practiced together drives high impact.

Coca-Cola discovered this for itself back in 1998. It had just acquired a bottler down south in India. In the newly acquired plant, workmen in the production lines would often take a bottle off the line to drink it fresh. This was a significant product quality and code of conduct violation. All types of action to stop this behaviour failed. The new plant manager understood the underlying motivation. To a workman, one free Coke a day valued at Rs 6 those days, amounted to Rs 156 a month—a perk. The manager had a fridge installed in the rest area and made Coke available. These were from the under filled or over filled bottles. The behaviour of pulling a bottle off a production line stopped.

I too experienced how a small tweak based on observing behaviour can bring desirable change.

Design thinking is applicable to every employee every day. It does not apply only to big ideas that disrupt the world

I had the opportunity to consult with the Malaysian operations of a Japanese retailer. Its new and first ever woman CEO wanted to get her leadership team ready for growth. We made a habit of the entire leadership team walking each of the stores to pick up issues and fixing them together. Poor in-stock was one of the issues, arising from poor store-level ordering discipline. We found that there were several in-stock officers in each store, so the rest of the staff did not consider it their responsibility. The retailer removed these roles from stores, and changed sales incentives to include in-stock. This rapidly fixed the issue.

Design thinking is applicable to every employee every day. It does not apply only to big ideas that disrupt the world.

As in these two examples at Coca-Cola and the Japanese retailer, one small change leads to a significant impact on culture and business outcomes.

Create intuitive interfaces for employees, be present in their lives

Take a moment and think of all the interfaces that employees have with their company. They are designed to maintain control or to standardise look and feel. Have you ever thought of designing them with the aim of changing existing behaviours in your company? When you design great interfaces, you design a great culture.

Think of Amazon dash buttons. They are present at the moment of need in consumers’ homes—they can order anything they need literally at the press of a button. While the customer enjoys the simplicity and convenience and buys more from Amazon, the company benefits through more sales, obviously, and with data that helps it understand consumer needs better.

So, what are the ‘dash buttons’ for HR that your employees would love to have?

I asked that question in all my discussions or workshops with HR teams over the past year. I am usually met with smiles, interest and silence. Then design thinking begins to find out.

How you embed into the daily lives of people can influence the outcomes

Why is this important? Because it helps you trigger desirable behaviour. In the same way that your bank does by giving you many kinds of buttons to spend with one click (and none to save), because it wants you to spend. So you can pay through apps, by scanning your fingerprint, through credit cards and more.

It is how you embed into the daily lives of people that you can influence the outcomes.

As part of my change agenda at a company, we designed a very functional HR portal. Employees could find any information they wanted in three clicks. We had a feature on it called ‘I want to’. This was a five-step guide to everything an employee might want to do. For example, I want to hire, set goals, give feedback, coach, manage change or create and action plan for engagement. We converted processes into simple ‘how to’. This feature was the most used and usage increased every year. We made HR invisible, yet present everywhere. This experience is further validated by the 70% growth year-on-year in ‘how to’ videos on YouTube.

So, if your HR function was measured on the same criteria as the companies on Siegel+Gale Global Brand Simplicity Index 2017 how would it fare? This study shows that 64% of customers are willing to pay more for simpler experiences. How much would your employees be willing to pay HR for their simpler experiences?

Make it easy for employees to learn what customers need and deliver it

We read a lot today about “learning at the speed of business”. Implicit in that is that existing methods or practices to assess, design and deliver learning are slower than what the business requires.

I have found that managers and teams, when given the freedom and resources to skill themselves, do a much better job and at “the speed of the customer”, because they feel the real need.

I saw this in action in my recent global organisation development and talent management role with an engineering company, where we removed all “trainer” roles in HR. The positive perception scores on training went up in the engagement survey year-on-year.

Often we come in our own way to drive the right capability by designing systems that make it more complex. The realisation that the time, effort and money are better utilised by managers for their teams is a simple one. There was no need to have a structure around this from HR.

What if we were to re-imagine each manager or employee having access to an “HR Alexa”?

With that thought, what if we were to re-imagine each manager or employee having access to an “HR Alexa”—and build a model to add skills at an exponential rate? Today, there are 10,000 commands that Alexa can respond to, making it a versatile and capable “assistant”. You could say that these are skills Alexa has.

For employees to add skills in the new world involves a combination of real time access to information, analytics and learnable common language. What that means is, if I was an employee, do I have a Google-like access to anything I wanted to know to help me do my job better?

Thoughtspot is a good example of this information delivery in an integrated manner. According to the website, this artificial-intelligence-driven analytics platform “makes it easy for anyone to get answers from company data in seconds.”

