Defuzzing Organizational Agility
We do a lot of future oriented skill-building work and we are delighted to be part of the Future Work Skills Academy.
We found the recently published report by World Economic Forum entitled “Eight Futures of Work” as well as the previous report entitled “The Future of Jobs Report 2018” to be very insightful and useful documents.
As methodology oriented sensemakers we did spot a key terminology fuzziness that appears in both reports.
From our Humantific perspective the most important sentence in the “Eight Futures of Work” document is this one: “…people are continuously challenged to react and adapt to large-scale economic, technological and societal shocks.”
If that is indeed the challenge you are facing then let us note that the capacity requirement often being described in the World Economic Forum reports as “adaptive”and “agile” is, in real life, not equivalent to mastery of the method branded and widely marketed today as “Agile”.
Let’s be clear: Organizational Agility and “Agile” are already known to be two different things. If time is of the essence and we want to fulfill the objects outlined in these World Economic Forum reports lets not confuse one with the other.
Typically facing a vast array of constantly changing complex challenges requires adaptive and assumption-free problem solving methods.
Regardless of how it is creatively being branded, mastery of any assumption-boxed, efficiency focused method is not going to make you or your organization more adaptable.
Its not rocket science: To state it as learning objective: increasing efficiency capacity and increasing adaptability capacity remain two different things.
Acknowledging constant change both World Economic Forum reports call for massive upskilling around adaptability, changemaking and complex problem solving, not efficiency.
We like this quote below from Thomas Friedman! In times of acceleration lets be clear about what capacity we are building so we get ourselves oriented towards the future and on the right track.
Hope this is helpful Humantific readers!
Interested in Future Work Skills capacity building?
Send us an email: kickitup (at) humantific (dot) com
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Header Image Credit: World Economic Forum.
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