Competing In The New World of Work

The pandemic has changed the way we work and live forever.

In the years to come, there will be recovery and renewal, but things will not go back to the way they were before.

The months and years ahead provide us with a once in a lifetime opportunity to remake our organizations and our relationships to them, but only if we take the step of viewing this as an inflection point for true reinvention.

If you do, this book offers a path forward to building a sustainable leadership style and strategy that will guide you through the low tide we are in right now, the fair seas ahead in the future, and whatever new surprises that will ultimately rear their head along the way.

Buckle up and enjoy this journey through a brand new world of radical adaptability.

Radical Adaptability

What’s required to thrive in the new world of work are seven shifts, which we will work our way though in this summary.

When you add them all up, you get what Ferrazzi calls Radical Adaptability, which will lead to your organizations short and long-term success.

Here’s how the old world compares to the new world.

The old world is authority driven, which means they are slower and less innovative. The new world requires what Ferrazzi calls co-elevation, which generates more and better ideas.

The old world is hierarchical, which means they are limited by structure. The new world requires agility, which creates pivot points and sprints towards creating a new future.

The old world depended on personal resilience, which led to overwhelmed teams. The new world requires team resilience, which requires and features peer-to-peer support.

The old world reacts to change, which leads to people and organizations being caught off guard. The new world requires people to actively foresee change, which means it is always ready to act when the time is right.

The old world prioritizes core businesses, which ultimately makes it risk averse when it comes to change. The new world requires organizations to actively seek constant reinvention, which means discarding old assumptions about what works and what doesn’t.

The old world focused on talent management, which leads to standardization and limited flexibility. The new world requires what Ferrazzi calls a “lego block workforce,” which means organizations have to be versatile and fluid.

Finally, the old world was mission focussed, which ultimately doesn’t inspire action. The new world requires organizations to be purpose driven, which ultimately drives every decision that gets made.

Collaborate through Inclusion

Collaborating through inclusion is all about embracing the the possibilities of remote, virtual and hybrid teamwork that help drive innovation forward.

Here are five high-return practices for doing just that.

Practice Co-creation through co-elevation

In the high-performing teams of the future, we need to go beyond cooperation and create a dynamic of constant concretion. That means interdependent team members sharing accountability for each others results, and picking each other up with one of them needs help.

Break through silos by teaming out

Once you have co-creation rolling in your teams, it’s time to reach out beyond your teams to draw others in to find and concrete solutions to our biggest problems. Your “team” is no longer who reports to you in the org chart, but anybody inside or outside the organization that might be able to help.

Because these people aren’t required to work with you, you need to adopt a leadership style of serving, caring, and sharing.

Hybridize teamwork for inclusion and crowdsourcing

The days of top down strategy exercises are over. Now that entire companies are networked and working on digital communication tools, you can start crowdsourcing big and bold ideas about product innovation and policy development across employee networks.

Deepen external partnerships

Not only should you deepen collaboration at every level in your organization, tapping into customers and suppliers as growth partners has never been easier.

Expand your personal coaches in a remote world

Finally, to both help keep your finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the broader world, and to constantly consider wise counsel, leverage your peer networks and formal coaching arrangements with experts in their fields.

Lead through Enterprise Agile

Leading through enterprise agile is all about keeping the idea of short term sprints that kept us on track during the crisis as a long-term way of working.

Why would we do that? Because change is the new normal, and our ability to respond quickly to it is critical to our success.

Here are five high-return practices for leading through enterprise agile.

Always put customer value first

Putting the needs of your customers first and making the speed at which you can improve their experience a top priority, innovative ideas can reach the market much more quickly.

Drive team autonomy downward

This type of speed and agility requires you to drive autonomy down into the organization, where the work actually happens.

Lead biweekly sprints towards measurable outcomes

There is a spirit of experimentation and focus on measurable outcomes in agile that leads to leadership asking more questions than providing answers. Questions like “what are we going to achieve in the next two weeks?” or “where do we need to pivot” become the norm.

Bulletproof the work through team feedback

Make sure you are surfacing feedback from your teams so that issues can get surfaced and resolved as quick as humanly possible. Encourage your team members to ask themselves questions like “what challenges or risks should be bring to the larger group’s attention?”

Scale to sustain innovation

Finally, as a leader, you need to ensure that your leadership team itself is true running under agile principles. This will allow agile to find its place in every team across the organization.

Promote Team Resilience

Promoting team resilience is all about ensuring that the entire team takes on the challenge of supporting each other and giving the support that’s required when some members are having a harder time than others in dealing with adversity.

Here are four high-return practices for doing it.

Diagnose your team’s resilience

The most reliable indicators of team resilience are candor, resourcefulness, compassion and empathy, humility and vulnerability, productive perseverance, generosity, gratitude, and positive intent. Nurture these like you would any value you consider to be paramount to your success.

Employ high-return practices for supporting team resilience

There are plenty of things you can do to support your team’s resilience, like:

• committing to building each other’s resilience (make it a team sport)
• providing positive feedback to your team;
• share your own challenges so others feel free to share theirs;
• show that you care; and
• enforce break times.

Co-create solutions for acute stressors

During the pandemic, there were specific stressors that needed addressing, like performance pressure fatigue, isolation fatigue, and a lack of health routines. Make sure you identify which specific stressors are acute in your organization, and design solutions for all of them.