Can you imagine a Google of HR that employees can use and learn every day to rapidly skill themselves? Can each employee in your company have 10,000 skills that can be easily installed or uninstalled each year?

Leadership at the intersections

In a recent PWC Study 56% of CEOs across all sectors predicted a large existing player from another industry will move into their industry. If you are a one-industry leader, you can never be the heart of ideation or of future value to a company.

Take GE. It has in the recent past lagged the Dow average, but remains a formidable industrial player. Former CEO Jeff Immelt gave his successor a “digital industrial” company. GE aspires to be in the top 5 with its push towards industrial automation with the Internet of Things or IoT-based Predix platform. It has been on the forefront of adopting additive manufacturing. It is one of the few companies that plays a multi-industry game very well in an integrated manner. It experiments, thus its breed of leaders have a transformational mindset. This is also seen in its appointment of a finance executive to figure out ‘future of work’.

Tesla is another example of a company that works at the intersection of several disciplines—IoT, AI, autonomous systems and work methods in manufacturing. It is an automaker and an energy company (with its rechargeable batteries for electric cars and homes and rooftop solar panels).

An example closer home is the explosion of mobile telecom in India in the past two decades. As this industry started up in India, it had to import talent from packaged consumer goods companies. This gave the players a competitive edge with a strong brand focus on services that could be replicated. But, as the industry matured, it built its own talent. And this single-industry mindset affected its innovation streak. But now Reliance Jio, a mobile telecom offering from an oil and gas major, is again making existing models irrelevant. In a span of few months, Jio has made India the highest data per capita country in the world, forcing other telecom players to rethink pricing.

So, how would the HR function anchor leadership and talent strategy at these intersections? How can companies build their leaders to transcend industries and have the confidence to make decisions on technology unknowns? Or invent new methods of work? Is it still worthwhile to articulate a leadership competency model that gets outdated due to rapid changes?

My recent assignment was with a global engineering company in major transformation. We moved away from competency models. The executive board crafted key behaviours that employees could choose from to match their job or development context. We experienced better outcomes on leadership capabilities and succession.

Bringing it home with a design thinking point of view, not digital

Design thinking is critical for innovation in talent and workforce strategies.

Strategic workforce planning still runs on conventional quantitative productivity-based models. It discusses capabilities, but is still looking at only structures and people. When we apply design thinking to this, we can mix full time human workers with gig workers, AI bots, robotics and automation. Therefore, your workforce is no longer just human. This makes the existing capability in HR outdated, as such a mix would need a focus on asset management, costing methods, investment planning, new work methods and the availability of human talent.

Harnessing AI, machine learning, etc. is all a terrific opportunity for HR. But design thinking is a greater opportunity to get it right. Very few in HR have been able to suggest solutions to mass re-skilling, unemployment, social disruption or new methods of working. Part of the reason is the overbearing discussion everywhere on Digital HR. Technology is key to HR. But it is not the driver of a strategic HR function. Even digital needs a strategy and HR needs imagination on how to use it.

There has never been a better time in HR to be the champion of ideas, if only we can create a culture of design thinking.

So in my view, here are three design-thinking starters for all HR folks:

1. Look at everything you do today in your HR function and ask, do we really need it? What happens if it didn’t exist? Would it be missed? Would it affect business outcomes? In the last week of August, I was in Zagreb facilitating an Agile Leadership workshop for the senior leaders of a European bank. They were from several countries. I asked them, what are the leadership competencies of your bank? They smiled but could not answer. That’s the point. If you can understand what the purpose and strategy of the bank is and apply it with great success across cultures, geographies and products, who cares what HR writes about leadership competencies? From my experience I would bet in any organisation, including yours, about 30% of what HR does is actually redundant.

2. Be ruthless about simplicity. Apply the rule of three in everything you do. Can you do a process in three steps? Can an employee find anything needed in three clicks? Can you explain something to employees in three steps? Can any employee issue be resolved in three decision steps? This is serious. I have applied this to everything in HR and it works. The only reason it won’t is your own mental block. I had the opportunity once to be a non-HR person in my consulting life. I never wanted to go to an HR person. Not because of the capability but because going to HR was a complex, painstaking effort. So, how can you build the HR function to be simple so that the real value is recognised? If your HR team is always ‘too busy and sweating’ then it is complex.

3. Stop pretending that your company, business or industry is so different and special that everything has to be re-engineered or over-engineered. Sometimes, just doing the basics is the greatest design you can have. But within that basic is doing what really matters. Focus on the one key outcome and value, ignore the incidentals.

If you can do these, you organisation structure, processes, employee interactions, ability to hire great talent, etc., will automatically differentiate themselves.

Don’t think so? Ask your employees.