Support mental health for sustainable resilience

Being mentally healthy isn’t about a lack of stress and anxiety in our lives. It’s about being able to function in spite of the stress and anxiety.

Ensure that your managers and C-suite are modelling and handling stress well. For instance, make sure you are speaking openly about your stressors, block off break periods in your calendar, and any other behaviors that signal to your team that it’s ok to take care of their mental health.

Develop Active Foresight

Radically adaptive teams thrive at planning for the future even thought the future is unknowable. They do this by developing foresight that proactively finds early change signals and allows the organization to respond to them, quickly.

Here are four high-return practices for doing it well.

Detect threats and opportunities

Ferrazzi suggests that we pick two time horizons to focus on: (a) short term (within one year, where most of our focus should be) and (b) long term (within five years, where we should make any projections with a grain of salt).

Ensure that you enroll your entire team in threat detection, and that you focus on the five macro forces that matter most: sociological, technological, economic, environmental, and political (STEEP).

Assess and prioritize signals

Now that you’ve found the signals, you need to prioritize action on them. You can create a two by two matrix to triage them, which impact (low to high) on the x axis, and likelihood (low to high) on the y axis. High/high signals should get urgent attention, the two high/low combos should be monitored, and the low/low signals should be put on the back burner.

Respond and plan possible scenarios

By creating plants for possible scenarios, you help create a bias for action.

Foster a culture of continuous learning

By following the advice in this section, you’ll be training your organization to learn, unlearn, and relearn on a continuous cycle. If you do this consistently over time, and not just in crisis situations, you’ll have created a culture of continuous learning.

Future Proof Your Business Model

Future proofing your business model is all about developing an ongoing process of experimentation to both create and then realize your company’s vision for the future.

Here are four high-return practices for getting that done well.

Zoom out to envision your industry ten years ahead

The changes you see in the short term are usually step-by-step and linear. Changes you see in the long-term are usually unexpected and non-linear. Here are 2 questions you can use to drive this process: What will our industry look like in 10 years? What is our desired position in that industry?

Identify technologies poised for exponential growth

Technology always has, and always will drive transformation. A few technologies to pay attention to today are AI as a service, quantum computing, avatar systems, blockchain, and the spacial web.

Zoom in through rapid agile experimentation

Once you’ve identified what the future looks like, and one or two technologies you think are most likely to disrupt your future state, identify one or two high-impact experimental projects you can work on within the next six to twelve months.

Create communities of raving customers

The best time to lean into community is during uncertain times, which, as we’ve already discussed, are becoming the norm. If you do it well, they will market for you, innovate for you, and help you shape the future.

Build a Lego Block Workplace

Building a lego block workplace is all about redesigning your workforce to support a creative, flexible, and cost-effective future.

Here are four high-return practice for getting it done.

Ask, “What work needs to be done?”

There are a number of things you need to do as a leader in this bucket. You start by focusing on what roles your team needs now, and in the future. Then you break down current and future roles into microtasks. Then, you put everything back together again using the best available tools and talent in the market – including external resources.

Ask, “What workforce will we engage?”

There are three dials you can tune to determine the workforce you’ll create for the future:

• Dial 1 – Augmentation: from human on one end to algorithmic on the other;
• Dial 2 – Employment: from traditional on one end to gig on the other;
• Dial 3 – Ecosystem: from internal on one end to external on the other.

Ask, “Where will the workforce exist?”

There are three dials you can tune to determine where the work will actually get done:

• Dial 4 – Presence: from in-person on one end to remote on the other;
• Dial 5 – Location: from onshore on one end to offshore on the other;
• Dial 6 – Environment: from open on one end to closed on the other.

Execute the transition

Once you’ve decided what your future workforce looks like, you need to execute the transition. You’ll need to focus on three things as you do: training your workforce to make the transition, deciding how to assess their performance, and how to reskill your current workforce. Reskilling is a distinction made between training somebody to take on progressively more important roles (training) and taking them out of one career path and starting from scratch in another.

Supercharge Your Purpose

Supercharging your purpose is all about building a movement inside your organization for radical adaptability, and for discovering and communicating your organizations long-term purpose.

Here are three high-return practices for doing just that.

Team out and explore your organizational purpose

This is about identifying the why behind your how. For example, Etsy’s purpose is “keeping commerce human.” Microsoft’s is “to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”

Promote purpose ownership

You’ve heard this many times before, but purpose cannot just be a slogan on a wall. It has to be lived out. At Best Buy, their purpose is to “enrich the lives of customers through technology.” To figure out how to create ownership of this purpose, they asked themselves the following questions:

• If Best Buy were a person, how would she or he behave?
• What do we look like when we are at our best?

Set a purpose-driven course for radical adaptability

Consider asking these four questions to use your purpose to set a course for the products and services you create in the future:

• Does it fit our company purpose?
• Is it good for our customers?
• Can we deliver on this promise?
• And, can we make money doing it?

Conclusion

As we said at the beginning, the future is becoming more and more uncertain every day. We are at an inflection point where you will only success in the short run and the long run if your organization is radically adaptable. This summary is the beginning of your playbook for making that a reality.

I encourage you to get the book and dig in further if you are committed to making the change.